IME, it’s generally a reaction to those Christians who claim to read the Bible literally. If you’re going to claim that the Bible is to be taken literally, then I’ll expect you to actually do so. You don’t get to pick and choose which bits are really supposed to be taken literally and which bits aren’t.
It’s also because those Christians tend to be the same folks who are trying to force (legally and/or socially) everyone else to follow their rules. If you don’t try to tell me how to live, I really don’t care how your religion works.
So, Curtis, the solution to your problem is simple.
Get all the literalists to either stop claiming that the Bible is supposed to be read literally, or get them to stop cherry-picking which parts they want to read literally and which parts they want to ignore. Their dishonesty and hypocrisy is the root of the problem.
While you’re at it, get them to stop trying to create a theocracy. Then all the mean atheists will stop picking on you and your book.
But this thread is an example of what I wrote. It was started by a Christian accusing atheists of attacking Christianity not by an actual atheist actually attacking Christianity.
Didn’t God write the whole thing? If Christians are to be believed the whole book is the actual word of an all powerful, all knowing being, written down for our edification. One flaw, one contridiction should be enough to cast doubt on that assertion. That is why someone trying to cast such doubt would interpret it hyper-literally, because the claim is that it is hyper-literally the word of God.
Its interesting that in this thread we are told not to interpret it literally, and then in this thread, we are given quotes to interpret it literally. So maybe, before you worry about what the atheists are doing, get your own house in order first.
Since I’m Jewish, does that mean God wants me to blow away the next missionary who comes to my door? And don’t tell me Jesus wants me to do anything. While I accept he existed, on the whole, his fulfillment of real prophecy was a bit on the weak side, as is evidence for the resurrection and associated miracles. It appears that you have a more or less literal reading of the Gospel, which is about as unsupported as a reading of Genesis.
But never fear - as an atheist I am not bound by the crazy crap the Bible tells me to do, so the missionaries are physically safe - though they will get mocked if they don’t go away when I ask them to.
Tell me again, what’s wrong with taking shots at some of the more obviously stupid stuff in your holy book? Practically every part of it is still being taken literally by some asshole somewhere.
That’s the beauty of being a Christian. It means anything you want it to mean when you are telling others what to do. If anyone disagrees with you they are disrespecting the sacred beliefs of hundreds of millions of other Christians.
Unfortunately from what I understand from chatting with believers I used to work with, their pastors are encourging them NOT to read the bible, but only certain books that they recommend to ‘interpret’ the bible .. so they are not even being encouraged to read or think for themselves, but to suck up whatever interpretation their pastor wants them to. They kept protesting when I mentioned that protestantism actually came about to encourage believers to read the bible in vernacular and think for themselves [among many other things that were issues back in the day] that they didnt know enough to properly read and interpret the bible :eek: We are talking about fairly well educated people here, with college degrees and many years of schooling.
I think Curtis has perfectly good point and there are a lot of atheists whose entire schtick consists of that sort of thing. For example, this guy seems to be the most popular atheist on youtube and his videos get millions of hits. His attacks are mostly, though not entirely, based on grabbing Bible passages out of context and being deliberately obtuse about the message. For instance he points to “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off” as proof that Jesus was insane, whereas no intelligent person has ever had trouble interpreting it correctly as a command to eliminate beliefs, habits, etc… that are leading to harmful behavior. It’s true, of course, that most atheists on this board know better, but in the world at large the point Curtis is making seems quite valid.
That’s half right. Early Protestant leaders, like Martin Luther for example, did encourage their followers to read the Bible and draw their own conclusions. But Luther assumed that the conclusions were foregone - that anyone who read the Bible would arrive at the same beliefs he had. Once they found out that a lot of people drew different conclusions from their Bible reading, Protestants downplayed the idea of free-thinking inquiry and shifted to guided study.
“And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.” - is this literal? is it an allegory saying we should keep ourselves ignorant? is it just not important and should be ignored? what?
Yes I agree that many bible passages are symbolic. That doesn’t mean that we can always easily tell which ones, or that the bible isn’t full of obvious and less obvious stupidity and ignorance. As far as I can see, the best Christian believers can do and still be believers is take whatever good parts they read in the bible as a bunch of myths, ignore the rest, try to act decently and not spread it around.
By the way, I’m fairly anti-theist. I don’t claim to speak for most atheists.
Does anyone actually say God wrote the whole thing? Again, not a believer here, but my understanding is that the claim was that Moses wrote the first 5 books of the OT, and that various other persons wrote other bits.
For example, the author of Ecclesiastes is self-described in the text as “son of David, and king in Jerusalem”, that is, Solomon.
That sounds really familiar, but I can’t come up with whatever you’re referring to.
But then some of them read the Bible, and came up with their own conclusions, and splintered out into a different denomination. I think this has happened about 2500 times now.
Sorry, ineffability clause. Could have intended the contradictions, lack of clarity and factual errors for some unfathomable purpose or to stick with the Plan.
Yeah, I know, it’s an easy and utterly unconvincing dodge, but them’s the breaks.
No that is not the Christian position. Perhaps you should learn what you’re talking about before posting incorrect things here.
What exactly would you classify as “evidence” on this point. If you mean that no one today can channel the minds of the authors of the Bible and find out directly what they were thinking at the time, then it’s true there’s no such “evidence”, but then again no evidence of that sort is possible so your statement is meaningless. On the other hand, if by “evidence” you mean analysis of what those authors meant based on our best knowledge of their society and how they approached writing and communicating, then there is ample evidece that the authors of the Bible intended many stories and passages to be taken figuratively, and you’ve been presented with that evidence in other threads.
Oh, and Superfluous Parentheses, I explained the meaning of Matthew 5:30 in my first post in the part that you quoted.
It’s worth noting that among the many things that Christians know and most atheists seem not to is the meaning of the word “literally”. It means either “presenting the exact meaning without figurative intent” or “produced as an exact copy, as by exact word-for-word translation”, according to my dictionary. Therefore, if someone says that they interpret the Bible literally, that does not mean that they believe it contains no metaphors.
All of my Protestant pastors have encouraged me to read the Bible myself, as indeed did the one Catholic priest who I’ve heard speaking on the matter. It is, of course, possible that the clergymen (and women) I’ve spoken with on the matter are an unusual sample who all happen to say the exact opposite of what the majority of the clergy say. However, we’d have to agree that that’s rather improbable. If, as you say, pastors are widely telling their flocks to not read the Bible, then surely many of them are also putting that advice in books, sermons, and so forth that are available online, so proving the point with a link should be easy for you.