How can people act like written text translated and misinterpreted and filled with contradictions is factual and talk like because something is written in one of those books that it should be taken as fact
I was thinking about something earlier today that might sort of dovetail into this, and it has to do with the times in my life where the behavior of others is counter-intuitive to my expectations. And this has to do with me trying to predict how they will react to present information/events, perhaps after conversations that we had, that were indicative of changes needing to be made in the future. But when the future arrives, maybe their behavior is not altered in a way that I would have predicted, so thus the conversation that we had in the past either had no bearing on the direction they took, or they misunderstood it, or I misunderstood how they would interpret it... etc. etc.
So the point is, is that other humans can be confusing enough, to interact with and convey information to, in the present, using the same language
When someone writes a religious text, or myth, or history, I am assuming that they know all this. But perhaps they do not. Perhaps they assume that someone will understand it well enough, 10 centuries on, without the caveat of the epistemological confusion that the passage of 10 centuries would inevitably seem to muddy the waters with. I am unsure. I assume as well, that they will know that someone in the future will have to make some massive assumptions about the context of where they were, in history. How easily they will assume that I understand that context, is also in question
I think people like the bible, and some related older texts, mainly because relatable feelings seem to be sometimes conveyed in those texts, and large logical arguments aren't the basis of the texts, (for large pieces of it) which would be more difficult to translate. I was thinking the other day, when I was reading through the 'prophets' section of the bible, that although the context is alien enough to me, there are lines here and there that seem to capture some of the various universal and lucid human feelings, that can affect a person irrespective of their place in history
For example, in the prophets section, it seems to be that the writer is just expressing simple uncertainty much of the time, be it with touches of hyperbole and mythic thinking. You don't actually have to look for prophecies in it, and I don't myself.