[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Acrobat]

They already believed before the rock incident in gods that gave them hope and purpose. The rock just fosters that faith. You accept the rock serves that function.

Faith, hope, trust in God are similar concepts. You seem to acknowledge that the purpose of myths are to foster hope and meaning in their communities. It's not terribly hard to recognize the importance of hope in such communities, absent of hope such communities would be unlikely to survive.

So a myth about a divine rock wouldnt be about its impressiveness, but one composed in a way to convey hope, like the rock giving water in time of famine. A god providing for his people, when all hope is lost.

That it was to be taken as both, as real and symbolic.

Christ death was tragic defeat for the messiah, an irreconcilable fate, unexpected even by his own followers. If the resurrection wasn’t real, than their hope was more a product of desperation, than real, a desperate attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. It’s becomes more or less the reality of nihilism,  a clinging to hope that doesn’t exist.

The cross becomes the human symbol of despair, not of any victory or defeat of it, but the triumph of misery.

That's what you would argue with people who question the literal interpretation of the accounts of the resurrection? They could just simply say you're wrong. The Resurrection happening literally would he absurd. It makes sense only if taken symbolically.

Absurdity isn't a reason to take an account symbolically. Sandy hook conspiracy theories are absurd, but they're not symbolic, they're just false beliefs.

It makes more sense to take the resurrection if it wasn't literal, as the desperation of his early followers, trying to cope with an irreconcilable tragedy, rather than purely symbolic. It would make more sense they had hallucinations of a risen Christ, or just made it up, than to read it as meant purely symbolically.