(March 26, 2021 at 2:03 am)Ferrocyanide Wrote: Unfortunately, most of the population between 1500 BCE to 1700 CE did not record a video stating whether they took the Genesis story literally or not. I’m not aware of any searchmonkey or askmonkey type of poll.
I don’t know. Is there such data available?

There is an enormous amount of data available, in the form of the books they wrote, the art and music they made. The detailed debates were well recorded. 

If one doesn't have an extensive knowledge of this, it wouldn't make much sense to issue pronouncements on what everybody thought.

It's a specialized subject with its own history and vocabulary. For example, when Augustine says that we should read a passage "literally," he means that we should read it in the sense that the original author intended. That means that if the original author intended a sentence to be a metaphor, then the literal reading is metaphorical.

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(March 26, 2021 at 2:07 am)Eleven Wrote: It's interesting to note that historical records have no use for allegory or metaphor so much as fiction does.

This is why we have to be careful, and not treat everything that's written as if it were intended to be a historical record. 

Some of the Bible is intended as history, though heavily weighted in favor of the writers. Most of it is not. 

There are other categories, besides history and fiction.

(March 26, 2021 at 6:12 am)Belacqua Wrote: There is an enormous amount of data available, in the form of the books they wrote, the art and music they made. The detailed debates were well recorded. 

If one doesn't have an extensive knowledge of this, it wouldn't make much sense to issue pronouncements on what everybody thought.

It's a specialized subject with its own history and vocabulary. For example, when Augustine says that we should read a passage "literally," he means that we should read it in the sense that the original author intended. That means that if the original author intended a sentence to be a metaphor, then the literal reading is metaphorical.

Just the opposite. Such a claim can be made only by those who haven’t read these theologians or are dedicated to whitewashing church history.

Augustine of Hippo, who commented extensively on Genesis, was quite explicit that the text, though it had a spiritual message, was based on historical events: The narrative indeed in these books is not cast in the figurative kind of language you find in the Song of Songs, but quite simply tells of things that happened, as in the books of the Kingdoms and others like them. But there are things being said with which ordinary human life has made us quite familiar, and so it is not difficult, indeed, it is the obvious thing to do, to take them first in the literal sense, and then chisel out from them what future realities the actual events described may figuratively stand for.
https://www.kolbecenter.org/st-augustine...f-genesis/

Augustine was also a literalist about many things later refuted by science: a young Earth, instantaneous creation, the historical reality of Adam and Eve, paradise, and Noah and his Ark.

Thomas Aquinas, for instance, emphasized that if there was a conflict between metaphorical and literal interpretations of the Bible, literalism must win. Here, for example, is Aquinas discussing the reality of paradise, the abode of Adam and Eve, in Summa Theologica wrote:
“Nothing prevents us from holding, within proper limits, a spiritual paradise; so long as we believe in the truth of the events narrated as having there occurred.” For whatever Scripture tells us about paradise is set down as matter of history; and wherever Scripture makes use of this method, we must hold to the historical truth of the narrative as a foundation of whatever spiritual explanation we may offer.

Aquinas believed not only in paradise, but also in the instantaneous creation of species and of Adam and Eve as humanity’s ancestors, as well as in a young Earth, and the literal existence of Noah and his great flood.

I could go on, but two more examples will suffice. The Protestant reformer John Calvin believed in the virginity of Mary, a historical Adam and Eve, and a literal hell. Like Aquinas, he also believed that heretics should be killed.

Even in 1950s Pius XII affirmedbelief in historical Adam and Eve in his encyclical Humani Generis:
When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism [our descent from ancestors beyond Adam and Eve], the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.


And I'll end this post with words by the historian David Livingstone from his book Adam’s Ancestors:

Quote:Regardless of how differently the Garden of Eden may have been conceived from ancient times through the medieval period to more recent days, and no matter the differences in computations of the creation date of the earth, the idea that every member of the human race is descended from the biblical Adam has been a standard doctrine in Islamic, Jewish and Christian thought. In this respect, if in no other, the catechisms of the seventeenth-century Westminster divines can be taken to speak for them all when they declare that “all mankind” descended from Adam “by ordinary generation.” People’s sense of themselves, their understanding of their place in the divinely ordered scheme of things, their very identity as human beings created in the image of God, thus rested on a conception of human origins that assumed the literal truth of the biblical narrative and traced the varieties of the human race proximately to the three sons of Noah and ultimately to Adam and Eve.

(March 26, 2021 at 2:03 am)Ferrocyanide Wrote: Is there such data available?

https://historyforatheists.com/2021/03/t...iteralism/

(March 26, 2021 at 2:07 am)Eleven Wrote: It's interesting to note that historical records have no use for allegory or metaphor so much as fiction does.

What do you mean?


--Ferrocyanide

(March 27, 2021 at 11:18 am)Ferrocyanide Wrote:

(March 26, 2021 at 2:07 am)Eleven Wrote: It's interesting to note that historical records have no use for allegory or metaphor so much as fiction does.

What do you mean?


--Ferrocyanide

It is simple, really. Historical records are bare facts.

The bible cannot claim historical accuracy if it alludes to allegory and metaphor.

Historical facts of past figures we know to have existed don't include elements only found in tall tales. Honest Abe was honest, he didn't speak Slytherin and live to the age of four-hundred.

(March 26, 2021 at 1:53 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote:

(March 26, 2021 at 1:28 am)Ferrocyanide Wrote: ==You mean to say that we use metaphors when were are communicating with each other?
If that is what you mean, that doesn’t seem unusual. Yes, it does happen. It’s pretty common.
Sometimes it is obvious that it is a metaphor and sometimes it is not.

The obviousness of the metaphor would have been assumed (and credibly so) with a contemporaneous reader.   If i make a comparison between a nation state that's about to roll me and a dragon......

I'm going to format the text my own way because this becomes part of my files.

“The obviousness of the metaphor would have been assumed (and credibly so) with a contemporaneous reader. If i make a comparison between a nation state that's about to roll me and a dragon......”

==What do you mean by contemporaneous reader? Which year are you talking about?
I didn’t understand your second sentence.
Does your statement have something to do with the book of Genesis?

“Not at all.  The speaker is discussing a very intelligent problem with a brain.  Other people.  Also, a dragon.  The one is like the other. Though, it's worth pointing out that..yes, we could conceive of a hole in our ship that way, and clearly, many religious people have done so.”

==Are we still talking about these lines of the Bible? Please quote the Bible so that I know what exactly you are referring to. Which people?

Psalms 74:13 KING JAMES VERSION
Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters.
{74:14} Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, [and] gavest him [to be] meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness.

Isaiah 27:1 KING JAMES VERSION
In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that [is] in the sea.


“So, there is conversation going on between 2 sides where one side says my god can do this and that and the other side disagrees with them and they claim that it is their god that can do this and that.”

==Who is “we” and which lines of the Bible are you talking about?

“A few centuries after the fact, yeah...but not by his literal ancestors.  By people who manufactured an entire alternate history out of the thematic elements of their grievances with their own very canaanite past.”

==That’s possible.

--Ferrocyanide

No offense, but you're formatting is obnoxious. I understand that you do it for your convenience but it inconveniences everybody else. At minimum, it would help if you put what you are replying to in bold, italics, or color, to set it off from your reply, with bold being my choice.

(March 27, 2021 at 11:24 am)Eleven Wrote: It is simple, really. Historical records are bare facts.

If by "records" you mean payment records and birth certificates, things like that, then what you say is true.

But all written history is interpretation, seen through the eyes of the writer. 

When included in a narrative, there is no such thing as a bare fact.

(March 27, 2021 at 11:44 am)Ferrocyanide Wrote: ==What do you mean by contemporaneous reader? Which year are you talking about?

We don't know.  Between 800 and 600bc two distinct waves of refugees and prisoners found themselves in need of an establishment legend, and there are different political factions speaking through it on top of that.  The dragon stories are believed to be part of an older oral tradition, which gets identified as thematically canaanite.  So that's who's talking.  Not a person who believe in abrahamism the way that anyone does today.  Presumably, from the comparisons, they're either speaking directly to -or directly about- a competing culture with other gods.  

We assume it happened more than once, or it was a long used comparison...since we don't think that the same people or even the same traditions wrote every remark in the subset.

Quote:Does your statement have something to do with the book of Genesis?

Are we still talking about these lines of the Bible? Please quote the Bible so that I know what exactly you are referring to. Which people?

Psalms 74:13 KING JAMES VERSION
Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters.
{74:14} Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, [and] gavest him [to be] meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness.

Isaiah 27:1 KING JAMES VERSION
In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that [is] in the sea.

Two examples, there are more (as before, you can use leviathan and behemoth to find the relevant narratives...and beyond just laughing at old mythology, it's what's around the dragons that interests, not the line item of the dragon.  

Quote:==Who is “we” and which lines of the Bible are you talking about?

The establishing narrator.  I could talk your ear off about this, but, broadly....in the immediate pre-exile there was an internal cultural crisis that a more ancient wave of migration and colonization engendered.  It's the reason for alot of the seemingly strange provisions in magic book - things like poly blend cloth..and it's even where we get the long used phrase "swords to ploughshares" (though, in reality, it went the other way around).  It was felt by a segment of the population at the time that too much cultural transfer and intermixing had occurred, and that the natives, as it were, got the short end of the stick on all of it.  Their settlements become stratified, and when superpowers went to war on either side of them they couldn't mount an effective resistance due to infighting.  That's how the period begins.  When it ends, some of these narrative points of view have persisted and they wind their way into the new myth.  

Quote:“A few centuries after the fact, yeah...but not by his literal ancestors.  By people who manufactured an entire alternate history out of the thematic elements of their grievances with their own very canaanite past.”

==That’s possible.

--Ferrocyanide

It's an absolute certainty that the canaanite themes in magic book are older than magic book, and that by the time they made magic book a thing, they no longer believed the same things (and no longer even remembered that they were once the same people).   They were people in 8-600bc speaking about events in the near periphery of that tragedy, but later authors were writing them as though they were an ancient past...which I supposed they would very much seem to be if I was just seeing the land of isreal for the first time, my family having been made pows centuries before, and having lived as second class citizens in their homes for centuries before that..and the civilization that once existed lying before me in rubble.

The stories felt like they were still true, an that's what gave them continued life.  Same way that we keep telling stories that our out of place and time but, timeless, in a way.

(March 27, 2021 at 11:44 am)Ferrocyanide Wrote: --Ferrocyanide

I urge you to read the description of hermeneutics in history, given here by an expert. 

https://historyforatheists.com/2021/03/t...iteralism/