Quote:
Originally Posted by TorqueDog
Theist sez: "lol no u r wrong, those stories r just symbolic"
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This is a massive oversimplification, but it is understandable given that we naturally have a tendency to read ancient literature much like a newspaper or even a novel. The literature contained in the Bible was all written at a time when the highest appreciable commodity in any composition was in its contemporary meaning. The Jewish and Christian notion of "scripture" was always governed by a sense that it repeatedly and consistently required interpretation. This is where the biblicists have strayed so far off track, in their insistence that the so-called "word of God" is fixed for all time. Quite to the contrary, for hundreds and thousands of years it was rather understood as the product of a complex cypher.
I think that part of the real problem is that so many of us have failed to grasp the real significance of symbols and metaphors—even those that were never intended in the first place. There is real value in literature, song, art, etc. through a sensitivity to metaphor. This is something that the biblical writers and editors recognized a long, long time ago.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TorqueDog
Problem is that the stories make as much sense being symbolic as they do being intended literally.
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I think it really depends on what you are looking for and what you expect to find. Symbols and meaning are certain to change over time, and relative to those who perceive them—or create them.
For example: I have often thought that the creation story in Genesis 1:1–2:4 could actually be highly supportive of and meaningful to a naturalistic worldview. There is no question that the man who wrote—or most likely re-wrote—this story believed it plainly: He envisioned a real god who really spoke everything into existence over a real period of six 24-hour days. Obviously, that amounts to nonsense. What I find much more significant is the more subtle celebration of order over chaos that every civilized person appreciates and takes for granted in the undertaking of his or her daily life. The story is founded in a much older Sumerian or Babylonian myth about the defeat of the chaos monster. The Hebrew version in the Bible holds to this theme by using verbs that indicate division, compartmentalization and structure in the process by which god "creates". It is the imposition of order and sense over a hostile and senseless universe.
You don't have to believe in god to be able to appreciate order, or perhaps the illusion of order. We depend upon it for the survival of our civilization; on one level (and certainly not the only one) the primitive and scientifically naive story of creation affirms as much.