Atheist Bible Study 1: Genesis

[The Grand Nudger]

I am so dense as to take the Bible literally; as it was written, in the context in which it is written, in the style it was written, for the purposes of which it was written. It is quite amusing to hear your wisdom in regard to how, why, & for what purpose we have Genesis. 
If you read something as it is written - it is then easier to get something out of it. 

That may be true, it may be easier to get Something™ out of a book if you read it "as it was written" - by which I think you mean literally.  You may also be so dense as to think that magic book is a dry news report from the front. 

However, the ease with which you derive some other thing is no indication that the thing from which you derived it is either true or literal. 

If you were interested in reading the book "as it was written"..rather than literally (as you mean that phrase), you would be looking for the connotation of allegory and metaphor, not the denotation of literary production.  That, conveniently, is where you would find theology, anyway.

So....adding up all of the difficulties of how you've chosen to approach this..and the fact that none of them are required to derive the thing that is important to you, and since the thing that is important to you is simply not contained in any accounting of the number of nuts and bolts and proper names.........why read an explicitly allegorical and metaphoric work of theological importance as though it were a weather report about a storm that never happened?  

How is it that you can affirm “Is the bible accurate, and literally true..and genesis in specific? No..and in it's defense it was never intended to be.” Millions of people over thousands of years have long missed your penetrating insight - Genesis was never intended to be read as & understood as truth. 

Easily, I can read.  The bible says x happened, the bible says that x happened some particular way.  X did not happen.  X did not happen that way.  The bible establishes theology with X, instead, in a manner understood to have had great prevalence during the span of it's production. They weren't writing news reports. The author of the bible is not a weatherman. It doesn't matter how many people, or for how long, have believed this, the fact of the matter has always been the same.  Consider all of the other things that so many people believed for so long, that were wrong. In light of those things, does it seem like the force of this argument above is all that great?

I would think there has been hundreds of commentators on Genesis. All of them wasted their time as they lacked your knowing that Genesis was never meant to be taken literally. Would you be so kind as to tell me of any other books of the Bible that are also so fictional?
Donald

No one takes genesis literally, Donlor.  There are tons of commentators, their work lead to this conclusion. 

Sure.  Acts.  Acts is completely fictional.  I figured you might enjoy one from new magic book.

Thing is, you're probably importing some negative associations with the term fiction that the people who came up with these stories simply wouldn't have. It may be a problem for you...but it's not a problem for them, or for the theology in their magic books.