Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?

[Neo-Scholastic]

There is one last thing I wish to say in this thread. Why does Steve not put other religions to the same three "tests" he subjects christianity to. Why does he not apply his pseudo-Bayesian equation to Nordic paganism, why does he not use the same "the claims are so out there that those who made them couldn't possibly have lied" to the claims made about Vishnu (whic are equally as fantastic as those made about Jesus), and why does he not accept the weight of numbers argument to accept the truth of the claim for Mohammed's  night journey?

Because when it comes to religiouns he doesn't believe he uses the same tools we do to dispassionately evaluate them and logically conclude's they don't represent reality. What when applied to the new testament is hyper-pseudo-sceptical becomes only right and proper when applied to the qu'ran or the bhagavad ghita.

This.

I'd honestly like to hear Steve (or anyone liking Steve's posts) to address this.

Well, I cannot speak for Steve, but in my own case I think people need to look at the type of literature containing miracle accounts. Works of mythological or allegorical literature describe vague seemingly timeless settings and begin with phrases like "a long time ago in a gallexy far, far away...once upon a time" or even "in the beginning" like in Genesis. The Vedic texts, Sutras, and so-called Gnostic gospels are pretty much all like this. The canonical gospels are very different. They mention specific times and places using the narrative conventions of the period similar to Plutarch. The Pauline epistles are letters on par with other similar types of functional documents produced at around the same time. As such, the miracles found in the NT are presented to us as historical events, with the Resurection in particular being prominently mentioned from in multiple places.

As for me I have no bias against the supernatural as such, so I see no reason to automatically rule them out simply because they are miraculous.