1987ce

Thank you for writing Zealot, it was a joy to read. In it you argue that Luke's audience knew his nativity story was incorrect, but thought it was true nonetheless. You explain this apparent contradiction by saying that facts and truths used to be two different things. Can you expand on why we should reject the alternative explanation that people believed Luke because they weren't able to judge claims about the past accurately?

Context from Zealot:

[Luke's] readers, still living under Roman dominion, would have known that Luke’s account of Quirinius’s census was factually inaccurate. Luke himself, writing a little more than a generation after the events he describes, knew that what he was writing was technically false. This is an extremely difficult matter for modern readers of the gospels to grasp, but Luke never meant for his story about Jesus’s birth at Bethlehem to be understood as historical fact.

This is a common misconception. There is a difference between philosophical naturalism ("nothing exists beyond nature") and methodological naturalism ("as natural beings we can only investigate nature").

An atheist is someone who does not believe in God. Not all atheist reject the possibility of the super natural. I say: give me proof and I'm in!

Right! You should tell this to our international celebrity Geert Wilders, who thinks the Koran should be banned because it is a book filled with hateful bigotry, whereas the Torah and Christian bible teach love and harmony.

This presumes that homosexuality was bad for survival in prehistoric society, but homosexuality might have evolutionary benefits. Perhaps the sociological phenomenon of ingroups and outgroups caused the discrimination of those with a different sexual orientation. Look at genes that make people different without affecting their survival rate: albinism and red hair were used as reasons for ostracizing people.

Interestingly, left-handedness was not a significant source of discriminiation, some suggest because humans are bad at seeing horizontal symmetry or perhaps because left-handedness runs equally in all families and isn't that big of a deal.