That is sad. Still, I can only hope that the 63-75 % Catholic majority will be able to hold against that rise in popularity.

The test for a modern Christian, I argue, lies instead in a kind of reason. What makes sense? And that which is fantastical can be dismissed. Under ancient light, Christianity stands out in a certain kind of relief. The incomparably brighter light of modernity reveals an entirely different landscape, sculpted in part by critical questioning and a refusal to accept the ancient answers. Part of that new clarity was always already there - part of the genius of the core idea. Strip away the miracles and everything else that simply can't be (with some care; the flood, for example, happened), and what endures is the Christian message of love. To be a Christian is to love like a Christian - neither as easy or simple as it sounds. But too simple for people who don't really understand it, and who need the dressing of myth. — tim wood

This being Easter Sunday, I would like to take issue with this. The whole point of the story of Christ’s resurrection is the disclosure of a reality beyond death.

When man lived securely under the canopy of the Judeo-Christian world picture he was part of a great whole; to put it in our terms, his cosmic heroism was completely mapped out, it was unmistakable. He came from the invisible world into the visible one by the act of God, did his duty to God by living out his life with dignity and faith… offering his whole life—as Christ had—to the Father. In turn he was justified by the Father and rewarded with eternal life in the invisible dimension. Little did it matter that earth was a vale of tears, of horrid sufferings of incommensurateness, of torturous and humiliating daily pettiness, of sickness and death, a place where man felt he did not belong, “the wrong place,” as Chesterton said…. In a word, man’s cosmic heroism was assured, even if he was as nothing. This was the most remarkable achievement of the Christian world picture: that it could take slaves, cripples, imbeciles, the simple and the mighty, and make them all secure heroes, simply by taking a step back from the world into another dimension of things, the dimension called heaven. Or we might better say that Christianity took creature consciousness—the thing man most wanted to deny—and made it the very condition for his cosmic heroism

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death [which was incidentally not at all a Christian apologetic but a psycho-historical analysis of religious motivation.]

This is not a conversion pitch. By all means, don’t believe it - but it’s worth being clear about what is that is not being believed.

The whole point of the story of Christ’s resurrection is the disclosure of a reality beyond death. — Wayfarer

I would like to take issue with this. As it's Easter, the resurrection is not a lesson in memento mori, remember death! Rather memento viveri, remember life! Not a reality after death, but the reality of this Christian life. The most potent reminder to live is to be aware of death. Fixation on death, however, is a Stoic ideal. The resurrection is instruction for this life as a Christian life. .