There are no answers in Genesis

[arewethereyet]

....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.

After Neo's edit/add - 
Are you saying you have your very own religion that doesn't follow the others?  Color me surprised.

[The Architect Of Fate]

...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.

If Christians aren't able to create a definitive interpretation of what's literal and what's not . Then no the refutation works period and simply employing "it's not literal"  is a cop-out.

[Mister Agenda]

I would suggest that you broaden your perspective. Any given text is profound to the extent that it can meaningfully  speak to the various inconsistent circumstances of Mankind across time and space.

Stop bullshitting and start explaining to the uneducated plebs, what the figurative meaning of Genesis is.

I can give one. It's an allagory for why we want to do good but so often fall into bad behavior. It doesn't really explain why we're morally flawed, but it does hammer home the fact that we're morally flawed, and that it's part of human nature. And women's fault.

[brewer]

Cosmic vagina?

That just makes my penis and tongue hurt.

But I think it would be excellent for expelling babies.

[Belacqua]

Stop bullshitting and start explaining to the uneducated plebs, what the figurative meaning of Genesis is.

I can give one. It's an allagory for why we want to do good but so often fall into bad behavior. It doesn't really explain why we're morally flawed, but it does hammer home the fact that we're morally flawed, and that it's part of human nature. And women's fault.

I think the interpretation you give here makes perfect sense. I suspect this is how a great many people read it. 

I'd also like to suggest that there is no single correct reading. To ask what "the figurative meaning" [emphasis added] is, as if it there were only one and it can be correctly decoded by those in the know, is too simple. 

When we talk about this maybe we have a tendency to say that a story is either literal or allegorical. But allegory tends to be a narrative in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between a symbol -- a character, say, or a building -- and a particular correct figurative meaning. The obvious example is The Pilgrim's Progress, in which a main character named Christian goes on a journey and meets people named Ignorance and Sloth, and Hopeful and Faithful. Bunyan clearly didn't want any ambiguity in our interpretations, so he just makes it as obvious as he can. 

There are some clear allegories in the Bible, including some of the Psalms and some parables in the New Testament. But I don't think that the various stories in Genesis are quite this way. 

A symbol doesn't necessarily have to have only one decodable meaning. In fact the value of a symbol may come from its richness, in which it serves many purposes in many different contexts. In this way it is more like a painting - a kind of mental image which can be put into service whenever it proves useful. A non-Bible example would be Saturn eating his children. If Hesiod had any particular coded meaning in mind when he wrote about that, it isn't obvious to us now. And particularly since Goya's painting made it famous, the story may be put to any number of uses. It provides a kind of mental tool or useful concretization that can help us organize and express very different situations. (When Goya painted it, it may have been a reference to the Napoleonic wars, and the waste of life that came with those. But we needn't read it that way for us to make our own use of it.) 

So I think that the Book of Genesis is best thought of as a kind of catalog of powerful images. The cherub with the flaming sword at the gate of Eden, for example. Or Jacob wrestling with the angel, and the strange way that story plays out. Or Nimrod the Hunter, or the Tower of Babel, or Cain and Able and what happened to them. If we think about the use that, for example, Brueghel made of the Babel story, I think it shows that culture has been enriched by this story. Or there is the passage in Nerval's strange book Voyage to the Orient, where he writes a kind of extended bizarre biblical fan fiction, in which the descendent of Cain, Tubal-Cain, is the founder of the first cities and a master of technology. This too becomes a not-quite allegory of the double-sided sword of technology, and how it is a blessing and a curse. 

It's just completely misguided to expect a mythological book of powerful, lasting images to give scientific answers. And the idea that only scientific information is necessary for culture is far too narrow. 

Likewise, it is too simple to expect any part of Genesis to be decoded into a single, correct message.

[Mister Agenda]

The atheists around here are too ignorant and touchy, try somewhere else.

I'm amused to hear that this is a forum where we're not supposed to criticize each other. That was not my impression in the past.

Your amusement is derived from poor reading comprehension. I'm allowed to criticize you too dumbass, and so is everyone else. If you don't like it, try being less smug and passive-agressive. You're always as good as your last post with me, but I don't blame anyone who's holding a grudge by now.

[The Architect Of Fate]

I think the interpretation you give here makes perfect sense. I suspect this is how a great many people read it. 

I'd also like to suggest that there is no single correct reading. To ask what "the figurative meaning" [emphasis added] is, as if it there were only one and it can be correctly decoded by those in the know, is too simple. 

When we talk about this maybe we have a tendency to say that a story is either literal or allegorical. But allegory tends to be a narrative in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between a symbol -- a character, say, or a building -- and a particular correct figurative meaning. The obvious example is The Pilgrim's Progress, in which a main character named Christian goes on a journey and meets people named Ignorance and Sloth, and Hopeful and Faithful. Bunyan clearly didn't want any ambiguity in our interpretations, so he just makes it as obvious as he can. 

There are some clear allegories in the Bible, including some of the Psalms and some parables in the New Testament. But I don't think that the various stories in Genesis are quite this way. 

A symbol doesn't necessarily have to have only one decodable meaning. In fact the value of a symbol may come from its richness, in which it serves many purposes in many different contexts. In this way it is more like a painting - a kind of mental image which can be put into service whenever it proves useful. A non-Bible example would be Saturn eating his children. If Hesiod had any particular coded meaning in mind when he wrote about that, it isn't obvious to us now. And particularly since Goya's painting made it famous, the story may be put to any number of uses. It provides a kind of mental tool or useful concretization that can help us organize and express very different situations. (When Goya painted it, it may have been a reference to the Napoleonic wars, and the waste of life that came with those. But we needn't read it that way for us to make our own use of it.) 

So I think that the Book of Genesis is best thought of as a kind of catalog of powerful images. The cherub with the flaming sword at the gate of Eden, for example. Or Jacob wrestling with the angel, and the strange way that story plays out. Or Nimrod the Hunter, or the Tower of Babel, or Cain and Able and what happened to them. If we think about the use that, for example, Brueghel made of the Babel story, I think it shows that culture has been enriched by this story. Or there is the passage in Nerval's strange book Voyage to the Orient, where he writes a kind of extended bizarre biblical fan fiction, in which the descendent of Cain, Tubal-Cain, is the founder of the first cities and a master of technology. This too becomes a not-quite allegory of the double-sided sword of technology, and how it is a blessing and a curse. 

It's just completely misguided to expect a mythological book of powerful, lasting images to give scientific answers. And the idea that only scientific information is necessary for culture is far too narrow. 

Likewise, it is too simple to expect any part of Genesis to be decoded into a single, correct message.

So in other words a long collection of excuses as to why a book supposedly authored by the creator of the universe that's supposed to tell people how to live and be a story of the world's origins etc can't get it's narrative straight and the supposedly enlightened followers of said can't get it straight either. The Bible isn't supposed to be a book of mythology at least to its followers so comparing it to mythology is kind of a category error as for your cultural critiques considering your failure to understand Star Wars or the works of Tolkien I wouldn't consider taking your input to heart.

[Anomalocaris]

Decode implies a conscious code. Genesis is not a code, it is simply a crass sales collateral, conceived by hucksterish would-be priest class, that steals from and plagiarizes other mythologies, in order to help sell a world view to the gullible that facilitates continued subservience to the priestly class.

[Jehanne]

Decode implies a conscious code. Genesis is not a code, it is simply a crass sales collateral, conceived by hucksterish would-be priest class, that steals from and plagiarizes other mythologies, in order to help sell a world view to the gullible that facilitates continued subservience to the priestly class.

I don't think that the authors of the Pentateuch had sinister motives; I think that they were just trying to understand and cope in the World that they inhabited.

[The Grand Nudger]

I suppose it would depend on what a person considers sinister. There's no doubt that this stuff has been and still is concocted as a normative lever of control. If a person sees that as sinister then it would then seem like the authors had sinister intent. However, if a person, instead, realizes that this is the fundamental purpose of religious ideation - and possibly that the creation and maintenance of such levers is instrumental to human society (or at least the continuation of human society-as-practiced) - then it's more process than plot.