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Lumifer comments on Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale - Less Wrong
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Translation: they were human.
I don't know of any large populations with non-terrible epistemic hygiene.
The relevant issue is not the epistemic hygiene of the populations, but of (so to speak) the process by which any given body of ideas reaches us. In the case of the Bible, on entirelyuseless's (plausible) hypothesis we find that at least some of it reached us (in its role as Sacred Scripture, no less) by being treated as reliable history by people who had no good reason to think of it as more than a fable.
Not every body-of-ideas exhibits such crass indifference to truth in its history, though of course it's by no means only religious ones that do.
And..? So what? I am not sure I see the point.
So the presence of the talking snake in the story is evidence against the rightness of the religion, for reasons that can be (albeit needlessly rudely and uninformatively) expressed as "ha ha, your religion has talking snakes, how ridiculous".
Just to be clear, what exactly is your point in this thread?
I don't see how that follows from your previous comment. And in any case, I continue to disagree with that statement.
Let's go upthread. That was my first comment and I still stand by it.
While we're restating our positions: I (1) agree that the talking snake is a long, long way from being the best reason for thinking that Christianity-as-traditionally-understood is badly wrong, but (2) think "conditional on sufficiently strong magic" misses the point, because the talking snake is not portrayed as talking on account of any sort of magic.
And I suggest that we leave it there rather than engaging in further rounds of clarification and/or nitpicking.