RE: Literal and Not Literal
August 29, 2019 at 7:59 pm
(This post was last modified: August 29, 2019 at 8:01 pm by Belacqua.)
(August 29, 2019 at 7:49 pm)EgoDeath Wrote:(August 28, 2019 at 5:34 pm)Acrobat Wrote: We don't live our life by scientific or historic facts either. So what do we live our life by?
So, are you going to answer my question, or no?
Acrobat can answer this on his own, I'm sure, but I think I've already addressed this.
A holy book is holy because people think it's holy. Someone somewhere found the book worthwhile, probably wise, perhaps numinous. The people who find the book this way think it is useful in thinking about how to live one's life.
The book itself may or may not contain specific facts or advice. Holy books are in large part holy because they have a history -- they are woven into the culture. The holiness of the book is the book itself plus all the commentary, midrash, response, and argument that came from it. Though you may find the text itself too strange to admire, the responses of people over millennia constitute a dialectic through which we ponder important questions.
We may not live our lives according to the bare historical fact that good people may well find themselves in conflict with their societies. Our interpretation, use, and response to this bare fact, however, is meaningful.
The interpretation we do for ourselves is a part of the meaning. Un-interpreted, no text is meaningful in this holy way. Clear statements, of the type that people here think God should give us, require no interpretation, but it is the very act of thinking and engaging with things that makes them important to us.
Harold Bloom, who is Jewish by background and atheist by belief, says "make Dante your textbook." Yet very little of what Dante wrote is true in a science-type way.
