There are no answers in Genesis

[Ranjr]

What some here are saying about the OT, that it was written as a fairy tale but later taught as history, is what I believe about the Gospel as well.  All midrash and aggadah.   Jesus is Moses 2.0.

The "divinely inspired unerring Word" nonsense was beaten into followers centuries after the fact to make these clearly human stories appear as something more.  But that only works if you close your eyes and make a wish.

[HappySkeptic]

Here's where we go when we take the stories as Metaphor.

Adam and Eve and the Fall

• Didn't really happen.  We are evolved animals, and never were or could be perfect.  Our intelligence lets us be moral creatures, however, with the capacity for both good and evil.
  

OT God judging, killing, and ordering killing

• Didn't really happen.  The OT people thought of their God as the cause of all things, good and bad, and they created stories to justify in their minds how bad events were really punishment.
  

Abraham and the Covenant

• Didn't really happen.  The idea that he "told" someone to kill his son is evidence of mental illness, not righteousness.  God didn't actively protect Abraham's descendants above other tribes in the world.
  

Jesus as Demigod

• God didn't actually make a half-divine half-human baby (like the Greek gods of myth).  Jesus isn't God (if Jesus existed as described at all).  Jesus just had better insight into God than others.
  

Jesus as Atonement for Original Sin

• There was no original sin, though it is clear we aren't perfect.  Substitution blood magic makes no sense.  Belief isn't a magic spell that saves.  The story of Jesus' death is just a way of grabbing out attention so that we'll be as good as Jesus was.  Jesus was just showing a way to heaven for good people.
  

If one follows this line, then all "good" people get to heaven, and something like Buddhist practice makes way more sense than Christianity, as it teaches a way to let go of the world and the attachments that make us do bad things.

If Genesis is just a story, then so is the divinity of Jesus, and the magic stuff that supposedly happened on the cross.  That at best neuters Christianity.  At worst, it makes it irrelevant.

[Ranjr]

Well, this is the problem I have with Neo.  It's fine to approach the bible as containing much more than history, but it's incoherent to approach it as making no historical claims whatsoever.  The answer, as always, lies somewhere in the middle.  Unfortunately, Neo insists that where he draws the line is objectively defensible and he shits on anybody who dares question his divine wisdom.  It's even more unfortunate as Neo's doing so appears to be a transparent case of an interpretational stance and defense of said stance driven by 21st-century political needs that he has, quite irrespective of how they might relate to what is true or can reasonably be defended.  In short, Neo is a typical conservative Christian, inventing the God that he needs, as opposed to the God that might be or is.

Remember the manic evangelical who posted here and made bad videos showing how Genesis is correct about creation?  I was taught as a child that Methuselah really did live 900 years.  Writing fairy tales and rewriting history are very much things people do.  So whichever stand a theist takes, including their weak deductive arguments, the world with God looks the same as the world without.  I'll take the simpler explanation.

[arewethereyet]

I suppose I was lucky in that my parents really didn't push religion or religious belief on me. I was made to do the Catholic stuff, cause that's what dad's parents thought was right, and I suspect he did too when he was younger. Once he found the religion of GOLF, the religion of god fell by the wayside. Sunday mornings were men only at the country club and apparently a whole lot more fun than being at mass. A few years before he died, he told me he didn't believe any of that crap he had been raised to believe. That was the deepest religious discussion we ever had.

Mom was very young when she had me and had been raised Methodist and then thrown into a sea of Catholics she soon began to detest.

I had to play the game but that was it. I was out of it before I realized it.

[Angrboda]

No, they didn't.  Not in catechism classes or through my many years at full Catholic schools.

Same-same.  I was always taught what Adam and Eve did, not that it was a parable concerning something else. When we were taught that Jesus died after being nailed to a cross, or what happened to Jezebel or that JTB ate bugs, it was explained to us that these were actual historical events with moral lessons behind them.

I can't think of a single Bible story that wasn't related to us as historic fact (apart from parables so labeled). 

Boru

It seems the bride of Christ has a vexing issue with multiple personalities. Is there a priest in the house that can exorcise this demon? (Sit down, Neo!)

[Neo-Scholastic]

....but I was just gettin' warmed up.

Anyways, I am admittedly someone with minority Christian beliefs and somewhat unorthodox in my thinking. My initial point was only intended to say this. A refutation based on a literal interpretation only applies to literal interpretations. I agree it is valid question whether other Christian doctrines can survive without treating the OT as historically. I think it can but I don't think this thread is the place for that discussion.

[arewethereyet]

....but I was just gettin' warmed up.

Don't bother.

[Ranjr]

[arewethereyet]

Same-same.  I was always taught what Adam and Eve did, not that it was a parable concerning something else. When we were taught that Jesus died after being nailed to a cross, or what happened to Jezebel or that JTB ate bugs, it was explained to us that these were actual historical events with moral lessons behind them.

I can't think of a single Bible story that wasn't related to us as historic fact (apart from parables so labeled). 

Boru

It seems the bride of Christ has a vexing issue with multiple personalities.  Is there a priest in the house that can exorcise this demon?  (Sit down, Neo!)

The nuns being brides of Christ was weird enough.  But the little girls in wedding dresses for their first communion creeps me out to no end.  I was very young when I had first communion...I had no freakin' clue what being a bride even meant....much less a bride of Christ.  It's just icky now when I look at it from an adult's view.

[Angrboda]

....but I was just gettin' warmed up.

Anyways, I am admittedly someone with minority Christian beliefs and somewhat unorthodox in my thinking. My initial point was only intended to say this. A refutation based on a literal interpretation only applies to literal interpretations. I agree it is valid question whether other Christian doctrines can survive without treating the OT as historically. I think it can but I don't think this thread is the place for that discussion.

Your streak of being wrong remains unbroken.