That’s an apt analysis.

When I was clinging to Islam, I convinced myself that the 6 days of creation in the Quran are 6 ages just like Augustine because the Quran also said that a day for God is a 1000 human years. I was always internally pressed though by how arbitrary these ages will be (13.8/6 = 2.3 billion years).

Well at least Muhammad was smart enough to remove the rest day and say his God doesn’t get tired 🙂

For me, when the literal interpretation of the Quran and Islam in general was no longer tenable, I couldn’t switch to a liberal allegorical one because of exactly what you said i.e. if it can mean anything then it means nothing and if those who wrote it clearly meant something then I can’t say that they didn’t.

Allegory is only honest, when it is admitted to be and treated as fiction.

And allegorical claims, like all claims, can be false. They are therefore subject to test, require a burden of evidence, and can be struck down by critical thinking.

We already have all that. It’s called movies, plays, television, and novels. We don’t need religion for any of it.

As to your interpretations of Christian myths, that’s all bullshit you just made up. It’s not what the stories say or were ever intended to mean. And no such chronological matches exist. Thus, again, you are proving it can be made to mean anything whatever. And that which means anything, means nothing. But worse, the fact that you are willing to ignore actual scientific facts to fabricate the meaning you want, proves why religion is dangerous. We need to get rid of it. Just stick with the scientific facts. They are far more glorious by themselves, than a crap genocidal rape book.

And as to the nonsense claim that Christianity had anything to do with the West’s dominance on the planet: that’s also bullshit. We figured out the steam engine first. Period. An accident of history. Nothing else made any relevant difference.

I dispute your claim that “Christianity can only be “compatible” with science if it becomes Secular Humanism “plus” special reverence for a collection of ancient myths it doesn’t regard as fact, and reinterprets completely contrary to their original meaning and intent.”

It is not clear that the original authors ever intended their myths to be accepted by scholars as literal, even though this literal acceptance looks likely for their intention regarding popular belief.

You are assuming the original meaning was as literal fact. There is good evidence against that assumption. If instead, the original intent was symbolic allegory, then reconstructing this meaning can potentially salvage a coherent ontology within Christian theology.

Augustine, for all his faults, gives good indication of this rejection of literal belief in favour of allegory. For example he says in his commentary on Genesis that anyone who believes in seven literal days of creation is an idiot, and proceeds in Of The Six Ages of the World to develop an allegorical interpretation, based on the idea in 2 Peter and Psalm 90 that a thousand years are as a day for God.

This Christian mythology provides a structure of time and history that surprisingly has some coherence, not as young earth creationism, but rather as allegory for precession of the equinox, which does in fact cause a slow physical climate cycle around twenty thousand years long. Precession produces ‘seasons’ in which ‘fall’ matches to the period of Christian myth, readily provable by modern astronomy in the Milankovitch cycles of glaciation driven by precession.

My point here is that rejection of literalism does not entail that Christian myth has no meaning or value, but leaves open the possibility that Christianity points to a deeper natural meaning and insight, and can reform to become compatible with scientific knowledge.

If all Christian miracle claims were originally meant as parables, including the claimed existence of Jesus, but were later corrupted into literal belief, it remains possible to retain some value in these stories. Proving the error of literal belief does not address the possible parabolic meaning.

For example the cross and resurrection myth has similar form as the daily and annual death and rebirth of the sun. The Christian passion story plausibly evolved as an anthropomorphisation of solar myth. If so, then a rejection of all meaning in the passion story implies a rejection of all meaning in solar myth, with all its evolutionary adaptivity and utility as a way of describing natural fertility cycles.

On your point about the lack of moral benefit of Christianity, the fact that Christian societies and social classes are generally of above average wealth is an indication that something of value may exist within this belief framework, as a causal factor in the social and economic success of Christians. The sociologist Max Weber argued on those lines in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Such benefit can endure even after a society has secularised, with social values displaying an enduring legacy of Christian beliefs such as in human rights and love, which emerge logically from the core Christian idea that the last are first in the kingdom of God.

Jettisoning the supernatural is essential for rational credibility, but abandoning dogma does not necessarily have to throw out the baby of allegorical meaning with the bathwater of supernatural belief.

That’s not the case, though. Jesus is not simply “from” the Septuagint. Philo’s archangel Jesus is not a crucified and risen demigod appearing in visions to a recent sect of anti-temple Jews. So that there was such an archangel before Christianity started, is not itself sufficient evidence the Jesus of the NT didn’t exist. For example, historicity already requires that his followers rapidly assumed he was that angel Jesus, descended among men to die (no other theory of the evidence can explain Paul’s describing his Jesus as that Jesus). Indeed, Jesus himself may have claimed that. So that being the case, does not argue against historicity. All it does is eliminate some arguments against mythicism; which is not the same thing as arguing for mythicism. The effect on the probability is a complicated matter of modulating the prior probability of mythicism against a certain set of claims that that prior should be lower. That’s too esoteric and complicated to explain in a debate. And wouldn’t be sufficient to win any debate.

It is way more complicated to debate the ‘historical details’ in the NT, than just simply pointing out that Jesus is from the Old Greek version of Zechariah 3 and 6.

But do what you wish my friend.

Because that’s far too complicated and esoteric even to establish the fact of it to the satisfaction of someone irrationally set against believing it; much less to explain the logical consequences of their relevance to people who don’t understand even basic logic, much less the complex probability reasoning this pertains to. Live debates can’t go into that kind of detail. They never can. There is not even remotely enough time. That’s why live debates are completely useless for deciding any question. People need to accept that fact. Live debates can only précis larger sets of arguments and evidence at a high level of abtraction and in broad scope. The truth requires following up on the details later. Which takes many, many hours of work, even when the research has all been done for you already and laid out in a convenient location. Hence, only books, not debates, have any realistic chance of deciding what’s true.