Quote:
Originally Posted by Mightyboosh
And I thought the chance of you retaining your friendly tone and not being sarcastic or unpleasant was a long shot. Love the way you casually throw round words like 'phenomenology' though.
I think your argument was poor and that you're approaching this from entirely the wrong direction. It's irrelevant to the topic of whether or not Christians (or you) should take the bible literally that you were taught not to take it literally, or what the majority of Christians actually do. The closest you came to an actual argument was 'the bible contains historical inaccuracies and contradictions' but unless your conclusion is something like 'and so the entire bible should be considered unreliable, including instructions to take it literally' which you didn't say, then so what?
I gave you specific biblical passages (and have more if I need them) and you failed to explain why they don't support a literal interpretation, you just refer to the fact that people have interpreted them differently, again, so what, all those people could be wrong. So why would you have changed my mind?
There is very little historic precedence for a literal reading of the Bible in its entirety. Traditionally in Judaism some passages were understood to be literal (like say... specific rules), but it is actually a fairly clever and systematic thinking behind which passages. It was also a system based on learned men doing relatively open discussion.
I'm not saying this system was perfect. In Christianity this developed into extremely authoritative institutions claiming monopoly on such interpretation (the Roman Catholic church being the most well known to us), which gave them immense political and geopolitical power. But still, for all its historical grievances, it certainly
never relied on literal reading of the Bible.
And then of course then came the reformation, and now every protestant bastard could develop his own allegorical understanding of bible passages.
The "new breed" of Christian fundamentalism, based on authoritative literal interpretation is a new thing... arising in the 1700s-1800s.
So your argument makes very little sense.
Why on earth should people read a holy book literally, when the holy book historically developed in religions that were never based on literal understanding of it?
