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Notes -
Do the religious people on here actually believe in Christianity? Like do you actually believe that Christ rose from the dead, Garden of Eden, Jesus is the son of God, the Trinity, virgin birth, etc? Or is more Deism and you like the community from going to church? I have a hard time believing most adult converts i.e. JD Vance actually believe these things, but I'm curious if I'm wrong here.
Yes. "Christ rose from the dead" is a very believable claim, just on the historical evidence - the rest of the core claims of Christianity are not particularly hard to believe if you believe that (e.g. if Christ rose from the dead then He certainly was not an ordinary human; thus believing that He is the Son of God, was born of a virgin, and are coming back again as He claimed aren't very difficult to swallow).
The one exception would be that while I tend to believe in a ~literal Garden of Eden, it's not really skin off of my nose if the Genesis account(s), not being written for 21st century scientists, was not intended to be interpreted as 21st century scientists would prefer to interpret them. (Notwithstanding this I toy with ideas that harmonize the Eden account with what 21st century scientists have deduced about the nature of early man, but that's more because I find it interesting than that I need to understand everything written in Scripture to believe in it.)
Yeah I think if you're willing to interpret the rest of Genesis metaphorically, there's nothing really stopping you from interpreting the Garden of Eden as the pre-agricultural state of Man, and the 'knowledge of Good and Evil' as the spiritual/cultural prerequisite for the creation of agricultural society.
I wish I had a better handle on the current state of archeology (and Biblical studies!) but one of the things that I have found interesting from my understanding of the current state of things is that scientists have found evidence of a somewhat puzzling "intelligence explosion" in primitive man.
Genesis 4 can easily be interpreted as describing the same series of events (and also explains what happened to kick the intelligence explosion off).
My belief is that Genesis was written for its audience in a way that they would understand it, with the main goal being to establish an accurate anthropology and theology - a conception of man's place in the world and their relationship to God - but that this does not mean that it is "mythical" in the sense of being fictitious or made up. I don't think God describing something that happened to premodern tribesmen in a way that they can understand makes it "inaccurate" or "not literal."
For a fascinating (yet long) set of reads from a rationalist-adjacent substack, you might enjoy this guy's Eve Theory of Consciousness, tackling things like the Sapient Paradox and generally tying myths to anthropology from a materialist perspective. There's nothing about theology in here, and of course the author treats myths the same way you do, as having kernels of truth.
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