RE: Literal and Not Literal
September 4, 2019 at 1:33 am
(This post was last modified: September 4, 2019 at 1:39 am by Belacqua.)
(September 3, 2019 at 8:03 pm)Grandizer Wrote:(September 3, 2019 at 8:00 pm)Belaqua Wrote: What do you know, non-intuitionally, concerning the thinking of these people?
I lived with them. I was born in a village with church at center and where everyone knew everyone else. I like, you know, talked to them and they, you know, told me things.
Oh, I thought you were talking about the authors of Genesis and ancient people like that.
If you want to include moderns among the "people, living in remote villages away from the influence of modernism and naturalistic way of thinking" that still doesn't mean that your neighbors thought in a way remotely similar to ancients.
Unless you were raised in some uncontacted tribe in Brazil, your generation has grown up with the influence of TV (its news and constant propaganda), capitalism, many of the benefits of modern science, a vague knowledge of how the world is that is far different from ancient people, and a thousand other things that ancients didn't have.
I see no reason to assume that just because you know modern American hicks you have any idea of what it was like to live and think in ancient Greece or Jerusalem.
(September 3, 2019 at 5:50 pm)Fierce Wrote: Our secular humanity is what connects us, while religion merely divides.
Unless your secularism is dividing you from religious people.
(September 3, 2019 at 7:49 pm)Grandizer Wrote: I'm talking about the kind of God theologians believe in. I don't see the evidence for such a god. I expect the evidence to be there. I do not have it.
What would that evidence look like?
Empirical scientific type evidence?
(September 3, 2019 at 9:02 pm)Fierce Wrote: By placing myself in the mind of the writer by reading his works, I can absolutely understand what he meant when he wrote what he did.
(September 3, 2019 at 9:40 pm)Grandizer Wrote: Furthermore these stories were not written out of whole cloths in the sense that there were no prior myths from which these were based. This I can say with certainty.
Well, sure. Nothing is 100% new.
I should be clearer and say that according to these scholars the writers of the myths weren't recording well-established beliefs that their people already had. They were inventing just-so stories (of course made with elements they had heard) for their own purposes.
