To Christians who aren't creationists

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

My understanding of the scriptures does not reflect the recent orthodoxies, so I do not speak for all. The scriptures have both an external meaning and an internal meaning. Just from memory this is how I read it.

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Thanks for your reply. It's quite interesting. I've never heard of your type of Christianity before.

I can't really follow up on most of your answers. But I have a question about the general symbolic way you interpret it. It seems that when you interpret it in such a symbolic way, you lose verifiability of any of its truth contents. When I was a creationist, I believed the scriptures because in my mind, it had many facts that were backed by "science" and archeology. Those things added a substantial amount of credibility from my point of view. The spiritual things, though important, I couldn't believe by themselves. They were only credible insofar as the Bible's verifiable scientific and historical claims were true. So, when you take the Bible as being mostly symbolic stories, I don't see any reason why I should believe the spiritual contents of the Bible over the spiritual claims of other sacred texts such as the Koran, the book of Mormon, or eastern literature. Your choice of the Bible seems arbitrary if you take it so symbolically.

Another problem is I haven't really gotten an answer to why you think the Bible was actually meant to be taken symbolically versus literally.

You said:

And they don’t? A system of symbols must be allied consistently. What works in Genesis must also work in Leviticus, John and Revelations.

You gave many examples of what you think to be symbols such as the coin in the fishes mouths, but how do you know that they were actually meant to be symbols and that you're not just simply reading in your own meaning to try to keep the Bible consistent with itself and reality? Please correct me if I'm wrong but your view from my understanding suffers from the similar problems as the Bible Code theory since you can find "prophetic codes" in Moby Dick and probably any piece of fiction. I could likewise given enough time and imagination see deep symbolic spiritual meaning in Moby Dick. But that would be silly because I know the author of Moby Dick never intended it to be read in such a manner. It's just my mind playing tricks on me.