How did you distinguish the Bible from, say, History?
By age 4 I think I had figured out that stories about magical or super-powerful beings always turned out to be made up. I did believe it when adults told me that people had souls though, until I got a book that showed the location of organs in the human body and I noticed it wasn’t in there.
Argh, how I envy you guys. Me, I used to believe All Myths Are True at first, and then I selectively and methodically disbelieved those that I (very gradually) discovered to be inconsistent. I guess I’ve always had the tendency to completely immerse myself in stories. Even now, I still take stories and fiction way more seriously than I should...
I had basically the same origin, just born/raised rationalist I guess and mostly agnostically christian enough to have done sunday schools and nightly prayers. Things like magic and such never really made sense, as much as I liked to imagine them, and used to hallucinate a different world frequently in which I had such abilities. Obviously I was just crazy but rational enough to at least accept that others didn’t see the things I did and thus it just made more sense that they weren’t real, that imagination and reasoning were clearly two different things (not mutually exclusive, you can combine them as this place seems fond of trying to do in some way or another). If anything I’ve felt too restricted by leaning to far toward rationality for most of my life and feel as if I’m only just beginning to understand that Maybe All Myths Are Actually True Somewhere. Regardless, that’s more philosophy than science and until we find such a somewhere or such a true myth (which we frequently do in smaller scale concepts) doesn’t seem too worth worrying about, but that’s my natural rationalist bias that I’m struggling to “overcome.”
By age 4 I think I had figured out that stories about magical or super-powerful beings always turned out to be made up. I did believe it when adults told me that people had souls though, until I got a book that showed the location of organs in the human body and I noticed it wasn’t in there.
Argh, how I envy you guys. Me, I used to believe All Myths Are True at first, and then I selectively and methodically disbelieved those that I (very gradually) discovered to be inconsistent. I guess I’ve always had the tendency to completely immerse myself in stories. Even now, I still take stories and fiction way more seriously than I should...
I had basically the same origin, just born/raised rationalist I guess and mostly agnostically christian enough to have done sunday schools and nightly prayers. Things like magic and such never really made sense, as much as I liked to imagine them, and used to hallucinate a different world frequently in which I had such abilities. Obviously I was just crazy but rational enough to at least accept that others didn’t see the things I did and thus it just made more sense that they weren’t real, that imagination and reasoning were clearly two different things (not mutually exclusive, you can combine them as this place seems fond of trying to do in some way or another). If anything I’ve felt too restricted by leaning to far toward rationality for most of my life and feel as if I’m only just beginning to understand that Maybe All Myths Are Actually True Somewhere. Regardless, that’s more philosophy than science and until we find such a somewhere or such a true myth (which we frequently do in smaller scale concepts) doesn’t seem too worth worrying about, but that’s my natural rationalist bias that I’m struggling to “overcome.”