Are Evolution and Christianity Completely Incompatible?

[Aaran]

If the Bible is translated literally: No chance for compatibility whatsoever.

If the Bible is translated metaphorically: maybe. To be honest, I'm not sure (but I'm very curious as to what the talking snake and the Garden of Eden are supposed to represent in that case). The only problem with metaphorical translation is that it provides thousands of possible interpretations, creating a shitload of potential disagreement within the Christian/Catholic community. So really, there'd be no way of knowing if the interpretation you're looking at is the right one. There's be no way of knowing if anyone got it right. :/

The tale of Genesis and its attendant Garden of Eden is just a plagiarism of the earlier ancient Greek myth of Pandora's box. Both fictions have all their major themes in common - a deity creates a male, followed by a female whose only reason for existing seems to be to act as a companion and toady to her man. In spite of firm warnings to the contrary administered by the overseeing deity the silly woman taps into a source of forbidden knowledge and in doing so unleashes all manner of suffering upon humankind. The story, in the metaphorical sense, imparts sexism and a mistrust of rationality. 

I don't feel we need to exercise such hesitancy when trying to appraise the validity of one interpretation of scripture over another. If you consider that most of the people to whom the embryonic version of Christianity was preached were the uneducated goatherds and plebeians of the Palestinian desert, the likelihood that these unlettered people would be capable of discerning any profound metaphors or allegories in the things which they read would be greatly diminished. The authors of both testaments would have been aware of this, the things they wrote would have been exactly what they meant. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" means pretty much that. I'm convinced that the literal interpretation is the only justifiable one.