I have a nonlegalistic opinion, one that would probably be Epic Fail, in a court. My opinion on this is… If this so called preacher is aware that people believe he is healing through prayer, and he knowingly provides all the props and trappings to keep this false belief going, he is guilty of deception, just as surely as if he had had called himself a healer. He is doing all he can to keep the illusion going, knowing and encouraging the “conclusion” the suckers will arrive at. So I’d say he’s guilty.
That sounds like an excellent law. I like it.
As to the “metaphor”, I guess by now you’ve noticed there are a lot of people who don’t quite see it that way. This may cause “problems” but for a lot of people, everything in The Book is literal - except when it’s inconvenient for them (Leviticus is a great one). They get to pick and choose, but the rest of us don’t.
Sure. Why not? Do you want to go down the other slippery path that everything is literal?
Because it’s an admission that there isn’t really a god?
That’s not a slippery slope, that’s common sense: until you have a reason to believe otherwise, believe people mean what they say. That’s not the same as believing what they say is true.
Huh? Where is the common sense in saying it is ALL literal? When Jesus told a parable, was it literal? No. He told a simple story to make a point about something bigger. Does anyone give a hoot about a mustard seed? No, they don’t unless it is a metaphor for something bigger and more important. When he talked about people with splinters in their eye being criticized by people with a beam in theirs, was that literal? People really walked around with chunks of lumber in their skulls? A lot of it was and is metaphor. That is common sense.
In a bigger sense, why would you or anyone else care if I did or didn’t believe? Maybe I believe, but not according to your “brand of religion”. Maybe my “brand”, my church and its official teachings say you are wrong if you go for complete literalism.
As for people meaning what they say, I don’t care. The hospitals are full of people who mean it when they say they are Napoleon or Teddy Roosevelt too. It takes more than just meaning it. It also has to be true or at least make some sort of sense.
We can’t say why people like the color blue, therefore god?
We can explain preferences without invoking magic. People have different brains. The neuron connections in one person may lead to certain preferences than others. Certain things may be associated with pleasant or unpleasant stimuli in the past. They’re not mysteries of the universe.
On the other hand, claims of god, especially the god(s), typically have observable claims. If God created man and then the animals and blah blah, why do the genetic histories conclusively suggest otherwise? God doesn’t push the sun across the sky, we know how the solar system works, etc.
So you can play the safe “maybe there’s this vague god that never does anything that affects us” sort of game, but that’s not the sort of belief that almost everyone holds.
I’ve seen this point brought up it in discussions about biblical literalism before, and it’s about the weakest counterargument I’ve run across. No, the metaphor isn’t literal. What’s meant to be literal is that Jesus told the story. I mean, really, duh.
Of course, there’s no clue in the writing that Genesis is a metaphor, so a literalist would likely take that story as truth, not metaphor. What about when Jesus said (paraphrasing), give up all of your stuff. Parable? Metaphor? Harder to tell.
Bart Ehrman makes the point that people long ago, just like people today, immediately recognized that if a story includes talking animals, it’s not meant to be taken literally.
Uh, there are people today who take the Genesis story literally.
Ok, what about virgin births, talking bushes, multiplying food and drinks, walking on water, resurrection, miraculous healing, etc etc? Because it they’re all not to be taken literally, then there’s no reason to take anything supernatural in the bible seriously, including God and the divinity of Jesus.
Not enough people today, IMHO.
And so what? Do I have to take it as literal because I can’t prive it wasn’t? No I don’t. You can try and prove that it wasn’t. I won’t do your homework for you. What is your counter argument, except what apparently is just a different version of “is not”? PROVE it is literal. I don’t have to disprove. You have to prove. You can’t. Genesis. OK. Six days. OK. Ummm, how does that happen? There was nothing. No place, no existence, NO TIME. So “on the first day”? There wasn’t any time yet, so how could it be ANY day? Whose measure of days? God’s? Isn’t time meaningless and irrelevant to him? He could have taken one microsecond, or 14 billion years by our reckoning. What’s the difference? To him, time is nothing anyway. The world is here, we’re here. Who cares if it took six days or 15 billion years or a trillionth of a microsecond?
The garden of Eden… was it an apple? A pomegranite? A polka dot pumpkin? Just a fruit? If the literal details matter so much, we better find out.
Anyway, did Jesus tell that mustard seed story? Maybe he did. Maybe not. Was it in exactly those identical words? I highly doubt it. He didn’t speak English, for one. We only have a written account, that was probably written several years later, and it may not have happened at all. As long as the underlying message gets across, who cares. Further, there were during the “early days” various meetings, conventions, the Council of Nicea, etc etc etc where people decided what books and passages would be part of the “official” bible. If this was the literal and unalterable word of God, how would they dare do that? What about those other books that they discarded? How about the King James version, which according to some people is the ONLY true and right version? That came how many many years later?
No, just saying “it’s literal until someone else tells me different” doesn’t work around here. You need more than what you’ve got, to convince people here.
“really duh” is a hell of a convincing argument :rolleyes:
And your point … is… ???:rolleyes:
So we are supposed to worship the god that performed all those incredible miracles, but the miracles were really parables. So what did this god actually do?
Well, CurtC was positing that people back then, just like people today, knew to take the really, really silly stories at metaphors, and I was just pointing out that there are lots of people today don’t take the Genesis story as metaphor, even the talking animals part of it.
I was addressing your specific statement that obviously you can’t all of the bible literally because Jesus told parables and the parables weren’t meant to be taken literally, and he used metaphors, such as the beam in one’s eye. To that specific point that you made, I think that’s a really specious argument – one can believe that everything that was described in the bible as happening, literally happened, without talking about logs in eyeballs. In the context of the story one could take literally, that Jesus said a certain thing (in Hebrew, or Aramaic, whatever language he spoke), that doesn’t make the metaphor in the story a literal thing.
I can write a book of history and describe conversation a historical figure had, including a parable in the conversation, but that doesn’t mean I expect the parable to be taken literally. The history was the conversation, not the parable within it.
I don’t want to prove anything to you – I don’t buy any of it.
What if it’s literally true that he used a metaphor to explain a truth?
I’m having trouble with the double talk you were answering too.
If it is literally true, then each of the four “remaing and not expunged by the Nicea Council” books would have the same, identical, account of it. Instead, from one book to the next, and even within the same book, there are differing accounts and contradictions. Genesis - Why are there two different creation stories, if it is indeed literal?
No, saying everything is literal, is not the right answer. Saying everything is metaphor is wrong too, because we do know there are historical references to real kings, real empires, and such. But, we can’t say it is all literal, and we can’t say it is all fable/parable/metaphor. Anyone who goes to either extreme is wrong.
Ah, so it’s unreliable.
Not quite - it could all be literal, but rife with error. The literal/metaphor distinction is one of authorial intent; whether they meant what they said, not whether what they said is objectively correct or agrees with other accounts.
Oh, that would be a “whole 'nother” can o’ worms. If it is full of errors, then it can not possibly be the exact and inerrant Word Of God. Because God does not make mistakes. Hmmmm.