(December 1, 2022 at 11:49 am)arewethereyet Wrote: From the time I was very young, I saw the Bible stories as being quite similar to Aesop's Fables. Stories to teach a lesson. I didn't buy into the Bible stories as reality for the same reason I didn't think grasshoppers and ants were talking to one another. I don't think I was even in school yet when I made that connection.
Never once did I think Jonah lived in the belly of a whale, never once did I think the animals marched onto a big boat two-by-two, and the list goes on.
Stories with a purpose that was not to teach historical reality. Sure, some settings were real, don't most authors draw from what is around them? Maybe not sci-fi, but you get the idea.
But did your Sunday School teachers ever tell you that Jonah and the whale (or any other story from the Bible) never happened and that it is only a metaphor?
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"
