[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Acrobat]

Tighten your shit up.  Literalism in genesis (and elsewhere) is more important to Christians than it was to the authors.  

It can't be that important, if hardly any church or christian community today or yesterday as you suggested, would take issue with Origen's support for a non-literal reading of the Garden of Eden of story. 


I'm a member of a conservative evangelical church, reformed Calvinist. There's a variety of things you are required to believe to be a member, you know what's not among them? A literal reading of Genesis, in fact this church, a fairly standard evangelical church, leave the question as an open one, unimportant to the question of salvation.

[The Grand Nudger]

Sure, if you say so. I guess god didn’t create the world. There’s nothing in genesis about salvation or about Christ. Origen was wrong, the Christians are wrong, the Jews nailed it.

Just a big metaphor. Mystery solved. Welcome to atheism.



Jesus, you’d think these nutters would want to talk about their beliefs rather than pretend they didn’t have them. Wtf is the point of coming here for that?

[Acrobat]

I’m not going to waste my time arguing mere reality into being before we can even start a conversation.

Tighten your shit up, man.

As to the rest, it doesn’t -matter- what any of you decide to plant in the metaphoric and literal categorizations.  All of you are required by faith to place some things in the literal categorization, and all of you are required by faith to place confidence in defining literalism.

Is Christ a metaphor?  Is god having created us a metaphor?  Is god a metaphor?  Is gods intervention a metaphor?

No, ofc not, and even Our boy Ori ( who wouldn’t get kicked out of any church for saying that, don’t be absurd, they need asses in seats) believed in the literalism of both creation and salvation through Christ.  That he was a cafeteria believer is likewise unsurprising, all of you are and all Christians have always been so.

This is precisely the trouble as I see it.  Believers accept some bits as literal, other bits as not.  And it always seems that the bits which are literal are the troublesome ones.  And, as science progresses, more and more bits seems to fall into the non-literal side of things.

Smacks of desperation, that does.

Boru

I think your narrative here is false Boru, you can find non-literalist views of the Garden of Eden, etc... in the writing of the Early Church Fathers, and others, long before the advent of the scientific age. In fact much of the support for literalism, the rise of fundamentalism, Inerrancy Doctrines, etc.. can be traced to the 19th century, rather than in the first century, or when Christianity first originated. 

Atheists here seem unable to account for the role the rise of the Christian Fundamentalism played in the role of Biblical Literalism as we understand it today, how it's influenced the valuing and understanding of it. 

Secondly I don't view things as non-literal, or literal, based on whether they're troubling, or contrary to some scientific understanding of the world.      I get that atheists enjoy the praise of believing scientific facts, and a bunch of their hero's are scientists, etc..while I'm fairly apathetic. The fact that you think it's absurd, or worthy of your contempt and ridicule to believe in talking snakes, or that it's unscientific wouldn't stop me from believing in talking snakes. 

There are also plenty of people who classify as literalist, view certain "troubling" parts of a story as not literal, but that I do view as literal, that Jepetha killed his daughter rather than kept her unmarried, or the term children in the story of the bald prophet and bear, meant children and not young men. 

So the fact the some biblical stories offend some dewey liberal aversion to violence, doesn't bother me.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Moderator Notice
Just a reminder.  This thread has been tagged as 'Serious'.  Both sides need to ease off on the insults. The penalty for not doing so is to be banned from the thread.

Boru

[Acrobat]

Jesus, you’d think these nutters would want to talk about their beliefs rather than pretend they didn’t have them.  

The truths that are central to Christianity, are not reducible to scientific or historical facts, these truth might have historical components attached to them, but they're not reducible to history and science. 

If we had all the scientific and historical facts, all we'd know is what is, and what was. Where the central truths of Christianity are about the way things ought to be. This is true as much for the literalist as the non-literalist. Any truth about the past, only important as it illuminates the future.

[The Grand Nudger]

Creation isn’t a historic or scientific fact. Rgr.

Neither is Christ. Neither is the fall. Paul got it wrong. Calvin got it wrong. All Christians got it wrong, lol.

[Acrobat]

Creation isn’t a historic or scientific fact.  Rgr.

Neither is Christ.  Neither is the fall.  

None of it is reducible to scientific and historic facts, or even quasi-scientific or historic facts. 

The meaning of Christ, the cross, etc.. contain oughts, inseparable from the oughts. Such is in statements like we ought to be Christ like, the suffering of the cross leaks out into the meaning of suffering into the future, the necessity of salvation,  That Christian life is a partaking, requires participation, repenting, forgiving, etc...

As a result such things can't be reduced to scientific and historic facts, because such facts don't require us to do anything.

[The Grand Nudger]

Sure, sure, the story has meaning, but I’m glad we’ve agreed that creation and Christ and the fall, etc, aren’t historic or scientific facts.

That Christians and magic book are not describing beings or events, but some oblique concept of meaning in a story.

OFC, you can’t actually believe that and be a Christian. Par for the course with you, huh. Third time I’ll have to politely request that you tighten your shit up, lol.

---

Let’s just cut to the chase, shall we? You’re not angling for any sort of anti-literalism. You’re looking for mistaken literalism.

You think the things described literally happened, just not the way described, maybe....except the Christ shit. That’s not a metaphor, that’s just the authors getting the details wrong in a literal account.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

like we ought to be Christ like

You mean I should be rude to my mum, threaten people, and lie to my friends?  Pass.

Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

A different non historic, and non scientific meaning, I think.