I think maybe the translations reflect when they were translated, too. So there is that aspect of it, making the bible a living document as much as it is an historical one. This continues today, with more recent serious and tongue in cheek translations of the stories that do reflect the world view of today. Including this one we’re discussing here, which is in part satirical.
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There is value in looking at things from a Humanities point of view too; the scientific point of view is important but not The.Only.Way. The problem comes when stories meant to be understood metaphorically are instead presented as literal truth.
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“For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
That’s one heck of a sales pitch; if only God hadn’t created Madison Avenue on the 8th day…
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May I suggest you might be fetishizing evidence?
I mean, yeah, the story of genesis is not the real story of creation and from what we know we couldn’t have possibly figured out how the universe was created, its not like we fully understand it yet.
The thing here, is that we know how we got our answers, and it started with asking ourselves questions, and deriving as perfect an answer from what we could understand at that point in time.
The fact that we were wildly wrong does not negate that this was an early iteration and a link in the chain of knowledge that got us to what we know now.
TL;DR
If we would have settled for “I don’t know” back then, we probably wouldn’t have bothered to ask now. We couldn’t even know that we are ready to know if we never tried to know and were able to prove ourselves wrong.
Evidence is fine, its nothing without wonder.
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you make that sound like more fun than it probably is…
we are discussing stories that were 100% made up, so there is no evidence at all, they are just stories.
not your point but the book we are discussing is full of some pretty fetish stuff though like ezekial 23:20 casual mentioning of donkey sex.
[quote=“tachin1, post:46, topic:46812”]
It started with asking ourselves questions, and deriving as perfect an answer from what we could understand at that point in time.[/quote]
yes we asked questions and i agree that is very important.
i totally disagree that we derived as perfect of answers as we could at the time. making something up for which there is absolutely zero basis, isn’t the best possible answer for the time, it is never a good answer, ever. If you make up an answer it is always just as made up from the day it was concocted onwords, it never gets more or less true based on information we have, or more or less better of an answer, it always is and always will be 100% made up. it isn’t derived. it extinguishes wonder, and represses further exploration of the questions.
I disagree 100%. These myths are not part of the knowledge chain, and in fact greatly hindered the knowledge chain. As a direct result of these concocted answers real answers were repressed and considered heresy, they held back advances in real knowledge for centuries. just ask galileo galilei. They are still holding back our collective knowledge, and are the basis for the denial of everything from evolution to climate change. It takes a long time and a lot of work to remove these false links from a knowledge chain before the actual links can be put in their place.
Again I disagree 100%. Not knowing is not settling. There are many questions that these myths never attempted to answer that we progressed much more quickly in answering once we had the ability. supplanting an entrenched wrong answer is an impediment, whereas an unanswered question can lead to many advances even before it is answered. Exploring potential answers to unanswered questions is quite valuable. Having false answers is detrimental.
Evidence is crucial, wonder in no way requires stories designed to quench and extinguish wonder without providing actual value or answers.
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I quite agree. There is nothing incompatible with Humanities and Science, they in no way interfere with or contradict each other. Both offer completely different things of value. I love a good philosophical discussion and am a history buff. I even enjoy studying and participating in the rituals of various religions, despite being an atheist myself.
There are lots of non-science practices that I value, such as music and art. I regularly paint and sculpt and love and value my experiences with art.
You make a good point though, unlike science or the humanities certain religions do claim to be The Only Way™
Again I agree, the problem is assuming they are anything other then stories. I appreciate the stories of most religions in the context of being stories.
Except that Genesis was supposed to be the literal truth. And most Christians think that some or all of Genesis is literal. How many Christians believe that Jesus died for a metaphor? (Or that Jesus is a metaphor, for that matter.) Christians can’t point to any reliable, objective way of discerning the “metaphorical” parts of the bible from the “literal” parts of the bible.
Christianity as “metaphor” is a nonsensical concept.
When I said:
May I suggest you might be fetishizing evidence?
I take it back, I should have said that you were being too literal with your interpretation of history.
If I suggested evidence as fetish its because you make one big assumption that allows you to make the knowledge we have today somehow available to people a few thousand years ago. That is, the evidence you see is more important than the evidence you don’t see.
Your assumption is that the stories these people made up were created as lies. What if they really believed this?
Continuing to unpack that assumption I’ll ask: Do you believe that people believe in religion? You seem to mean that nobody ever honestly beieved in a god, if people really believe in god/s then having god create everything in 7 days must seem as plausible as the big bang. Even more so when the big bang was not a competing theory.
Yes, the first person who said and convinced other people that “Thunder is caused by the gods” seems to have made an incredible leap of logic but for the precondition of already believing in gods.
You can’t rely on the bible to be its own witness, we know this, but you seem to forget that nobody wrote the accounts of genesis in real time, and the bible was not created wholecloth, its a series of stories that had been already floating around the zeitgeist of the time. It is the best account some people could give at the time. Were there others? Yes, we know of some of these accounts. They were all fantastic, they were nothing like what we understand today to be true, and yes, they all tried to suppress each other. That doesn’t make anyone of them even remotely valid for today, only relevant for their time.
You are also too literal when interpreting this:
If we would have settled for “I don’t know” back then, we probably wouldn’t have bothered to ask now. We couldn’t even know that we are ready to know if we never tried to know and were able to prove ourselves wrong.
I didn’t say that not knowing is settling, I meant that not answering is settling, are you really saying that in the dark of the desert people should have known better than to believe in spirits?
We as a species still believe in ghosts. To all evidence you say something that could not possibly be, in fact you’re saying that what actually happened, could not have happened.
While history is imperfect, we know that people once believe this, they wrote it down for us, is it not then evidence that people really believed in god?
If you want to argue that there’s no reason to believe in god, go ahead, make that argument, but to deny history is not evidence for what they really believed or for what they should have believed.
The thing you need to look at in your argument is how you dismiss what we know to be false as lies because we have a good answer now and how you ignore addressing what we know we don’t know about humanity (how we can believe some pretty silly nonsensical things) because there are no answers.
This is what I meant about fetishizing evidence. Evidence is the result of appropriate experimentation and methodologies born of asking the right questions, it is not in itself what is most important about the truth. for millennia we had evidence of gods and spirits. Some people still claim to have evidence.
What we know today to be true are facts, they are not the evidence that got us to those facts.
Because we have facts, we know that a lot of what people used to believe is wrong. It doesn’t mean that they knew that they were wrong or in which ways they were wrong. You’ll need to bring evidence that proves this.
One last thing.
Yes, a lot of religions have attempted to suppress serious scientific inquiry, but in nature, some eat their young.
In the U.S. that’s often true. But it’s not true of all Christians, especially not worldwide.
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Yes, it’s the insistence that the words as written (OK, as translated, multiple times, by different people laboring under the prejudices of their time) are exactly, literally true that causes problems.
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It’s true that complete Christian biblical literalism is very common in the US, but selective literalism at the least is the general rule world wide, and it is a requirement of Catholic doctrine, which not only believes in a litteral Adam and Eve, but also that priests literally (not figuratively) transform bad and wine into the actual body and blood of Jesus. (Catholocim really is a cannibalistic death cult by its own doctrine.)
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Ah, yes, the Catholic church.
What about it? It’s the world’s largest Christian denomination. Are you disagreeing with their doctrine? If so, on what basis?
You keep going on about how literalism is the problem rather than the unjustified certitude of religious people, be they literalists or not. Tell us your reliable, objective method of separating biblical “facts” from metaphor? Is the command to kill all non-virgin brides on their father’s doorstep a metaphor?
You seem to be assuming a lot of erroneous facts about me and I really don’t have the time or patience to educate you today.
I’m a fan of using metaphors to tell stories. I’m not a fan of lying about the literal veracity of stories in an attempt to make them seem more important or true.
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I know I don’t know about your panoply of beliefs, which is why I politely asked you about them, and rather than answer you respond with empty, condecendiding snark.
Great, you are a fan of metaphors. What is your reliable, objective method of separating the “facts” from the metaphors in the bible?
I don’t know if you are Christian or merely an accomodationist, either way your vague claims about literalism don’t address the problem of unjustified religious certitude, something that exists independent of biblical literalism.
I came to terms with this by realizing that its all in the interpretation.
Catholics and protestants both have the same texts.
They diverge in their interpretation of the text, and these differences in interpretation are not trivial.
Furthermore, within these divisions there are still more differences of opinion. Some minor, but all of them severe enough that people feel strongly enough to go form their own group.
If I meet a catholic, I don’t have to debate the bible on his terms, I can just read the book and form my own opinion, like millions of people already have. Like even other devout believers have done.
If my interpretation doesn’t match theirs, well, too bad, I won’t be the first.
Sure, my interpretation is very radical coming from a catholic point of view, but very sensible coming from a humanistic, historical, anthropological point of view.
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Honestly, I don’t think metaphor is a great word in this case (or at least it’s a bit misleading) - there are many events that are metaphorical of something else, but you are also expected to believe that they really happened. “That rock was Christ” is a metaphor that only really works if both Jesus’ existence and water coming from the rock during the exodus period are presumed to be historical. The rock was not literally Jesus, but it was a literal rock that metaphorically represents Jesus in this passage (and if you accept that, I don’t really see why you have to believe that “this is my body” was intended to be literal, especially as Jesus hadn’t died by that point). Jesus’ parables were metaphorical stories that aren’t assumed to be true, but they are clearly marked as such and aren’t the same as the parts of the Bible marked as historical.
I would say that a lot of the historical sections are not supposed to be read as scientifically true (the Bible talks in terms of a flat earth with the sun going around it, but even most literalists will claim that it was speaking with the knowledge of the time). There are also a number of times when simple continuity errors are allowed for the sake of the narrative or because two accounts came from different perspectives; we may see this as a basic error, but I don’t think the culture looked on these as severely as we would. While there are plenty of criticisms to be made, we have to read the text as it was intended to be understood (often poetically, figuratively, with a definite message that can change in retellings…) instead of simply dismissing it for its lack of accuracy. On the other hand, while a lot of leeway can be given for figurativeness, it seems clear to me at least that a lot of the events are meant to be taken as fundamentally true (I don’t think the rest of the NT works very well if Jesus only figuratively came back to life. Even though Genesis 1 is highly figurative and isn’t mainly about answering all the questions that people give it, there are presumably some circumstances under which it was understood to be true in a sense that a different story would not be true. Jesus used miracles at times to validate his message. If the miracles were figurative, they don’t have much of a purpose in the text). Ultimately I think there’s only a certain degree that you can bend the text before it completely loses its meaning. I think the intertextuality and many other literary elements are fascinating and there is an incredible amount of depth to explore, but taking the Bible as authoritative (not just literal) causes plenty of problems in itself.
without getting sucked into refuting things I don’t think, which always ends up being pointless, I think if you reread my comments above you’ll see I make direct arguments to the contrary of all three assertions you make about what “I must think”. i stand by my actual points without feeling the need to refute your injected ones. no offense, but those types of “discussions” never lead anywhere.
I will repeat my answer to one point of yours that you repeat without addressing my actual response because it is an important point and one of the very foundations of knowledge:
my counter assertion is that “we don’t know” IS AN ANSWER, and a highly valuable answer. many great discoveries have come from exploring questions that we admit we don’t have the answers to, whereas we are still undoing much of the damage that these false answers have done by blocking actual inquiry and curiosity and progress. the denial of evolution and denial of climate change both are symptoms in the modern world of the negative impact these stories have had on the “knowledge chain”. I also previously reminded you of galileo galilei as but one of many many many historical examples of this same thing. While these stories have irrefutably blocked actual knowledge and progress for centuries, no actual knowledge or progress in answering any of these important questions has been built upon the expanded answers of these stories.
settling would be accepting a BS answer to satiate our curiosity instead of continuing to strive for a real answer (which these religious stories have not done).
And of course I couldn’t let this gem pass without comment:
O rly? I think our understanding of what constitutes evidence differs greatly…
@tachin1 Will you please open you protestant bible to the book of Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, or Maccabees (I or II)? You’ll note in your book, parts of Psalms, Daniel, Ester, are also missing. The entire Apocrypha was removed. etc. Massive alterations. The original 1611 King James Bible has 80 books, and the “modern bible” has only 66 books. When England split with the Vatican, certain theologians where given the task of writing a new version. One that would not conflict with their political needs at the time, this modified version is the parent of the “modern bible”. There might be a lot more differences then you realize if you studied both texts side by side. The history of the bible, its canonization, and the various changes it has undergone throughout different points in history, is quite fascinating, even for an atheist such as myself.
Oh and don’t forget about the dragons!!! Any good discussion about the selective editing of the bible isn’t complete without discussing when they removed all references to dragons.
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Right, or, in other words, it was supposed to be true - hence the “knowledge of the times” excuse we hear so often. You can drop the term “scientifically” and just go with whether certain claims are factually correct or not (something we test with science, but the facts are merely true or false, not “scientific” per se). Geocentric flat, circular earth? Bible fail. Which is fine if we are looking at the book as a curiosity, written by men with the knowledge of time. But it is is a major fail for any who claim the book is the inspired or dictated word of an all knowing being.
we have to read the text as it was intended to be understood
To what end? Looking at the bible to understand the moral strictures of the time, sure. But, again, as the inspired or dictated word of an all knowing god, especially one who is supposed to be the source of absolute, unchanging morality, not so much. An all powerful being who sets absolute morality is not limited by the limitations of humans trying to make cultural changes, such as, say, the Mormon church trying to be less racist but not make too much change lest they lose the base. Rather, an all powerful god sets down the rules. Period. As God does in the bible. Even what fibers you can wear is dictated, and beard trimming, so if god didn’t want slavery there would have been a commandment against it. No careful political lobbying or gentle issue framing needed.
I think the bible is an interesting document to study, and that we should take note of the cultures that produced it, but those legitimate scholarly tools of analysis work on the bible only so far as we recognize the bible as solely the work of people, not of an omniscient god.
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