Elijah John wrote:For debate: Do skeptics err, and are they too quick to dismiss Bible tales as worthless? (Or even harmful or superstitious). In dismissing the tales of the Bible, are skeptics omitting the very real human propensity to exaggerate, and "blow things up in the telling"?
No. The Bible says what it says, and when one of us says, "Yeah... no. That can't have happened," we're referring to what it says.
If somebody wants to amend the stories toward believability, and then say
that is true, I invite you to write
that story and my opinion of it will not be nearly as negative.
Elijah John wrote:And conversely, are Fundamentalists erring too, when they accept the tales literally, as written. Are they also disregarding the very human propensity to "blow things up in the telling"?
Well no, not really. As soon as you accept that the Bible is not literally true, you discard it as a perfect authority. And now you have to answer all sorts of questions like why this book is considered an authority on morality at all. Like Paine said, atheists and fanatics.
Elijah John wrote:And in the words of Thomas Paine, the Bible sometimes does it's cause no justice. Paine put it this way: (to paraphrase from memory) "The Bible has produced nothing but atheists and fanatics".
Well, my theory on that is that we're all worshipers of Tash.
This goes back to a quote from
Chronicles of Narnia. Now Tash (the sort of devil to Aslan's god/Jesus figure) represents evil, and there are a whole bunch of people in Calormen who have been brought up to worship Tash. They're all bound for eternal damnation, right?
Wrong. Not according to Aslan anyway.
At the very end, when the world literally ends, one Calormen soldier goes to Heaven.
Aslan tells him, "For [Tash] and I are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, then it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he knows it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted."
But what if, in
our particular universe, there was no Aslan and it was quite on purpose? Here, out in the fringes of existence, there is only Tash. Again, quite on purpose.
Well, the good people can really only do one thing: Put Aslan's face on Tash.
It no longer boggles the mind quite so much that Christians are (generally) such decent people even though their scriptures... well... you said it yourself. Or Paine did: The Bible sometimes does its cause no justice.
Maybe that's the test.
And that's the very best light I can put any of this in.
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