(September 20, 2021 at 12:36 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: So yeah, it is pretty dumb to consider the deluge narative a factual account of actual events. Apart from literal minded fundamentalists and atheist trolls, I do not know anyone who thinks giving a factual account was ever the point of the story.
Then the Gospel writers were also idiots or trolls because they included Noah in the genealogy of Jesus - meaning that at least one of Jesus' ancestors was just a metaphor.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"