Setting your snark aside, not all physical resurrections break laws of science:
Biffster: Modern historians consider the Bible to be a valid historical document. Why wouldn’t they? Acts is thought to shed insight on early Christianity for example, though interpretation must be careful, as for any old document.
As is often evidenced by these kinds of threads. Especially when historically significant and notably accomplished persons (Rational & Objective!) are used to support a more literal view than even they (ostensibly) held.
Do you feel the same way about Islam?
I’ll grant you this too. Far more plausible explanation. But is it mainstream Christianity? I submit if it were, it would lose something in the telling.
Hah! Good one.
FTR, not at all to my knowledge. Except insofar as mainline discourse can get a bit blurry at times. Ambiguity allows for expansive interpretation.
There is a tradition in Christianity that advocates setting aside the supernatural aspects, e.g. Deism.
We have to be careful though. Paul was a bit of an upstart within Christianity: he has every reason to claim that his (wholly spiritual) encounters with Jesus were very very very similar to a competing branch of the Church run by Peter et al. Paul’s letters contain a great deal of not particularly successful efforts to keep the troops in line, which is particularly challenging if others have a clearly more direct line to the original prophet. (Though without Paul’s proselytizing, few today would have heard of Jesus.)
Just out of curiosity, If you asked an evolutionary biologist why mosquitos exist, would you accept the answer, ‘because nature is stupid’?
If you want to think like a scientist, when confronted with some widespread property of a biological or social system, your initial thinking should be that you really don’t know until you study it, but given that it seems to persist in an evolutionary system, the default assumption should be that it brings some benefit to the system, or at least it did in the past.
Of the possibilities for why organized religion has persisted in human cultures since the dawn of recorded history, ‘people were just brainwashed’ is probaby the least likely to have any explanatory power.
I already gave a detailed description in this thread of a possible reason why religion persists: It’s a form of government for people at a community level. It helps facilitate cooperation within the group and allows for collective behavior without bureaucracy by building trust and improving communications. The church is a place where everyone comes together once a week, which helps solidify the community and act as a central clearing house for information. With a priest as authority, people can trust that their fellow church goers share the same values, and can be trusted to cooperate without the need for lawyers and contracts.
If you go to a small town, you may find that the church is not where you go to pray, but it’s also the local day care, the bulletin board has lots of non-religious community information, charitable services organize there, social functions happen on weekday evenings, etc. The level of trust fellow churchgoers develop for each other allows for a lot of ad-hoc coordination, sharing, etc. This even more true for Islam, where Mosques are often the center of religious and secular community activity.
I’m not religious at all, but I can look at religion without bias, and it’s not hard to find many ways in which it can add value to a community. And given its ubiquity in human history, it would be foolish to assume that it provides no benefit to society.
I imagine the why wouldn’t they comes down to the numerous characteristics of mythology that are depicted, from bringing sight to the blind to hearing the lepers to raising the dead. Oh, and walking on water too. I think the reason that JC was given so many of these superhuman superhero characteristics was just to make sure we didn’t confuse him with an actual live human being. Just my view, for what it’s worth. Not much historical, but plenty that is allegorical.
Once again, an insightful reply, Sam. Sociologically speaking, religion provides all kinds of benefits, not the least of which is belonging to a group. The stories that are preached by a religion do not need to be true stories in order to provide this benefit to group cohesiveness. Many times I’ve thought if people really believed we were consuming actual flesh and blood at communion time, they’d be sick to their stomach; and transubstantiation is an actual belief of the Catholic Church (the one I go to). I just assume we all wink at each other and carry on because nobody in their right mind would really believe this. Cannibalism is not popular in this culture. Yet here we are.
Why would you think that? Critters like mosquitos exist because they can. There is a niche in the ecosystem that supports them, so they fill it. They are no more “beneficial” to the system than any other living thing. What “benefit” does a bear provide? Or woody nightshade? Or a squirrel? They exist because they can an because the system can support them.
Sometimes a non-native species invades an ecosystem and throws it out of balance, until the system crashes. But it will eventually come back in some altered form. There is no “benefit” calculation in ecobiology, only relative stability.
Religion exists not because it provides a benefit but because humans are a social species with curiosity and complex language. We seem to be hard-wired, to varying degrees, to support it, through our typical social structures and to pass it along through ritual and linguistic indoctrination. To say that it provides unique benefits that are not available through some other more benign social construct is post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Well, that’s where YOU are! 
I’m more of a Memorialist, supporting my assertion that I’m a piss-poor Lutheran. But even when I was a really good Catholic I had problems with transubstantiation, preferring what I later found out was Real Presence. Wife, a Transubstantiationist, and I would disagree, with her saying, “Jesus said, ‘This is my body.’ He didn’t say, ‘Let’s let this bread represent, but not actually be, my body.’” I thought that Jesus time and again demonstrated that he was the king of parables and similes, and if he actually said that, he knew his guys were used to him by then and assumed he was speaking metaphorically.
Dear God, I miss her. 
But that is out of place in this thread, much like the entire Eucharist hijack.
Sorry to hear about your wife. Yeah, I’m more of a parable and simile guy myself, as it makes religion far more understandable to me, if a little less spectacular. I didn’t realize the Eucharist discussion was a hijack, but the OP hasn’t posted in about six days, so I figured this was a natural progression from the original topic. In a nutshell, I’d say the only “proof” of the resurrection is the fact that we still celebrate it nearly 2000 years later. That’s a long time for a myth to survive.
Just a thought: While we’re hijacking, do any Fundamentalist Christians believe that mustard seeds are the smallest? I mean, poppy seeds were used back then!
shrug For the Hindus it’s chickenfeed.
Birds can’t lodge in the branches of a poppy.
So he left it in to make his story work?
Yes. Rule of funny.
Comparing the grandeur of the Kingdom Of Heaven to a smelly and fast growing weed is borderline sacrilegious but also thought provoking. Tweaks the pompous temple phonies. The unlikely idea of birds nesting on this ground plant also might have provoked amusement among the local peasants.
Take it literally and you miss the point. Jesus could have spoken about acorns and Oaks. He didn’t, partly because that was a tree associated with Rome, but he could have picked another. Heck, the mustard line could have been a wise-guy comeback.
TV Tropes? Holiday weekend? YOU BASTARD!
I have no problem accepting that Jesus was a real person and the Big Four record, in places, real events, though embroidered with some “miracles” of a sort that all holy men do (see: Oral Roberts). The Epistles seem to stand on firmer ground, especially Acts and anywhere “Paul” gets testy.
I fear we have encountered a person who has limited experience with even other sects of Christianity, as I suggested earlier.
About Good Friday (today): when your Lord and Saviour is tortured and crucified in a most bloody and painful way, what exactly is good about it? Also, why do we say He rose on the third day, when only two days elapsed between Friday and Sunday morning? Things that I ponder.
Some sects (Greek Orthodox, for instance) translate it as Great Friday, because it’s the day that the most profound act in Christianity (the Crucifixion) occurred (strictly speaking within what Christianity believes, rather than what I personally believe).
This may have something to do with how the Jewish people count days. The day begins at sunset. Friday afternoon to sunset =first day. Friday night through Sunset Saturday = 2nd day (and, incidentally, Shabbat). Saturday night through Sunday morning = 3rd day.