[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Anomalocaris]

The universal and indispensable foundation of theism is the refusal to accept reality as deduced from a sound and validatable process and determination to assert something else in its place that feels more comfortable.    The theist in most cases could not very well admit what is comfortable has no valid reason to be thought of as being true, because doing so would destroy his ability to derive comfort from the comfortable.    If comfort is that important, and one has already crossed the cognitive Rubicon to embrace what provides comfort in place of what is more probably true,  then there is relatively unlikely to be any other serious cognitive barrier against embracing whatever more wish thinking intellectual self-deception is required to defend the intellectually indefensible.

Hence, in many if not most cases, the Christian claiming not to be a fundamentalist is already in for the penny, and has torn out any innate intellectual safeguards against also being in for the pound.

I personally have no problem with anyone adopting a position because it's comforting for them, but as soon as one comes here to defend such position and in such a confident manner, then they're acting like it's intellectual and it's understandable to expect them to back up their position with something concrete rather than arguing from ignorance or appealing to their personal intuitions ... or adopting naive and clearly false understanding of cognitive/developmental social/psychological phenomena …

I have no problem with people adopting a comfortable position because it's comfortable for them, such as their children being talented, their wives faithful, or the cost of carbon fiber golf clubs really is a down payment on a better game.    But such positions usually do not require that policies affecting millions and posterity onto many generations be shaped to primarily to coddle fantasies.

Theist religious comfort is usually a totally different beast.   To start with, to be religious comfort means it is not conceived by the individual to serve his own comfort.   Rather it was designed and further evolved to create an block of followers to be able to shape policies affecting as many as possible for as long as possible.   Nothing would become a religion unless it has aspiration of shaping policies to suit itself.     Thus by default religious comfort is without the innocuousness that made the foolish quest for private comfort through private self-deception innocent.   


Further, religious comforts are usually conceived and evolved to impose a unifying fantasy amongst people who talks amongst themselves.   So it typically strive as much as possible to be all things to all people.    So religious comfort tend to not be economical.  Instead they tend to be based on extravagant, overarching lies that cover as many aspects as possible in order to smothers the intellectual outlook of its victims to the maximum degree that will be tolerated.   Thus religious comfort not only is part and parcel of fantasies concocted to shape some specific policies, the policy shaping must involve discouragement if not the suppression of anything that might penetrate its extensive array of overarching lies.  Thus religious comfort supports not only policy making via fantasy, but efforts to extend influence into ever broader range of policies.