Your point being…?
Is there a place on that ark for dinosaur eggs? I heard some preacher or something (who claimed that dinos and Noah lived at the same time) say that he knew you couldn’t fit all those dinos on an ark of that size. Duh! Therefore, Noah took only the eggs. Makes perfect sense to me! It seems to me that there will alway be three things on which you can make money. Golf, weight loss and religion. Maybe a blessed driver that will melt the pounds off.
That would be an adequate description of the denomination that I grew up in, the Fundamentalist “Churches of Christ”. Heck, even as a youngster, I couldn’t swallow the literalist crap. (I read widely, from an early age.) But there were plenty of seemingly-intelligent adults who did; they were just adept at turning a blind eye to any and all scientific evidence to the contrary of their holy book. Because everything else has got ta be the work of “the olde debbil”…
This probably is not the right thread to jump in with this question but this question often comes up in my mind so, what the hell.
If not for the exact words of the bible, what do Christians have to base their faith on? Is the bible the sacred word of God or not? If so, then every word must be taken literally. If not, then why even bother? If a perfect god wanted to leave instructions to his creation then wouldn’t those instructions be received with perfect understanding? Wouldn’t transferring the word of God be like pouring water from a pitcher to a glass? Why would the word of God be written into a book that no one agrees on the meaning or truthfulness of the words?
Personally, I’m pretty agnostic. There might be a God, there might not. God could have created the the Universe 20 billion years ago, 6000 years ago, or last Tuesday. I really don’t spend much time thinking on the existence or non-existence of God but the bible thing bothers me often. To me, the bible is the single largest and longest running hoax ever played on mankind.
When Phil Collins sings Jesus He Knows Me?
Do the deranged bible-thumpers have an explanation as to why no dinosaurs around today? Did they have a few too many omelets on the ark?
And haven’t you ever wondered how all the plants survived this flood, considering that they don’t seem to have bothered to load up the ark with seeds, cuttings and the like? What about bees?
They’re heavily tax-subsidized, so, in effect, yeah, they are.
But they aren’t religious, so there’s no First Amendment entanglement.
Why?
Why can’t God speak in metaphor, or in any other literary device He wants?
God (or Gods) presumably would like to communicate to all of his/her/its creations directly in clear, clean, specific ways. What would be the advantage, from God’s perspective in writing in such a way as to require a clergical class of intermediaries? Why, again from God’s perspective, would you want to be vague when you could choose to be specific? Now, flip the question around. Why would it benefit a clergical class to write a religious text in complex obfuscative language? That’s easy - self interest. Bloody self-interest. Again. We are so predicable as a species.
Personally, I would expect any communication from an actual deity to be akin to a series of progressively more challenging text books.
That assumes that metaphor requires an intermediary to interpret, something that would come as deeply disappointing to my 7th-grade English teacher.
Metaphor and simile and other literary devices predate written language, and are widely found in the literature that was originally oral; Homer, Germanic folklore, classical Sanskrit, Native American myths. The authors/composers of this literature certainly assumed their audiences could figure out literary devices all by themselves; why would God (or Jewish priests) have a vastly lesser opinion?
But, other fundamentalists are having problems with this Ark. They say that the Ark was never big enough to have dinosaurs, so Noah must have just taken dinosaur eggs with him.
As I stated up thread, I so don’t get all that. And you’ve hit the nail on the head… right off the bat, one must decide if they believe that spirituality includes supernatural elements. If so, then it really doesn’t matter what kind. Gah. It’s like watching a horror movie and suspending disbelief to include werewolves, ghosts and aliens, but completely drawing the line at vampires. Makes no sense.
This is exactly my point. Humans write (or speak) in metaphors and simile because we have no better way to do it. We are incapable of transferring information to one another any other (more efficient) way. The fact that the bible is all metaphor and simile points to the fact that it was written by humans, for humans, and about humans. God, on the other hand, can presumably transfer information to us in a (by definition) perfect way. Instead, we are left with a book that requires interpretation.
If metaphors, similes and the like were both easily understood and easily separated from factual history we would have a “Bible” and a Christian Religion.
They aren’t, and we don’t.
This is a weirdly incorrect, fallacy-of-the-excluded middle way of looking at things. Of course we can communicate efficiently in other ways. Your own post contains not a single metaphor, simile, or euphemism, but is quite clear.
In fact, the Bible, like pretty much any longish piece of work, is a combination of literal claims of fact, metaphors, allegories, stories and so on. Most of it is written in the fashion of history and biography, but then most of the New Testament is epistolic, written in the first person and using all the conventional modes of writing. From Philippians, Chapter 1:
“I am quite confident that the One who began a good work in you will go on completing it until the Day of Jesus Christ comes. It is only right that I should feel like this towards you all, because you have a place in my heart, since you have all shared together in the grace that has been mine, both my chains and my work defending and establishing the gospel. For God will testify for me how much I long for you all with the warm longing of Christ Jesus.”
This is both first person and mostly literal, but uses an ancient metaphor (“you have a place in my heart”) That’s just the way humans speak and write.
Of course, in the Gospels you have both happening at the same time; a literal description of Jesus telling a parable which He does not mean to be taken literally.
This is the way people talk, and always have; an ongoing mix of the literal and the figurative, often without even noticing they’re doing it. If God (which I do not believe in) decided to come down and tell me all about how I’m wrong in my atheism and we got to talking about the nature of mankind and our place in the universe, He could just plant the ides in my head, but He could also just speak English to me - and if so, He would probably use metaphor and euphemism, because that’s how English works. Conventional Canadian English, which is the best way to impart information to yours truly, uses both figurative and literal speech to impart meaning.
Except when the Old Testament tells them to kill homosexuals…
It’s kind of like choosing which Swiss Army knife or Leatherman tool to buy, based on which little tools are included.
I’d love to discuss literalism with Flyer, who seems to have the biblical literacy of a 16 year old raised in a fundamentalist household, but he’s already been chased off and this is neither the thread nor the forum for it, alas.
However I’d like to point out that not only is Jesus mentioned in Genesis several times, he’s mentioned before they even leave the Garden of Eden:
Genesis 3:15 – "[God said to the serpent] I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.”
That prophecy is traditionally recognized as a foretelling of Jesus.
Like many bible stories, Noah’s ark is a myth. That doesn’t mean it is or isn’t literally true, it means whether or not it is true is irrelevant. The historicity of the event is not the point of the story. Once that is understood, it becomes silly to cling to the argument that it literally happened.
‘traditionally recognized’ != actual mentioning of ‘jesus’. Secondly, as a ‘prophecy’, that particular bit fails miserably, since its God saying he’s doing that ‘now’.
Even IF you qualify that bit of scripture as a reference to the, as yet un-named, messiah, the Jews would still not qualify that as ‘Jesus’.
That’s a prophecy of the coming of Christ? It looks like a straightforward statement that, without legs, that serpent is gonna get stepped on, and(at best) be able to be an ankle-biter.
No, that’s not what “myth” means, according to any standard dictionary you can find.