Enlighten Yourselves

[pocaracas]

This is the main problem with it...
The people who wrote it, had no knowledge of any god.... they had no foresight, no insight, nothing tangible... they believed.
Like people believe nowadays, so did they believe back then.

Unless, they knew it was a con...

That's an assload of speculation on your part isn't it?

For all we know, they might really have had these supernatural experiences. Maybe it was drugs. Maybe there really was a God. Maybe it was aliens. Maybe it was supernatural demons/spirits pretending to be God.

It's very hard for me to believe that these longsuffering Israelite peasants wandering through the desert had the time and inclination to make up, memorize, and indoctrinate others into their beliefs if they knew it was all false.

That's a lot of wasted effort that could have gone into farming or hunting or what-not.

They were between at least two great theist civilizations: Egypt and Mesopotamia. Their greater work was coming up with something that people would identify with, while not identifying with the neighbors.

For all we know, the writers of the Bible (OT and NT) were people like all people that we know of that are alive today.... and like all these people, they were very human and very flawed and had their beliefs, their ulterior motives, their way of living.
The likelihood of they having access to some supernatural event is similar to the likelihood of people nowadays having access to such an event... negligible.

I consider it FAR FAR more speculative the possibility that they did have experience of some actual supernatural event.
We know humans will say anything to con others... and we know humans are easily conned by someone cunning enough.
We do not know that supernatural events occur.