I look at it this way: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That Jesus is the son of God, performed many miracles, predicted Judas' betrayal, rose from the dead, and ascended to Heaven is a lot to take in.
It's a lot like the claims that ET visits Earth regularly, abducts people and performs experiments on them, is in cahoots of some sort with our world governments, and so forth.
And people say, "Where is the evidence? Where is the alien technology? Why are all the photographs blurry, the videos shaky and fuzzy, and the witnesses almost always isolated?" But there's the thing: The witnesses. We have thousands of them across the decades (if you count back from the alleged crash in Roswell in 1947). And these witnesses cross the spectrum from lone wingnuts to pillars of the community who have nothing to gain and everything to lose by telling their stories. We have everyone from farmers, to airline pilots, to military personnel, to law enforcement, to little old ladies describing phenomena with common elements. The sheer depth and breadth of these accounts is such that they cannot be explained away by delusion, hallucination, misinterpretation, or deception.
And such is the case with supernatural and preternatural phenomena. Except with these, the accounts go back *thousands* of years. Anyone who is more than passingly familiar with the work of Ed and Lorraine Warren (or Malachi Martin, or Dave Considine) has to wonder. I used to be firmly secular, until I came across their work. I consider myself an educated and rational person. I used to get into protracted arguments with people who said God was real, and that Jesus was an authentic historical figure.
There are, certainly, lots of problems with the Bible: inconsistent claims, contradictory chronology, mistranslation, homophobia, sexism. I don't know what to make of it. And it's selectively interpreted in modern times -- we endeavor to abide by the Ten Commandments, but we discard most of the teachings of Leviticus, like stoning people who don't keep the sabbath holy, and refraining from pork and alcohol. There are rules in Leviticus that no reasonable person would follow.
In fact, the line from secularity to faith can't easily be drawn with the Bible. The Warrens make a better argument, perhaps, by way of relating their encounters with "evil." I put that in quotes because their claims are far more extraordinary than what you'll hear from any UFO witness. They see things and hear things that cannot be explained by science, or even basic logic. They see things that can't even be explained by possible ghost or poltergeist phenomena.
But while the phenomena they claimed to have encountered is extremely unpredictable, there is a common thread: Invoking Jesus always makes these entities recoil. Holy water makes them recoil. In the New Testament, Jesus specifically granted his apostles the ability to repel demonic forces, and to do so in his name.
If you are firmly secular like I was, then this probably sounds like a load of bunkum. And you may have heard of Ed and Lorraine Warren from the stories of the Amityville Horror. But I'll bet you haven't heard of
and their bizarre experiences. It gets off to a rough start, in terms of suspension of disbelief, but I think it's worth the read. You can check out a bunch of sample pages on http://books.google.com/books?id=0qscomSDhcoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+demonologist.
I can't say that the book has me rushing to church, but I'm no longer snug and comfortable with my previous agnostic/atheist views. Yeah, the narrative of the Bible reads like a mixture of pre-existing beliefs, and the narrative of the life of Jesus is one that history had already told in dozens of different nations and languages. But now, instead of assuming plagiarism or lack of originality, I find myself wondering if there isn't another reason why his story keeps cropping up.