[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[GrandizerII]

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.

What American hicks?

The village I'm talking about happens to be in a country that borders Israel. So close enough to Jerusalem.

And if we can't take cues from what Middle Eastern villagers believe, then who do we take cues from? We don't know either way how the stories were originally intended so we have to speculate based on what we can see.

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?

Is there such a thing as non-empirical evidence? I don't know, but it can certainly be empirically demonstrated to me that God does exist. There are infinite ways this could've happened. But alas, nothing. Makes you wonder.

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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.

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Our secular humanity is what connects us, while religion merely divides.

Unless your secularism is dividing you from religious people.

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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?

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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. 

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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.

What source says they invented these stories? Sounds like this bit is more conjecture than based on evidence.

Did they invented Noah as well?