The Noah's Ark thing, for example. Just about every religion has a flood story, which makes sense, because floods happen. People read those, and they end up interweaving those with their own cultural flood stories. Put it all in a blender and stir for a few thousand years. It makes sense that some of them are practically word for word.

I mean, we know human nature. Stories in the Bible existed in oral form until written down centuries later, and most people can't keep their stories straight over a span of one year, much less a hundred.

So if you want it to be even sort of literally true - in the face of absolutely ALL available information - you have to insist that God guided it. But now you have a bunch of stories that simultaneously don't hold up to scrutiny yet have to be word for word true.

So, you do what some people of any religion do in this situation: shut off your brain. When somebody points out how absurd you're being, you just pray louder - and maybe kill them.

I wish they would figure out how to relax a bit and accept what's out there. If you just allow for the fact that maybe God's days are longer than human days, then there's absolutely nothing more religion-y sounding than the Big Bang: there was nothing, then a big flash of light and there was everything. Allow for the possibility God didn't need to make everything exactly as it is, but laid down the basic rules and let things evolve to the point he wanted before creating humans. There are a thousand tiny points of doctrine that could be let go without doing any harm to the faith and make it align with observable facts.

But no, it can't make sense but must be literally true, and anybody who disagrees shouldn't wander down any dark alleys.