[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Acrobat]

It usually goes like this

It seems much of the criticism applies more to fundie literalist, than non-fundie literalist.

Biblical writers were subject to the same scientific misunderstanding of the world, as everyone else at their time. They likely didn't believe the earth was round, or the earth orbits the sun, just like many people at the time didn't. Some of these attitudes can be found in their scriptural writing as well.

There's all sort of violence and deviance in the Bible. Jepetha killed his daughter, the Bears mauled children for making fun of a bald prophet. It's usually literalist who claim things like Jeptha didn't kill his daughter but forgoed her getting married or losing her virginity, and the the children in the bear story were actually young men. All these softer versions require a perversion of context.


As I indicated, I read the Bible on the nature of the style in which it was written, decipher it's meaning as I do language in general, or any other book, religious or otherwise. It's a result of this that I'm not a literalist, not because of my theism, or otherwise. I would read the Bible the same way even if I wasn't a theist, the way I'd expect an atheist to read it. Yet as the forum shows, this doesn't seem to be the case, that many atheists don't read the Bible with any more competency than the worst fundie.