But for me, there is a body of evidence to suggest the Bible talk of people being raised from the dead is physically impossible. Feeding umpteen people with little food cannot be done. Tablets of stone written by a human invention, floods and plagues caused by conscious intervention. Wrong.

So. The evidence suggests the Bible is fantasy.

That's right. But fantasy's fine as long as you don't start to think it's reality. Fantasy is one of the spices of life. For me, evidence has got to have more balls than "somebody says so". We don't know that the theory of evolution is true because Darwin said so. We know it's true because he gave us real evidence to chew over, things we can go out and find for ourselves (I do it every day) and everything that's been explored in that particular field since Darwin has confirmed the theory. We are supposed to think the Bible's true because someone says so. Because whoever wrote it said so and whoever tell it us from pulpits says so. This in spite of the Bible being full of inconsistencies and somewhat dodgy omissions (the gospels of Mary and Thomas, anyone?). We are supposed to believe the intimate details of the life of Jesus, including hundreds of his precisely-recorded sayings, written by men who not only never met him but who lived a hundred years after him. But that's divine inspiration, and we're supposed to believe that that's possible, because religious people say so. We are supposed to believe in Lourdes and Fatima because some small girls made unsubstantiated claims (it's always peasants on hillsides somehow). We are supposed to believe that certain persons have had various visions and speak with God's authority, just because they say, uncheckably, they've had visions. We are supposed to believe that God is all-merciful and can be prayed to because bishops and priests and Mother Teresa say so (in spite of the fact that they don't know any more about these things than anyone else does). We are supposed to have our belief reinforced by beautiful cathedrals, works of art and sublime religious music, but they are all made by clever human beings and have nothing to do with belief. We are supposed to be overawed by ceremony and tradition into believing even more strongly, yet ceremony and traditions are no more than human inventions (and there have been some pretty foul ones down the line of human history). Above all, these say-so people tell us it's wrong to not believe, and that you must mistrust atheists and people not of your belief system by accident of birth. Because they say so. Well, I want evidence, not people telling me to believe stuff because they say so.