(September 20, 2026 at 6:42 am)Deesse23 Wrote:  If you, or any ancient reader, wants to claim there is potentially a deeper meaning.....demonstrate it. Otherwise it would be legit to interpret anything you want into a text.

Sometimes it's not too difficult.  The story in the garden is an incredibly obvious coming of age allegory.  Broadly speaking, all that follows in the ot is what it meant to be cast out of their fathers house and their deep longing to return.  A compelling story for transportees.

That didn't mean much to christians.  Christianity was a story by and for gentiles - much more concerned with the deep social inequality of their own time and relief from the pandemics which defined it.  Isaiah, probably the best example, could not be about some now long gone nation, about some other people, about their time and their interests.  It must be a literal prophecy even when the text of isaiah explicitly demonstrates that it is not.  So it became about a christ, for them - despite jesus-the-mans alleged admonishions in the nt for even thinking this was a thing.  

By the time that christian lit was taking something resembling it's final form this too had become less of an issue to christians.  They were no longer impoverished outsiders.  The pandemics had taken the old social order with them when they left.  Now they had expansive cultural and territorial claims after the collapse of the classical world - and so, christ becomes kingmaker.

In the most fundamental sense, religious literature always has at least two meanings. Stories about gods are a vehicle for what the authors (or creator-culture) would like to do or see in the real world. That is the essence of religious ideation - which is often communicated in a superstitious narrative but doesn't truly rely on it - as we can see with late pan hellenism, and now, cultural christianity.

(the same is true of the eight legged horse and setanta killing the hound, and those god damned apples, that Boru mentioned)

-all of this swirling around a ubiquitous observation on the development of scriptural religions and marketplaces. The least silly version of any religion, the least silly version of any scriptural interpretation, is always the one that services the needs of the contemporary host culture, never what was important to the predecessor. That some characters or events persist between revisions is not narrative continuity - but an artifact of a continued and insurmountable cultural affinity.

(September 20, 2026 at 7:09 am)emjay Wrote:

Quote:why should the Bible have more credence to you, as 'words of truth' about god, in one way or another, if you don't take it as literal claims?

Well, there are all kinds of ways of reading the Bible, obviously. How a person reads it will depend a lot on what he thinks it's meant to be. 

And that's complicated by the fact that different parts of it were written at different times for different purposes. Genesis is myth, Leviticus is rules, the whole cycle of Saul to David to Solomon is written as dramatized history interpreted morally. 

I'd say there are two reasons why it has a stronger hold on people than Harry Potter or any other random bit of writing. 

The first is that its myths are clearly effective. Whereas Harry Potter, for example, is largely a collection of clichés we've all seen a million times, with a vaguely conservative message, the myths of the Bible resist any kind of final interpretation. The story of the expulsion from Eden is a powerful image; it stays in people's memories and will come to mind in any number of different circumstances and life events. (There are people who claim that this story has one and only one correct meaning, and that they know what this meaning is. They are not correct.) The Book of Job remains affecting, many of the New Testament parables are memorable to the point where (until very recently) they were an important part of the Western cultural tradition. They have sticking power. And a big reason why they have this power is because they change their emotional resonance depending on the time and place and the person recalling it. 

The second reason is that, like it or not, this is the book that Western culture used as its touchstone for a very long time. Not to go all Roland Barthes on you here, but when a book gets to that level its author is no longer important. A Bible story is the text itself, plus all the many interpretations and pictures and operas and half-remembered quotations that it has become. Reading the Bible after Dante is not the same as reading the Bible before Dante, although a lot of people don't realize they've been affected in that way. For the same reason that philosophers and literary critics keep coming up with new interpretations of Greek myths to demonstrate their theories, the Bible is our most powerful compendium of cultural images. 

Remember in the Phaedrus, the title character asks Socrates if he believes that the stories in the Greek myths are true. Socrates answers that he doesn't know; he leaves that question for other people. He says that he uses the myths to learn about himself. ("Know yourself" used to be considered good advice.) 

I think we can see how this works if we experience more modern psychological novels. If you read Stendhal's The Red and the Black at twenty years old, and again at sixty years old, your impressions of the novel will undoubtedly be very different. A young person at the beginning of his career will read Julien Sorel's ambitions, goals, methods, and love affairs in a very different way than a person at the end of his career, after he has had his own opportunities, failures, moral dilemmas, and the time to reflect. The point of the novel is not to teach us about social conditions in the time it was written (although it does that too). The point is to allow us to see ourselves. 

This is even more true with Proust's À la recherche. There has never been a more detailed, subtle, and perceptive novel about psychology, and how we discover who we are as we grow up. Here, too, if you read it as a young person you will get certain things out of it, but if you read it later it's very likely that it will seem entirely different. The difference is obviously not in the words, which have stayed the same, but in the reader's reactions -- what he notices, what he admires, what ruses of the narrator he has learned through experience to see through. If a person made it a habit to re-read the whole thing every ten years, it would become a profound education in one's own development. 

So with these books, as with Socrates's myths, the goal is to learn about oneself. A person who learned nothing about himself between childhood and old age, and whose impressions of the books he's read remain exactly the same, is not someone who is growing.

In my opinion this is also one of the reasons why the Bible is important. Because in our culture (until recently) it was a book that people knew all their lives, it was also a touchstone to perceive changes in oneself. An 8-year-old who has led a sheltered life will read the Beatitudes in a very different way from an elderly person who has known suffering and loss. An adult who has experienced cruelty and betrayal will read Jesus's words about forgiveness differently than someone with only childish happy experiences. 

Again, this is from Blake. His Songs of Innocence are not his own opinions, but the words of a fictional narrator in the state of innocence. The Songs of Experience demonstrate the changes that a person goes through. So the speaker of The Lamb, in the first book, is the same as the speaker of The Tiger, in the second book, after he has realized that the world is a harsh and dangerous place. Blake, like Stendhal or Proust, is far too great an author to tie everything up with a nice moral: "and so children, we all learn that______." If we don't live it for ourselves we won't learn it.

You'll notice, I'm sure, that none of this depends on the Bible being the word of God. Dictated, inspired, or anything else. But part of my point is that we can't assume what an omniscient God would want to write. A lot of people think the Bible is intended to be a simple instruction manual and insofar as it fails to be clear it has failed. But maybe an omniscient God would want to operate more like Stendhal or Proust or Blake, and give you the material that allows you to do the work yourself. (And Blake would say that all great literature is simply God's extended version of the Bible, no matter whose name is on the title page.)

(September 22, 2026 at 1:18 am)Belacqua Wrote: Well, there are all kinds of ways of reading the Bible, obviously. How a person reads it will depend a lot on what he thinks it's meant to be. 

And that's complicated by the fact that different parts of it were written at different times for different purposes. Genesis is myth, Leviticus is rules, the whole cycle of Saul to David to Solomon is written as dramatized history interpreted morally. 

I'd say there are two reasons why it has a stronger hold on people than Harry Potter or any other random bit of writing. 

The first is that its myths are clearly effective. Whereas Harry Potter, for example, is largely a collection of clichés we've all seen a million times, with a vaguely conservative message, the myths of the Bible resist any kind of final interpretation. The story of the expulsion from Eden is a powerful image; it stays in people's memories and will come to mind in any number of different circumstances and life events. (There are people who claim that this story has one and only one correct meaning, and that they know what this meaning is. They are not correct.) The Book of Job remains affecting, many of the New Testament parables are memorable to the point where (until very recently) they were an important part of the Western cultural tradition. They have sticking power. And a big reason why they have this power is because they change their emotional resonance depending on the time and place and the person recalling it. 

The second reason is that, like it or not, this is the book that Western culture used as its touchstone for a very long time. Not to go all Roland Barthes on you here, but when a book gets to that level its author is no longer important. A Bible story is the text itself, plus all the many interpretations and pictures and operas and half-remembered quotations that it has become. Reading the Bible after Dante is not the same as reading the Bible before Dante, although a lot of people don't realize they've been affected in that way. For the same reason that philosophers and literary critics keep coming up with new interpretations of Greek myths to demonstrate their theories, the Bible is our most powerful compendium of cultural images. 

Remember in the Phaedrus, the title character asks Socrates if he believes that the stories in the Greek myths are true. Socrates answers that he doesn't know; he leaves that question for other people. He says that he uses the myths to learn about himself. ("Know yourself" used to be considered good advice.) 

I think we can see how this works if we experience more modern psychological novels. If you read Stendhal's The Red and the Black at twenty years old, and again at sixty years old, your impressions of the novel will undoubtedly be very different. A young person at the beginning of his career will read Julien Sorel's ambitions, goals, methods, and love affairs in a very different way than a person at the end of his career, after he has had his own opportunities, failures, moral dilemmas, and the time to reflect. The point of the novel is not to teach us about social conditions in the time it was written (although it does that too). The point is to allow us to see ourselves. 

This is even more true with Proust's À la recherche. There has never been a more detailed, subtle, and perceptive novel about psychology, and how we discover who we are as we grow up. Here, too, if you read it as a young person you will get certain things out of it, but if you read it later it's very likely that it will seem entirely different. The difference is obviously not in the words, which have stayed the same, but in the reader's reactions -- what he notices, what he admires, what ruses of the narrator he has learned through experience to see through. If a person made it a habit to re-read the whole thing every ten years, it would become a profound education in one's own development. 

So with these books, as with Socrates's myths, the goal is to learn about oneself. A person who learned nothing about himself between childhood and old age, and whose impressions of the books he's read remain exactly the same, is not someone who is growing.

In my opinion this is also one of the reasons why the Bible is important. Because in our culture (until recently) it was a book that people knew all their lives, it was also a touchstone to perceive changes in oneself. An 8-year-old who has led a sheltered life will read the Beatitudes in a very different way from an elderly person who has known suffering and loss. An adult who has experienced cruelty and betrayal will read Jesus's words about forgiveness differently than someone with only childish happy experiences. 

Again, this is from Blake. His Songs of Innocence are not his own opinions, but the words of a fictional narrator in the state of innocence. The Songs of Experience demonstrate the changes that a person goes through. So the speaker of The Lamb, in the first book, is the same as the speaker of The Tiger, in the second book, after he has realized that the world is a harsh and dangerous place. Blake, like Stendhal or Proust, is far too great an author to tie everything up with a nice moral: "and so children, we all learn that______." If we don't live it for ourselves we won't learn it.

You'll notice, I'm sure, that none of this depends on the Bible being the word of God. Dictated, inspired, or anything else. But part of my point is that we can't assume what an omniscient God would want to write. A lot of people think the Bible is intended to be a simple instruction manual and insofar as it fails to be clear it has failed. But maybe an omniscient God would want to operate more like Stendhal or Proust or Blake, and give you the material that allows you to do the work yourself. (And Blake would say that all great literature is simply God's extended version of the Bible, no matter whose name is on the title page.)

Fair enough, that's interesting in its own right... and I agree, people's interpretation of things can change/evolve over time, just as people can change/evolve over time. But using the Bible as a touchstone nonetheless has a flip side... in that in my experience of its usage by others, it's more often than not used just to 'justify' or excuse people's prejudices... homophobia for instance, even if only a line or two in the Bible references it, and any other 'line or two' is conveniently ignored etc. In that sense, its use is anything but changing/evolving over time, but rather representing a fixation/obsession/prejudice over time... and if for nothing else necessarily, they may 'hang onto' that it seems... ie whether they believe in god or not. In other words, things like homophobia continue to exist with such unending stubbornness because many people use the Bible to reflect their prejudices in the senses of 'justifying' them.. to them...  both amplifying them and acting as an anchor... or ball on a chain... however you look at it, preventing them from 'moving on' beyond it, whether they see that as a good or a bad thing. In my own case... the case of my homophobic parents... I think it's more in a 'ball on a chain' sense, in that it keeps them tied to homophobia and that without that Biblical 'justification' to them, they might well be able to move on beyond it... because they actually do believe in god, sadly, and are indeed very loving towards me in any other respect, but will never accept my homosexuality because of this 'ball on a chain'. So that's a sad case, but the flip side of the 'ball on a chain' is the 'anchor', when people are using it as a 'safe' space from which to continuously and aggressively attack... thankfully my parents aren't using it that way, so there is that, but nonetheless some people do... many people do... despite only a few lines in the Bible even mentioning it, but enough for them to fixate on, at the expense of everything else, showing the negative side of the brain's ability to read meaning into anything... in that case, the power of confirmation bias etc.

Anyway, as for me, the Bible is the last thing I'd use as a means to reflect on 'morality' and/or 'justice' as it does neither, and all it represents mainly to me, is that 'ball on a chain' keeping this world so polarised when it doesn't need to be. In other words, the world could have been a very different place now if there'd been two less assholes in the Bible for people to fixate on ...which everyone else uses as either their anchor or a sad, ball on a chain, grounding them in or tying them to these bigoted beliefs.

But as to the question of taking it literally or not, its only 'value' to me remains as a literal, metaphysical (or whatever), claim to be accepted as true or not, and obviously I do not believe it to be true, for many reasons, but given than non-belief in its actual truth, and seeing how negatively it is used by many people, either intentionally or not, why should I want to read it for any other purpose? There's nothing inspirational about it to me, even as pure fiction, if we could agree that it was that. But do you see it as a claim at all? Does it help you in any way at all, literally or non-literally come to any conclusion about whether the Christian god actually exists or not? Or could do? Because that remains the primary point as far as I'm concerned, and that has long ago been decided, that no, it does not suggest or prove in any way the existence of the Christian god, and all it does is bring more suffering to this world than needs to be here... in many ways, not just homophobia, I might add... so certainly not something to read in any inspirational or reflective sense. Buddhism for instance, is far more meaningful to me, in both of those senses, than the Bible ever could be.

Guy thinks it has a stronger hold on people than Harry Potter. IDK…..maybe we should ask an evangelical preacher. Seems like they have some salient thoughts on a subject for a change.

Bel is comparing apples to Oranges, Bible with Harry potter. He tries to explain the Bibles enourmous cultural influence by literal study. Yet he fails to grasp the psychological, intitutional and religious dimensions of the Bible and beliefs based on it.
but
who tells him that in 2k years Harry Potter is NOT an important book that has shaped a culture? Harry potter aint pulp fiction, it also has lessons about sacrifce n stuff.

He also basically misses the point entirely. The original question was

Quote:why should the Bible have more credence to you, as 'words of truth' about god, in one way or another, if you don't take it as literal claims?

and Bel answers on a level of aestethics and cultural history. Nobody denies all the facts about what the Bible was and was not in the past 2k years, what it was the basis for or not. He repeats his claim that one may interpret the bible as one likes, giving his favourite interpretations as a follow up. Why should anyone accept those? Sounds a bit like "You can interpret it as you like, as long as its identical to my interpretation". But this is the entire point and dilemma of the past 2k years: The text was interpreted in ways that demonstrably caused innumeral human sufferings. If i can interpret the bile as i like, why not the Quran? Vedas, etc? Just because it happened to be the focus point of a (european) civilisation which conquered most of the world and is as dominat as it is today? (forced) Success does not equal truth or content. What if.......not bible but Vedas, or Nordic Mythology? The fact that the Bible succeesed does not prove in any way that its worth investigating and interpreting more than any other holy book. Its success does not add at all to the truth or validity of its claims (especially the metaphysical ones).
Thats is survivors bias and also a bit cultural chauvinism. We could analyse any (other) philosophical framework and find it more intellectually challenging and being a better food for thought. The bible wasnt so successful because of its (true, aesthetic, rich, etc) content, but because it was succesfully spread by the sword. The entire conquest (including cultural!) of Africa and the Americas is based on this: Convert or die, in any case submit, because....... Bible!!! Even on its "home turf" and within its own denominations, it took the 30 Year War, Hussite Revolt, Cathar Crusade and more with more unimaginable human suffering to get to where we are now. I dont see where the (special to the Bible) achievement is based solely on its content and interpretations of it, and thus the Bible deserves special treatment. I dare to challenge this and ask for the exact opposite! Why not analyse the background of China, culturally, philisophically religiously, an empire during most of history being an oder of magnitude bigger in population or economic power than Europe, but yet it didnt feel compelled to conquer the entire planet, by force? It even set a clear limit to how far it wanted to extend its dominance, when it easily could have gone "all in". Why not read and interpret the philosophical and religious wrings that were the focus opint of that particular culture? Looking at the 21st century that may be warranted even more so.

Bels analysis to me is too much about the perspective of a (far removed) philosopher, completely ignoring the unimaginable human suffering that went along with the Bible and spreading it, over the course of its evolution. All of this wasnt happening in a vaccuum, but in a lake of blood caused by the very foundation the Bible itself created, by the very rules it laid out as to how "new interpretation" is to be dealth with by the "established interpretation". It is christianity who is notorious for violently fighting the "interpetations" of its own content to the point of eradication (Arianism, Cathars, etc.) of entire groups of people, if they could not be "convinced" to convert....within christianity (but one has to give credit to the Quran too, another religion that happens to be based on major parts of the Bible). Its was enlightenment and secularism that enabled us to be able to sit here and discuss "interpetations" without the want and need to kill each other and wipe the globe clean of the entire opposition.

To sum it up:
Instead of explaining how a non-literal myth can still carry divine truth, Bel takes refuge in cultural history. He manages to prove that the Bible is a great, highly influential book, but he  fails to show why it should be considered a holy book with more authority on God than any other piece of human writing. Yet sill he is not able to explain as to why the Bible should be prefered to any other sacred book .

(September 20, 2026 at 7:37 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: Why is it that only the Abrahamic religions are routinely scoured for deeper meanings, often boiling down to the-text-doesn't-mean-what-it-says? You don't get that nonsense with other ancient religions. When the Norse stories say that Odin's horse had eight legs, they mean the horse had eight legs. Cu Chulainn's killing of Culann's guard dog means that the dog was killed. When we're told that Heracles stole the golden apples, we're asked to accept that there were apples made of gold and Heracles stole them.

But Matthew 10:34 doesn't really mean that Jesus didn't come to bring peace. The Song of Solomon is actually a chaste and holy allegory and not a poem about the author wanting to give a hottie a jolly good seeing-to. Muhammad actually rode a flying horse.

At least pagans are honest about their silly stories.

Boru

I've heard Sleipner is a metaphor for a coffin with four pallbearers. The dead person is symbolically riding an eight-legged steed into the afterlife. Tis my nature to quibble.

(September 22, 2026 at 1:11 pm)Deesse23 Wrote: Bel is comparing apples to Oranges, Bible with Harry potter. He tries to explain the Bibles enourmous cultural influence by literal study. Yet he fails to grasp the psychological, intitutional and religious dimensions of the Bible and beliefs based on it.
but
who tells him that in 2k years Harry Potter is NOT an important book that has shaped a culture? Harry potter aint pulp fiction, it also has lessons about sacrifce n stuff.

He also basically misses the point entirely. The original question was

Quote:why should the Bible have more credence to you, as 'words of truth' about god, in one way or another, if you don't take it as literal claims?

and Bel answers on a level of aestethics and cultural history. Nobody denies all the facts about what the Bible was and was not in the past 2k years, what it was the basis for or not. He repeats his claim that one may interpret the bible as one likes, giving his favourite interpretations as a follow up. Why should anyone accept those? Sounds a bit like "You can interpret it as you like, as long as its identical to my interpretation". But this is the entire point and dilemma of the past 2k years: The text was interpreted in ways that demonstrably caused innumeral human sufferings. If i can interpret the bile as i like, why not the Quran? Vedas, etc? Just because it happened to be the focus point of a (european) civilisation which conquered most of the world and is as dominat as it is today? (forced) Success does not equal truth or content. What if.......not bible but Vedas, or Nordic Mythology? The fact that the Bible succeesed does not prove in any way that its worth investigating and interpreting more than any other holy book. Its success does not add at all to the truth or validity of its claims (especially the metaphysical ones).
Thats is survivors bias and also a bit cultural chauvinism. We could analyse any (other) philosophical framework and find it more intellectually challenging and being a better food for thought. The bible wasnt so successful because of its (true, aesthetic, rich, etc) content, but because it was succesfully spread by the sword. The entire conquest (including cultural!) of Africa and the Americas is based on this: Convert or die, in any case submit, because....... Bible!!! Even on its "home turf" and within its own denominations, it took the 30 Year War, Hussite Revolt, Cathar Crusade and more with more unimaginable human suffering to get to where we are now. I dont see where the (special to the Bible) achievement is based solely on its content and interpretations of it, and thus the Bible deserves special treatment. I dare to challenge this and ask for the exact opposite! Why not analyse the background of China, culturally, philisophically religiously, an empire during most of history being an oder of magnitude bigger in population or economic power than Europe, but yet it didnt feel compelled to conquer the entire planet, by force? It even set a clear limit to how far it wanted to extend its dominance, when it easily could have gone "all in". Why not read and interpret the philosophical and religious wrings that were the focus opint of that particular culture? Looking at the 21st century that may be warranted even more so.

Bels analysis to me is too much about the perspective of a (far removed) philosopher, completely ignoring the unimaginable human suffering that went along with the Bible and spreading it, over the course of its evolution. All of this wasnt happening in a vaccuum, but in a lake of blood caused by the very foundation the Bible itself created, by the very rules it laid out as to how "new interpretation" is to be dealth with by the "established interpretation". It is christianity who is notorious for violently fighting the "interpetations" of its own content to the point of eradication (Arianism, Cathars, etc.) of entire groups of people, if they could not be "convinced" to convert....within christianity (but one has to give credit to the Quran too, another religion that happens to be based on major parts of the Bible). Its was enlightenment and secularism that enabled us to be able to sit here and discuss "interpetations" without the want and need to kill each other and wipe the globe clean of the entire opposition.

To sum it up:
Instead of explaining how a non-literal myth can still carry divine truth, Bel takes refuge in cultural history. He manages to prove that the Bible is a great, highly influential book, but he  fails to show why it should be considered a holy book with more authority on God than any other piece of human writing. Yet sill he is not able to explain as to why the Bible should be prefered to any other sacred book .

Wow, that's a far more in-depth analysis than mine... and makes my issues with homophobia feel like a drop in the ocean compared to all the other suffering that the Bible has led to over centuries, being as you put it, roughly speaking with square brackets, [spread by the sword]... , as well as [suppressing different interpretations, again, usually with a sword, rather than celebrating or encouraging them]... both very thought provoking and insightful ideas, so thanks for that. As for Bel, I'm curious too how he'd respond to these points, because they just take my points to a much deeper level, and in some directions I hadn't even thought of, but make perfect sense.

It's probably not accurate to say that the bible succeeded. Most christians who have ever lived have never read it. That also helped people "read things into it"....real easy to do if you've never read it to begin with. Political christianity succeeded. Anything we might be able to call biblical christianity (with a straight face and without a mountain of caveats that give the game uop)had a very short shelf life. The mayfly of historic religions. In and out within the confines of rounding errors for world majors.

I prefer the epics. I guess that makes me shallow.