If the text is just metaphor for deeper truths then what validates those deeper truths as truths at all? It seems like trying to have your cake and eat it too.

(September 24, 2026 at 12:22 pm)Angrboda Wrote: If the text is just metaphor for deeper truths then what validates those deeper truths as truths at all?  It seems like trying to have your cake and eat it too.

What’s always puzzled me is that the Bible is claimed to be the inspired word of God. If God wishes everyone to be saved (1 Timothy 2:3-4), why are there all those ‘deeper truths’ at all? I mean, it to much to expect God to speak plainly?

Boru

(September 23, 2026 at 1:25 am)Belacqua Wrote: Likewise it's a commonplace among Internet atheists to say that reading the Bible is what made them stop believing, but again that's due to prior beliefs and standards of judgment telling them that it's not credible. A person who has learned a scientific/materialist worldview from his culture will easily dismiss the whole thing. When the Bible is taught like children's stories, then it's easy to dismiss it once you're not a child any more. 

I'm an Internet atheist who says reading the Bible is what made me stop believing. I was a tongue-speaking literal fundamentalist Pentecostal when I set out to read the Bible cover-to-cover in a fit of devotion. I just wanted to understand it better. At the time I thought evolution was a hoax and nearly every fringe belief I encountered was plausible.

As I read it, I noticed irrconcileable discrepancies, but they were mostly in details I could probably have excused. I noticed God commanding awful things. Conquests, executions, taking slaves, and so on. And I noticed the God who is 'the same today, yesterday, and forever' changed from book to book. I noticed Jesus talking about hell and that he became a more and more fantastic character the farther I got into the Gospels.

Reading the Bible didn't make me stop believing in God, but it did make me stop believing in Christianity. I had been taught that God was loving and good and morally perfect, and I thought too highly of the God I was raised to believe in to also believe that the authors of the Bible had any special connection to that God.

It really is interesting how the idea of a loving god always gets abandoned at the wayside for the monstrous concept that better reflects the minds of its believers.

(September 24, 2026 at 12:01 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote:

(September 24, 2026 at 9:23 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Remember children, the cool thing about magic book is that people can interpret it any old way....but certainly not the way that "haters" interpret it. That would be bad.

They can't. Claiming that the book of Genesis is a metaphor is just fooling yourself. The existence of Adam and Eve is crucial for Christianity, but those metaphorists simply ignore it—like Belacqua, who has been told this numerous times over the years, but he just ignores it and keeps repeating his talking points like a broken record.

Just as crucial as a passage in Isaiah being prophecy about Jesus Christ even though it explicitly states in the lines before and after that it isn’t. In truth, Christianity is not now and has never been based on the contents of magic book. Rather, it has always been about whatever was transmitted about what was in there- and largely by people who had never read it. There are some people who take that as a defense of some sort…but they too are falling into exactly that trap. Believing that if people did read what was actually in there that would be an improvement. It isn’t. All scriptural religions suffer this issue. The jots and tittles are always a reflection of their place and time. People change, but the stories themselves are frozen.

The Bible is just forerunner to the game 'Telephone'. As the messages/stories passed from group to group, the interpretations varied and were passed on to next group. If the Bible was the outline for the Christian faith, there would not be a zillion different denominations and variations within those denominations.

Mix that up with a charismatic preacher/teacher and add politics and money and the subgroups are endless.

The fact that are so many versions of the Bible exist should lead one to wonder which one is supposedly the real deal.

Here is definitely a more saner version of Christianity.

Quote:James Talarico's lesbian minister questions whether Jesus ever existed and rejects Virgin Birth

Reverend Babs Miller, a minister at St Andrew's Presbyterian Church, attended by the Texas Democratic Senate candidate, has made a series of provocative comments about core Christian beliefs.

In undercover footage recorded by the Daily Wire, Miller questioned traditional Christian teachings about Jesus' death and the Virgin Birth.

Miller dismissed the traditional Christian teaching that he died for our sins.

'Jesus was political. Jesus was put on that cross not to save us, they killed him. He didn't die to save our sins,' she said matter-of-factly.

She likewise rejected the idea that God sacrificed Jesus for mankind, saying she found the traditional explanation difficult to accept.

Miller also questioned the biblical account of the Virgin Birth, suggesting that the story was influenced by ancient pagan traditions.

More strikingly, she expressed uncertainty about whether Jesus even existed at all, comparing the question to debates over the historical existence of Buddha.

Miller argued Jesus's historical existence was 'ultimately unimportant,' calling the vengeful God of parts of the Old Testament pure mythology - and went further, suggesting Christianity itself may have been invented outright.

https://www.dailymail.com/news/us-politi...Birth.html

(September 24, 2026 at 12:49 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote:

(September 23, 2026 at 1:25 am)Belacqua Wrote: Likewise it's a commonplace among Internet atheists to say that reading the Bible is what made them stop believing, but again that's due to prior beliefs and standards of judgment telling them that it's not credible. A person who has learned a scientific/materialist worldview from his culture will easily dismiss the whole thing. When the Bible is taught like children's stories, then it's easy to dismiss it once you're not a child any more. 

I'm an Internet atheist who says reading the Bible is what made me stop believing. I was a tongue-speaking literal fundamentalist Pentecostal when I set out to read the Bible cover-to-cover in a fit of devotion. I just wanted to understand it better. At the time I thought evolution was a hoax and nearly every fringe belief I encountered was plausible.

As I read it, I noticed irrconcileable discrepancies, but they were mostly in details I could probably have excused. I noticed God commanding awful things. Conquests, executions, taking slaves, and so on. And I noticed the God who is 'the same today, yesterday, and forever' changed from book to book. I noticed Jesus talking about hell and that he became a more and more fantastic character the farther I got into the Gospels.

Reading the Bible didn't make me stop believing in God, but it did make me stop believing in Christianity. I had been taught that God was loving and good and morally perfect, and I thought too highly of the God I was raised to believe in to also believe that the authors of the Bible had any special connection to that God.

It sounds as if you had very good reasons to reject the Christian claims you'd heard. 

I'm glad you were able to grow out of that, and find something much better.

Slight tangent here, but on the issue of looking for 'deeper truths', lately I've found myself more and more interested in learning about Hinduism... as a side effect of starting to learn the Hindi language and the Devanagari/Sanskrit script. Never thought I'd see that day, but yeah, recently my YouTube is getting more and more full of Indian content, both pertaining to the language and the Hindu religion... as well as my usual Buddhist stuff as well obviously.

It's fascinating, and not a case of looking for a god or anything supernatural to believe in or anything like that, but nonetheless Hinduism is described... or at least certain types of it - Advaita Vedanta I think it's called... so in Devanagari/Sanskrit that might be something like अदवैद वेदान्त (just guessing, letter by letter, so could well be wrong, but I'll check to see how close I was later) - as being very similar to Buddhism. The main difference being in how it views the 'awareness' behind consciousness... which is pretty fascinating I have to say, and I am actually interested in it in more than just an 'intellectual' sense, but in the sense of looking for insights into the nature of consciousness etc... which it seems to me, Hinduism, or at least that type of it, could be just as much a 'secularly' treated religion/philosophy as Buddhism is.

Then on top of that there's also, and probably very related, the idea of 'Om'/'Aum'... ॐ, which I came across while learning about Devanagari... that far from being just a random sound used in mantras/meditation, which is what I originally thought it was, it turns out it's a very special, revered, and unique Devanagari symbol, representing many things in Indian religions, but the 'Aum' representing (roughly speaking... look it up if interested, cos I can't do it justice ) awake, dreaming, and deeper dreaming, as separate aspects of consciousness as well as separate steps involved in actually pronouncing the character correctly... so it sounds like a fascinating and potentially deeply insightful thing to look into, on many levels. As a 'reductionist' by nature, this sort of thing does actually seem very reductionistic, so that's probably why it's becoming so appealing to me.

As early as 500bc Hindu tradition already contained people who didn’t believe in gods but still accepted Vedic authority as a matter of deeper meanings™…and those who didn’t believe in gods and called the deeper meaning™ a scam for the maintenance of traditional hierarchies of oppression.