Ah, but talking animals -- given their ubiquity in folklore and fairy tales and legend and Disney movies, etc., are the easiest thing in the world to picture! And -- I would venture -- that at the death of a loved one, the imagining of him getting up and walking is easier than the mental acceptance of the actual and awful death staring us in the face.
Maybe some people can believe only what they can picture, what they can understand from human experience.
Maybe some people can believe only what they can picture, what they can understand from human experience."
Very good, m!
We all believe what we want to believe. We can just as easily believe that someone likes us as it is to believe that someone hates us. That's why the Jews and Muslims and Hindus and others are equally 'at peace' with their beliefs.
If one can believe in talking snakes and people getting up after they died, or that one and the same individual can be both man and God, or dog and rabbit, or alive and dead, why is it "too difficult" to believe that God can be three and still be one, or that the Father gives existence to the Son and the Spirit, and yet that all three existed, outside of time, before all ages as one, simple and indivisible monad?
Believing that something exists outside of time is a serious logical stumbling block. In order for something to exist without time as a dimension brings up all sorts of quantum-like, chaotic and psychotic-like possibilities, like reducing three-dimentional humans to two-dimentional creatures that have length and width but no volume.
Without time, we can't even speak of existence, all events have become uncertain; they either occurred, are occurring, or have not even occurred. The logic breaks down and out reasoning ability stops.
This is where "faith" comes in, which is often dressed up in psuedo-logical language (such as John Chrysostom's homilies) or anthropomorphic terms for easier digestion, but it is still not rational. Trying to reason faith is, by necessity, pure sophism.
As Archbishop Hilairon (Afeyev) of the Russian Orthodox Church makes that perfectly clear when he says that spiritual ascent is "where words fall silent, where reason fades, where all human knowledge and comprehension cease, where God is."
My comment was not ridiculing human fancy, but showing that saying that something is "too difficult" to believe is an oxymoron. There is no limit to what man can believe, if he is willing!