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Zubon comments on Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale - Less Wrong
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"Many (most? all?) Christians believe the snake was really Satan,"
Without meaning to nitpick, what percentage of people who call themselves Christians do you think actually believe this? I'm pretty sure most of my Christian friends don't believe that any of Genesis is literally true. They probably also don't believe that a man can survive for 3 days in the belly of a whale, or that donkeys talk (Numbers 22: 26-30). I'm not really sure how this is relevant here, except that maybe I'm trying to say that a talking snake is just so damned absurd that even people who say they believe it don't actually believe it.
About a third of Americans believe "the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally," explicitly contrasted with "the Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally." Your friends are probably not a representative sample of Americans, and even then, a third is a minority, but it is a rather large minority. I know people in this category.
The next question is whether they really believe it or just believe in belief. If you press those people, will they bite the bullet and accept talking serpents and donkeys, surviving in whales, and trumpet blasts knocking down city walls? Yes, some of them really will, and there are certainly communities where this remains a majority belief.