(July 10, 2022 at 8:02 am)Belacqua Wrote:(July 10, 2022 at 7:51 am)TheJefe817 Wrote: Exactly! My original post was celebrating a move away from the literal and, frankly, away from any reliance on the book at all. As I had said, it's teh 20% that concern me. I mean, they built a fucking ark full of dinosaurs in Kentucky.
Besides that, if we are willing to accept that theologians, up to and including Jesus himself, were viewing biblical content as allegory - that just makes the 20% look even more bugnutty.
I understand that many people here want to focus on the uninformed Christians who are making trouble in the US today. I also oppose their political goals.
I do not see this as a reason to type false things about history. For example, it's just not true that sacred writings were originally meant and interpreted as literal truth, and only later came to be read as allegory. And it's just wildly false to believe that a person in the 16th century would be burned at the stake for agreeing with Anselm, Augustine, Aquinas, Ficino, and many others, that much of the Bible should be read in non-literal ways.
Believing and typing falsehoods about history do not help defend good political goals against modern Christians. It's not enough to be anti-religion; we should also be pro-truth.
I'm not the one who initially argued whether or not historical folks viewed it as allegory or were punished for such, so I won't expand too much on that. I think there seems to be evidence on both sides. Frankly, I don't really care. I care far more about the current state and more recent views, chopped in half percentage-wise in the last 40 years or so according to the poll. Also, I frankly do not find it all that comforting that most view it is allegory. That just opens up the whole world of interpretation on which parts are allegorical vs. literal and what the allegorical meaning is - a whole new world of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning in many cases.
