Really? Maybe you and I just have a different view of the major themes of the bible. What would you consider major themes in the bible that are not compatible with non-religious views?

resurrection

slavery

demons

I would disagree. But that is probably a thread in its' own.

Well, first there are posters saying exactly that, but I am not so much concerned with that. As far as the bible representing our best understanding of the scientific realm, this is exactly what I am saying it is not! But I don't think that the scientific realm is all that important when compared to the non physical aspects of life.

yeah guys science isn't that important

OK, but a couple points:

1. A large number of Christians disagree with you. They think the Bible has a superior account of the sensory world to modern science, because it was literally inspired directly by an all-powerful deity. That is partly what I'm trying to establish. I'm glad you don't consider the Bible to be the best authority on the natural world.

2. Even in terms of non-physical, non-scientific, most humanistic meaningful experiences, I vehemently disagree that the Bible represents our best understanding of what it means to be human or what constitutes a moral life, just as an example. Even a lot of Christians generally feel the Bible is insufficient for personal or even spiritual fulfillment.

The most reasonable religious people I know basically take the position that, the Bible reflects the understanding of peoples who lived thousands of years ago. It was a starting place for exploring a a mystery that was bigger than themselves. It was not the end of the story, nor is our modern understanding of spirituality. It is an ongoing, perhaps fundamental quest of the human condition.

When I considered myself a Christian, that was more or less my stance. But when I could no longer get behind the idea of a literal resurrection or the idea that Jesus was in fact God, I realized I was not a Christian--then it was a sort series of jumps from general theist, to agnostic theist/deist, to agnostic-atheist.

Salvation, original sin, prayer, sacrifice, and sexual repression, to name a few. All the supernatural stuff as well.

What themes do you have in mind?

As Justin A noted, I did not mean to say that all profound insights must be easily comparable. You can see this by thinking about the contributions of the examples I gave:
...
Origin of Species: theory of evolution. The first real falsifier in psychology and neuroscience. The supreme explanatory framework of complexity (not only biological). A complete re-visioning of ethics, epistemology, and indeed all of cognition.

Syntactic Structures: generative grammar. The beginning of a rigorous theory of human language capacity. A death-blow to behaviorism. Philosophically, a profound falsifier for any satisfactory theory of meaning.

"Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids": structure of DNA. Enabled the information-theoretic framing of heredity. Ever-deeper revelations of genetic determinism. Future implications unimaginable.
...
Pretty hard to put all three into any single box except "Profound Insights into the Human Condition." My point relevant to this thread is as follows. All educated, intelligent people agree that the above documents belong in that box. But many, many of the best educated, most intelligent people don't put the Bible in the Profound Insights box.

Why? From my perspective, the answer is simple: because the Bible contains no profound insights of any sort. Not of programming language design, not of the human condition, not of anything at all. That's how I explain it.

But from your perspective, where the Bible belongs at the very top of the Profound Insights box (or very bottom?), this situation needs explaining.

Then why do all the changes from literal to metaphorical take place AFTER science has repeatedly beaten them over the head so many times that they couldn't take it anymore? Pretty strange coincidence that the MAJORITY of Christians do this.

MAJORITY of Christians! That's hardly a strawman. Besides, suppose you are a "perfect Christian" in your opinion. Who's to say that all (or even any) of your views are correct? He's arguing against the majority of Christians, not you. Atheists can't change their argument every time a fly-by-nighter pops in the thread with a view that is different.

Yeah, but did they know which parts, and WHY they felt that way? And even if "yes" was the answer to both questions, it was only a small number of Christians. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Ah. I only skimmed Coyne's blog entry; a closer look shows that I did miss the point. He never asks for criteria for recognizing metaphor; but rather fact.

In a less sloppy world, I would have realized that I was only replying to some subtextual vibe I got. :/

Actually there's a double transposition there. The nuances of the Bible were actually taken quite seriously by educated medieval and Renaissance thinkers. It's only after popular readings (ie, by the "uneducated masses") and the Reformation you get ancient myths to be taken as legitimate historical accounts, with some nuances and exceptions. The real tradition we would call "literalism"/fundamentalism really only starts to show up quite recently, after the rise of science. This is partly because the scientific vocabulary of certainty and universality start to filter into the rest of culture, and there is a feeling among the reactionary crowd that religion must have the same air of authority or certainty, lest the church pews go empty.

So among the early Christians, metaphor was almost certainly an accepted part of Scripture--Scripture was metaphor, as most Mystery Religions were. Then as the Church gets established, the metaphor becomes dogma. Science and secularism undoes the dogma, and the Scripture must be interpreted as metaphor to have any meaning. But if religion is still to hold the same sway, it must carry the same weight as science. That's what I mean by a double transposition.

Anyone can read Darwin, understand the arguments, and realize why evolution is true. The arguments are objective.

There is no way to assess whether 'the nature of mankind both descriptive and prescriptive' as detailed is actually true or not. Different people will draw markedly different conclusions from the same text. This does not discount the Bible as poetry, or cultural narrative, or art - in fact, it's malleability increases its worth from these perspectives - but as something which is supposedly true, it does not hold up to objective scrutiny.

After cracking open a first-year psychology textbook you will have more actual knowledge of the nature of mankind than from reading the entire Bible.

Source on this? Biblicial commentaries that are centuries old show theologians discussing the allegory, symbolism, and metaphor of Genesis, Revelation, and throughout the whole Bible.

Not sure why you think the majority of Christians take the whole thing literally (the idea that you should even do so is actually reasonably new, and very few denominations hold to 100% literal truth of the Bible) but okay, let's say the majority of Christians do think that. So what? A majority of people interested in, say, physics, vastly misunderstand it and aren't even remotely able to talk about it.

If you posted a long column or blog about how the y of physics is BS because you had a conversation with a bunch of stoned college students about it and they made no sense, you would (justifiably) be laughed at. If you want to be taken seriously, you're expected to interact with people who actually know what they are talking about (in this case, physicists).

You're asking if the writers of the books knew if they were writing allegory or not, when they wrote it? I'm going to go with "Um, yes."

For a less dickish answer, let's take a look at say, Lady Gaga. If I have you read a transcript of the songs on the album The Fame, can you tell me if they are songs, or if they're intended as literal truth? Obviously if we ask Lady Gaga herself, she can set us straight too. But you could as well - as someone who exists in the same culture as Lady Gaga, you can point to things like rhyming words, stanzas, repetition, themes, and a ton of other stuff that says to a 21st century observer, "Hey, this is a pop song."

But let's fast forward 5,000 years. In this distant future, English has disappeared, pianos, guitars, and sheet music as we know it are long gone. No recordings video or audio exist.

Lady Gaga's work is then translated into a language that didn't even exist when she wrote the songs, and given to some 71st century construction worker with no education. Do you think he can tell if what is written there was intended literally or not?

Of course not. But if you take someone who has studied a lot of the 21st century, looked over the cultural situation of the era, along with other available documents, they can make a pretty informed guess.

As I think about this, this really proves too much for theists.

After all, one thing we know about early Christianity is that there were a heck of a lot of people running around telling different stories about what Jesus taught and what it meant, including many teachings that the Church declared heretical. And that among those heretical teachings were indictments of what is now Christian dogma, i.e., that Jesus was the son of God, that he was resurrected, that he was the Messiah, etc.

So the basic problem is that while yes, there were always people discussing the allegory, symbolism, and metaphor of the Bible, there were also people discussing whether the parts of the bible that theists want to EXEMPT from that analysis were ALSO not accurate.

So if a theist wants to point to the discussions of early Christians as evidence that the argument about metaphors wasn't a recent invention, fine, as long as they also admit that this same argument indicts all the supernatural beliefs that they espouse as well.

Ya, this was pretty much the whole point of my post before SW mutilated it.