How can people still take the Bible or other the religious texts literally?

[Wahoo Redux]

Shoot. I thought I existed. My bad.

Well now you know.

[Hibush]

Shoot. I thought I existed. My bad.

Well now you know.

Thanks to all the commenters for a fun discussion. I never took philosophy or anything in the vein in college, so this is a pretty good recap of some key points. I appreciate people being informative on something that could have devolved immediately into a flame war.

Plus, I had not previously considered George Carlin a prophet, but it turns out he was for somebody.

[polly_mer]

However, how is it that full-grown, otherwise intelligent adults can believe literal accounts of the resurrection or other religious miracles?

Lots of people believe lots of things. How far do we have to go before we find one of yours that is just plain wrong?

Are you staying home except for medically necessary trips or to get food?  There are very few places in the US right now where going out is a reasonable thing for intelligent adults to do.

Do you believe that reading the news makes you informed and limit yourself to just a couple complementary outlets that seldom cover much of the world other than the US, Britain, and the occasional story on Europe or Canada?  The stories that aren't being covered are often much more interesting as illuminating the blind spots.  The lack of good science reporting in most mainstream media is shocking.  Equally shocking is how little of even the US/UK is covered outside of a handful of cities.

Are you somehow a great critical thinker without any math skills beyond basic arithmetic?  I am amused every time someone makes that assertion and then fails on basic statistics and probability.

Do you really not believe in many superstitions and yet bless the people who sneeze, throw the salt over your shoulder, are extra careful on Friday the 13th, and check your horoscope regularly just for fun?  Yeah, lots of people do and then wonder why a society that prints horoscopes in the media are light on the good science reporting.

[mahagonny]

Shoot. I thought I existed. My bad.

Well now you know.

Thanks to all the commenters for a fun discussion. I never took philosophy or anything in the vein in college, so this is a pretty good recap of some key points. I appreciate people being informative on something that could have devolved immediately into a flame war.

Plus, I had not previously considered George Carlin a prophet, but it turns out he was for somebody.

Well, does atheism have prophets? If so, who sends them? If no one needs to send them, then old George is good enough.
He was classified as a comedian or a comic entertainer, but mention his name among baby boomers and chances are nobody will recite any of his lines fishing for laughs or even mention how funny he was. Instead, he is taken very seriously as a perceptive serious commentator. In lay society, I mean. The heir to Lenny Bruce. Any why I mentioned popular music changing the landscape: John Lennon's 'Imagine' appears to me to have brought the idea of atheism as a place of morality back into the mainstream (though conveniently avoiding the question 'how do you get there?')

[Wahoo Redux]

Do you really not believe in many superstitions and yet bless the people who sneeze,

Personally I prefer the Seinfeld option of "You're sooooooo good lookin'!"

[mahagonny]

Are you staying home except for medically necessary trips or to get food?  There are very few places in the US right now where going out is a reasonable thing for intelligent adults to do.

i think that depends on one's priorities. I would think that going out to do something truly worthwhile is not worth the risk if I believed that if I never went outdoors again I would never die.

[kaysixteen]

Hmmm... I notice that the OP (and no one else for that matter) has refused to answer my thought query.

[Treehugger]

What evidence would convince you of the correctness of the Biblical stories, or for that matter of the claims of any other religious texts?

What evidence would convince me of the literal resurrection of someone who was actually dead for three days back 2,000 years ago way before modern medicine?

Well, for starters there would have to be multiple credible eye witness accounts with some semblance of realism (not just mythical hyperbole) from more than one political perspective (I.e. not just the  apostles). But even that wouldn't be enough. There would also have to be a credible, natural  explanation as to how this could have possibly happened.

However, this evidence will never be forthcoming because the whole point of the literal resurrection is that it is one of two things, depending on your perspective: 1) a miracle which defied the laws of nature, because otherwise it wouldn't have showed Jesus's supposed divinity and wouldn't have called upon a believer to believe (have faith) or 2) a non-event.

How can it ever be something else beside those two things?

[marshwiggle]

However, this evidence will never be forthcoming because the whole point of the literal resurrection is that it is one of two things, depending on your perspective: 1) a miracle which defied the laws of nature, because otherwise it wouldn't have showed Jesus's supposed divinity and wouldn't have called upon a believer to believe (have faith) or 2) a non-event.

How can it ever be something else beside those two things?

That is exactly the point.

• Even though Jesus told the disciples it would happen, they didn't believe it.
• When they were told the tomb was empty, they didn't know why.
• After most had seen Jesus, Thomas, who wasn't there, didn't believe the others; he said he'd need to put his fingers in the nail holes and his hand in the gash in Jesus side to believe.
• Mary and the men on the road to Emmaus, even when they first saw him, didn't recognize him.
• Saul went around jailing and executing his followers until Jesus appeared to him specifically. (While he hadn't met Jesus, he certainly would have had lots of access to people who had.)

So, yeah, even the people closest to Jesus who'd heard him and seen his miracles thought it was a non-event until he actually appeared to convince them otherwise.

[spork]

I'm reminded of the scene from the old M*A*S*H tv show in which a shaman is brought in for an exorcism. Frank is in a huff with the chaplain, ranting about how sacrilegious it is, and the chaplain, or maybe one of the other physicians, says "there are many ways to skin a ghost."

The concept of an invisible, powerful sky god has been with us for at least 3,000 years, courtesy of, at minimum, various Mesopotamian and Semitic peoples. I don't really see the attraction of believing in such a thing myself, but I'm content to let others do so as long as they don't try to limit the freedoms of others to believe something different. Unfortunately Biblical literalism is usually more like Bible buffet in the USA -- people using selective interpretations of selected passages to promote ideological agendas that will lead to the acquisition of wealth and power. E.g., U.S. evangelicals clinging to the false idol of Trump in the hope of gaining political power -- which, if one is reading the Bible literally, is not something Moses, Jesus, or God (or El Elyon, or Yahweh, or whatever word you want to use) would have found acceptable.

[Wahoo Redux]

Every religion I am aware us has a most-high, most-powerful god king in the sky and a death-father (or mother if you lived in fertile-crescent-era Babylon) underground.

What is interesting is how culture shapes the concept of deity, how paleolithic cultures generally perceive animals as personifying the forces of the universe, how warrior cultures such as Rome or the Vikings tend to favor their war-gods, and how the more sophisticated we become technologically the more abstract and symbolic our deities become, for instance.  My favorite is what we know of the Bikini Island sky-god conception (a religion obliterated by Christian missionaries): an albatross floating on the warm wind.

Carl Sagan's aphorism that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" seems appropriate to kaysixteen's mind-query.

[marshwiggle]

Every religion I am aware us has a most-high, most-powerful god king in the sky and a death-father (or mother if you lived in fertile-crescent-era Babylon) underground.

What is interesting is how culture shapes the concept of deity, how paleolithic cultures generally perceive animals as personifying the forces of the universe, how warrior cultures such as Rome or the Vikings tend to favor their war-gods, and how the more sophisticated we become technologically the more abstract and symbolic our deities become, for instance.  My favorite is what we know of the Bikini Island sky-god conception (a religion obliterated by Christian missionaries): an albatross floating on the warm wind.

Carl Sagan's aphorism that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" seems appropriate to kaysixteen's mind-query.

Proof of all kinds of things is pretty much impossible to establish. The more important question is whether a system of belief (be it a scientific theory or a religious system) provide a more complete and consistent explanation of reality than the alternative(s).  So while any direct physical evidence for things like miraculous events millenia in the past is unavailable, it is completely reasonable for a person to accept religious beliefs if they provide a more complete description of their universe and life within it. Specifically, if questions of human value, the purpose for existence, and so on are  more satisfactorily answered in a religious framework, then it is reasonable for someone to accept those beliefs on that basis even without being able to verify specific factual claims about ancient events.

In other words, it's much more likely that people believe in miracles because their religious faith makes sense of their life than the other way around.

[Caracal]

What evidence would convince you of the correctness of the Biblical stories, or for that matter of the claims of any other religious texts?

What evidence would convince me of the literal resurrection of someone who was actually dead for three days back 2,000 years ago way before modern medicine?

Well, for starters there would have to be multiple credible eye witness accounts with some semblance of realism (not just mythical hyperbole) from more than one political perspective (I.e. not just the  apostles).

This is a historical point, not christian apologetics. One of the weird things about history once you get past the early modern period/late medieval period is that sources are very, very thin. That's really obvious if we're talking about somewhere like 7th century Britain, where there may be no evidence of something beyond a line or two in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. However, it is true even where we do have somewhat detailed accounts. I was reading about the history of in the Roman period and the writer pointed out that the vast majority of our information on Judaism and Israel from that period comes from one writer, Josephus. It isn't like we just have  newspapers from Judea or someone went around and did some oral histories of Jesus.

Of course, it is totally reasonable for you to just say that you don't believe things unless you have evidence for them. But, the argument gets incoherent when you start applying standards of evidence that aren't possible. It all gets rather reductive.

[Treehugger]

I'm reminded of the scene from the old M*A*S*H tv show in which a shaman is brought in for an exorcism. Frank is in a huff with the chaplain, ranting about how sacrilegious it is, and the chaplain, or maybe one of the other physicians, says "there are many ways to skin a ghost."

The concept of an invisible, powerful sky god has been with us for at least 3,000 years, courtesy of, at minimum, various Mesopotamian and Semitic peoples. I don't really see the attraction of believing in such a thing myself, but I'm content to let others do so as long as they don't try to limit the freedoms of others to believe something different. Unfortunately Biblical literalism is usually more like Bible buffet in the USA -- people using selective interpretations of selected passages to promote ideological agendas that will lead to the acquisition of wealth and power. E.g., U.S. evangelicals clinging to the false idol of Trump in the hope of gaining political power -- which, if one is reading the Bible literally, is not something Moses, Jesus, or God (or El Elyon, or Yahweh, or whatever word you want to use) would have found acceptable.

Yes. This is what I am primarily worried about. I don't care in the slightest what people believe in private. I do care a lot when their religious beliefs shape political agendas.

More particularly, at the moment, I care a lot about people believing QAnon, about people believing that Biden and other liberal elites are secretly running an international pedophilic sex trafficking operation and that Trump is secretly working to free the children.  This is where believing whatever you want to believe becomes not OK. This is where we need to say: "No you're wrong! And here's why ... " Not "Everyone's free to believe whatever they want to." The only problem is consistency. How can I tell QAnon believers they are wrong to believe nonsensical beliefs and somehow have it be OK for others to believe equally far-fetched things (like a human being came back to life after having been dead for three days).

[Wahoo Redux]

it is completely reasonable for a person to accept religious beliefs if they provide a more complete description of their universe and life within it. Specifically, if questions of human value, the purpose for existence, and so on are  more satisfactorily answered in a religious framework, then it is reasonable for someone to accept those beliefs on that basis even without being able to verify specific factual claims about ancient events.

I was once channel-surfing and ran across one of those mega-church broadcasts at exactly the moment that the preacher was saying "What would you rather believe in?  A God that is all-powerful and benevolent or a cold impersonal universes?" or something right along those lines.  My thought, of course, is that there are all sorts of things I'd like to believe in (I am a rock star in the world's biggest band; I can bench-press 500 lbs; I've won the Nobel Prize in Basket-weaving), but reason and experience suggest otherwise. 

And the "framework" of religion has given us some of the worst times in human history, so it is not a clear-cut answer. 

This is not to say that religion doesn't provide a worthwhile framework----it does...sometimes.  This is to say that just because we want to believe something doesn't mean it is objectively true.  People really truly believe in Bigfoot, the belief answer some call in their lives.  But there is no Bigfoot.