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Notes -
I find it interesting that The Motte tends to treat Christianity with kid gloves that are not reserved for other belief systems. For example, the idea that there is no difference in intelligence between different genetic groups of humans is widely called out here as being simply wrong. Which it almost certainly is, in my opinion. But consider the idea that a man 2000 years ago was god incarnate and rose from the dead and we should believe this because a few people who lived decades later wrote that this was true and because some other people have had some visions and powerful feelings. This idea is, I think, even less likely to be true than the idea that there is no difference in intelligence between different genetic groups of humans. But Christianity on The Motte is usually not met with accusations that it is as absurd, indeed perhaps more absurd, as any flavor of wokism. Wokeism gets often and in my opinion properly pilloried on here for being nonsensical on the level of correspondence to objective reality, but Christianity typically gets a free pass. Even the atheists on here mostly refuse to really call it out as being absurd when the topic comes up.
Does this happen because Christianity is largely not viewed as a threat and because since wokeism is this community's main out-group and Christianity is vaguely right-aligned in the modern West, people here tend to follow the principle of "the enemy of an enemy is my friend"? Or, to be more charitable, maybe it is because wokism can fairly easily be criticized on the level of normal scientific investigation, whereas the claims that Christianity makes go so far beyond typical materialism that one makes an exception for it because its claims are fundamentally viewed as being orthogonal to scientific investigation?
Religion is not about literal scientific claims. “Religious language” is unique. Definitions of God are also not as simple as imagined. Origen was writing about how Genesis is figurative in the 3rd century, Tertullian was writing about how the absurdity of Christian led to a stronger belief, and the earliest Gospel commentary we have is allegorical (Fortunatianus).
While the point of the religion is to have a perfect belief that God was born to a virgin, walked on water, converted water into wine, and so forth, this is tremendously difficult. The number of Christians who truly believe these things on a deep level are approximately the number of Saints. Consider how differently a person would act if they had a true, deep certainty that Jesus as depicted in the Gospel is returning: that imitating Jesus leads to true happiness, that you receive a new life, that Godly suffering leads to joy. You would be the most restless missionary ever while having no anxieties.
Christianity uses all kinds of things as propaganda to draw people into the inner faith, but at the heart of it it’s not “literal”. It’s true, and in fact more true than the literal. But not literal-scientific.
I don't think this is right. Or if it is, the "on a deep level" is doing all the work there.
It really isn't that difficult to believe that water was changed to wine or that Jesus was born to a virgin when you keep in mind that Christians believe that God is omnipotent.
And I was about to cite the passage of 1 Corinthians on the Resurrection, before I saw that I had been preempted.
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