There are no answers in Genesis

[emjay]

I just meant that what's most important to me to evaluate as a claim to truth, for the sake of my own beliefs, is only the author's original intent.

I certainly don't mean to criticize, if this is what most interests you about the texts. It's a fascinating question.

I'm sure you know how difficult it is, since we can't really know the answer. Ancient writers didn't operate under the current academic rules about sticking to one's own genre, and properly attributing sources, what's original, etc. After Plato died lots of people wrote "dialogues of Plato" containing what they thought he would have said if he'd had more time, and signed Plato's name to them. It took centuries to work out which ones are by the man himself, and there is still disagreement. 

One source I read suggested that the Genesis creation stories were written quite late, during the time of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and were intended as founding myths to solidify religious coherence in the face of competing myths from nearby competition. As you know from the OT, Hebrews were continually tempted away to nearby faiths due to more popular festivals, less strict commandments, etc. So it's quite likely that the 6-day creation and Adam and Eve were relatively late and intended as national foundation myths, like the tall tales Americans tell about their Founding Fathers. (I don't think this has been proven; it's one theory among others.) 

So there are a large number of interlocking problems: was it written when they claim it was written? Was it re-edited to get a different meaning later on? 

Did the original author even intend it as a claim to truth, or as something more like a "speech act"; an act which, by speaking something, something is made to change? Such acts may not be evaluable in terms of truth or falsehood. 

Anyway, you could have a good long career working on these issues, and I'm sure people have. It's not irrelevant by any means.

To be fair, I didn't mean it in any high brow academic sense, just at face value; just as I read it when I was a child growing up with Christianity, and now as an adult that doesn't read the Bible very often. Granted in the past I have read books about the historicity of Jesus and/or the history of the Bible itself... but a long time ago, and I don't remember much of what was said, but yes I accept that face-value is probably not the most accurate approach to reading the Bible, but I have to admit, I do find it surprising to find a theist (or however you class yourself... maybe we can create a new classification (if it doesn't already exist) 'agnostic theist'?; someone who believes there's a God, but doesn't know which, or doesn't know the nature of which) advocating technical analysis of the Bible, because in my experience, that only tends to further cement my atheism. But then, I think that brings us back to the crux of what this whole discussion is about, namely what we each respectively get from reading the Bible. Clearly... and interestingly... it's very different...

If you're saying that there are far reaching consequences from the views that have built up around those original texts, some allegorical, some not... basically all the different schisms of Christianity and all their negative affects on the world... then I don't dispute that and in that sense agree with you and Belacqua that that is indeed important, practically if nothing else. 

Yeah, I don't think we're fighting at all. More a question of which part interests us. 

To me, the Book of Job, for example, can be analyzed textually to try to figure out when exactly it was written, and in what context, so we can make educated guesses about what its original authors may have meant. 

But the significance of the Book of Job for history, for the development of Judaism, Christianity, and Western thought in general, doesn't rely on that original intent. Like it or not, the Book of Job now consists of the original text plus all of the influential interpretations which have come since, including those of Blake and Jung. It's impossible for 21st century people to read it as ancient people did. 

Maybe we could compare it to those guys who dress up and do Civil War reenactments on weekends. They can learn a lot about what really happened, and can refine the accuracy of their uniforms, placements on the battlefield, etc. But there is no possible way they can experience what those soldiers experienced. What the modern guys do is a different thing. Likewise, 21st century readers can't experience a text the way the old guys did.

This is not just my crazy idea, either. Mostly I am thinking here of Roland Barthes and what he said about the "death of the author," which (like so many ideas in literary hermeneutics) is taken into the secular from Bible hermeneutics. The idea is just that once the text is "out there," and becomes the property of its readers, it is no longer limited to what the original author had in mind. This is not to say that every interpretation is equally good -- just that the text becomes an open-ended source of dialectic and debate, not an authoritative list of facts.

Yes, I certainly agree that interpreting old or ancient texts in light of modern biases is likely to lead to much getting 'lost in translation', though I admit it had largely slipped my mind. But this 'death of the author' idea again I think speaks to the crux of this discussion, which I think needs a little bit of analysis...

Presumably we both start with the same question 'does God exist?' (or even 'does a god exist?')?
From there can we, or do we, agree that there are only two ways to answer that question:
1. personal experience - what we experience in our own minds
2. indirect experience, ie through [accepting or rejecting] the claims of others

If we've got this far I think we're probably already starting to diverge on what we mean by each of these things...

Starting with personal experience:

For me, the concept of [divinely] inspired, even potentially, is very difficult. Since I believe the brain and psychology to wholly explain at least the content of our experience (ie not experience itself... that - discussion of the nature of consciousness - is something else) that leaves little room for external influence, or at least such influence I'd consider unfalsifiable and therefore unreliable and untrustable, and thus certainly not informative in any reliable way regarding the original question, does [a] god exist. For instance, if I have an idea, even a novel, unexpected, or unwelcome idea, I'd attribute that to my subconscious ticking away, combining and recombining what I've already learnt... ie nothing new under the sun, just a recombination of existing components... that's my general view. Likewise if I see a 'sign' stand out to me, such as the oft-quoted 'Jesus in a piece of toast', then prior bias and/or what I've recently been thinking about fully explains to me that phenomenon, just as it does with a Rorschach test. So someone already grappling with issues of religion (ie thinking about and thus priming it) sees a cross stand out to them in the stars or on a piece of toast, that to me would not be grounds enough to believe in God, but for many people it is, yourself perhaps included?, I don't know.

For you, I can only speculate. I don't think I've ever seen you talk about signs, but you do talk about 'inspired' a lot. So that already seems a great divergence between our views; to you [externally] 'inspired' seems to have great importance, but to me, it's very dubious and uninformative towards the question because it's inherently unreliable and unfalsifiable.

Moving on to indirect experience:

For me, given my view of my own personal experience, and the unreliability of the concept of external inspiration within, you can imagine how much weight I give to those sorts of claims from others. Basically then, that avenue, of personal experience - inspiration, signs, etc - is closed to me as a way of answering the original question, leaving only concrete testable claims as something that would satisfy and help answer that question for me, and the truth or falsity of which speaking to the credibility of the 'claimant' especially as a mouthpiece for god, if such is the claim.

For you, again I can only speculate. For you, the importance seems to lie in the ideas themselves rather than their authenticity (or original ownership). Is that because the question 'is there a god?' is already answered for you (ie by Aquinas' arguments etc)? And all this search for 'inspiration' is just about honing in on the nature of that god? Basically if you're not looking for, and informed by (regarding the original question), concrete claims in the Bible, or any other text (since you've said elsewhere that in this regard, you're accepting truth from multiple sources, or that there can be multiple truths), what are you looking for?

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Basically, as much as you found my perspective bizarre... I find yours, and by extension Neo's (ie that a literal reading is least important... to me it's the most important, because it, and it's attendant concrete claims, is the only avenue left that could convince)... equally strange. But that's not a judgment, just a statement of fact... and it's interesting trying to analyze and work out the differences.