LogFAQs > #884902599

The better question to ask is, why do people believe that every word of the Bible is and must be literal truth, when it doesn't actually make that claim, and Judaism itself has always acknowledged that at least some of those stories were either allegorical or metaphorical?

I mean, it's pretty obvious that people from that era were capable of not taking everything literally, considering that's more or less the entire point of Jesus teaching via parable. You're not supposed to assume that every story he's telling is literally true, as much as you're supposed to understand the moral point he's making via a tangible example.

Keep in mind, there are plenty of Christians who consider most of the "God made the world in six days" narrative to itself be a metaphor for millions of years, with "evolution" being perfectly acceptable as one of the tools God used to create life over the long term. It's really only the more extremist/fundamentalist fringe who tend to argue the "No, it's exactly six days as we know them, and everything was magicked into being instantaneously."

Especially since, if you actually READ Genesis, and attempt to understand it in context, the beginning isn't even a single story as much as it is two separate related stories that have been interwoven in an attempt to represent different viewpoints.

It's also why the early parts of the Bible use multiple names/titles to describe "God" (at least in the original translations, English versions tend to steamroll over all the subtlety and just use "God" or "The Lord"). Different versions of the story referred to God by different names, and someone thousands of years ago basically just took all those stories and tried to turn them into one coherent narrative.



TheCyborgNinja posted...

Then there's the "earth is 6000 years old" BS.

That's not actually in the Bible. That was literally one asshole doing the math himself and then extremists taking it at face value. I'm pretty sure even the Catholic Church doesn't accept that as factual at this point.


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