Quote:
Originally Posted by Daradon
...It's a little bit like the way we suspend our belief for movies or books we know are fiction. As long as the art stays within the rules it itself has presented, we can't really argue with it, and we accept it.
But in this case, the theology isn't even playing by the rules it has laid out for itself. It's full of contradictions and cases against itself.
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You seem to be assuming that ancient, biblical literature should work like what we recognize as "fiction". This suggests in the first place that there are common conventions in place that permit us to recognize clearly that the biblical literature
is fiction.
What literary elements make clear to you that "fiction" is the best genre classification for these texts?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Daradon
In the movie example, the Bible would be a crappy movie full of contradictions and continuity errors. It would be a summer blockbuster that flops because IT MAKES NO SENSE. Even in it's own rules. Even if you start out by believing that yes, it's possible god may exist, yes it's possible that someone may rise from the dead, so you can enjoy the movie one ends up feeling cheated because it doesn't play by the rules it outlined.
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So what are the rules?
Of course the Bible makes no sense if presume to interpret it like a movie, any more than if we understood the Star Wars Trilogy as a blueprint for inter-galactic trade relations!
It is a mistake to approach the Bible and to expect internal consistency or continuity, simply because these are matters that were rather superficial and unimportant in practically all ancient literature. We can fault the Church for imposing rules that imply continuity, but these fail to properly understand and to engage with the biblical literature on its own terms. The biblical authors simply did not share the same concerns for narrative or philosophical coherence, because none of them proposed and undertook to write a "Bible". A huge number of the stories, rules, songs and poems in the Bible were discrete and loosely connected, independent, literary products, that were brought together on the unifying principle that they are some way or another connected to varying ideas about God.