(July 10, 2022 at 1:43 am)Belacqua Wrote:(July 7, 2022 at 2:55 pm)Jehanne Wrote: Five hundred years ago one would have been burned alive for publicly questioning the Bible being the literal Word of God. Progress, I suppose.
You think that in 1522 a person could be burned alive for announcing that large parts of the Bible are to be read as allegory or parable?
Citation needed.
Thomas Woolston was the first theologian who interpreted Bible allegorically, and he lived in the 17th and 18th centuries and because of his allegorical interpretation of the Bible he was put in prison where he died.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"