[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[GrandizerII]

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.

Sigh ... shifting the burden of proof, I see.

At least I can point to a comparison of styles to infer what should read literally and non-literally. What's you basis?

I was born and raised in a village away from Western civilization. The people in that village take the stories of Genesis literally.

Oh and lest you think they're Americans or Protestants, they're not.

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.

You're assuming that the compiler/editor was the one who came up with the stories in the first place!

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.

You're a modern educated guy who thinks the passages would be absurd to take literally, and you like appealing to your intuition a lot as if it's supposed to reflect the intuitions of those who were around long before you and me and before the resources you and I have access to.

Furthermore, the compiler(s)/editor(s) may have not taken them literally, but that doesn't rule out others at the time taking them literally.

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...
........

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.

Man, all these words and nothing to substantiate what you've been arguing with me. Are analogies and appeal to intuition all you can do?

Why not just simply agree with me and say maybe it is so but that it doesn't matter, some of the more intelligent and educated Christians did not take Genesis literally and some such argument ...

But no, you want to insult my intelligence instead.