I feel it's more of a personal background issue. Do you really have objection with planets effects on personality but at the same time feel turning water into wine is plausible in the slightest?
To a raised atheist all religions are not far removed from belief in Santa Claus. But to someone with religious people in the family cutting them off may come not as natural as of strangers with astrology brain.
Magicians can do what looks like turning water into wine easily. Is that seriously your biggest issue with religion? If there's anything to be really skeptical about its that a person resurrected from the dead, rest of the miracles are pretty mundane in modern standards. And the way I understand their epistemology, they know it happened because people saw him both dying and living afterwards, so it boils down to whether you believe their accounts. I don't expect more evidence to that than witnesses, but then again, it's hard to believe when the only evidence is witnesses.
Either way, I don't see a huge epistemological problem with a person believing these things. They might be believing wrong things but at least they do it for reasonable reasons.
You need to distinguish between epistemology and logic. It's much more important to get your epistemology correctly than your logic. It's ok to be wrong with your reasoning, you can still have an intelligent discussion. But talking to a person without epistemology is like talking to the wall. You're playing chess and he's playing checkers.
If the other person doesn't epistemologically need cause and effect relationships to believe in something, and it doesn't matter to him, I can't have an intelligent discussion. I can't reason without cause and effect, and if it doesn't matter to the other person it's completely hopeless.
>> they know it happened because people saw him both dying and living afterwards, so it boils down to whether you believe their accounts.
I come from a religious background, born and raised catholic, and even in our indoctrinating upbringing it was made clear that the new testament isn't eyewitness testimony. It's a written story of something someone said. Given the age of the material this is the best we're going to get, obviously, but it's not quite as clear cut as it might seem.
" They were written between approximately 70 and 100 AD, and were the end-products of a long process of development; all are anonymous, and almost certainly none are the work of eyewitnesses."
Wikipedia is incredibly biased when it comes to certain topics, especially anything pertaining to Jesus. The irony is, the section you have quoted doesn’t even have a source attached!
More reading:
https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/
It's better than Britannica and other encyclopedias and has been for over a decade.
Just because it doesn't support your _preferred_ narrative doesn't undermine the fact that it's effectively the most trustworthy source on damn near any topic including that one.
One of the books that I've come across that gets into the development process of the gospels is:
Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
According to that book, there was a fair bit of religious conflict between the gonastic branch and the proto-orthordox (and some others too) with gospels and edits that attempt to discredit the other sects or build up their own narrative that is in agreement with their faith.
I like to think that most adults understand the difference between a trick that appears to verse actually turning water into wine and wouldn't worship a magician as the son of God if they saw the trick directly.
Saying water/wine happened exactly once 2000 years ago is much harder to falsify than claiming a present, ongoing, and universal correlation between planetary bodies and psychology.
On the page you have linked, there is a section titled "Skeptical explanations," which contains explanations of the event that are both plausible and satisfying. If you stare at the sun for a while you're going to see some weird stuff. Don't try it at home.
> turning water into wine is plausible in the slightest?
If you drop hallucinogens into water, it could be perceived to others that people would be getting drunk off water, which would be, in effect, turning water into wine. The story could have come from this, easily plausible.
When people say they "literally did so and so" do you freak out about calculating the possibilities of their specific mention or do you sit back and understand what parables, allegory, and stories are?
Besides, If you don't believe it really happened, what's the point of picking apart the story?
but plenty of Luke and Matthew underpin Christian ethics, and have been the justification for building schools, charities, hospitals, etc. for centuries.
people will hear what they want to hear, e.g. Loaves and Fishes vs. Angry Revaluation Jesus, but at least there is an attempt at altruism there.
Astrology has all of the woo woo mythology without attempting any sort of actual altruism, just inane categorization.
To a raised atheist all religions are not far removed from belief in Santa Claus. But to someone with religious people in the family cutting them off may come not as natural as of strangers with astrology brain.