Lazy Atheism?

[Belacqua]

Sure I can accept that some parts of the Bible are allegorical, but as I've said before, I think it's clutching at straws to consider Genesis allegorical. It for instance gives the names and locations of rivers, which is just something you wouldn't do if you were speaking allegorically/metaphorically, so to me it's blatantly obvious that it's meant to be taken literally as a factual record.

I don't think historians are clear on just how much the original authors of Genesis wanted us to take literally. 

Currently the consensus seems to be that it was written down in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, while Israel and Judah were under serious threat from more powerful nations. As part of a program to strengthen and unite the Israelites and Judeans (always a fractious group) the powerful people saw it as important to give a greater structure to their history and beliefs. This included a clear origin story. 

We could compare this (loosely) to Virgil writing the Aeneid under Augustus. As you know, Augustus held national image to be very important. Giving his state a heroic, mythic origin story made the country seem more important to the gods, and more admirable to the people. It tidies up the facts that real history tends to be contingent and unglamorous. It uses lots of real locations and a few real events, and weaves them into a new propagandistic narrative.

Yet anyone at the time who was intellectual enough to read the Aeneid was also well-informed enough to know that Virgil had just made it all up. He had cobbled together existing myths and legends and given them a main character, a new telos, and a local meaning. 

On a smaller scale, we can compare the heroicized history of the US that we learned in elementary school with the rather less admirable real history. A bit of myth builds national pride. 

The Israelites and the Judeans were faced with enemies who had far older mythical traditions. We know from the Old Testament that the Israelites were constantly tempted by foreign rituals and ceremonies. Especially during the Exile, when there was a real danger of the Jewish population disappearing through assimilation into their new home, a unified set of national myths was seen as necessary. 

But again, it's not clear to me how much they really believed it. And I also suspect that literal belief in such stories was not as straightforward as it is today. In those days you could kind of accept things and take them seriously without believing that everything happened that way. For example in Plato's books, it's clear that he takes the local ceremonies seriously. ("we owe a cock to Asclepius.") At the same time, he has no trouble rewriting the myths whenever he has a point to make. He can demote Eros from a god to a daemon, and then promote him again. He can declare there are two Aphrodites, etc. etc., and nobody worries that he's being heretical. 

More importantly, we have to remember that in our time, the original intention of the authors is of very little importance. Not to get all Roland Barthes on you here, but the text is not just the text. The text is the history of the text, and all the uses it has been put to, and all the interpretations it has been given. If Genesis has been read as allegory for 17 centuries, then it's allegory. If modern people insist that it's accurate in the way that science is supposed to be accurate, then they are simply wrong. But they're also missing what's important.