(November 28, 2022 at 7:20 pm)Jehanne Wrote:(November 28, 2022 at 6:41 pm)Belacqua Wrote: 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?
Because the literal was, and still is, the least important way to approach scripture.
<insert profound quote here>
