(May 26, 2012 at 2:12 am)Minimalist Wrote: So, IOW, none of it is real?
Allegorically, it is 100% real.
I opened up to a Christian friend yesterday about everything I have researched about. The first thing he asked me was, 'so.. For example, do you believe Jesus healed the blind man?' I told him how the Gospels sometimes use the Greek word for 'therapy' and the fact that it took Jesus two tries to heal him. So for me that means he was simply a doctor performing therapy! When the book tells us then to go and 'lay hands on the sick and they will get healed' I see that as surgeons 'laying hands' on the sick.
Everything just becomes a tangible observation about the natural world, so answering your question, yes IOW it's all real, but not how the church sees it.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it" ~ Aristotle