Dear AnthonyMarinac, yours was the first post, and you have maintained a respectful position throughout. Well done! (Ryaninsa, dear Christian, please note!)

Your question: "BeeTee, what are the two positions I'm having trouble holding together?"

They were ...

Position 1: The teaching '... that the miracles of the Bible HAD actually happened and were to be taken literally', and ...

Position 2: '... I protested the unlikelihood of those events (and) ... I do not follow that faith.'

You further state later that '... (you) quite respect those beliefs ... (b)ut I can't find a way to believe that stuff myself' ... which I submit Anthony can be paraphrased 'I'm having trouble holding these two positions together.'

May I offer A STRATEGY, and A CHALLENGE for redressing your dilemma?!

STRATEGY:
a. Read through, once or more (I'm up to my umpteenth read!), John's Gospel, as you would any book.

b. Get the author's different angles on 'Who Jesus Is' by progressively putting yourself into the shoes of both 'questing believers' such as John himself, Peter, Nicodemus ... and also 'skeptical questioners' such as the Temple authorities, their Officers, and Romans such as the Official (John 4:46-54), Pilate and the Soldiers.

c. Then come to Chapters 20 and 21 and ask what has happened, first to apparent skeptics such as NICODEMUS and Pilate and the Temple Authorities, and second to 'apparent questing believers' such as Peter and JUDAS and John and Thomas and the Marys; try to see yourself amongst these people, in circumstances like these, people like you and me, witnessing these events.

THE CHALLENGE: Now, Anthony, honestly give your response to 'Who Jesus Is' with all of your mind, heart, soul and spirit!

The experience will be like running a marathon, you struggling with all the aches and pains and oxygen deficit etc. ... alone ... yet 'in the grandstands' you will not be alone ... all heaven and earth awaiting the moment you will reach the finishing tape!

And all of us are running this marathon! But will we all reach the finishing tape and claim our prize?

Rhian, thanks for your several comments above.

If I caught you correctly, you say the resurrection of Jesus need not be physical or corporal. I would suggest that this does not make sense. What is a resurrection if it is not physical? I am most happy to agree that Jesus’ resurrection was more than just physical but it couldn’t have been less than that.

All the people connected with the event are saying that the body is missing. What happened to it? Is it rotting away somewhere, as in the normal course of events after a body dies? Or did something amazingly miraculous and supernatural take place?

When I spoke of an “all or nothing package”, I mean that we need to be faithful to the testimony of the apostles, which are the most accurate and reliable eye-witness accounts of what happened. These writings have come to us as a whole, and can’t be divided into bits we prefer and bits we don’t prefer. This does not mean they are above criticism, but that their testimony stands as a unity. The record of events is either right in its totality or it is in error. And they record that the person and body of Jesus was once again a walking, talking, eating, touchable and recognisable reality (however apparently the slightly upgraded model).

Can I also quickly add that I don’t like to call myself a literalist. I would prefer the term ‘plain reader’ of the Scripture. That is, I try and interpret it as the author intended (the way you would any other book). If it is poetry, read it as such. Read the narrative as narrative, history as history, symbolism in prophecy as symbolic, etc. etc.

BeeTee, weren't you my teacher in Year 3? Your style is very familiar.

As someone who shares AntonyMarinac's views, of respecting the right of people to believe in any god they choose but not believing in one myself, I hope you don't mind if I join the conversation.

You posit that the inability to accept that the Bible should be taken literally, coupled with a protestation at "the unlikelihood of those events", plus "a respect [for] those beliefs" coupled with an inability "to believe that stuff myself" constitutes - in your words - a dilemma.

I obviously can't speak for Antony, but I would be interested to hear why you consider this sequence of thoughts to be a problem, for which you kindly offer "A STRATEGY, and A CHALLENGE for redressing your dilemma" (Your capitals)

The problem I have is your proposition that I consult texts whose accuracy I question, in order to address the "problem".

>>Read through... John's Gospel, as you would any book.<<

Any book?

Lord of the Rings, perhaps, or a John Grisham potboiler? That would require the suspension of disbelief, and if I could suspend disbelief, I wouldn't have a "dilemma" in the first place.

(It cannot be read as history either, given that the author wasn't actually there, but that's another issue)

If I were writing a document to support the growth of a new religion, I would probably include the story arc "first they didn't believe, then they did". It is a standard authorial device, so in exhorting me to read it “as you would any book”, you encourage my view that it is predominantly fiction.

Your position is identical to Ryaninsa in many ways.

>>Christianity has hundreds of well documented events to support its claims...<<

Well documented? Certainly in the sense that there are a few carefully selected documents around to support the story. But as Ryaninsa also says, very perceptively,

>>simply stating a view is not enough to prove it<<

How utterly inane this debate has become. BORING indeed.

Does a religion really rely on the credibility of the writings of the long dead when any demographic study of the Christian world points only to a more violent history and no difference in their longevity, freedom from disease or all the other expressions that Christians make supplicant prayers for.

Using a book like Grimm’s with fairy tales, of sacrifice, murder and misdeeds.

I am not born in sin and neither were you. Jesus shared his believes. Others translated them to suit their ends.

Burn the bible. Kill “god”. A religion is a straightjacket to freedom to inquire, live, love and enjoy this "kingdom of god".

Rhian, “I have one parial reservation - the proviso that practices are permitted “provided their practice conforms to the law” is reasonable, but may in certain circumstances be challenged. Some people may feel bound to break laws that discriminate against the practice of their religion, or laws that are fundamentally unjust, or even sometimes in countering some greater evil. ”

Good comment, and I tend to agree with you that in certain circumstances laws may and should be challenged. Law is not an end in itself. Laws should be useful, like traffic lights, to keep things orderly.

But that doesn’t mean that the law applies to every single case, and neither are laws always good, morally. We once had slavery and sex discrimination protected by laws, luckily because of different times and different social attitudes these laws changed; they were no longer seen as ‘just’.
We now struggle with other issues. For example, euthanasia. A religious friend of mine is set against it because it is immoral, while I take the opposite view, as do many others. I think that it is immoral to NOT to have it available for the suffering people who want and need it. Should the Catholic Church dictate to others, who do not adhere to the Catholic Church, whether they can have euthanasia? Abortion is another issue we struggle with right now, so is same sex marriage. These are issues that are forced on non-Catholics by the Catholic Church.
Why should religion have the monopoly on morals? Slavery, sex discrimination, homosexual marriages, abortion and euthanasia are or were all morals held up by the Church, but we can clearly see now that these religious morals were no longer acceptable. We can clearly see that morals and laws that represent some of the morals are not absolute.

Religions and any other organisation that feel the law should be challenged will have to go through the proper exercise of the lawmaking powers of judges.

Sells, it is most unusual for you to abstain from a debate that you have started, even if it is (usually) to deride us lot for the shallowness of our thought processes and the paucity of our argument.

I'm intrigued that we haven't heard from you, especially given the "New Sells" character that you have placed before us, with yet another layer of shiny certainty abraded by wind and time...

It does rather sound as though you are only just hanging onto your religion by the slenderest of threads, watching the myths and fancies that have decorated it for so long gradually disappearing one by one under the unkind jackboot of knowledge and awareness.

Say it isn't so.

I for one would miss you.