Is the holey bible one BIG figurative metaphoric figure of speech that can't be taken literally at all?

Answer 1

Christians seem to only take the Bible literally when it seems to meet the specific purpose they are trying to prove....like homosexuality is wrong.....that's why they are hypocrites.

Answer 2

I'd say you would still have problems interpreting it as a figurative metaphor or a figure of speech.

It is a collection of stories, bottom line. Many of those stories conflict other stories. Keep in mind that this is even AFTER years and years of sorting through stories and gospels and accounts to cannonize the stories contained in the Bible.

As a collection of stories, we must keep in mind that it is subject to personal beliefs of the author, cultural and temporal biases, transcription errors and translation errors.

The bible we have today is quite different than the original stories which were probably quite different than the actual events.

Take it for what its worth...

Answer 3

truly no longer, merely as (((Fractal))) so rightly reported the bible isn't an finished one style ebook. I see the bible as an anthology, and in case you attempt to teach an anthology as a actual textual content e book you've gotten issues (as we may be able to work out in present day.) as an instance if someone picked up a e book that it changed into an anthology of short memories, non-fiction literature,poems, and informative information articles about shall we are saying city existence and tried to teach it as a non-fiction textual content e book on city existence the ebook isn't being interpreted acceptable. accordingly it does no longer make experience to take all the advice in that textual content actually because the textual content itself is made from many sorts of literature. yet when the guy changed into to maintain in mind that this e book is a compilation of distinct substances, and genres of literature all below an analogous topic they could understand it truly is purpose more advantageous acceptable. at the same time as they say the e book in its entirety isn't to be taken actually it truly is not a lot "Cherry figuring out on" via the indisputable fact that's less expensive understanding of the variety interior the textual content. same with the biblical analyze, i imagine the blunders is that folk deal with the bible like a one style e book really of an anthology and accordingly the understanding of the bible turns into muddled. So in case you held the understanding that the bible is an anthology and also you stated some parts of that e book were allegorical and poetic at the same time as different parts were informative and timelessly relative to the human difficulty it does no longer be hypocrisy. it must be hypocrisy in case you claimed the e book changed into completely 100% authentic and then at the same time as confronted with a contradiction of words tried to apply the reasoning above. If human beings were to understand the bible is a anthology of poems, testimony, letters, etc all below the topic of Christian non secular Philosophy per chance it truly is message ought to get by more advantageous acceptable. desire you're properly ((((Nikonf5))) take care! Peace and reward = )

Answer 4

The Holy Bible contains the word of God. It is truth. That truth is shared in ways that we are apt to understand. Some complex topics are better understood using various methods of communication, including metaphors.

The Bible is not only metaphorical and there are many literal truths to be learned from reading it.

May God bless you.

Answer 5

The Bible is the inspired Word of God. Period.
It is that or it is nothing.

Each must decide what they believe and move on. Be happy with whatever you decide, and leave others to their own choice.

Answer 6

Actually, the Wholly Babble MUST be taken literally... that is the only way it makes sense. The thing that must be kept in mind, though, is that it just isn't TRUE. Consider the 'cosmology' of Genesis, for example.

In biblical times, people thought that the earth and heaven were all that there was... and that the earth was essentially a 'terrarium' (you might want to look that up). They thought that the sky was a solid object, called the 'firmament', and that the sun, moon, and stars were affixed to it. So, essentially, heaven is 'on the other side of the sky'.

The story of Genesis is comprised of the myths, superstitions, fairy tales and fantastical delusions of an ignorant bunch of Bronze Age fishermen and wandering goat herders, lifted from the oral traditions of other cultures, and crafted into a tale that incorporated some of their own folk tales and pseudo-history. This collection of ignorance provides the basis for the Abrahamic death cults of desert monotheism... Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The cosmological aspects of Genesis are perfectly understandable, if you contemplate it in the proper context. At the time the bible stories were concocted, the perception was that the earth was the object and the center of creation. Why? Because they had no reason to think otherwise. Today, as we advance science, we stand upon the shoulders of all the scientists that came before. Back then there were no shoulders to stand upon... so they did the best they could with what they had... their senses and their imaginations.

* They had no concept of 'outer space', and so they conceived that in the beginning all that existed were dark waters.

* They had no concept of 'nothingness'. Remember, the concept of 'zero' wasn't invented (discovered?) until thousands of years later. With that in mind, the term 'void', as it is employed in Genesis, can not refer to 'nothingness'... it can only be applied in its alternative definition, which is 'empty'. So, the waters were dark, formless and empty (devoid of content).

* They thought that all of creation consisted of the earth and an unseen 'heaven', and they thought that the sky was a 'thing'... a substantive 'firmament' that was created by god to separate the waters and differentiate earth from heaven, when both were created.

# They had no idea that Earth was a planet, orbiting the sun.

# They had no idea that there is no firmament... that the sky is not a 'thing'.

(If you don't believe that they thought the sky was an object... a solid barrier... consider the Tower of Babel, that they were building to reach heaven. Apparently, God ALSO thought that the sky was an object, since it concerned him so much that he confounded their speech, so as to disrupt their project and keep them from reaching his domain. God must be pretty much of a dumbass, if he doesn't even know the actual configuration of the universe that he created. So much for the 'inerrant' bible.)

* They thought that the sun was a light that god had placed upon the 'firmament' to differentiate night from day.

# They had no idea that the sun is a star... the center of our solar system.

# They had no concept of 'stars' in the same sense that we understand them today.

* They had no idea that night and day were a consequence of the earth's rotation.

* They thought that the moon was a 'lesser' light that god had caused to travel across the firmament to enable man to differentiate the seasons, and provide illumination at night.

# They had no concept of the moon as a satellite.

* They thought that the stars were tiny lights that god had placed upon the firmament to provide for omens. (Some thought that the stars were 'holes' in the firmament that allowed the 'light of heaven' to shine through.)

# They had no idea that the stars were suns, just like our own sun.

# They thought the eyeball-visible planets (Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn) were 'wandering stars'.

# They had no idea that the planets were actually sun-orbiting bodies, just like earth.

* They had no idea that the earth, itself, is a planet.

# They had no clue as to the actual nature of the earth, our solar system, the place of our solar system in the galaxy... or even of the existence of our galaxy. (Up until very recently, we didn't even know that there were other galaxies. Our galaxy, when it was first known that there actually WAS a galaxy, was thought to be the whole universe.) From their perspective, the 'earth' and 'heaven' (i.e., whatever existed on the other side of the sky) represented all that there was. A terrarium.

I do not say this things to disparage what they thought back then. They were trying to do what science is trying to do today... trying to understand nature and reality. Today, we have technology and disciplined meta-procedures (scientific method) to help us extract answers from nature.

Back then, they did not.

Today, we have 'theories' to provide a consistent explanatory framework for what we are able to observe in nature, supplemented and validated by the additional information that we are able to extract from nature by means of our technology, our disciplined methods and our intellectual tools (mathematics, logic). Most of our theories are incomplete, so we continue to work on them... because we know that they are incomplete.

Back then, they did not have disciplined methods, and they did not have the technology to extract answers from nature. The only information they had access to was what they could see with their own eyeballs. There was no technological knowledge base or scientific context in which to interpret their observations, so they had to appeal to their imaginations... and the 'supernatural'... in order to make sense out of what they saw. Actually, what they really achieved was deluding themselves into thinking that they knew the truth. Amazingly, over time, this delusion has become codified, institutionalized, and incorporated... complete with franchises.

Basically, Genesis can be thought of as a 'theory', concocted by people who were constrained by lack of technology, methodology and intellectual tools... but they sure weren't constrained by lack of imagination.

Today, we try to interpret Genesis in the context of what we KNOW about the universe... galaxies, stars, planets, moons, gravity, orbits, inclination of the earth's axis, planetary rotation, etc. They problem is that Genesis can't be interpreted in terms of those things, because Genesis was written by men, based on oral traditions, and those men DID NOT KNOW about those things. They could only write about what they could see and what they could guess about the reasons that lay behind what they saw. In any event, it provided them with a mechanism to quell the innate anxiety that comes with fretting about how and why they came to be here.

They guessed wrong.

So... the cosmological aspects of Genesis require a literal interpretation... no metaphors... no allegory... no hidden meaning. The key, though, is in understanding that the literal interpretation does not lead to a description of the way things ARE... it leads to a description of the way they THOUGHT things are. It leads to a naive description of reality, concocted by people who were doing the best they could with what they had.

It is absolutely appalling, though, to realize that hundreds of millions of people, TODAY, including participants in this forum, ACTUALLY BELIEVE that this mythological nonsense is actually TRUE.


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"Myth has been needed precisely because we were not in a position to understand the universe on its own terms, through the language of natural law and direct examination of its workings on a material, rational level. Once that process of understanding is completed—and we are well on our way to achieving that—the use of myth can be discarded. Its continuing retention is already proving to be counter-productive." - Earl Doherty
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