[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Well, the Bible says God has wants, and one of these is that everyone be saved.  Is this another reason not to read the Bible, that it can't be trusted?

I guess thats better than saying God wants some people to be saved, and others not to be?

The Bible says a lot of things, that God has regrets, that God is jealous, that God has wants. Yet pretty much all believers, Christian or otherwise, acknowledge God as an eternal and unchanging being. So what would it mean for biblical writers who share such view to says things like this? That they're similes, the limit of finite language to express the infinite.

The Hebrews didn't try to define that undefinable something?  Then what's the OT all about? And if it's written for those who already see it, what's the point of writing about it?

Not about defining the given. It's written for believers in something, not written for believers in nothing, to convince them of something.

It helps those who see it, to see it more clearly. It's one generations attempt to chip away at that perception, to pass along to the next generation to chip away even further, until it's seen more clearly. It's to take whats partially realized to being fully realized.

It's not for those who can see nothing in the Bible, but a series of wannabe/pseudo scientific and historic facts. Who look at the world and their lives, and see nothing except that.

Well, the Bible DOES in fact say that God wants some to be saved and not others.  How would you address this contradiction?

I hate to keep hammering on this fact, but if people view God differently that how the Bible describes God, what use is the Bible?  If I were so inclined, I could get as much spiritual guidance from 'The Tempest' or 'Moby Dick'.

Thank you for reinforcing my position that theists go to surprising lengths to demonstrate that the Bible doesn't mean what it says.

If the Bible is not written for unbelievers, what is the point of its constant threatening of unbelief?

Boru

[Acrobat]

Does the fact that language can not express the alleged infinity of god be traceable to god not being any sort of coherent or internally consistent concept able to withstand such minimal scrutiny as might be brought to bear when a fluffy notion in the head had to be articulated?

Infinity in this context seems to be a code word for "mind fully accustomed to bullshit and will not accept limits on its ability to make shit up, trying to protect certain treasured bullshit with yet more bullshit excuses, if not threats against scrutiny".

Language is a recent invention in our evolutionary history. Prior to language we just experience, observed, recognized reality, without being able to articulate it.

Do you believe that all of reality can be reduced into a series of propositions?

It also seems to me there are things that appear simple yet undefinable, Good in a moral sense, seems to fall into that category.

I can easily say he’s a good person, what he did was good, kindness is good, reducing suffering is good, honesty is good, etc... What’s meant by the term good, is the same in all these different instances, that what I’m communicating is pretty simple, that I don’t really have to worry about someone not understanding me, unless they’re deliberately being obtuse.

Yet Good appears quite difficult to define, so much so that even atheists philosophers like G.E. Moore, recognize it as simple but indefinable.

Moral Good is one those terms we find an equivalency across cultures, yet we have no real definition of it meaning, at least in relationship to its use.

It’s far easier for us to recognize a variety of things that are morally good, yet difficult to articulate the meaning of good.

[Anomalocaris]

Does the fact that language can not express the alleged infinity of god be traceable to god not being any sort of coherent or internally consistent concept able to withstand such minimal scrutiny as might be brought to bear when a fluffy notion in the head had to be articulated?

Infinity in this context seems to be a code word for "mind fully accustomed to bullshit and will not accept limits on its ability to make shit up, trying to protect certain treasured bullshit with yet more bullshit excuses, if not threats against scrutiny".

Language is a recent invention in our evolutionary history. Prior to language we just experience, observed, recognized reality, without being able to articulate it.

Do you believe that all of reality can be reduced into a series of propositions?  

It also seems to me there are things that appear simple yet undefinable, Good in a moral sense, seems to fall into that category.

I can easily say he’s a good person, what he did was good, kindness is good, reducing suffering is good, honesty is good, etc...  What’s  meant by the term good, is the same in all these different instances, that what I’m communicating is pretty simple, that I don’t really have to worry about someone not understanding me, unless they’re deliberately being obtuse.  

Yet Good appears quite difficult to define, so much so that even atheists philosophers like G.E. Moore, recognize it as simple but indefinable.

Moral Good is one those terms we find an equivalency across cultures, yet we have no real definition of it meaning, at least in relationship to its use.

It’s far easier for us to recognize a variety of things that are morally good, yet difficult to articulate the meaning of good.

I think the notion that language must be an incremental analogue of subjective experience is deeply flawed.   It is an analytical descriptor of subjective experience.   The description enables scrutiny to be brought to bear upon the experience, and enables the experience to assessed for any possibly correlation with any thing that is not purely a fabrication of the mind.    

You should not conflate too lazy to set out, no time to set out, no immediate need to set out, or the desire to avoid bursting a happy hazy illusory bubble by setting out, with impossibility of setting out as a series of propositions.

If it is real in the any manner that is not purely an levitated assertion without correlation to anything outside of the mind,  then proposition can be formulated to encompass it.


Moral good as perhaps you mean it seems to be an infantile and uncritical concept that is completely intellectually bankrupt.   The so called inability to define it is really an unwillingness to define it because a subconscious awareness that efforts to define it would expose its contradictions and bankruptcy.

[EgoDeath]

If a Holy Book is NOT the direct word of god, what is the point in giving it any credence as a book to live your life by?

[Acrobat]

If a Holy Book is NOT the direct word of god, what is the point in giving it any credence as a book to live your life by?

We don't live our life by scientific or historic facts either. So what do we live our life by?

[Anomalocaris]

If a Holy Book is NOT the direct word of god, what is the point in giving it any credence as a book to live your life by?

We don't live our life by scientific or historic facts either. So what do we live our life by?

We certainly do live our lives by historic facts.   everything you do is informed by facts from your own history.    Everything that ever happened to you to make up your history, happened because operation of the world of which science is the only credible guide for our understanding.

You have morality not because god actually existed to gave it to you.  It is because the circumstances of your life and the evolutionary history of all your ancesters and all the ancesters of your fellow men caused you perceive the an urge to behave in a certain way and accept the fictious god as a self-justifying rationale for behaving this way.


There is no higher truth.  Higher truth is a fiction that stands in the way of deeper understanding of reality.

[Acrobat]

We don't live our life by scientific or historic facts either. So what do we live our life by?

We certainly do live our lives by historic facts.   everything you do is informed by facts from your own history.    Everything that ever happened to you to make up your history, happened because operation of the world of which science is the only credible guide for our understanding.

You have morality not because god actually existed to gave it to you.  It is because the circumstances of your life and the evolutionary history of all your ancesters and all the ancesters of your fellow men caused you perceive the an urge to behave in a certain way and accept the fictious god as a self-justifying rationale for behaving this way.


There is no higher truth.  Higher truth is a fiction that stands in the way of deeper understanding of reality.

The original comment was a guide to live our life by

If we accumulated all the historical and scientific facts, all we’d have is what is and what used to be.

There’s no guide to live our life by among them. In fact there nothing that says I should live at all, let alone how I ought to live.

If history and scientific facts are no guide than what is?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

We certainly do live our lives by historic facts.   everything you do is informed by facts from your own history.    Everything that ever happened to you to make up your history, happened because operation of the world of which science is the only credible guide for our understanding.

You have morality not because god actually existed to gave it to you.  It is because the circumstances of your life and the evolutionary history of all your ancesters and all the ancesters of your fellow men caused you perceive the an urge to behave in a certain way and accept the fictious god as a self-justifying rationale for behaving this way.


There is no higher truth.  Higher truth is a fiction that stands in the way of deeper understanding of reality.

The original comment was  a guide to live our life by

If we accumulated all the historical and scientific facts, all we’d have is what is and what used to be.

There’s no guide to live our life by among them. In fact there nothing that says I should live at all, let alone how I ought to live.

If history and scientific facts are no guide than what is?

You could do a lot better than the Bible as a guide by which to live your life (such as 'Meditations' or the 'Analects).  I mean, unless you'd prefer stoning your children or being condemned to eternal punishment for thought crime.


Boru

[Belacqua]

It helps your understanding if you do the same drugs as the authors did while writing it.


Especially Revelations.....

Since modern people are more familiar with drugs than with ancient Hebrew symbolism, it sometimes seems that the Revelation of John must be drug-fueled. It's kind of a "cool kid" way of avoiding the work that has to be done to get into the text. 

I've had people tell me they don't like William Blake's longer poems because they don't like drug stuff -- even though he never took any drugs. He's just using so many tropes and methods that are unfamiliar to us that people assume he's a nutcase. In fact it was very much his intention to make his meaning[s] difficult to discern, and, being a genius poet and amazingly informed about ancient esoteric traditions, he was able to weave great depth into each sentence.

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The idea that holy texts mean different things to different people ('Moreover, part of their value is that the prompt they give will be different for every reader, and that this is what the writer wants.') is a pretty compelling argument that these texts are human in origin, and not divine or even divinely inspired, taking 'divine' in the literal, narrow sense.

This is assuming that you know how a God would operate, and that it would do what you would do. 

Since God wants people to get to Heaven (per the text), it would be in the best interests all parties concerned that the text be  interpreted in the same manner.  BUT...if the texts are intentionally ambiguous and open to as many interpretations as there are readers, the clear conclusion is that the texts were concocted by human writers who were writing from imperfect knowledge and the typical human emotions (greed, fear, prejudice and greed).

Or it may be that if there were a God, it wouldn't want its texts to be clear and unambiguous. Speaking for myself (i.e. not for an omniscient existence) I think that part of being good is figuring out how to be good. It requires individual work. And I think that someone who had a perfect knowledge of typical human emotions might know that these are variable, that they manifest differently in different people, and that therefore a single clear statement couldn't cover every possible instance. 

In short, the holy texts aren't 'holy' at all.

If you're defining "holy" as a set of clear unambiguous rules, then you're right. If, on the other hand, it's possible to be holy and difficult, demanding hard work and discernment, then you're not right.

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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.

Ah, here again, we have the unproven assumption that holy books start out as literal and then get re-interpreted as non-literal. Do you have some documentary evidence to show this? 

It's just as likely that the authors of the Adam and Eve story didn't intend it to be journalism, that they knew from the beginning that it's allegory. 

And, as I said in the OP, it really doesn't matter what the original authors intended, if we use the story as a myth to think about our own situations. It's the later interpretations, using the myth as a jumping-off point, that give the text its richness. 

A similar example: Neoplatonic stories of katabasis. (Ha! my spellcheck insists on "databases" instead of "katabasis.") Early Greek myths of descent to the underworld were taken, later on, by philosophers and reinterpreted as allegories of descent from the Ideal world to our own material world. In this way the myths were enriched and made into tools to think about our own lives.

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Oh, please. Omnipotent god can’t imprint the neurological pattern of full understanding with a “let there be understanding” just as how he allegedly called light into existence?

What makes you think an omnipotent god would want to do this?

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A proper reading of ancient texts always includes one informing himslef of the background of the time the stuff was written in, the person who wrote it and the possible audience. When i took latin classes and we translated classic roman literaure, 50% of the time was devoted to this background, in orde to be able to understand the text from the persepctive of the times it was written in.

It depends on what you mean by "proper." You are proclaiming what "proper" means for everyone, when it might be different for different uses of the text. 
Historians must know the background. That's their job. Interpreters of myth, on the other hand, use the text differently.
In your studies did you read Plato's Symposium? Do you recall how the different speakers use the mythical figure of Eros as a jumping-off point to think about love, without reference to the historical origins of the character?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

It helps your understanding if you do the same drugs as the authors did while writing it.


Especially Revelations.....

Since modern people are more familiar with drugs than with ancient Hebrew symbolism, it sometimes seems that the Revelation of John must be drug-fueled. It's kind of a "cool kid" way of avoiding the work that has to be done to get into the text. 

I've had people tell me they don't like William Blake's longer poems because they don't like drug stuff -- even though he never took any drugs. He's just using so many tropes and methods that are unfamiliar to us that people assume he's a nutcase. In fact it was very much his intention to make his meaning[s] difficult to discern, and, being a genius poet and amazingly informed about ancient esoteric traditions, he was able to weave great depth into each sentence.

---

The idea that holy texts mean different things to different people ('Moreover, part of their value is that the prompt they give will be different for every reader, and that this is what the writer wants.') is a pretty compelling argument that these texts are human in origin, and not divine or even divinely inspired, taking 'divine' in the literal, narrow sense.

This is assuming that you know how a God would operate, and that it would do what you would do. 

Since God wants people to get to Heaven (per the text), it would be in the best interests all parties concerned that the text be  interpreted in the same manner.  BUT...if the texts are intentionally ambiguous and open to as many interpretations as there are readers, the clear conclusion is that the texts were concocted by human writers who were writing from imperfect knowledge and the typical human emotions (greed, fear, prejudice and greed).

Or it may be that if there were a God, it wouldn't want its texts to be clear and unambiguous. Speaking for myself (i.e. not for an omniscient existence) I think that part of being good is figuring out how to be good. It requires individual work. And I think that someone who had a perfect knowledge of typical human emotions might know that these are variable, that they manifest differently in different people, and that therefore a single clear statement couldn't cover every possible instance. 

In short, the holy texts aren't 'holy' at all.

If you're defining "holy" as a set of clear unambiguous rules, then you're right. If, on the other hand, it's possible to be holy and difficult, demanding hard work and discernment, then you're not right.

1. I quite like Blake's artwork, his poetry somewhat less.  I do admire his contrarian spirit, but I also agree with Wordsworth that Blake was somewhat off his nut.

2.  But you said the writers intended to elicit a different prompt from each reader.  This is hardly compatible with a God who wants all to be saved.

3. I'm sure we can 'figure out how to be good' without benefit of holy texts.  We managed it for millennia without them.  And if a single clear statement can't cover all possible instances, why don't Levitical laws include the word '...except...'?  The writers clearly intended that their texts WOULD cover all possible cases ('Thou shalt not commit adultery' isn't 'Thou shalt not commit adultery unless her husband be away on a business trip.').

4.  No, I'm defining 'holy' as 'promulgated or approved by God'.

Boru