[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Acrobat]

I’m not going to waste my time arguing mere reality into being before we can even start a conversation.

Tighten your shit up, man.

As to the rest, it doesn’t -matter- what any of you decide to plant in the metaphoric and literal categorizations.  All of you are required by faith to place some things in the literal categorization, and all of you are required by faith to place confidence in defining literalism.

Is Christ a metaphor?  Is god having created us a metaphor?  Is god a metaphor?  Is gods intervention a metaphor?

No, ofc not, and even Our boy Ori ( who wouldn’t get kicked out of any church for saying that, don’t be absurd, they need asses in seats) believed in the literalism of both creation and salvation through Christ.  That he was a cafeteria believer is likewise unsurprising, all of you are and all Christians have always been so.

This is precisely the trouble as I see it.  Believers accept some bits as literal, other bits as not.  And it always seems that the bits which are literal are the troublesome ones.  And, as science progresses, more and more bits seems to fall into the non-literal side of things.

Smacks of desperation, that does.

Boru

I think your narrative here is false Boru, you can find non-literalist views of the Garden of Eden, etc... in the writing of the Early Church Fathers, and others, long before the advent of the scientific age. In fact much of the support for literalism, the rise of fundamentalism, Inerrancy Doctrines, etc.. can be traced to the 19th century, rather than in the first century, or when Christianity first originated. 

Atheists here seem unable to account for the role the rise of the Christian Fundamentalism played in the role of Biblical Literalism as we understand it today, how it's influenced the valuing and understanding of it. 

Secondly I don't view things as non-literal, or literal, based on whether they're troubling, or contrary to some scientific understanding of the world.      I get that atheists enjoy the praise of believing scientific facts, and a bunch of their hero's are scientists, etc..while I'm fairly apathetic. The fact that you think it's absurd, or worthy of your contempt and ridicule to believe in talking snakes, or that it's unscientific wouldn't stop me from believing in talking snakes. 

There are also plenty of people who classify as literalist, view certain "troubling" parts of a story as not literal, but that I do view as literal, that Jepetha killed his daughter rather than kept her unmarried, or the term children in the story of the bald prophet and bear, meant children and not young men. 

So the fact the some biblical stories offend some dewey liberal aversion to violence, doesn't bother me.