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2d ago
I think my favourite anecdote of the liberal Christian "explain it away" is the "Jesus was ice skating not walking on the water",
In all of the years I've spent following the mythicist discourse I have never encountered this explanation. Usually what is offered as an explanation is that it was a magic trick: walking on a submerged plank of wood (maybe a deck or something). The criticism on Peter falling is not really biting, since a single gospel has it and you wouldn't expect a detail such as that to be omitted or forgotten, if it had happened. A much better one is that they are clearly supposed to be too far from the coast for it to be a trick of that sort.
Explaining away the virgin birth is fun, too.
I've never heard this one either. To be onest they both sound like strawmen to me. Usually the explanation for the virgin birth is that it wasn't even there in Mark, the explanation for the "specialness" of Jesus was initially his Davidian genealogy and the virgin birth was developed later, when the story moved into the hellenistic world, where people didn't care about David and stories of vigin births abunded.
The only religion that I am aware of that has a thriving secularized branch is judaism. I think it works for judaism for two reasons: 1) it was always more rule-following focused than other religions, 2) they have the (very recent) memory of the holocaust to help them form a sense of community.
Belief in christianity is very important, how are you going to reconcile all the passages that say something along the lines of "salvation only happens through faith" with "actually it's all a bunch of baloney"? More broadly you will encounter two problems.
The first one is theological. You have started cutting things off the bible and off tradition, where do you stop? Christianity had an answer to this: you stop when the church tells you to stop, only they have the power, through apostolical tradition, to know what to cut.
The other problem is more practical, how do you get people interested in this? This thing has already been invented, it's called the Church of Humanity, it was invented in 1859. Nobody cares. People like to think of the societal benefits of religion but to be adopted and spread, just like genes, it needs to be useful to the individual here and now. The "magical" aspects of religion give real, immediate returns on investment in psychological terms. Saying "trans women are women" gives real, immediate monetary returns in the right career. What's your cultural christianity going to provide? What's your church going to do for me tomorrow?
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