(November 28, 2022 at 6:41 pm)Belacqua Wrote:(November 28, 2022 at 4:35 pm)emjay Wrote: if it's claiming to be a historical record, which I believe is most probable for the Eden story, then that's how I think it needs to be judged.
Yeah, I don't think we're going to agree on this.
I see no reason to believe the Eden story was ever intended as journalism or history.
Affective, suggestive, spiritual literature, including scripture, just isn't meant to be read as a straight accounting of facts. That would be like reading Swann's Way as a factual listing of events. It would be like trying to make oneself autistic. Not to read it as spiritual just seems bizarre to me.
I think that modern ways of reading have damaged our abilities. Somehow people think that every book should be read as if it were a physics textbook, and books which can't be read this way are failures. It narrows down the possibilities of human experience.
Why did theologians, for centuries, take the Genesis account literally?
