[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Acrobat]

You make two buckets. Take all styles of writing we know are non-historical, and all the styles of writing that are historical, and then ask yourself which bucket the style in which the garden of Eden story, the flood, etc.. written resembles the most?

I'm sorry, I don't understand. Are these real buckets?

I’m confused too, is that going into my sarcasm bucket?

[Deesse23]

I dont make assumptions about the Genesis account, and i am not basing any of my beliefs on that.

You operate on an assumption about the Genesis account, when you suggested I need to show that it was written as non-literally.

Either way I pointed how to identify it as non-literal, by my two bucket system, of writing styles that resemble non-literal, non-historical stories, and those that resemble literal, historical accounts. Genesis resembles the style of the non-literal bucket.

No, i dont. For the x-th time, i am not assuming either way it having been written literally or allegorically. All i am saying that if its written literally, we already have falsified it.
You claimed that is is intended to be allegorical, at least not literal. You need to provide evidence to support your claim (such as "looks like other things written in the same style" provided by you, which however seems to be rather weak to me, looking at the underlying claim at stake about a deity).

---

voiced my expectaton that its didactics would be better than yours

Right. But how do you know what kind of didactics would be better? Maybe the fuzzy difficult ambiguous kind is better, in the long run.

We can evaluate methods of teaching. We have the technology (afaik).

If you arent interested in a discussion in good faith, then just tell me so. I also have other things to do.

[Belacqua]

We can evaluate methods of teaching. We have the technology (afaik).

If you arent interested in a discussion in good faith, then just tell me so. I also have other things to do.

What technology evaluates whether you are a good person? 

I have been discussing in good faith.

[Fake Messiah]

Truth and metaphor are not mutually exclusive

Metaphor is when an entire story is not meant to be taken literally, but symbolizes an underlying message. Not exactly history. And now we're going in circles. 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.

People used to believe in deluge and six day creation but today it's more like a metaphor. People believed Bible that Earth is immovable and Christians persecuted those who discovered otherwise and now it's a metaphor.

Perhaps some Christians see the Bible largely as allegory, but there are some nonnegotiable beliefs that are virtually diagnostic of each religion. William Dembski, a Southern Baptist and prominent advocate of intelligent design creationism, has specified the "non-negotiables of Christianity" as these: divine creation, reflection of God’s glory in the world, the exceptionalism of humans made in the image of God, and the Resurrection of Jesus.

Some of them will be happy to call the events of the Gospels allegorical, although you may declare them not to be Real Christians.

Then you don't know me. I never claimed some group of Christians are real and some not. Indeed Christianity today is splintered beyond belief. There are, at the moment, an estimated 41,000 different denominations. This is one of the key reasons why many people are skeptical of Christianity. But you seem to know who true Christians are since you scoff on literalists. And in the same time you're not bothered that the world's Christians can't even agree on precisely who Jesus is, what he wants us to do, how we are supposed to worship him, and how we get to heaven?

And evidence for Jesus as the son of God is unconvincing

To you it is. Not to a lot of other people.

Well it is unconvincing to majority of people because 70% of people who live today find Jesus as son of God unconvincing.

writers of the time were more interested in the spiritual than the journalistic meaning.

Or they lied, made stuff up, like with all other holy books that are not your religion.

I AM NOT SAYING I KNOW WHAT IS TRUE. I am saying that you don't either.

It usually goes like this

[The Grand Nudger]

Lol, that meme. I’ve always found it strange that the faithful would defend a book to the detriment of their god. Who in all of the earth has more skin in the game when it comes to calling out superstitious bullshit, than the religious?

[Deesse23]

Some of them will be happy to call the events of the Gospels allegorical, although you may declare them not to be Real Christians.

Then you don't know me.

Yeah, i too think that was a bit, erm....over the top.

[Belacqua]

Metaphor is when an entire story is not meant to be taken literally, but symbolizes an underlying message. 

No, metaphor is a trope in which one thing is said to be another thing. "Love is a rose." "Nature is a temple." 

And now we're going in circles. 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.

People used to believe in deluge and six day creation but today it's more like a metaphor. 

We are going around in circles because you keep asserting that the stories started out as literal explanations and only changed later into allegorical or figurative meanings. "People used to believe in X but now it's a metaphor" is overly simple. Sometimes they did, and sometimes they didn't. Augustine and Origen didn't. 

Perhaps some Christians see the Bible largely as allegory, but there are some nonnegotiable beliefs that are virtually diagnostic of each religion. William Dembski, a Southern Baptist and prominent advocate of intelligent design creationism, has specified the "non-negotiables of Christianity" as these: divine creation, reflection of God’s glory in the world, the exceptionalism of humans made in the image of God, and the Resurrection of Jesus.

I'm not surprised you could find one such Christian, especially in modern America. What I've been saying all along is that earlier Christians were likely to interpret the stories non-literally, while modern dumb Americans are MORE likely to interpret them literally. So we've got Origen and Augustine (old, non-literal) and William Dumbski (new, literal), a juxtaposition which works in favor of the point I was making. 

To be clear and careful, I am making no claims about the total percentage of literalist Christians at any given time. I cannot make any claims, for example, about illiterate peasant Christians who heard about six-day creation in church. Farmers know that light comes from the sun and so it's silly to say that light was created before the sun, so they might well have taken the story non-literally, but the thing about people who can't write is that they tend not to leave memoirs. I'd be more comfortable speculating that among Christians who can read and write, a smaller percentage of them read six-day creation literally in the old days, compared to now. Because educated Christians in the old days would be more likely to know Augustine's work, whereas today they are unlikely to know Augustine, and more likely to know Dumbski. Again, this is unprovable speculation.

Then you don't know me. I never claimed some group of Christians are real and some not. 

Thank you, I'm glad of it. Next time you see someone doing that, I'd be grateful if you'd call them out.

Or they lied, made stuff up, like with all other holy books that are not your religion.

Yes, it is always possible that people were insincere. It is hard for me to know the private thoughts and motivations of people who are long dead. 

It usually goes like this

To the extent that people are insincere, or try to make up falsehoods to justify whatever they want to believe, they are doing a bad thing. 

To the extent that they are using myths as the basis for contemplation and discussion about what it is good to do, I see nothing wrong with that, and I think it's how human beings, so far, have tended to operate.

[Acrobat]

Absolutely not, unless the source is making the claim to be historic (something along the lines of "I will destroy Tyre and it will never be rebuilt"). But in absence of conclusive data regarding one or the other metaphoric (or whatever) interpretation, i would tend to withold belief either way. I have no dog in this "book inspired by god" being literal or not race. I am just wondering, why others seem not to suspend belief in absence of evidence...either way.

I wouldn't even know what suspending belief here would look like, unless i avoided reading it all together. If I'm reading genesis, how do I suspend belief on whether it's symbolic/metaphorical, or intended as literal history? What does a suspended reading look like?

It seems to me that reading requires at least intuitively making such assumptions, even if we're not particularly conscious of what those assumptions being made by our brains are.

Like when someone misunderstands sarcasm, it's generally because they assumed incorrectly that it was meant literally/non-sarcastically. I have no idea what it would mean to suspend belief one way or the other on whether it's sarcastic or not, without having to cover my ears refusing to hear a word being said.

As i indicated earlier, people on the autistic spectrum, tend to have an impaired inferential capacity, so they have trouble understanding sarcasm, metaphors, and non-literal use of language. But even here, such individuals tend to read and interpret everything quite literally, rather than in this supposed state of suspension.

...and you are basing your belief in an outrageous claim that some deity spoke all of reality in existence, wants to be worshipped and is interested in your bedroom activities

I'm not basing how I read the Bible on any of those things. I don't read the Bible any differently than i read anything else. I also don't believe God wrote the Bible, but men did. So i read it the way I would anything else written or spoken by men.

on this!? At least partially, of course. Even if i grant you that you may be correct in your interpretation, what may be the impact on the plausibiity of the existence of said deity? Thats the part i just dont get.

We were arguing over literalism, and the basis of this argument doesn't have anything to do with the plausibility of the existence of God.

I was pointing out why I read the Genesis account non-literally, based on the style in which it most resembles. In fact reading it literally requires a whole slew of silly assumptions to hold.

Yes, they better to. Lots of miscommunication in my everyday life is caused exactly by this.

Yes, in the meantime let’s suspend all attempts to understand each other, until we preface all our communication with a disclaimer as to whether we’re speaking literally, non-literally, sarcastically, using similes, metaphors, etc....

Sorry I forgot the disclaimer: sarcasm

[GrandizerII]

Some writings are clearly meant to be taken symbolically such as Revelation. But it's not really clear to me that any part of, say, Genesis was originally intended to be symbolic on the whole.

When you were a kid, and the teacher read a fable, like the three little pigs, Where you confused as to whether she was reading a historical account or non- historical one?

Not the same. That's a fairy tale, not a myth. Cosmogony myths were used to explain how the world came to be. There's no reason to suggest it wasn't taken literally by at least some of the ancients.

I dont think it's that hard to recognize that the Genesis accounts aren't literal.

How do you know it wasn't intended to be taken literally at the start? Can we see an actual argument instead of confident appeals to personal intuition?

You make two buckets. Take all styles of writing we know are non-historical, and all the styles of writing that are historical, and then ask yourself which bucket the style in which the garden of Eden story, the flood, etc.. written resembles the most?

It seems to me it could've been seen as "history" in the mythical sense.

[Acrobat]

It usually goes like this

It seems much of the criticism applies more to fundie literalist, than non-fundie literalist.

Biblical writers were subject to the same scientific misunderstanding of the world, as everyone else at their time. They likely didn't believe the earth was round, or the earth orbits the sun, just like many people at the time didn't. Some of these attitudes can be found in their scriptural writing as well.

There's all sort of violence and deviance in the Bible. Jepetha killed his daughter, the Bears mauled children for making fun of a bald prophet. It's usually literalist who claim things like Jeptha didn't kill his daughter but forgoed her getting married or losing her virginity, and the the children in the bear story were actually young men. All these softer versions require a perversion of context.


As I indicated, I read the Bible on the nature of the style in which it was written, decipher it's meaning as I do language in general, or any other book, religious or otherwise. It's a result of this that I'm not a literalist, not because of my theism, or otherwise. I would read the Bible the same way even if I wasn't a theist, the way I'd expect an atheist to read it. Yet as the forum shows, this doesn't seem to be the case, that many atheists don't read the Bible with any more competency than the worst fundie.