(August 29, 2019 at 2:51 am)Belaqua Wrote:(August 29, 2019 at 2:05 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: Ah, yes, but you ignored it as usual. Go figure.
Both Origen of Alexandria (c.184 – c. 253) and Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430) said clearly that much of the Bible is not to be read literally.
The claim that the earlier a Christian is the more likely he is to be a literalist is false.
Take Garden of Eden, the Fall, and Adam and Eve as our ancestors was accepted by early theologians and church fathers like Augustine, Aquinas, and Tertullian, although some, like Origen, were unclear on the issue. But, like I said earler, in 1950, however, Pope Pius XII affirmed monogenism in his encyclical Humani Generis insisting that a historical Adam committed a sin passed on to his offspring—as if sin were a gene that never gets lost—and those sinful offspring grew into all of humanity.
But yeah, what does Pope know about theology.
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"
