Three Bible Stories We Only Call Normal Because We Heard Them as Children

Imagine I walked up to you today and said a serpent once held a conversation with a woman, one act of eating fruit altered the condition of humanity, God later drowned almost every person and land animal on Earth, and centuries after that, dead people climbed out of their tombs and walked into a city.

If I presented this as a new revelation, you would probably ask for evidence. You might ask whether I meant it literally. You would certainly not reorganise your entire life before asking a few follow-up questions.

But I did not meet these stories as claims. I met them as facts.

I grew up in Ghana, where Christianity is not merely a private belief people practise on Sundays. It is ambient. It is in homes, school assemblies, public transport, funerals, politics and ordinary conversation. The conclusion often arrives before the question: this is the truth, God said it, and doubt is dangerous.

That does not automatically make Christianity false. Familiarity is not disproof. But it is not evidence either, and it can make extraordinary stories feel far more ordinary than they are.

Familiarity is doing more work than we admit

Religious stories rarely reach children as neutral information. They arrive with trusted adults, songs, colourful illustrations, moral lessons and the authority of God attached. Long before a child can compare competing worldviews, one worldview has already been furnished, decorated and called home.

This creates a strange double standard. A miracle from our religion is sacred history. A miracle from somebody else's religion is mythology, superstition or an obvious invention. We scrutinise their talking animals while ours receive a children's choir and a memory verse.

I am not interested in mocking Christians for believing unusual things. As I have argued before, disagreement is not disrespect. I am interested in what happens when we remove the stained glass, lower the background music and hear the stories again with adult ears.

1. The serpent, the fruit and the inherited disaster

In Genesis 3, a serpent speaks to Eve and challenges God's warning about a forbidden tree. Eve eats the fruit and gives some to Adam. God questions them, curses the serpent, assigns pain and hardship to human life, and expels the pair from Eden.

Later Christian theology gives this story enormous weight. In Romans 5, Paul connects Adam's disobedience with sin, death and condemnation spreading through humanity.

The strangest part is not even the talking serpent. It is the scale of the consequences. Billions of people enter a broken world because of a choice made by two ancestors before any of us existed. The story also creates a difficult question: if Adam and Eve had not yet gained the knowledge of good and evil, how fully could they understand the moral gravity of disobedience?

Many Christians do not read every detail literally. They treat Eden as theological symbolism, an account of humanity's tendency to rebel, or a story carrying truth without functioning as scientific history. That is a more sophisticated position than insisting there was definitely a conversational snake somewhere in Mesopotamia.

But it introduces another question: which parts are symbolic, which parts are historical, and what method decides? Allegory may reduce the story's implausibility, but it also changes the kind of truth being claimed. You cannot move casually between literal history and metaphor only when scrutiny becomes uncomfortable.

2. The flood we turned into nursery décor

Genesis 6–9 says the Earth had become corrupt and violent, so God decided to destroy life under the heavens with a flood. Noah, his family and selected animals entered an ark. The waters covered the mountains, and every land creature with the breath of life died outside it.

We somehow turned this into nursery décor.

The version children usually see has a wooden boat, a rainbow and two smiling giraffes poking their heads through a window. The picture almost never includes what Gustave Doré placed at the centre of his engraving: parents trying to keep their children above the water and animals struggling to save their young.

The cute version is not merely simplified. It is morally edited.

The biblical flood is not mainly an animal-rescue adventure. It is a story of near-total destruction with one surviving household. Among the dead would have been infants, children and animals incapable of participating in the violence used to justify the flood.

A common response is that God was judging a profoundly wicked world. But naming the event “judgment” does not settle whether the punishment was just. An all-powerful being would not be short of alternatives. The question remains: why was drowning almost everything the chosen solution?

Then comes the rainbow, commonly presented as a cheerful sign of love. Within the story, it marks God's promise never again to destroy all life with a flood. The words “never again” matter. A promise not to repeat an act does not remove the moral weight of having done it once.

3. The day the dead walked into Jerusalem

The resurrection of Jesus is so central to Christianity that many believers stop hearing it as an extraordinary claim. Jesus is executed, buried and then returns to life. Angels appear, a sealed tomb is found open, and Jesus later meets his followers.

But Matthew 27:50–53 contains an even stranger detail that many sermons glide past. When Jesus dies, the temple curtain tears, the ground shakes, rocks split and tombs break open. After Jesus's resurrection, many dead holy people leave their tombs, enter Jerusalem and appear to many people.

This is not Christian fan fiction. It is sitting quietly in the Gospel of Matthew.

Read without the cushioning of familiarity, the scene is astonishing: not one resurrection, but an unexplained group resurrection followed by dead saints appearing around a populated city. Who were they? Who saw them? What did they say? What happened to them afterward? The text supplies almost none of the details that such an event would make us desperate to know.

If someone from another religion told us that a recently executed spiritual leader returned from death and other corpses rose with him, most Christians would not accept the claim merely because followers recorded it. They would test the sources, seek corroboration and consider whether legend, symbolism or sincere error offered a better explanation.

Christian apologists do offer historical arguments about the empty tomb, reported appearances and the behaviour of the disciples. Those arguments deserve evaluation. What they do not deserve is automatic victory because questioning the conclusion feels spiritually dangerous.

“That sounds unbelievable” is not my whole argument

Something can sound strange and still be true. Reality is under no obligation to match my intuition. The fact that a story contains a miracle does not, by itself, prove that the miracle never happened.

But extraordinary claims do not become ordinary evidence merely because we heard them early. A miracle is a departure from what we normally observe. That should make careful investigation more necessary, not less.

The real issue is unequal scrutiny. Would I accept the same quality of evidence from a religion I did not inherit? Would I call the story symbolic if it became difficult to defend, then treat it as history when building doctrine on it? Would I regard doubt as intellectual caution elsewhere but moral rebellion here?

Those questions are uncomfortable because religion is rarely only an idea. It can be family, identity, community, hope and fear braided together. When hell is attached to the possibility of being wrong, questioning does not feel like research. It feels like walking toward a cliff.

The test I wish every inherited belief had to pass

Change the names. Remove the familiar artwork. Imagine the story comes from a culture you know little about and a religion you do not follow. Then ask:

• What evidence would I require before believing this?
• Am I accepting an explanation, or merely repeating one?
• Would I consider the deity's action moral if another religion described it?
• Can the belief tolerate a sincere question without threatening the questioner?

I am not saying every Christian believes thoughtlessly. Many believers have wrestled seriously with these texts and reached conclusions different from mine. I am saying that childhood repetition, trusted authority and cultural dominance can make a belief feel self-evident long before it has actually been examined.

Perhaps these stories can survive scrutiny. If so, honest questions will not destroy them. If they cannot, sacred language will not make them true.

The question is not why they once felt obvious to us. We were children, and the adults had already supplied the answer. The question is whether, hearing them now with adult ears, we still have good reasons to believe.