(August 28, 2019 at 7:13 pm)Belaqua Wrote:(August 28, 2019 at 9:08 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: 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?
Ah, yes, but you ignored it as usual. Go figure.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
