Summations Only

The ability to recognize talking animals as fiction is still alive and well.

On the contrary, strong evidence for some bits doesn't necessarily distribute over all bits. Just because Bristol is a real town doesn't mean that all of Treasure Island is true. Are you saying that you only believe in talking animals because the Bible sez so? That doesn't sound like common sense at all. It sounds like belief overriding common sense.

It evolved.

If you take it as yesterday's newspaper then you'll never learn anything from it. Yesterday's news is often superseded by new information gathered today. If you stop the clock and insist on believing in "Peace in our time" you're not facing up to reality.

How would you know? Can you see the future?

That's a bad example. Are you suggesting that "primitive" societies that don't use money have no evil? That would throw a monkey wrench into the whole good-evil spiel in the Bible wouldn't it?Paul was apparently indulging in a bit of hyperbole. What he should have said, if he intended to be taken literally, was that the love of money is the root of quite a lot of evil.

So your argument that it reads like history goes out the window. It doesn't, in fact, read like history at all because history does read like yesterday's news. History is, in fact, the accumulation of yesterday's news.

The problem is that people who claim to know The Truth™ clearly don't. They often can't even distinguish fantasy from reality or history from fiction. So yes, I am pretty skeptical about the possibility.

I know you think you know that. However, what you think you know doesn't correspond with reality. Talking snakes are not real.Edited by ringo, : Malfunctioning shift key.

Satan isn't real. If he was, you could provide real-world evidence. I don't dismiss anything out of hand. But I do distinguish between "supernatural" and "real". I use "real" for things that have real-world evidence and "realistic" for things that have superficial real-world "evidence" but are not really what they seem to be - e.g. movie special effects. "Supernatural" is something for which there can not be real-world natural evidence.You just seem to be hung up on a need to call something "real". It's like whistling in the dark.

Please.

Every time I ride a donkey I make sure to tell people that I'm not the Messiah, just in case.

Maybe a better question would be, "How have believers progressed to be as moral as unbelievers?"

That's what I'm saying. In many ways, religionists have had to play catch-up with the secular world, morality-wise.

Yes, I should have added that Freedom of Religion is primarily freedom from persecution by other religions. It isn't about what you can do yourself so much as about what others can't do to you and you can't do to them. If religions were morally self-policing, we wouldn't need secular protection from them.