(March 7, 2024 at 8:28 pm)Belacqua Wrote: Both Jesus and Paul interpret stories from the Hebrew Bible as allegory. That's pretty far before modernity, and they weren't dragged to it.
Yeah right. The gospels begin with Jesus's genealogy which includes characters from every fairytale in the OT, so that is as literal interpretation as it gets.
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"