[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Fake Messiah]

A purely literal reading of the Bible is the compliment that poorly-educated believers pay to science. They think that the only way to get important meaning from a book is to read it like a science text, so they read it that way. In this they ignore the history of their own religion and unknowingly agree that scientific statements -- ideally unambiguous, requiring no interpretation, and either true or false -- are the only good kind of statements. 

When I see that phrase “The Bible is not a textbook of science.”, I automatically translate it as, “The Bible is not entirely true,” for that is what it means. The “nontextbook” claim, of course, is a rationale for believers to pick and choose what they consider really true in scripture—or, for liberal Muslims like Reza Aslan, in the Quran.

Indeed, as branches of science—evolutionary biology, geology, history, and archaeology—have disproved scriptural claims one by one, those claims have morphed from literal truths into allegories. This is the big difference between science and religion: When a scientific claim is disproved, it goes into the dustbin of good ideas that simply didn’t pan out. When a religious claim is disproved, it then turns into a metaphor that imparts a made-up “lesson.” And the theological mind is endlessly creative, always able to find a moral or philosophical point in fictitious stories. Hell, for instance, has become a metaphor for “separation from God”. Or the story of Adam & Eve that is now some sort of a lesson how evil humans are.