[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Acrobat]

Not the same. That's a fairy tale, not a myth. Cosmogony myths were used to explain how the world came to be. There's no reason to suggest it wasn't taken literally by at least some of the ancients.

How do you know it wasn't intended to be taken literally at the start? Can we see an actual argument instead of confident appeals to personal intuition?

You're making a big assumption here. You claim that such mythology was meant to be taken literally from the start. But you haven't supported this. At least I can point to a comparison of styles to infer what should read literally and non-literally. What's you basis?


Your assumption requires even bigger leaps. Such as the person writing the Genesis story, was someone who believed he had special access to how the world came to be, via vision or something, and sharing with everyone else, that he was oblivious to the fact that he couldn't possibly know or guess the mechanics of how the world came to be. If that were the case, they would probably have prefaced the narrative, recounting this miraculous acquisition of past knowledge. Perhaps address the falsity of the other prevailing origin myths at the time. Rather than setting two competing genesis accounts side by side, or an interpretative tradition at the time, that took even greater liberates reimagine these same stories.

What reason do I to have to read it literally at the start? I have for more reasons to read it non-literally from the start, than literally, as I indicated here.

The Genesis story primarily revolves around the knowledge of good and evil, and that it's through this knowledge that we sin, do things that are wrong. A point that nots hard to realize, that nothing is right and wrong without knowledge of right and wrong. Without knowledge of right and wrong, they're just things.

The text is overflowing with symbolism, snakes, and a tree of life, a tree of good and evil, a fruit, a tempting snake, etc...
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As I've said before if we took all the facts of science and history and laid them out, all we'd have is all that is, and all that was. There's no guide to life among these facts, how we ought to live, or be in the world among us. No fact is superior to any other fact, it's all just flat. Evolution is no more important, than a rock rolling down a hill, life no more valuable than death.

If the Bible served as the writing of highest values, so important that these communities saw that it needed to passed down from generation to generation, seen as sacred and holy, what purpose could they see it as serving other than as some guide to navigate the confines of the life in front of them? Other than as a purveyor of some meaning to the world in which their communities children ought to follow? A conveying something that is not scientific or historical?

If you believe that life possessed some intrinsic purpose or meaning? Wouldn't that be the most important question worth pursuing? And not the flat facts of science and history? Perhaps for those who reject such meaning, the facts of science and history is all there is to say about anything. But for those of us that do, this question, this pursuit is the fundamental one.

The commonality between us, is that they are chasing Truth, but truth they see as the same as Meaning, the two are intwined in such a view. In finding meaning, one finds truth.

This isn't true for those who see truth, as nothing but scientific and historical facts. There's no meaning here to be found, all thats here is all there is, and all there ever was. It's a pursuit of a dead end.

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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.

There you go, you scoff on literalists and yet claim that you don't know what true Christian is.

The Bible fails because it doesn’t communicate a clear message or intent and that's why state of Christian unity is shattered. Bible is too dense, too convoluted, and too confusing. There is no way millions and then billions of Christians could remain united for long with the Bible as their ultimate source for what God wants of them. One could hardly come up with a more perfect blueprint for fracturing a religion.

I remember the public debate leading up to the Iraq War in 2003. Some Christians on both sides of the issue confidently stated what Jesus would want and then backed it up with the Bible. How can a divinely inspired message demand peace and war simultaneously? How can it justify extravagant wealth while also demanding poverty? How can it unite and divide those who believe it? Skeptics, observing all this from the sidelines, can only think that when a book says everything to everyone, perhaps it’s not really saying much at all.

You seem to have too much faith in the clarity of language, to bridge the divisiveness of humanity.

Christ died as brutalized innocent man hung up on the cross. Something clear to all christians. 

Yet somehow white christiandom, collectively gathered to string brutalized black bodies on trees, often in their Sunday best, without even a hint of irony. The allusions to Christ, their Lord and Savior, entirely lost on them. But not on black Christians, who saw this clearly, vividly, their children hung to die, beaten and tortured, like Jesus. No loss of irony there. 

No clarity in language can bridge this divide. 

 “A Festival in Christendom” (1920) by Walter Everette Hawkins:

The bound him fast and strung him high,
They cut him down lest he should die
Before their energy was spent
In torturing to their heart’s content.
They tore his flesh and broke his bones,
And laughed in triumph at his groans;
They chopped his fingers, clipped his ears,
And passed them round as souvenirs.

James Andrews incorporates the idea of animal sacrifice in “Burnt Offering” (1939):

A lonely tree, a surging crowd
With clubs and stones and voices loud;
A black man as a calf they bring.
Upon a newer Cross he dies,
And smoke ascends toward the skies:
Burnt offering.