Really Existing Cacognosis

Last night, D, a neighbor with whom I had always had relatively pleasant relations, subjected me to an aggressive attempt at proselytization. What follows are what I take to be the most significant of my observations:
1) D believes that the events narrated in the gospels are well-established facts. He claims that their historicity is corroborated by hundreds of witnesses, and denying the reality of Jesus's life, death, and resurrection would be as absurd as denying that the Second World War happened. My attempts to point out that a journalistic reporting of pure, unadulterated facts of the sort he was implying that the gospels were doing was more or less generically and epistemologically foreign to the 1st century Eastern Mediterranean, needless to say, did not really register.
2) D also believes that "no one else has ever claimed that someone was resurrected," and therefore it is unimaginable that several witnesses could have claimed that this happened without it actually being the case. My assertion that the motif of resurrection is common in, for instance, Greek and Hindu mythologies did not seem relevant to him since, of course, we are talking about historical facts and not myth. This made clear what I had already recognized: that for him, there is nothing even remotely metaphorical or symbolic about the gospels.
3) D presented me with a series of multiple choice-like options: either Jesus was God as he claimed, or he was a madman ("he couldn't have been just a 'great thinker,' because great thinkers don't go around claiming to be God"); either you believe in heaven and hell, or you believe that we simply turn to dust at death, etc. When I attempted to answer "none of the above" or respond that the question simply had no meaning for me, D insinuated that I simply had not thought about these things out of sheer apathy.

At risk of belaboring the obvious, I would like to note the following. All are points which I had never ceased to be aware of on some level, but it was illuminating to have them forced into my consciousness in such a violent manner:
1) D's claims about the warrant for his beliefs are exactly the same as those of militant atheists/secularists. He claims that he simply has the facts right, and appeals to the indisputable authority of the texts and institutions attesting to those facts in order to establish that their truth is simply transparent and indisputable to any reasonable person. It was important for me to be reminded of this, since it reminds me that literalist Christians and literalist scientific ideologues ultimately speak the same language. D, like Dawkins, believes that people who do not accept the truth he is promulgating are simply too apathetic and/or obtuse to accept the facts.
2) D would seem to be a real-existing cacognostic, at least in terms of our grid, in that he believes that the gospels have real historical referents and that these referents are strongly relevant. This reminds me that we need to think more about the socio-political significance of the fundamentalist as cacognostic in symbological fiction. Fundamentalists, as in the cases of Silas and the Camerlengo, can be cacognostics, or they can be quite distinct from the cacognostic as in the case of Senator Kurtz and some of Reilly's and Navarro's characters; but one of the things that symb-pologists (B) praise about DVC is that it is supposedly anti-fundamentalist (even though it shares the literalist epistemology I encountered in D). Given the symbiosis of fundamentalists and late capitalism, I hope this line of inquiry re: fundamentalism might productively intersect with the investigation of Vulgar Economic Determinism I proposed in my previous post.
3) The impossibility of this conversation, the sense that we were simply speaking two different languages, was far more extreme than I could have expected. It was especially notable to me that what I might have taken to be my most sophisticated and well-thought out positions (for instance, my claim that while I believe that there is "a truth" to the ideas of heaven and hell, but that that truth does not make me think that I will go to one of them when I die [i.e., although I did not put it this way, they possess a social truth, not a literal truth]; my argument that we cannot even know with absolute certainty even the "facts" of what happened last week in our own town, since facts are the result of people's cumulative narrations, much less the "facts" of some obscure events that occurred two thousand years ago in a radically different cultural and historical milieu) were clearly interpreted by D as expressions of ignorance and apathy. He didn't even do me the honor of considering me a dangerous relativist, he simply thought I was badly informed!
4) "The question of the neighbor." I sense that what I just described as the impossibility of this conversation is entirely emblematic of many of the problems we have been discussing here and on the other blog. So my question: How do I interact with the neighbor? Do I attempt to continue this impossible conversation? Do I instead attempt to confine our discussions to the weather? is one with many ramifications. And it is one I am, for the moment, completely unprepared to answer.