You seem the one confusing authority with literalness.
I really don’t get your point here. The Bible has some stories. People generally believed them, because there was no reason not to. The phenomenon of believing in the literal truth of the bible in contradiction to the scientific consensus is what most people have in mind when they talk about biblical literalism.
But only because there was no science to say otherwise. Many agreed that a “day” in Genesis may have been any length of time and there may have been gaps, and it wasn’t terribly important whether it was 7 24 hour days or not. You seem to have a grudge that they didn’t propose a 5 billion year old earth when nobody in the first century had any conceivable idea the earth was that old.
Try to follow along; I mentioned Jesus’ divinity not his miracles.
If rising from the dead or walking on water were scientifically possible, they’d be pretty crappy miracles wouldn’t they.
I don’t have to; you’re the one creating some kind of artificial tension between science and religion.
Based on their replies to my posts in this thread, I think you’re failing to mark a distinction others are making, between a literal interpretation, and a literalist interpretation.
That someone interprets the bible literally doesn’t make them a literalist. What makes them a literalist is if they will insist the literal interpretation is the only appropriate one, even in the face of decisive evidence that the literal interpretation yields falsehoods.
On the other hand, if someone interpreted it literally til they were shown the evidence that this yields falsehoods, and then changed their interpretation, this means that they were never a literalist in the first place. They read it literally, but they were not literalists.
And you are wrong. There are different ways to look at any mythology, but the aspect of “Literalism” in which writings are considered objective facts from which one can draw explicit conclusions about specific events is actually newer than the notion of history that arose during the Enlightenment. Your Ark story is evidence of this: no one wandered around counting animals and calculating living space prior to the Enlightenment. It was never considered relevant.
Well, aside from the fact that he was never threatened with torture.
No. It means that the trials were conducted by specific groups within the church, not the Church-As-Monolith, and that no one considered them all that important to re-examine for most of that time.
And prohibitions against condoms, (which are not universally condemned by everyone in the church), do not arise from some line in Scripture that is taken “literally.” So you are multiply wrong, again.
What does that do to the Sabbath if it wasn’t meant for a 24 hr period? Something as petty as building a fire that day was a capital offense. Not sure if they enforced this law or not. Did they? I honestly don’t know. I think it was important for them to understand what was meant by a day. It’s been over 30 years since I read my bible from front to back, but I do remember many times the bible saying how God rested on that day, and so shall his followers rest on that day too. There were other problems with it as well.
And to edit my previous post, last line meant to read “more liberal camp” not “moral.”
Yeah, I got the paper and it’s pretty interesting. For one thing they classified Catholics as “dogmatics” as opposed to liberal Christians, and having spent some time reading through the Catholic Catechism I think this is the right thing to do. As the abstract indicated their were 4 classifications of religion, Atheists, Agnostics, Liberals and Dogmatics and that was the order of IQ from highest to lowest by group. Atheist vs religious was 111.08 vs 105.95, Agnostics were 109.13, liberals 107.26, and dogmatics 105.19.
All separated out by particular religion and IQ it went as follows:
Episcopal/Anglican: 113.43
Jewish: 112.43
Atheist: 111.08
Agnostic: 109.13
Methodist: 108.33
Presbyterian: 107.74
Lutheran: 107.51
Protestant (other): 107.42
Disciples of Christ: 106.90
Roman Catholic: 106.66
Other: 106.43
Mormon: 106.16
Un. Church of Christ: 106.14
Bible Church: 106.09
Muslem: 104.87
Personal Philosophy: 103.56
Holiness: 103.56
Baptist: 102.13
Pentecostal: 101.89
They quoted another study that showed Jews and Episcopalians had the most education and Baptists and Roman Catholics the least, and this "seemed to be due to different values placed on education. Based on other studies I have read I would have figured Jews to be at the top but it surprised me that the Church of England would be up there, as I would have expected them to be largely the same as Catholics.
Sure it is. I have the Catholic Catechism right here and prohibitions against all forms of birth control (except that monthly timing thing), fornication, masterbation, and homosexuality follow from the 7th commandment, which seems to have been taken quite literally.
I don’t understand your meaning. A fundamentalist is a literalist if he will insist: “the bible is true, in its literal sense, no matter what evidence there may seem to be to the contrary.” (And they will of course typically think the evidence is only “contrary” if you haven’t thought about it hard enough.)
I was not raised by literalists in this sense, but their brothers, sisters and parents certainly fit the definition. Dinosaur bones? That’s either God or the devil tempting us to disbelieve the bible. That kind of thing. That’s biblical literalism. The explicit affirmation that all evidence must be interpreted in the light of the truth of the literal reading of the scriptures.
I don’t know what the force of this comment is supposed to be, unless you’re assuming I’m a literalist. I’m not. I’m a wishy washy liberal protestant universalist.
Do you not know that the Episcopal church and much of the Anglican church is for such things as gay marriage, availability of abortion, and other things on that side of the political spectrum? It is rare that a biblical literalist would support social causes like that.
I’ve never met a fundamentalist who really thinks they should give up their possessions. They’re pretty soft on divorce and remarriage, drinking poison, snake handling, etc.
I know some young earth creationists but none that really think dinosaur bones are fake.
OK, well I was wondering what your thoughts are regarding what Jesus’ comments on prayer. It’s something you can submit to scientific testing. Just another metaphor? What suggests divinity?
Yeah, Henry the 8th wanted to divorce, the Catholics wouldn’t let him, so he started his own church. Apparently the rest that followed was just a slippery slope.
Yeah, that’s part of why I think Catholics fall more under the literalist heading.
Notice I put the claim in quotation marks and attributed to a literalist as the doctrine they would affirm. As to whether they would live by that doctrine’s implications, I did not to make any particular claim. But they’ll say what I said they’ll say. It’s the doctrine they affirm, and it’s the doctrine under discussion in this thread.
Well, surprise. I have known several. (Well, now that I sit here and count it out, I’ve known two.)
I don’t even know if it’s a doctrine they will affirm, they more just lean in that direction. They almost all admit there are some stories that are allegorical, or say it applied only to a given time period, it’s more of a sliding scale.