“My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.” ― John Dominic Crossan
I became an atheist because in college I spent a lot more time around fundamentalists. The more time I spent around them and their rediculous justifications for thinking the Earth was 6,000 years old the more that it became apparent to me that if they could be that ignorant of why their beliefs didnt make sense, the same could be true of mine. So I investigated why I believed what I did and over time more and more of my religious beliefs failed to withstand the sort of scruity that I put them under and eventually I realized I couldnt call myself christian anymore because I didnt believe any of it.
My usual response. “You do know that malnutrition makes people hallucinate?”
I mean hell, anyone can test this themselves. Just restrict your daily vitamin E for long enough and I bet you’ll be seeing people walking on water in no time.
I mean, you’ll also do irreparable harm to your heart and nervous system, but you’ll be seeing some crazy shit first hand as well.
The metaphysical / new age religions have a version of “a desire to be totally rational” that is honestly just as bad.
I grew up in one. No glass and steel, but quite the desire to be made out of cosmic sunbeams and spiritual joyfulness.
Humans feel more than that. Pain, grief, loneliness, stress, rage, and pride aren’t toxic energy: they are existence. You can’t aspire to something that cuts out half of your existence, or you’re always going to feel inadequate.
A lot of them were also understood to be parables, obfuscations, and metaphors but Europeans in the early 300s lacked a decent grasp of literary concept. In particular there are two tellings of the demolishment of the walls of Jericho. There’s the one where the trumpet blast did it, but there’s also the one where the trumpet blast was a signal to the sappers under the walls to knock out the support beams they’d rigged while they were working to undermine the foundations of the wall
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