[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Belacqua]

It helps your understanding if you do the same drugs as the authors did while writing it.


Especially Revelations.....

Since modern people are more familiar with drugs than with ancient Hebrew symbolism, it sometimes seems that the Revelation of John must be drug-fueled. It's kind of a "cool kid" way of avoiding the work that has to be done to get into the text. 

I've had people tell me they don't like William Blake's longer poems because they don't like drug stuff -- even though he never took any drugs. He's just using so many tropes and methods that are unfamiliar to us that people assume he's a nutcase. In fact it was very much his intention to make his meaning[s] difficult to discern, and, being a genius poet and amazingly informed about ancient esoteric traditions, he was able to weave great depth into each sentence.

---

The idea that holy texts mean different things to different people ('Moreover, part of their value is that the prompt they give will be different for every reader, and that this is what the writer wants.') is a pretty compelling argument that these texts are human in origin, and not divine or even divinely inspired, taking 'divine' in the literal, narrow sense.

This is assuming that you know how a God would operate, and that it would do what you would do. 

Since God wants people to get to Heaven (per the text), it would be in the best interests all parties concerned that the text be  interpreted in the same manner.  BUT...if the texts are intentionally ambiguous and open to as many interpretations as there are readers, the clear conclusion is that the texts were concocted by human writers who were writing from imperfect knowledge and the typical human emotions (greed, fear, prejudice and greed).

Or it may be that if there were a God, it wouldn't want its texts to be clear and unambiguous. Speaking for myself (i.e. not for an omniscient existence) I think that part of being good is figuring out how to be good. It requires individual work. And I think that someone who had a perfect knowledge of typical human emotions might know that these are variable, that they manifest differently in different people, and that therefore a single clear statement couldn't cover every possible instance. 

In short, the holy texts aren't 'holy' at all.

If you're defining "holy" as a set of clear unambiguous rules, then you're right. If, on the other hand, it's possible to be holy and difficult, demanding hard work and discernment, then you're not right.

---

Indeed, as branches of science—evolutionary biology, geology, history, and archaeology—have disproved scriptural claims one by one, those claims have morphed from literal truths into allegories. This is the big difference between science and religion: When a scientific claim is disproved, it goes into the dustbin of good ideas that simply didn’t pan out. When a religious claim is disproved, it then turns into a metaphor that imparts a made-up “lesson.” And the theological mind is endlessly creative, always able to find a moral or philosophical point in fictitious stories. Hell, for instance, has become a metaphor for “separation from God”. Or the story of Adam & Eve that is now some sort of a lesson how evil humans are.

Ah, here again, we have the unproven assumption that holy books start out as literal and then get re-interpreted as non-literal. Do you have some documentary evidence to show this? 

It's just as likely that the authors of the Adam and Eve story didn't intend it to be journalism, that they knew from the beginning that it's allegory. 

And, as I said in the OP, it really doesn't matter what the original authors intended, if we use the story as a myth to think about our own situations. It's the later interpretations, using the myth as a jumping-off point, that give the text its richness. 

A similar example: Neoplatonic stories of katabasis. (Ha! my spellcheck insists on "databases" instead of "katabasis.") Early Greek myths of descent to the underworld were taken, later on, by philosophers and reinterpreted as allegories of descent from the Ideal world to our own material world. In this way the myths were enriched and made into tools to think about our own lives.

---

Oh, please. Omnipotent god can’t imprint the neurological pattern of full understanding with a “let there be understanding” just as how he allegedly called light into existence?

What makes you think an omnipotent god would want to do this?

---

A proper reading of ancient texts always includes one informing himslef of the background of the time the stuff was written in, the person who wrote it and the possible audience. When i took latin classes and we translated classic roman literaure, 50% of the time was devoted to this background, in orde to be able to understand the text from the persepctive of the times it was written in.

It depends on what you mean by "proper." You are proclaiming what "proper" means for everyone, when it might be different for different uses of the text. 
Historians must know the background. That's their job. Interpreters of myth, on the other hand, use the text differently.
In your studies did you read Plato's Symposium? Do you recall how the different speakers use the mythical figure of Eros as a jumping-off point to think about love, without reference to the historical origins of the character?