This is an exact illustration of my point. You are assuming that my local church is made up of literalists. In point of fact, it isn’t.
The attack on the bible as literally true in every word is only effective on those who happen to hold that belief - and I’m willing to bet that they are not the majority of believers. Thus it is an ineffective argument, pretty well the definition of a “straw man” - as it substitutes an easily-defeated target (biblical literalism) for the religion as a whole, which in most manifestations is considerably more sophisticated.
Which is odd, because there is no particular reason it is necessary. An ineffective or silly attack on the text is worse than none, because although the belief in the religion is I think quite mistaken, in repelling this particular attack, the believers would be correct.
I’d vote that using textual quirks of the Bible to attack the Bible is always silly and ineffective, regardless of what type of interpretation you use. There’s essentially an infinite number of ways to interpret it, which means that the other person can always just flip around between possible interpretations until he finds one that counters your argument.
I read the Bible literally because that’s probably what the intent of the writers was. They were taught on their grandma’s knee stories of magical animals that talked in ancient times, of a deity who only liked you if you lopped bits of your willy off, and who lead your people to conquer the region. So far as they knew, being ancient peoples in an ancient time, all of those things were just as plausible as anything else. I’ll grant that many of them may have understood that they were recording legends not history (particularly in the Genesis section), but overall we’re talking something like 1-2% of the book which they might have considered pure legend, and even there I wouldn’t bet my life that they didn’t mean it exactly as written.
I should add that I think that atheists, and even moderate theists, attempts to use the bible to respond to fundamentalists loons are probably doomed to failure. Because the have chosen to understand it as they do and nothing will change them. You may as well argue with a rock.
However, the law says we can’t kill them or lock them up, so we may as well TRY to reason with them, and the bible itself is about the only thing with even a small chance of penetrating their defenses.
They may not be the majority of believers, but they ARE the majority of troublemakers, as far as attempts to Christianize our legal and social institutions are concerned.
I usually take a hyperliteral approach in response to cherry-picking, as others have described. My more usual approach, at least aspirationally, is to try to use the structure of the Bible to support the idea that God is a postmodernist. I mean, if God had any influence on the the structure of the cannon, what, for instance would he have been trying to tell us by allowing the four conflicting Gospels all to be included. Surely the point is that a degree of subjectivity is unavoidable in anything touched by humans? Not a very interesting discussion with liberal types, but interesting with the more fundamentalist.
Don’t think that you point out the Bible’s absurdities in vain.
I was raised as a fundamentalist, Evangelical Christian. It was partly though noticing how absurd the Bible is in numerous places, and how contradictory, that got me started on the road to skepticism, and eventually atheism. At first I was defensive when I encountered people who mocked the Bible on its own terms, but in the end, I realized they were (often, mostly) correct.
I don’t encounter many biblical literalists. Most Christians around here will accept that the bible is not to be taken literally most of the time. IMHO that’s because most Christians here are fairly thoughtful, decent people. On the other hand, the bible itself is what many of them still claim to be the foundation of their beliefs. Criticizing the bible is still fair game. Saying “well, I just don’t believe that part” is just step one; because now they’ll have to explain to me how they are able to determine which parts are important and which parts are not - and they obviously can’t use the bible itself to do that.
It’s not a question of having to “junk the whole thing” it’s a question of (a) what the bible probably is and (b) what degree of authority it carries and (c) what its present usefulness may be. These are the underlying issues with which atheists are concerned when pointing out the contradictions in a literal interpretation of the bible.
The lack of literal coherence of the bible suggests (taking these issues serially):
(a) it is not clear guidance from a god. It is more likely a bunch of folk tales put together by different authors over time;
(b) it is not the authoritative word of a god from which morality can be derived since its vague and contradictory nature is not what one might expect from an all powerful and hence presumably highly coherent and eloquent god;
(c) it has little usefulness because its contradictory nature means that what people take from it is necessarily not “handed down from on high” but actually just a reflection of their pre-existing attitudes causing them to take notice of what they like and ignore what they don’t.
Your position is basically a strawman because what you seem to be saying is that atheists think the bible is junk because it is self contradictory. What they are actually saying is it is not evidence of a god nor of an authoritative and coherent belief system.
I could perhaps bastardise the old adage about the difference between a man who has a watch and a man who has two watches.
Some Christians are like a man who says he knows precisely what the time is because he has watches which derive from a god. Atheists look closely (literally) at the man’s watches and mock the man because the watches all show a slightly different time and some are stopped altogether.
Atheist don’t argue from this (as you say) that since the watches are not perfectly in synch they must all be “junked” (to use your term). What they are doing is arguing that this imperfection strongly suggests that (a) the watches are just ordinary watches made by man and (b) the man’s knowledge of the time probably just comes not from exalted supernatural authority figure but from his own common sense: he averages the times shown by his working watches, and ignores the time shown on the obviously defective or broken watches. In other words, atheists aren’t saying his watches are useless, they are saying his watches don’t give him any better handle on what time it is than anyone else’s.
It is not persuasive because Aesop’s Fables work differently to the Bible. In the fables the moral occurs as a direct consequence of the actions of the characters, while in the Bible the moral only occurs through the actions of an invented third party, God. The fables make an argument for why Action A will result in Consequence B that can be transferred to real life, while the Bible says Consequence B occurs because God says so, based on your Action A. If God doesn’t exist, the whole thing collapses.
It’s the difference between making an argument and making an appeal to authority.
Again, this isn’t a very useful argument, because your targets - I presume, most Christians - do not deny the contradictions in the text, and explain them very simply by pointing out that the authors of the narrative are human witnesses to the divine, not the divinity itself.
In your tale of the watches, the believer would analogize god to the notion of time. Time (in this analogy) exists and is perfect, but man must approach it through human means - the “watches” being, for example, the four Gospels, each telling a slightly different story, each telling, as it were, different “time”.
Literate and learned Christians have known since, well, there have been Christians, that (for example) the four gospels are not the same, so pointing this fact out with a flourish and a “gotcha!” isn’t really going to have the affect you are assuming. It may work on ignorant and unlearned ones, who have not actually read and studied the texts … but it is not part of Christianity to deny the differences (indeed, Christians analogize this to having four witnesses in a court-case, all of which basically agree on the story but all having slightly different ‘takes’).
While (most) Christians are not very ecumenical, and insist that only they own watches (presumably the Torah is more along the lines of a sun-dial ), many religious folks - such as Sufis - are more willing to accept that other folks have “watches” telling “time” - that is, holy works pointing to the same divinity (Muslims generally admit that the Christians and Jews have time-pieces, but insist that theirs is the last and most accurate - they have the atomic clock of the Koran).
Christians are more likely to claim that other folks, save the Jews, have barometers and aliometers that they are mistaking for watches.
Certainly the Bible is premised on the existence of God, and as we both agree, that’s a myth.
However, we are not discussing the Bible’s veracity (which we agree on - that it;s a collection of Iron-Age mythology) but on the attacks on it.
Pointing out the absurdity inherent in the myths on the assumption that, if the myths were literally true they would be absurd, only “works” if the person relying on the story has a shallow understanding of the nature of mythology.
The creation stories (for example) in the OT are clearly absurd as history and biology. They are not necessarily absurd as psychology.
And yet we have a goodly chunk of people in this country who want the OT creation stories to be taught as biology. This has been an ongoing battle for the last thirty years, at least.
And, as I said earlier, if you ask them which one, the response is frequently “Huh?” because they’ve got no idea what the stories actually are.
If someone is telling me that the schools I pay for should be teaching this “psychology” as biology, then I don’t see where the problem lies in me going “hyperliteral” on his ass. Sure, it may not work at all, waste my time & annoy the pig, but what does that matter to you? It’s my time.
And I have actually seen a tiny crack in the brick wall on occasion.
Again, as I pointed out, such arguments can work against those who are literally ignorant about their own religion - which includes most if not all actual biblical literalists.
However, an argument that only “works” against those who quite literally do not understand what it is that they purportedly follow is not a good argument.
For example - if I wished to argue against Atheism as an intellectual position (and I don’t), I could argue that ‘athiesm is just another religious position based on faith and thus inherently no better than any other’.
We all know that this is a piss-poor argument - because Atheism isn’t simply another religious position based on faith for those that know anything about it - it is based not on faith but on the absense of verifiable objective proof for any god or gods - but no doubt for some people, it is simply a matter of faith. People who have drifted into atheism without really thinking about it, though, may be persuaded by such an argument.
So the ‘just another faith’ argument, though it may work on the ignorant, isn’t a good argument against Atheism. Neither is “hyper-literalism” a good argument against religion, and for the same reason - it can only ‘work’ on those ignorant of the subject-matter.
But they assume the existence of the divine - the existence of the Bible can’t lead them to it because of its flaws. They explain away the flaws through the concept of human interpretation, but they never explain why they accept the parts that they do.
The time analogy does not work, since we have independent means of demonstrating the existence of time. However, in the two watch case, how does the man choose between the contradictory times. If he were a Christian, he’d choose the watch running late if he was late for a meeting, and the watch running early to tell him when it was time to leave work.
Depends on the form of Christianity. In Catholicism, for example, the Bible is only one of several sources of authority – Scripture, Tradition and the Magestrium. The other two interpret what is truly “sacred” in the first.
How does anyone truly know what time it is? By checking watches against each other, generally.
In the case of Christians, the ‘watches’ are the gospels and other biblical texts (not to mention sacred tradition and the guidance of the Magesterium). It may well be a valid critique that they are rejecting other sources of time-measurement in favour of these alone - but again, the fact that one watch runs slow and another fast doesn’t discredit the notion that three o’clock exists.
Someone setting a watch by another random watch is unlikely to get the correct time. We have a defined standard for time - NIST - and I have two clocks that get their time from the NIST signal. I use these to set the other clocks. My watch resets itself at night from this signal also.
Since that is the defined standard, I am in good shape. In the Christianity case, we have no defined standard but only claims of being the standard. That is like setting your watch by a radio station which sometimes gives the same time five minutes apart, and which has not traceability back to the standard. Not a good move. We know Catholic dogma and the selection of which books would make up the Bible were done by very human committees. Hardly gives you confidence in the validity of their claims of connection to the divine.
Well, yes, a “hyper-literal” argument doesn’t work against non-literalists, agreed. But pretty much everyone here is talking about using them as a reaction to theocratic literalists.
To use another bad analogy, it’s kind of like you’re telling parents not to use “because I said so” as an answer to their kids, because that’s not generally a valid answer for the rest of the world. Yeah, no one said it was - but it IS a valid answer for your own kids, at least in some situations.
The OP asked why atheists interpret the Bible hyper-literally. The answer is usually because they’re dealing with literalists.
IIRC, the OP is a literalist - which is why he has experienced this technique in arguing with atheists.
Speaking of which - I know that Curtis LeMay is theoretically a uber-Xian child, but I don’t generally read his threads.
What I’m curious about is, is this typical of his threads? That he starts a new thread, posts a few replies that day, and then disappears?
But the Church claims to have continual traceability back to the ‘standard’. That’s exactly the function of the Magisterium.
It sort of functions like the National Institute of Standards and Technology, only setting standards for the faith.
Of course, you and I both know that it is all a mere human elaboration of the original mythology - but these sorts of attacks will not shake it. The books were written by humans and selected by other humans and the whole process is overseen by humans - but all, at least according to them, animated by the divine will. The Magisterium is there to guide believers in determining what in the scriptures and sacred traditions is truly the essence of the divine and what is merely human error.
), many religious folks - such as Sufis - are more willing to accept that other folks have “watches” telling “time” - that is, holy works pointing to the same divinity (Muslims generally admit that the Christians and Jews have time-pieces, but insist that theirs is the last and most accurate - they have the atomic clock of the Koran).