[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Acrobat]

We know, for a fact, that people have had varying levels of compulsion to superstition over time, Acro.

It doesn't seem to me that we are any less superstitious today than in the past, we might have different superstitious but nothin leads me to assume we're less. If you have any data to support this please, supply it?

Now I know that people are less religious than in the past. Older generations are more religious, than younger generations. But in regards to superstitions this appears to be the other way around. Young people are more likely to be superstitious than old folks. Perhaps your fooled into thinking the decline in organized religions, equates to a decline is superstition, but this doesn't seem to be the case.

https://today.yougov.com/topics/lifestyl...erstitious

The record is under your feet.  That the superstitions in question were once more central to life, and more strenuously believed in, and believed in literally, is also not a point of legitimate debate.

The stories were central to their life, as central to mine as well. In fact it's the story that's central not the literalism. Why do you think the Doctrines of Inerrancy, Fundamentalism etc.. arose around the 19th Century.

Why do you think such revered church Fathers like Origen could express sentiments like this:

"who is so silly as to believe that God ... planted a paradise eastward in Eden, and set in it a visible and palpable tree of life ... [and] anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life?"

Without courting any real controversy, without being rendered a heretic, and cast out of orthodoxy? Can you imagine a fundie evangelical pastor saying this? He'd be kicked out the church quicker than if he slept with gay prostitutes and snorted coke.

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No, I'm confident about this part. Why is this up for debate exactly? Because <insert Acrobat's Christian-related belief about so and so>?

So you care to support it?

I mean you made a claim about the sort of doubt which I would have possessed regarding these stories as literal, didn't exists in the past, that it comes natural in our age but not their's.

This is pretty interesting claim of yours, but entirely unsupported. I would like to know the history of the development of such doubts, like my own, since in your view they're a modern phenomena? I want to learn what sort of events gave rise to these doubts?

Now you seem to suggest this is some self-evident truth, so you don't need to support it or something?

Where's your proof?

You continuously repeated how the support I used for my view was insufficient, while here you are not even supplying anything remotely compelling for a claim you say you're confident about.

You know why it comes natural to me, because I don't have the same reverence to scientific and historical facts as you do. You view such things as the only thing true, while i view such truths as superficial, Truths about meanings and values are far superior. Is this appreciation of meaning a modern phenomena to?

Since you seem to suggest otherwise, I want to hear your support, the history you're trying to paint here.