Lazy Atheism?

[emjay]

That's all very interesting, but, and I think we've talked about this before, at the end of the day, the value of the Bible to me... such as it is... is as a claim to some sort of truth, ie that God exists and is, does, or did x,y, and z. Do you not see it as that sort of claim? Or even a claim at all? Given that you treat much of it as allegory, or as you say, myth and propaganda, how does that, to you, make a more compelling claim to the existence of God than a factual claim? Or are you just in awe of the literary aspects of it but without treating it as a claim? For me, if the majority of it is relegated to the realm of allegory, myth, and propaganda, without any concrete claim, then that does not make it more, but less compelling, ultimately boiling down to a bunch of random people's vague musings on God, which these days is a dime a dozen.

Yes, I'm sure the authors of the Bible intended to make all kinds of claims. They no doubt take the existence of God to be a fact, and want to make claims concerning his existence. They also want to make claims concerning morality. 

The manner in which they make these claims is perhaps what's at issue. 

Some sentences are metaphors, but so obvious that even the simplest sola scriptura literalist gets the message. When Jesus talks about casting one's seeds on stony ground, nobody thinks he's giving agricultural advice. 

Many important messages and lessons are best taught through literary styles, and not through a straightforward listing of facts. Readers who have to engage with a text, ponder it, debate it, and keep it with them over time, are more likely to get more out of it in life than if they just read a brief précis.

That's all very interesting, but, and I think we've talked about this before, at the end of the day, the value of the Bible to me... such as it is... is as a claim to some sort of truth, ie that God exists and is, does, or did x,y, and z. Do you not see it as that sort of claim? Or even a claim at all? Given that you treat much of it as allegory, or as you say, myth and propaganda, how does that, to you, make a more compelling claim to the existence of God than a factual claim? Or are you just in awe of the literary aspects of it but without treating it as a claim? For me, if the majority of it is relegated to the realm of allegory, myth, and propaganda, without any concrete claim, then that does not make it more, but less compelling, ultimately boiling down to a bunch of random people's vague musings on God, which these days is a dime a dozen.

There's another old tradition of how to read the Bible, that probably goes against modern people's expectations. 

I learned this from reading William Blake, but he got it from a minority mystical strain of Christianity which includes Jacob Boehme, Theresa of Avila, and others of that type. 

For them, it is a key point that God and the world are far beyond what a finite human mind can understand. (At least, under normal circumstances.) Therefore any book which gave us the impression that we had everything figured out would be false. Worse, it would make us stupider by convincing us we know more than we do. So it's crucial for them that the Bible remain unresolved, open-ended, and infinitely interpretable. If you thought you'd figured out the truth behind it all, you'd be wrong. 

A while back someone was trying to persuade me that he knew the real meaning of the symbolism in the Adam and Eve story. He was completely sure that he knew its one and only message, and that every other reading was simply wrong. (Even though his reading was different from that of Maimonides and many others.) In my opinion he was making a modern type of error, interpreting in a da Vinci Code kind of way, to think that each symbol points to exactly one decoded message. 

It seems more reasonable to me to take those stories as provocations which we respond to. How we respond tells us as much about ourselves (and our relationship to God, if you believe that sort of thing) as it does about ancient authors. 

Any story could serve the function. But the Bible stories have centuries of added meaning, so that when you read it you're not just reading an ancient text, but all of the weight that has been added to it since by its many genius interpreters.

This all assumes that the reader takes it for granted that a) God exists, and b) the writings in the Bible are divinely inspired in one way or another, but for the atheist, these are just as much a part of the claim, even if only implicitly, as the message. The fact that any body of text is infinitely interpretable, which to me is usually a bug not a feature BTW, doesn't speak to those underlying claims, ie the existence of God, or the reliability of the text as coming from or inspired by God, if it exists.

Basically, would you still go all gooey over the pedigree of a given biblical text and its layers of interpretations over the years, if the underlying text turned out to be written by ChatGPT or the ancient equivalent, a 'false prophet'? I can never quite tell whether it is literature itself that you're so passionate about, regardless of subject, or specifically the religious ideas within? Ie do you just enjoy the puzzle of looking for deeper meanings in things, regardless of the source, so you'd be just as happy to see Dante's interpretation of a ChatGPT text as anything else? At the end of the day, do you find these texts and their interpretations a compelling claim for the existence of God, or do you, like they, take that for granted, or something else?