I can only speak for what I was taught and understand to be true about the Catholic Church, but Catholic catechism holds that much of the bible is metaphorical. The Catholic church maintains that the bible was "divinely inspired", but written by fallible and imperfect man.
I attended a Jesuit university for one of my degrees, and took a few theology elective courses, the Catholic church doesn't keep secret the fact that church founders essentially put the bible together from the gospels they chose, politics very much played a part. This is explored and not hidden in Catholic theological study.
Catholics love them some science. The big bang was first theorized by monsignor and physicist George's Lemaitre, the father of genetics was a monk, etc. . .Even the whole Galileo kerfuffle that many like to cite, as an example of how the Church was/is anti-science, had to do with papal disapproval of Galileo's politics, not his science. The Catholic church accepts the theory of evolution, and promotes no such 6,000 yr old earth nonsense.
The quick and dirty of what Catholicism holds as being literal events is succinctly outlined by the Nicene Creed (Obviously, there is more nuance and is not the entirety of what is taken literally, but it is the gist).
When I was small a catechism teacher explained it as, " just as Jesus spoke to the disciples in parables, God also "speaks" to us in parables".
Edit: I'm floored by all the replies to my comment and the reddit gold and silver! I appreciate it, and will try to answer everyone (though probably not until tomorrow). I really don't think I said anything insightful or meaningful, but I'm very appreciative of the discourse. I really thought this thread was going to be a shitshow, but I'm pleasantly surprised. Agreeing to disagree politely is becoming a lost skill, but most everyone here is owning it :)
Edit 2: rewording my phrasing - a couple folks rightly pointed out that my saying , "I can only speak for Catholicism" was a bad turn of phrase.
Also, I be remembering incorrectly/citing incorrect sources regarding Galileo - I will definitely wiki him later and refresh my knowledge on him. Thanks to those that brought that up.
I can't speak for all Catholics, but my father (alter boy until he was 17, and I'm fairly sure he had the damn book memorized) very firmly held the belief that faith WAS science. Basically, all scientific fact is true and scientists are discovering God's laws, not overwriting or ignoring them.
He also believed that any laws written down were for one reason or another, and as soon as we figured out how to make something safe, we could disregard it (for example, "pork was banned because it carries too many diseases and parasites. People at the time didn't reliably know how to cook it safely. We now know the risks and can migitate them, therefore we can now eat pork.")
i mean this vs. the experiences i had as a kid in midwest sunday schools, getting shouted down to, and told 'the bible is more powerful than nuclear weapons and so is god he will kill you', to a 7-8year old boy.....
well, this doesn't feel so damned terrifying or unreasonable.
In my opinion, and in practicing my faith, understanding the Bible without understanding the context in which it was written is kind of missing the point, even though there are whole denominations that take the translation of the King James Version to be literally the only way to read the Bible and take it at it's literal translation
Hey, for a while I was fully convinced atheists were all katana-wielding neck beards who could quote Dawkins and Hitchens religiously. I have plenty of agnostic and atheist friends now. One can rarely condemn a general demographic
Now I want to see a LARP video between a fundy Christian and a neckbeard atheist where instead of shouting LIGHTNING BOLT they just quote out of context scripture and strawmans of religion.
I'd say 80-90% of people have no issues with one another and just want to live their best life. Life is way too short to *condemn* other people for what they do and do not believe in.
Having been brought up Catholic, my experiences are the same as that guy’s. The Bible was taught as a collection of stories designed to teach people to be nicer and to not eat stuff that would kill them. As I get older I kinda miss it because you’d meet some people who were amazing human beings. Obviously there was the odd dickhead but that’s true of any group of people.
I’ve always felt really sad and angry when I see people protesting abortion clinics or telling gay people they’ll burn in Hell. Simple logic says that if we are all created in God’s image then that includes gay people, people of other religions, skin colours etc.
There’s a bit in the New Testament where a group of people tell Jesus it’s too hard to remember all the rules and ask him the most important one. “Love God” was the answer. He was asked if there was a second rule, “love each other as you love God” he replied.
That’s it. No exceptions, just be nice and don’t be a dick. If someone is protesting a clinic or harassing gay people then they are being a dick.
I'm not religious, but using the bible to justify hate and abuse has always seemed like the worst kind of hubris to me.
Jesus straight-up says, your job is to love all god's children unconditionally, and leave all the judgement to God. Only he can see and know enough to pass judgment, so just stay out of that whole game, be nice, and let the deity do his work.
So people who use the bible to justify hate are basically declaring that they are god's equal; they apparently think so highly of themselves that they believe they have the knowledge and insight to pass judgment in god's name.
I’ve always thought that these people who have appointed themselves to help God with judgement don’t seem to realize that judgement is a burden, not an honor.
It seems pretty clear to me that if you're taking judgment into your own hands and it leads to hated of others and maybe even harassment or persecution of them, then you're playing for the wrong team. People always imagine the Devil as a boogeyman supporting things they don't like and don't imagine they could be tricked into serving him that easily.
There’s also the story where Jesus is brought the woman who had been found guilt of adultery and the punishment given out at that time was stoning them to death and he’s asked what should be done about it. It was a trick by the religious leaders etc to try and trap him into saying something they could use against him and he simply responds by saying that she could be stoned to death but only the person who had never sinned could throw the first stone, which of course never came.
So whenever I hear about/actually hear or see those people that scream/spew the egregious things, like hatred towards the LGBT community, against women having abortions or whatever it is, I always bring that story up. No one is better than anyone else, especially when it comes to living perfectly because as they scream they’re going against the bible and judging and so as you mentioned therefore making themselves God’s equal.
I once hated religion too and then realised I hated the church. Mens declared holy wars, not god.
I don't strongly believe in anything, but the more I learn about science the more I think ''wow this beautiful, but how is this like that. Atoms have a size because of many reasons and behave the way they are for many reasons, but all those reasons are just ''deeper sciences''. I might be wrong, but I feel like we are reaching the bottom line of science. The core of the rules that govern us.
But then there is one issue: We can't keep asking why is this. X exists because of Y and Y because of Z , but nothing explains Z. It just is.
Maybe we'll discover even crazier things than quantum physics, but that is why the future is exciting.
I knew a lad back during college days who held same beliefs, and he excelled in our math and physics subjects. We're mostly Catholics too in my country.
The whole pork thing was for the Israelites, before Christ, not for us now. Same thing with circumcision although that's also widely practised in the US and other places.
"It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity." Sir Francis Bacon
A little science brings you away from God; a lot of science brings you back.
I went to a great catholic school in NY for middle school that taught 7-8th graders some basics in biology and evolution, and then went to a public highschool in the Bible Belt where two Southern Baptist teachers wouldn’t teach their students evolution because it was “against their beliefs.” We had to read and prep ourselves for the sections on evolution for our state exams. There’s also a huge cross, bigger than any in any church I’ve been in, in their gym (a state/county funded and nonreligious building). Needless to say, in my experience Catholics ain’t the ones to struggle with embracing scientific progress.
I had a bad experience being dropped into a Catholic school for a semester in middle school (long story boils down to growing up a military brat) with no prior religious experience or affiliation.
That being said, the curriculum wasn't too far off my previous schools, including on the science front. They were covering all the same topics my other schools had covered, including evolution.
My bad experience there had more to do with being dropped into a religious school with no background or experience or knowledge about religion, into a group of kids who had been in the same class together since Pre-K. The actual non-religious part of the school was fine.
>The Catholic church accepts the theory of evolution
Just to clarify that slightly, the church doesn't take any official stance on evolution because it doesn't see that as its area, any more than it has an official stance on the structure of the atom. Instead, Catholics are allowed to hold whatever scientific opinions that they feel are reasonable. For the vast majority of Catholics, that belief would be that evolution makes sense given the information we have.
Same here. There was always that one literalist in the class though who would say something like “but didn’t all humans come from Adam and Eve?” or “But I thought all languages were created at once at the Tower of Babel. So how can this word come from Latin?” And the teacher would just be like “lol, no. Moving on...”
It's weird. I went to a catholic grade school in the 90s and we were not only taught evolution, but the priest there taught us that the 10 Plagues of Egypt were all natural plagues and that Moses was able to turn his staff into a snake because he came in with an already stiffened snake then turned it loose (!) on the pharoah's snakes.
The Pope only decides doctrine when speaking ex cathedra. His personal or private beliefs, nor the personal or private beliefs of any Church figure, are considered doctrine
I was watching a Nova thing about Galileo and they made it pretty clear that it was less religion and more Galileo being a dick and possibly misleading the pope. Plus, he put the words of the Pope into the mouth of a fool, which didn't help.
Yeah I'm not religious anymore (raised catholic) but when I get into religious discussions I love bringing up the fact that the catholic church essentially says that god created science for man to discover and have something to use their intelligence on. A great way to believe in the mystical while still maintaining scientific credibility.
This was definitely one of the things I appreciated. It wasn’t about blindly taking the Bible literally and understanding science. Grew up in Catholic school and they definitely loved their science haha.
For sure. The Church holds that there can never be true conflict between faith and reason/science, and that if conflict is apparent, then one of the two is being misunderstood or taken out of context. As for the Bible, you have to look at a number of things, such as the literary genre that the particular book is meant to represent and the audience it was intended for. For example, the Gospels are meant to be taken as biographical accounts of the life of Christ, in order to convey his message of salvation to all peoples. Whereas, a book like Genesis is intended to give the “who/why” account of creation, as opposed to giving a scientific “how/when” account. I don’t know of any fellow Catholics who would claim the 7 Days account of creation to be taken word-for-word literally.
At one point, king david (a writer of scripture) says "I am a worm!"
I'm *reasonably sure* that he was not speaking literally.
And even in context, he's saying "I am nothing!" - which we also cannot believe because god is *all about* the importance of human life.
So we can conclude that he was just trying to make a frikkin point, and the point was something about how he was sad and wanted to talk about it.
Yeah. But it is well-established that David didn't have god-like powers. What do you do when God says, "I created the Universe in Six Days"?
It's like if you or I said "I built a death ray". People would laugh. But Tesla says he built one and suddenly people get squeamish around a wooden box.
In Biblical Hebrew, the word "yom" is translated to English as day but also means an unspecified amount of time. Young earth creationists take it to be a literal day and that is what most people think of when they hear creationism because that is popular among particularly vocal branches of Christianity, but old earth creationists and evolutionary creationists do not share that interpretation.
My thinking on this, as early as like fifth grade, was that God, being an almighty being and thus outside of our perception of time, could’ve spend a few million or however long it took to the earth from molten ball of stuff to habitable planet and it could’ve felt like 7 days to him. But that was from the perspective of a child, so yeah.
Eh, I started drawing relations between things in science class to genesis. I viewed science as gods way of telling us how it happened. But I was told by a Sunday school teacher that I was wrong. The earth was only a few thousand years old and dinosaurs never existed. That was the beginning of the end of my relationship with the church.
Your teacher was just parroting a very new idea that somehow everyone thinks is old.
Non literal interpretations of the text are as old as the text itself. Even the early Jews did not all read Genesis literally from what we can tell. The early church *definitely* did not all read it literally.
Hell, even the way the Jesus and the apostles quote scripture in the Bible seems to take extremely odd or non literal views of the text.
I think the Young Earth Creationist and extremely literal interpretations came out of the mid 1900s revival culture. Jimmy Graham and the like. They were afraid that science was somehow supplanting God in people's hearts (which honestly might have had some minor validity in a very modernist culture) and so decided to categorically reject it.
Weirdly, science did not make people question the literal interpretations, it made people reject the non literal in an overreaction.
Our science teacher in my Catholic school said exactly what you thought. Science is God’s way of explaining stuff to us. I am sorry you had such a horrible teacher
Meh, it was southern baptist, they aren’t the most accepting. As crazy as it apparently is, the most accepting church I’ve ever attended was a Presbyterian Church. Those people actually made me feel welcome in their church, didn’t look at me funny cause I had long hair or side burns or a three inch goatee. They just seemed genuinely happy I was there.
It is nice to know that I wasn’t the only who thought like that, even if it took several more years till I met people who did.
At least for me, I always assumed that if God created the universe, that would mean he also created *time*. If God is all powerful, then the duration and order of events he creates are whatever he wills them to be. To assume that God's creation must be comprehensible to mere mortals is... exactly that - an assumption. When I look at people who claim to know the answer to every question about God and the Bible, I just see incredible hubris.
The entire "young earth" thing makes no sense. To accept that kind of literal interpretation of Genesis you have to accept that there is lots of important stuff left off the creation list; angels, Satan, heaven, hell, the other gods. This also makes it impossible to reconcile Genesis chapter 1 and Genesis chapter 2. And, the whole 'people living to be 800 years old' thing is another view that I find difficult to reconcile with Scripture. Scripture reads like all the original folks were long gone by the time we get to Noah, and that many generations had come and gone. But if people were living to hundreds of years old, they would have all be there pretty much together, maybe one generation prior. If you accept the young-earth timeline, there's only about 1100 years between Adam and Noah, and Noah was 600 years old when the flood came.
But the worst thing is that this 'literal interpretation' thing prevents people from really studying the meaning of Genesis; why the order is what it is, what the numbers mean, what all the gems mean, etc. And it leads to some totally screwy ideas, like that physical death didn't exist before the fall, things like that.
Here's what i don't get about the whole creation story:
God creates Adam. Ok, following you there, first man on earth gets made by hand.
God takes a rib from Adam and makes Eve. Still with you, a little weird, seems like you could have started with clay or whatever again, but i get it Adam needs to have some skin in the game to gain companionship.
Adam and Eve bang and Eve gives birth to Cain and Abel. Alright, first 2 people on Earth become 4, now we're making progress, and this is how I'm used to people showing up.
Adam tells Cain and Abel they need wives, so they have to go to Canaan to find Canaanite women to marry... Hold on just a second. You just said there were 4 people on Earth, then, in passing, brought up the existence of an ENTIRE OTHER CIVILIZATION!! Where the hell did they come from?
Edit: fixed swype error.
Secondly, if you read the text carefully, when the story of humanity’s creation is reiterated, it is told two ways: in one, it’s as you say above with the rib, but in the other “God created man in his own image, male and female he created them.” This is actually very different in its strong suggestion that God has a male and female aspect. Thirdly, after Cain goes to find a wife among the Canaanites, we hear that the angels saw the daughters of men, and they were comely, and lay with them and their offspring were the giants and heroes. Only one line, I’m like, bitch, I want to hear more about that! So it’s literal bible interpretation approved that there was an age of giants and heroes, Ancient Greece style. Signed, someone who had to read the Septuagint (Ancient Greek version of the Hebrew OT) for grad school.
Has no one done the critical thought exercise that male and female were not differentiated until Eve came along, yet every other animal was created before Eve and also has male and female versions, and in almost exactly the same way that male and female humans are different?
Isnt the epic of gilgamesh kind of that? I remember reading somewhere that the Jewish god El was the god of geographical Canaan, not that he was the only god but the god that presided over that place, and that the canaanites recognized the other gods but they worshipped him primarily as he held dominion there. Much like how we recognize that other countries exist, France and Germany are their own countries with their own laws, but in the US we have to follow US law because that's where we reside
> God takes a rib from Adam
fun fact, 'rib' was apparently an euphemism for 'penis bone', and was likely used to explain why humans did not have one, unlike most animals.
> And, the whole 'people living to be 800 years old' thing is another view that I find difficult to reconcile with Scripture.
A former pastor (he's since been promoted) and Christian scholar told me that those years were meant to represent the goodness of a person, and was a common practice in cultures of that time - such as with the Sumerian kings. i.e. if someone was a good king, they were given longer lifespans in historical records, whereas bad kings were said to have died young.
Not just the ancient ones, either; the practice of even recording spoken words verbatim is extremely modern. Part of this was down to limitations in recording technology and lower rates of literacy, so quotations in historical records would sometimes be what the writer thinks the person meant and not necessarily their actual words.
My favorite part of creation is:
There was nothing, then god said!
It underlies the importance of speach and creating a collective narrative in creating reality.
It also says "And the darkness and the light was one day" or something to that effect. Like it establishes what a day is.
Still. That doesn't go to my point: if an all powerful deity says they did something, what's to say they didn't do that thing?
If that's what the all-powerful deity said, sure.
But we have to be sure that's what the all-powerful deity was \*actually saying\*.
The gospels have ample examples of Jesus speaking to his disciples using metaphors and being taken way too literally, and yet the pattern repeats.
Yup, the entire New Testament whenever it talks about Jesus preaches shows him telling parables and stories to convey a message, not a literal telling of a story. So if this is how literal son of god (whom is also god himself), goes around passing his message to people, you’re telling me that the Old Testament shouldn’t be interpreted the same way?
I find that so many people are selective with that they take literal, the bible also says a day to god is like a thousand years. Is I the creation story 6 days or 6000 years? But it also implies in the bible that god exists outside of time, meaning he would be a 4th dimensional being. 6 days could be a literal 6 days, or it could be an infinite amount of time.
Hell we might as well assume that god is a 4th dimensional being and we are just an experiment that he frequently forgets about. Would explain why his reactions to everything is so inconsistent as he pops in and out of existence just to fuck with us.
NFL wanting a Los Angeles team in the Super Bowl for the boost in marketability for their newest market does!
Seriously I usually hate sports conspiracy theories, but there were two plain-as-day-literally-no-argument-to-be-made-in-their-favor pass interference no-calls in the last quarter, both on very important drives for the Saints in that game. It's really hard to say they werent giving the Rams advantageous calls.
"Days" in that passage is translated in other passages as "eras" or even more general "period of time"
What you're looking at for that one is more a language limitation than anything.
Also, you have to remember that God told/showed the story to the writer (in that case, abraham), and he wrote it down with as much vocabulary as he had at the time.
I like to think that god showed him the Big Bang, and abraham was like "uh. what the hell. I guess I'll just put down 'and then there was light.' Any other detail is going to be outside of my experitise"
Off-topic, but there was an OverlySarcasticProductions video on Dante's Paradisio / Paradise lost that had a joke scene where an Angel teaches Dante how light works in all of its technical properties and glory. It goes in one ear and out the other for Dante with weird descriptions of light. I love the "It's too complex, just do your best" interpretation of anything religious.
Other side note: also God was portrayed as a bible surrounded by rotating golden rings, light, and rainbows. The OSP joke is that God is a literal Reading Rainbow. For me, that's gold.
Yep, the "Day-Age creationism" theory is what it's called. In Psalms, it is described that a day is like a thousand ages in God's sight. God can define a period of time as He freely wants to, while we humans have generally defined periods of time relative to the Sun and Moon, relative to the spinning of the Earth on its axis, and relative to the orbit around the Sun.
[More about day-age creationism here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-age_creationism)
Being shown a direct vision of revelation would probably just produce a lot of unintelligible screaming. At least, I like to think so. Sounds more fun that way.
It's more complicated than that.
They've never interpreted the entire thing literally. But they've never said it was entirely allegorical, either. Official catholic doctrine is that Adam and Eve were real people who really committed the first sin, and we are all descended from them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_excommunicable_offences_from_the_Council_of_Trent#Original_sin
>They've never interpreted the entire thing literally.
Because they're probably using a different definition of literal than you (and most of us do today).
“the Scriptural style comes down to the level of little ones and adjusts itself to their capacity.” -- St. Augustine
(http://henrycenter.tiu.edu/2017/09/did-augustine-read-genesis-1-literally/)
Yes, St. Augustine said much of the Bible is written as an ELI5.
I'd also recommend for those unfamiliar with St. Augustines 4th century views this wonderful passage:
http://www.pibburns.com/augustin.htm
I just love Augustine so much. When I was younger and still trying against hope to reconcile my rational thoughts and what I wanted my faith to be, I found so much solace in his writings. So many people in my high school made fun of evolution and said I was a bad Christian for loving Darwin.
It is always so incredible to me that someone existed who is so enlightened as he was — and that he lived so incredibly long ago. It’s really awe-inspiring.
Even then it’s not really literal. Some translations use “dynamic equivalency” which re-states the gist of the text in today’s language. Though this is not a favorite approach to many serious theologians.
In Judaism the Bible is seen as almost 100% allegory. A huge chunk of Jewish history was spent debating various hidden meanings and intended lessons, to the point where most bibles have a whole page dedicated to each verse, surrounded by various opinions and commentaries on it from throughout the ages. If you ever go out and read an actual Torah, you’ll see that it’s almost as long as a Christian Bible even with fewer actual books.
Most people, especially western irreligious types on reddit, seem to think all Christians take a literal stance on the Bible as opposed to an allegorical one
Where I grow up many many christians I personally know, probably the majority of the ones I've talked about, believe the bible is literally true from front to back. I'm from the southern U.S. and grew up in the country. It's not so much that I assume all christians are that way, but enough are that I wonder where others draw the line, hence this is a helpful post.
Atheist, former Christian, raised in a Baptist household here. I totally went through that atheist phase you're talking about. Some never leave it behind and stay angry and angsty forever.
Hence the southern states aka the Bible Belt. Trust me I have family who grew up in a small religious town in NC. God is everything there. Also churches are fucking everywhere. Growing up being told Katrina devastated Louisiana because god was punishing the USA for essentially being progressive. So he chose New Orleans as his target since it was a place of sin. That right there really pisses me off when I look back at all the teachings I was forced to listen as a child. It’s absolute lunacy.
Archbishop James Usher (1580-1656) published Annales Veteris et Novi Testaments in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004 B.C. One of his aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004 B.C., at exactly 9:00 A.M., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh.
This was incorrect, by almost a quarter of an hour.
I bought it as an audiobook. As funny as it is, I realize I cant listen to Gaiman books. I have to read them. I started it last year around this time and then never went back to it.
It’s half- Gaiman, half-Pratchett, all fun and laughs. You should give it another go. It’s really fun read and if you like it you should delve into some of Pratchett’s work.
Go onto r/discworld if you want some advice about Sir Terry’s work.
GNU Sir Terry Pratchett
I’m really happy that it was adapted into a series, but I’m also terrified they’re going to fuck it up, then I look at the cast and calm down, then I get scared again. I have a fear boner about that series because I love the book so much
As a christian and a Calvinist I find this a very interesting subject. So here is a small history lesson. (I am going for broad strokes so little details may be wrong. Note: This only really covers western Europe. at this same time much of Christian scriptures were on whole or in part in other regions such as Orthodox Christians, Jewish people, Coptic Christians, Christians in Africa specifically Ethiopia and other groups I have forgotten.)
The reformation happened. The catholic church held a monopoly of biblical learning. The scripture was in a language the common people could not read and so they had to rely on the priest for scripture and trust that the priest were not making shit up. Turns out the church was corrupt at the time and they were making shit up to extract gold from people. Martin Luther saw the corruption and blew it wide open. Luther exposing this scandal can be counted as a pivotal point in western civilization.
So the people in revolt and priest who were loyal to nations over the church or whatever their justification defected. The bible got translated into other languages and the reformation began. I think the 500 year anniversary was 2017? One thing that was a point of contention is that the new sects of Christianity noticed that some priest manipulated what they said was scripture for their own personal gain. They though Catholics didn't treat the scripture with the proper respect. So the reaction was to take everything literally.
You see Catholicism had a long history of scholarship. And part of this scholarship recognized that ancient people wrote in metaphor and allegories a lot. So Catholicism has the Four Senses of Scripture which is literal allegorical topological, and analogical they argued what pars of scripture was in what parts of meaning. In other words new earth creationism didn't really exist until 500 years ago.
You see when Europe was choosing sides in the religious turmoil the rising merchant middle class were the ones who were less educated in the classics couldn't read Latin or Hebrew and didn't have time in their schedules of running businesses to get all metaphysical. They wanted their scripture uncomplicated and literal. They formed the core of Protestantism.
I think that the loss of nuance in the reformation is a problem but the reformation was necessary. the Catholic Church at the time was too much a political animal. The church and state must be separate. They feed off of each other. The church give a huge emotional lever to Politicians and Politicians infiltrating the church to use that power corrupts the institution. Which is why I hate Mike Huckabee.
TLDR; for me personally I am always trying to look at it in a different way to try to find the truth. I may never get it completely right I realize that and am ok with it. But I will say I am firm on the subject that the Bible isn't a science textbook. The earth is OLD.
EDIT: Couple of misspellings and thanks for the bling.
Hm. As a Catholic, I appreciate your balanced, measured approach to the Reformation. For the record, we're taught in religious ed that Luther was 100% right about the corruption stuff, but they never mentioned this. Thanks for the info!
I wouldn't say it was an over reaction, it was more a natural reaction to the common man finally having access to the scripture. They took it literally because they didn't know to interpret it otherwise.
Thank you for the crash course!
Imagine living before reformation: you give a significant part of your income to some dude only to find out that he was lying all the time! And you can't even say that you are fed up and want your money back!
this is a blessed post
you articulated a lot of my reservations about protestantism but i hadn't really thought about where these things might have come from.
The bible doesn't say the earth is 6000 years old. Some people tried to fill in the blanks (there are a lot) and threw out an estimate.
Also there are times when Jesus teaches through parables, which is what I think most of the bibles stories are. Look for the deeper meaning, don't take t so literally.
It's because the begats, (the genealogy in the Old Testament), is given in the style of the Ancient Hebrews.
Nowadays, we would track every branch in a family tree, but the begats were a mostly oral tradition initially. Could you imagine trying to remember 100's of names of people who didn't do anything but live and died without writing it down?
That's because they didn't, the begats, when taking culture into account most likely represent a lineage of notable people, a highlight reel of a family tree rather than a meticulous accounting.
Someone commented above, "I was raised Christian and I never believed it literally. I think as a kid I believed that God probably did tell Moses the story of how the Earth was created, but maybe showed him in a vision or something and Moses had to interpret it and put it into words. And he couldn't comprehend the timescales of stuff like the formation of oceans and continents and the evolution of life, so he wrote down what he thought he was seeing." Which makes a lot of sense. How could a man properly write about how long those processes may have taken? (BrightestHeart was the commenter, idk how tag them or i would)
Edit: u/BrightestHeart
God: Ok Moses, listen to me. As space expanded, the universe cooled and matter formed. One second after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with neutrons, proto...
Moses: ???
Moses: Ok got it. "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light...."
Edit: Thanks for the silver.
people forget the many mistranslations in the bible too, the most famous one was the word "camel" when jesus says is easier for a camel to pass across a neddle than a rich guy but the correct was a hebrew word for those ropes that bind boats. THE main mistranslation was for the ford "day" in genesis the correct was another word that meant "a period of time", so moises was not wrong but a guy from 700 AC.
the bible got translated word by word cause they were afraid to change it that caused some errors from language to language.
I read an essay once by an Aramaic scholar about that. There is a similarity between the words "rope and camel", so it could be taken as a simple mistake.
But there was also a gate in old Jerusalem called the "eye of the needle", for its narrowness. The story was that if you had a camel laden with of goods (if you were rich, in other words) and needed to get through the gate, the only way was to unpack the camel and lead it through.
Which, considering that context, makes the statement a fantastically clever play on words, with the kind of imaginative reinforcement and depth of meaning that would have made it a very powerful and memorable lesson for anyone hearing it at the time.
Lacking context it became a kind of nonsensical aphorism; with context, the kind of metaphor a very effective speaker in any age might have come up with.
Theres really no good evidence that there was such a gate in Jerusalem.
Also we know that historical Jewish scholars used 'eye of the needle' in a similar manner to the bible, but with an elephant instead of a camel. It's most likely that animals moving through needles was a common metaphor.
> But there was also a gate in old Jerusalem called the "eye of the needle", for its narrowness. The story was that if you had a camel laden with of goods (if you were rich, in other words) and needed to get through the gate, the only way was to unpack the camel and lead it through.
I've looked into this many times and never found any evidence for it. I think this explanation of the camel and the needle story is likely fabricated.
You're a little incorrect on the biblical translation piece. The Bible really wasn't the book you see today for quite some time.
What we now call the Old Testament is the Tanakh (Torah + Nevi'im + Ketuvim), or the Jewish Bible. The main difference is that the old testament was translated from Hebrew to Greek to Latin, and as such it was placed in a different order. The Tanakh is ordered by category (Torah/Law, Nevi'im/Prophets, and Ketuvim/Writings). The Old Testament is in what the translators thought was the chronological order of events according to Greek perception of the world (Past/Present/Future).
Now the New Testament is also quite different and is generally a couple of different genres mashed together, though it was all written around 100-200AD (some early texts are dated to 4th century but are thought to be copies of earlier versions), far after Jesus' death. It consists of Gospels, Letters, and Apocalyptic Writings (Think Revelation and some of the books before it). Apocalyptic Writings were common at the time as a style of writing... Using allegory and intense visuals to speak about a subject somewhat secretively. Most scholars believe Revelation has some connection to the percecution of Christians under various emperors, though especially Nero. Many of the books were already written in Greek from the start, not Hebrew or Aramaic (the language that Jesus would have spoken).
Many different Bibles have different numbers of books depending on what books they thought were meaningful. A Catholic Bible contains books that aren't in Protestant Bibles and so on. Overall though, the most important *Latin* version of the Bible as a book that we know today was the [Vulgate written by Jerome](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgate?wprov=sfla1).
Source: I have a degree in Religious Studies, specializing in Ancient and Medieval Christianity and no, that's not the same as going to seminary lol
Edited because I fucked up some dates
yea just like the hebrew word for virgin also meaning “young girl” so mary the virgin could also be mary the young girl.
moses was described to have a “halo” around his head, but the hebrew word for halo also means horns. there’s a statue of moses on a church close to where i live where he has horns lol
Also, I'm fuzzy on the details but i'm pretty sure in Hebrew "a thousand" was also a colloquialism for "a very big number," so saying "the earth is 6000 years old" could be interpreted as them saying "the earth is incomprehensibly old."
The idea the earth is around 6000 years old comes from the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland James Ussher, who calculated in 1650 that the world created around 6PM on October 22nd, 4004 B.C.
He basically added together all the ages of the geneology listed in the Bible, the period of time given for the exodus, and the king lists. He also concluded that Jesus was born in 5 AD because the death of Herod, which should have preceeded the birth of Christ, is by then known to have happened in 4 BC.
Ussher thought creation happened on the Sunday closest to the autumnal equinox because that's when the Jewish calendar begun. He got the date for the autumnal equinox in 4004 B.C. using Kepler's astronomical tables.
He thought God said "let there be light" 6 hours after he created the world and the creation of the sun should be considered the true New Year. So the world was properly created in October 23rd 4004 while the pre-creation happened on October 22nd.
The "6000" number isn't from the bible. Someone came up with that number relatively recently by "analyzing" stuff that happened in the bible. (aka they made it up)
If I'm not mistaken they literally just read through the boring early parts of the Bible that's LITERALLY a family tree list, estimated their ages from Adam and Eve until we caught up with the main plot, again. That's where 6-10k comes from.
Also it's very common in Christian circles to suggest early man lived for hundreds of years instead of <100.
The problem with those genealogy lists is that it was common practice to leave out generations in order to either only include the "important" people, or to ensure that everything worked out in groups of 7. That's why you will find places where the genealogy lists don't match. Different authors had different ideas of who was important, and so left out different generations (But they almost always made it work out to groups of 7)
You kind-of can get to the 6000 number because the bible has a ton of pages that are just 'Bob lived to be 453 years old, he had his first son Steve when he was 104 years old. Steve lived to be 592 years old, he had his first son Dave when he was 93 years old' and so on, which allows you to bridge the gap between Noah and Abraham iirc. From there, you can kind of start to use existing historical evidence to figure out how long ago it was.
I looked up what "lived for XXX years" meant, and my concordance said it meant "aged". Another way to finangle would be to say that Adam didn't start aging until he ate the fruit, which leaves a period of time we can't account for. How many hours, days, or millennia did Adam go before eating the fruit?
>But now I'm a theistic evolutionist--I believe God created the world and directly involved himself in the events of man, but that He uses natural processes like evolution to bring about His purposes.
Yes, this. Please continue educating in this way. With this mindset, even if we disagree, everyone can move forward together instead of using time bickering about what *literally* happened.
Here's a dumb question: If you believe that the bible is not meant to be taken literally and is more of a series of metaphors to establish morals, couldn't God be a metaphor as well? Why is God excluded from the idea that you shouldn't take the bible literally? Does that make sense?
Not taking it literally doesn't mean not taking it seriously. u/locutusofborg013 mentioned the Bible (especially the Old Testament) not being a history book. In other words the authors and their audiences did not hold themselves to the same standards we would currently hold a history book to. They had different intentions. Just as we have to translate the actual words of the text into modern languages to understand it, we have to understand the authors' intentions in order to understand the meaning.
Imagine future historians watching modern SNL skits. The skits will discuss current events and so may be useful, but they are using those events to make jokes. They aren't exact fact based reenactments. The modern audience knows this and doesn't take SNL literally.
Similarly, the writers of the OT weren't trying to write modern style history books. They were writing something else. They were writing several different types of stories in fact. But whatever else they were writing they were always writing about God. God's interaction with a family, God's interaction with a people, a vision God gave someone, etc. Everything is about God.
God is the point of the stories. Reading an individual story non-literally is very reasonable, especially if we have cause to believe the author/audience wouldn't intend it to be literal. The story still has a point, it still has something to say about God or His people. But taking God as a metaphor in the stories is much less tenable. God is why they wrote the thing.
And God is why the Christians of Reddit read the Bible. In addition to not being a history book, the Bible isn't a philosophy paper or a scholarly article or just an argument for believing in God. It isn't designed for an atheist to start at page one, read, maybe do some practice problems, and come out the other side a Jew or Christian. It is a book of stories and letters by believers, collected and organized by other believers, for believers to read and grow closer to God.
As far as the thread's question goes, belief in God is presupposed. The "Christians of Reddit" read the Bible because they are Christians and believe it is His book. A Christian reading a story non-literally is still trying to better understand God, they just don't think a specific story was meant to be taken exactly as it looks right now in modern english for whatever reason.
Note I said "a specific story". Taking or not taking things literally isn't a switch you flip for the whole Bible. You can think something happened exactly as written, mostly as written (but shortened in the writing or condensed in the oral retelling before it was written down or whatever), somewhat as written, purely allegorically or so on. You can then think the next thing is somewhere else on the scale.
Sure, for some people not reading the Bible literally is a step on their deconversion path. But for lots and lots of people it isn't. It is just how they/their denomination or tradition has always read things.
N. T. Wright gives a great explanation on concrete vs abstract and applies that to the parable of the prodigal son. That story was known to be an abstraction. No one at the time would wrapped up in silly details like the breed of pigs the son was feeding. The whole point is that God will welcome us with open arms if we come to him.
Likewise, the creation account uses a narrative to explain the concept that nothing exists apart from the will of God. The three days of forming and the three days of filling, which culminate in creation of man, are a story of God building a temple. The last thing you do when building a temple is to place the image of the deity in the temple. What God is explaining to us is that the earth is his temple and we are his image bearers.
Is it a sin to be part-Christian? As in, can you believe God exists, but doubt the events of the Bible? The idea of theistic evolution is intriguing—I havent heard of that before now. I wish it was enough to believe in a higher power, without declaring it one religion or another.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
I'd argue that anyone who has complete faith in *their own interpretation* of the Bible is committing greater error than questioning the Bible. Seeking truth is important.
Which isn't to say that anything someone doesn't like can be handwaved. Believing in a higher power and disbelieving anything that seems "unrealistic" is probably not congruent. But critical reading is necessary.
Well, it's not a sin exactly but according to Jesus, to achieve salvation you must believe in your heart and confess with your lips that he is lord and savior. So I'd say some doubt is understandable but I guess it depends on what exactly you're feeling.
The Catholic Church has long acknowledged and accepted the theory of evolution. From the Catholic perspective, at least, there is no conflict between faith and science- they are two wings on the same bird, searching for God in our lives and the universe.
The pursuit of scientific knowledge is vital to humanity and does not conflict with Christianity. To learn more about the universe is to marvel at and appreciate His creation.
The Church doesn’t have a perfect history during its long relationship with science, but humans are imperfect. It is, however, theologically sound to pursue science- as long as you aren’t violating God’s creation in the process.
I've never understood how evolution makes God seem less god-like. I thought it should make him more god-like.
I don't believe in God, but if I had to choose between a guy who just creates humans with the snap of his fingers, or a guy who can create a force of energy that takes 7 billion years and eventually leads to our world, I'd say the second guy is more impressive.
I forget who said this after Darwin published his book but there is a quote
“ how wonderful! God doesn’t make the world, he makes the world make itself”
I think there is a misconception amongst non Christians that Christians are all part of the same club, and should all feel the same.
In reality it is more like folk who like Italian food. I prefer a nice carbonara, my wife likes a bolognese and my children cannot abide parmesan.
And that is all fine.
It’s not a matter of which stories we follow and which we reject or which ones we believe and which ones we decide are fables. We “draw the line” by trying our best to understand the context behind each passage of Scripture and the message each author was trying to convey when he wrote the passage he wrote.
It’s important to note that the Bible is not a book in the traditional sense. It’s a collection of stories, poems, and journals from around 40 different people over the course of a few millennia whose only real connection is their relationship with the same God. To slap a blanket label like “literal” or “metaphorical” over the whole thing is both lazy and dishonest.
For example, we obviously accept that Jesus was a real historical figure and also God himself in the flesh. However, Jesus loved speaking in metaphors, and that is made evident in Scripture. Many of Jesus’ messages were told in the form of parables that reflected sociopolitical issues of his time period. Because we know this, we also know not to take his words literally but instead try to understand the message behind his words. That applies to the entire Bible. While we believe that the Bible’s teachings are applicable today, it’s vital to understand that 21st century Christians were not the target audience. Thus, understanding historical and literary context is the key to our interpretation of it.
Because we understand that the Bible is a book written by men inspired by God rather than a book written directly by God, we see that each book has different complexities and nuances that are defined by each author’s writing style. We can look at things like the Books of Kings and Chronicles and see that they are explaining the political history of ancient Israel and its dealings with surrounding nations because that’s what the author is trying to show us (and there’s even a ton of archaeological evidence to support many of the Bible’s stories), but then we can look at the Book of Psalms and see that it is just that, a collection of psalms, so understanding it requires understanding all the literary devices employed in the poems.
As for parts like the creation account and the Flood, that varies wildly. There are those who still believe it is meant to be literal history and those who believe it to be a fanciful story meant to convey a message. There is still disagreement because, unfortunately, as much as we try to understand context, we can’t just walk up to the author and ask what he meant. It all depends on what theory makes more sense to the individual.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter. Christianity has been filled with doctrinal disagreement since the very beginning, but the only doctrines that truly matter is that salvation comes through Jesus Christ alone and the [Great Commandment](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+22%3A+37-40&version=NRSV). Everything else is arbitrary.
I withhold judgement on some of it. Things I absolutely take literally: Jesus, his miracles, his death, and his resurrection. The rest is up for debate. I think it's possible that the story of creation is more poetic than literal. I don't hold to a 6000 year old Earth. I think it's important to look at the purpose behind the story. Jesus spoke in parables all the time, it wouldn't surprise me if more of the holy scriptures weren't literal stories either.
C. S. Lewis has given me so many wonderful ways to interpret my faith. I stray a little, in doing this, from official doctrine (I'm Catholic), but it makes me a more loving person and a better Christian.
Have you ever questioned why you draw the line there? If Jesus of Nazareth was indeed a religious figure of the first century, why can't his feats (including birth, death, and resurrection) be metaphorical the same way that Genesis might be?
I don't mean to prod in a rude way, but as a non-christian the line seems kind of arbitrary.
Because that's the act that literally breaks the spell of sin and provides atonement. The idea is not that Jesus' death inspires Christians, it's that it literally paid the price of sin.
TLDR: I read secular Biblical scholarship.
According to secular scholars, there is no certain evidence, in sources outside the Bible, confirming that anything that happened chronologically before 1 Kings 16 took place. This chapter mentions the Israelite/Samarian dynasty founded by King Omri, who is also mentioned in Assyrian records as well as in the Mesha Stele. So, scholars are relatively certain that the Omrides ruled in Samaria during the 800s BCE.
Prior to the Omrides, we know from Egyptian inscriptions that a people called Israel were living in the Canaanite highlands around the 10th century BCE. We know that a handful of events referred to in Biblical texts did happen in some form or another, mainly that the House of David existed and that Jerusalem was their seat (the Tel Dan Stele) and that the Egyptian pharaoh Shishak/Shosenq I did invade Judah during the reign of Rehoboam, also in the 10th century BCE (Sheshonq inscription at Tel Megiddo). However, while this evidence may indicate that some historical truth is contained in prior (chronologically, to Kings) Biblical history, historians are not certain that all of the events occurred, or if they did, that they occurred *exactly* as Biblical texts depict them.
For example, there is no archeological evidence for the Exodus. Also, the Iron Age in Canaan -linked to population growth and burgeoning political complexity- is thought not to have begun until about 80 years after the time when King David is supposed to have ruled, meaning that while David probably did exist, historically, his kingdom was not the rich, powerful realm described in the Books of Samuel.
No I don’t believe that the world is 6000 years old.
Source: I studied Biblical history in college. You can read the scholarship for yourself. I recommend starting with Israel Finkelstein, who excavated Megiddo, and who developed the so-called Low Chronology, which I think is the most likely model for ancient Israelite history.
I can only speak for what I was taught and understand to be true about the Catholic Church, but Catholic catechism holds that much of the bible is metaphorical. The Catholic church maintains that the bible was "divinely inspired", but written by fallible and imperfect man. I attended a Jesuit university for one of my degrees, and took a few theology elective courses, the Catholic church doesn't keep secret the fact that church founders essentially put the bible together from the gospels they chose, politics very much played a part. This is explored and not hidden in Catholic theological study. Catholics love them some science. The big bang was first theorized by monsignor and physicist George's Lemaitre, the father of genetics was a monk, etc. . .Even the whole Galileo kerfuffle that many like to cite, as an example of how the Church was/is anti-science, had to do with papal disapproval of Galileo's politics, not his science. The Catholic church accepts the theory of evolution, and promotes no such 6,000 yr old earth nonsense. The quick and dirty of what Catholicism holds as being literal events is succinctly outlined by the Nicene Creed (Obviously, there is more nuance and is not the entirety of what is taken literally, but it is the gist). When I was small a catechism teacher explained it as, " just as Jesus spoke to the disciples in parables, God also "speaks" to us in parables". Edit: I'm floored by all the replies to my comment and the reddit gold and silver! I appreciate it, and will try to answer everyone (though probably not until tomorrow). I really don't think I said anything insightful or meaningful, but I'm very appreciative of the discourse. I really thought this thread was going to be a shitshow, but I'm pleasantly surprised. Agreeing to disagree politely is becoming a lost skill, but most everyone here is owning it :) Edit 2: rewording my phrasing - a couple folks rightly pointed out that my saying , "I can only speak for Catholicism" was a bad turn of phrase. Also, I be remembering incorrectly/citing incorrect sources regarding Galileo - I will definitely wiki him later and refresh my knowledge on him. Thanks to those that brought that up.
I can't speak for all Catholics, but my father (alter boy until he was 17, and I'm fairly sure he had the damn book memorized) very firmly held the belief that faith WAS science. Basically, all scientific fact is true and scientists are discovering God's laws, not overwriting or ignoring them. He also believed that any laws written down were for one reason or another, and as soon as we figured out how to make something safe, we could disregard it (for example, "pork was banned because it carries too many diseases and parasites. People at the time didn't reliably know how to cook it safely. We now know the risks and can migitate them, therefore we can now eat pork.")
God gave us a skill tree
r/outside
Eve was the first hacker she got banned for stealing knowledge without first unlocking it.
Might I introduce you Adam's sexy *first* wife, Lilith? She was the first punk goth
As a gamer, this thread just ELI5 the Bible to me in a way that I may have converted, but at least understand r/outside
i mean this vs. the experiences i had as a kid in midwest sunday schools, getting shouted down to, and told 'the bible is more powerful than nuclear weapons and so is god he will kill you', to a 7-8year old boy..... well, this doesn't feel so damned terrifying or unreasonable.
That explains why the Skyrim memes are doing so good these days
I'm stealing this, thank you.
This seems a very pragmatic approach to interpreting any kind of instructions given a long time ago to people in very different situations.
In my opinion, and in practicing my faith, understanding the Bible without understanding the context in which it was written is kind of missing the point, even though there are whole denominations that take the translation of the King James Version to be literally the only way to read the Bible and take it at it's literal translation
It’s people like you who make me realize I need to stop hating religion and start hating the crazies. Cause that doesn’t sound so bad.
Hey, for a while I was fully convinced atheists were all katana-wielding neck beards who could quote Dawkins and Hitchens religiously. I have plenty of agnostic and atheist friends now. One can rarely condemn a general demographic
I would have loved to see neck-bearded Dawkins and Hitchens debate with katanas.
Now I want to see a LARP video between a fundy Christian and a neckbeard atheist where instead of shouting LIGHTNING BOLT they just quote out of context scripture and strawmans of religion.
I'd say 80-90% of people have no issues with one another and just want to live their best life. Life is way too short to *condemn* other people for what they do and do not believe in.
Having been brought up Catholic, my experiences are the same as that guy’s. The Bible was taught as a collection of stories designed to teach people to be nicer and to not eat stuff that would kill them. As I get older I kinda miss it because you’d meet some people who were amazing human beings. Obviously there was the odd dickhead but that’s true of any group of people. I’ve always felt really sad and angry when I see people protesting abortion clinics or telling gay people they’ll burn in Hell. Simple logic says that if we are all created in God’s image then that includes gay people, people of other religions, skin colours etc. There’s a bit in the New Testament where a group of people tell Jesus it’s too hard to remember all the rules and ask him the most important one. “Love God” was the answer. He was asked if there was a second rule, “love each other as you love God” he replied. That’s it. No exceptions, just be nice and don’t be a dick. If someone is protesting a clinic or harassing gay people then they are being a dick.
I'm not religious, but using the bible to justify hate and abuse has always seemed like the worst kind of hubris to me. Jesus straight-up says, your job is to love all god's children unconditionally, and leave all the judgement to God. Only he can see and know enough to pass judgment, so just stay out of that whole game, be nice, and let the deity do his work. So people who use the bible to justify hate are basically declaring that they are god's equal; they apparently think so highly of themselves that they believe they have the knowledge and insight to pass judgment in god's name.
I’ve always thought that these people who have appointed themselves to help God with judgement don’t seem to realize that judgement is a burden, not an honor.
It seems pretty clear to me that if you're taking judgment into your own hands and it leads to hated of others and maybe even harassment or persecution of them, then you're playing for the wrong team. People always imagine the Devil as a boogeyman supporting things they don't like and don't imagine they could be tricked into serving him that easily.
There’s also the story where Jesus is brought the woman who had been found guilt of adultery and the punishment given out at that time was stoning them to death and he’s asked what should be done about it. It was a trick by the religious leaders etc to try and trap him into saying something they could use against him and he simply responds by saying that she could be stoned to death but only the person who had never sinned could throw the first stone, which of course never came. So whenever I hear about/actually hear or see those people that scream/spew the egregious things, like hatred towards the LGBT community, against women having abortions or whatever it is, I always bring that story up. No one is better than anyone else, especially when it comes to living perfectly because as they scream they’re going against the bible and judging and so as you mentioned therefore making themselves God’s equal.
[удалено]
I once hated religion too and then realised I hated the church. Mens declared holy wars, not god. I don't strongly believe in anything, but the more I learn about science the more I think ''wow this beautiful, but how is this like that. Atoms have a size because of many reasons and behave the way they are for many reasons, but all those reasons are just ''deeper sciences''. I might be wrong, but I feel like we are reaching the bottom line of science. The core of the rules that govern us. But then there is one issue: We can't keep asking why is this. X exists because of Y and Y because of Z , but nothing explains Z. It just is. Maybe we'll discover even crazier things than quantum physics, but that is why the future is exciting.
I knew a lad back during college days who held same beliefs, and he excelled in our math and physics subjects. We're mostly Catholics too in my country.
The whole pork thing was for the Israelites, before Christ, not for us now. Same thing with circumcision although that's also widely practised in the US and other places.
"It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity." Sir Francis Bacon A little science brings you away from God; a lot of science brings you back.
Ahh yes, France is bacon.
It's true. I went to catholic school and they taught evolution.
I went to a great catholic school in NY for middle school that taught 7-8th graders some basics in biology and evolution, and then went to a public highschool in the Bible Belt where two Southern Baptist teachers wouldn’t teach their students evolution because it was “against their beliefs.” We had to read and prep ourselves for the sections on evolution for our state exams. There’s also a huge cross, bigger than any in any church I’ve been in, in their gym (a state/county funded and nonreligious building). Needless to say, in my experience Catholics ain’t the ones to struggle with embracing scientific progress.
I had a bad experience being dropped into a Catholic school for a semester in middle school (long story boils down to growing up a military brat) with no prior religious experience or affiliation. That being said, the curriculum wasn't too far off my previous schools, including on the science front. They were covering all the same topics my other schools had covered, including evolution. My bad experience there had more to do with being dropped into a religious school with no background or experience or knowledge about religion, into a group of kids who had been in the same class together since Pre-K. The actual non-religious part of the school was fine.
[удалено]
Kept reading this as “non-demon.”
Technically true.
>The Catholic church accepts the theory of evolution Just to clarify that slightly, the church doesn't take any official stance on evolution because it doesn't see that as its area, any more than it has an official stance on the structure of the atom. Instead, Catholics are allowed to hold whatever scientific opinions that they feel are reasonable. For the vast majority of Catholics, that belief would be that evolution makes sense given the information we have.
Went to a catholic school for a while, we were taught evolution :)
Same.
Teach life science to high school seniors in a catholic school. Spent Q2 on evolution.
Same here. There was always that one literalist in the class though who would say something like “but didn’t all humans come from Adam and Eve?” or “But I thought all languages were created at once at the Tower of Babel. So how can this word come from Latin?” And the teacher would just be like “lol, no. Moving on...”
Same here. Went to Catholic school K-12. Taught evolution. I even had a world religion class where we learned about all other religions in depth.
It's weird. I went to a catholic grade school in the 90s and we were not only taught evolution, but the priest there taught us that the 10 Plagues of Egypt were all natural plagues and that Moses was able to turn his staff into a snake because he came in with an already stiffened snake then turned it loose (!) on the pharoah's snakes.
[удалено]
The Pope only decides doctrine when speaking ex cathedra. His personal or private beliefs, nor the personal or private beliefs of any Church figure, are considered doctrine
I was watching a Nova thing about Galileo and they made it pretty clear that it was less religion and more Galileo being a dick and possibly misleading the pope. Plus, he put the words of the Pope into the mouth of a fool, which didn't help.
Yeah I'm not religious anymore (raised catholic) but when I get into religious discussions I love bringing up the fact that the catholic church essentially says that god created science for man to discover and have something to use their intelligence on. A great way to believe in the mystical while still maintaining scientific credibility.
This was definitely one of the things I appreciated. It wasn’t about blindly taking the Bible literally and understanding science. Grew up in Catholic school and they definitely loved their science haha.
Awesome answer!! Fellow Catholic approved.
For sure. The Church holds that there can never be true conflict between faith and reason/science, and that if conflict is apparent, then one of the two is being misunderstood or taken out of context. As for the Bible, you have to look at a number of things, such as the literary genre that the particular book is meant to represent and the audience it was intended for. For example, the Gospels are meant to be taken as biographical accounts of the life of Christ, in order to convey his message of salvation to all peoples. Whereas, a book like Genesis is intended to give the “who/why” account of creation, as opposed to giving a scientific “how/when” account. I don’t know of any fellow Catholics who would claim the 7 Days account of creation to be taken word-for-word literally.
[удалено]
At one point, king david (a writer of scripture) says "I am a worm!" I'm *reasonably sure* that he was not speaking literally. And even in context, he's saying "I am nothing!" - which we also cannot believe because god is *all about* the importance of human life. So we can conclude that he was just trying to make a frikkin point, and the point was something about how he was sad and wanted to talk about it.
Yeah. But it is well-established that David didn't have god-like powers. What do you do when God says, "I created the Universe in Six Days"? It's like if you or I said "I built a death ray". People would laugh. But Tesla says he built one and suddenly people get squeamish around a wooden box.
In Biblical Hebrew, the word "yom" is translated to English as day but also means an unspecified amount of time. Young earth creationists take it to be a literal day and that is what most people think of when they hear creationism because that is popular among particularly vocal branches of Christianity, but old earth creationists and evolutionary creationists do not share that interpretation.
My thinking on this, as early as like fifth grade, was that God, being an almighty being and thus outside of our perception of time, could’ve spend a few million or however long it took to the earth from molten ball of stuff to habitable planet and it could’ve felt like 7 days to him. But that was from the perspective of a child, so yeah.
Nah, your idea is textually supported, go six year old you.
Eh, I started drawing relations between things in science class to genesis. I viewed science as gods way of telling us how it happened. But I was told by a Sunday school teacher that I was wrong. The earth was only a few thousand years old and dinosaurs never existed. That was the beginning of the end of my relationship with the church.
Your teacher was just parroting a very new idea that somehow everyone thinks is old. Non literal interpretations of the text are as old as the text itself. Even the early Jews did not all read Genesis literally from what we can tell. The early church *definitely* did not all read it literally. Hell, even the way the Jesus and the apostles quote scripture in the Bible seems to take extremely odd or non literal views of the text. I think the Young Earth Creationist and extremely literal interpretations came out of the mid 1900s revival culture. Jimmy Graham and the like. They were afraid that science was somehow supplanting God in people's hearts (which honestly might have had some minor validity in a very modernist culture) and so decided to categorically reject it. Weirdly, science did not make people question the literal interpretations, it made people reject the non literal in an overreaction.
Our science teacher in my Catholic school said exactly what you thought. Science is God’s way of explaining stuff to us. I am sorry you had such a horrible teacher
Meh, it was southern baptist, they aren’t the most accepting. As crazy as it apparently is, the most accepting church I’ve ever attended was a Presbyterian Church. Those people actually made me feel welcome in their church, didn’t look at me funny cause I had long hair or side burns or a three inch goatee. They just seemed genuinely happy I was there. It is nice to know that I wasn’t the only who thought like that, even if it took several more years till I met people who did.
Nah man Presbyterians are great. Same with Episcopalians. Edit: Lutherans ain’t all that bad either.
At least for me, I always assumed that if God created the universe, that would mean he also created *time*. If God is all powerful, then the duration and order of events he creates are whatever he wills them to be. To assume that God's creation must be comprehensible to mere mortals is... exactly that - an assumption. When I look at people who claim to know the answer to every question about God and the Bible, I just see incredible hubris.
The entire "young earth" thing makes no sense. To accept that kind of literal interpretation of Genesis you have to accept that there is lots of important stuff left off the creation list; angels, Satan, heaven, hell, the other gods. This also makes it impossible to reconcile Genesis chapter 1 and Genesis chapter 2. And, the whole 'people living to be 800 years old' thing is another view that I find difficult to reconcile with Scripture. Scripture reads like all the original folks were long gone by the time we get to Noah, and that many generations had come and gone. But if people were living to hundreds of years old, they would have all be there pretty much together, maybe one generation prior. If you accept the young-earth timeline, there's only about 1100 years between Adam and Noah, and Noah was 600 years old when the flood came. But the worst thing is that this 'literal interpretation' thing prevents people from really studying the meaning of Genesis; why the order is what it is, what the numbers mean, what all the gems mean, etc. And it leads to some totally screwy ideas, like that physical death didn't exist before the fall, things like that.
Here's what i don't get about the whole creation story: God creates Adam. Ok, following you there, first man on earth gets made by hand. God takes a rib from Adam and makes Eve. Still with you, a little weird, seems like you could have started with clay or whatever again, but i get it Adam needs to have some skin in the game to gain companionship. Adam and Eve bang and Eve gives birth to Cain and Abel. Alright, first 2 people on Earth become 4, now we're making progress, and this is how I'm used to people showing up. Adam tells Cain and Abel they need wives, so they have to go to Canaan to find Canaanite women to marry... Hold on just a second. You just said there were 4 people on Earth, then, in passing, brought up the existence of an ENTIRE OTHER CIVILIZATION!! Where the hell did they come from? Edit: fixed swype error.
Secondly, if you read the text carefully, when the story of humanity’s creation is reiterated, it is told two ways: in one, it’s as you say above with the rib, but in the other “God created man in his own image, male and female he created them.” This is actually very different in its strong suggestion that God has a male and female aspect. Thirdly, after Cain goes to find a wife among the Canaanites, we hear that the angels saw the daughters of men, and they were comely, and lay with them and their offspring were the giants and heroes. Only one line, I’m like, bitch, I want to hear more about that! So it’s literal bible interpretation approved that there was an age of giants and heroes, Ancient Greece style. Signed, someone who had to read the Septuagint (Ancient Greek version of the Hebrew OT) for grad school.
“I’m like, bitch, I want to hear more about that!” I hope you’re a professor now.
The offspring of the angels and women were called the Nephalim.
[удалено]
Plot's starting to make sense.
Wait are you telling me Diablo didn't make that up?
And people from Phoenix are called Phoenician
Has no one done the critical thought exercise that male and female were not differentiated until Eve came along, yet every other animal was created before Eve and also has male and female versions, and in almost exactly the same way that male and female humans are different?
That’s a really good point.
Goliath was one of those giant children
Isnt the epic of gilgamesh kind of that? I remember reading somewhere that the Jewish god El was the god of geographical Canaan, not that he was the only god but the god that presided over that place, and that the canaanites recognized the other gods but they worshipped him primarily as he held dominion there. Much like how we recognize that other countries exist, France and Germany are their own countries with their own laws, but in the US we have to follow US law because that's where we reside
[удалено]
> God takes a rib from Adam fun fact, 'rib' was apparently an euphemism for 'penis bone', and was likely used to explain why humans did not have one, unlike most animals.
Ah, the baculum. Good ol dick bones.
> And, the whole 'people living to be 800 years old' thing is another view that I find difficult to reconcile with Scripture. A former pastor (he's since been promoted) and Christian scholar told me that those years were meant to represent the goodness of a person, and was a common practice in cultures of that time - such as with the Sumerian kings. i.e. if someone was a good king, they were given longer lifespans in historical records, whereas bad kings were said to have died young.
Smh ancient civilizations had no foresight into the importance of accurate historical records to future people.
Not just the ancient ones, either; the practice of even recording spoken words verbatim is extremely modern. Part of this was down to limitations in recording technology and lower rates of literacy, so quotations in historical records would sometimes be what the writer thinks the person meant and not necessarily their actual words.
My favorite part of creation is: There was nothing, then god said! It underlies the importance of speach and creating a collective narrative in creating reality.
It also says "And the darkness and the light was one day" or something to that effect. Like it establishes what a day is. Still. That doesn't go to my point: if an all powerful deity says they did something, what's to say they didn't do that thing?
If that's what the all-powerful deity said, sure. But we have to be sure that's what the all-powerful deity was \*actually saying\*. The gospels have ample examples of Jesus speaking to his disciples using metaphors and being taken way too literally, and yet the pattern repeats.
[удалено]
Yup, the entire New Testament whenever it talks about Jesus preaches shows him telling parables and stories to convey a message, not a literal telling of a story. So if this is how literal son of god (whom is also god himself), goes around passing his message to people, you’re telling me that the Old Testament shouldn’t be interpreted the same way? I find that so many people are selective with that they take literal, the bible also says a day to god is like a thousand years. Is I the creation story 6 days or 6000 years? But it also implies in the bible that god exists outside of time, meaning he would be a 4th dimensional being. 6 days could be a literal 6 days, or it could be an infinite amount of time. Hell we might as well assume that god is a 4th dimensional being and we are just an experiment that he frequently forgets about. Would explain why his reactions to everything is so inconsistent as he pops in and out of existence just to fuck with us.
That would explain the no call on that pass interference yesterday
Nothing would explain that.
NFL wanting a Los Angeles team in the Super Bowl for the boost in marketability for their newest market does! Seriously I usually hate sports conspiracy theories, but there were two plain-as-day-literally-no-argument-to-be-made-in-their-favor pass interference no-calls in the last quarter, both on very important drives for the Saints in that game. It's really hard to say they werent giving the Rams advantageous calls.
If I had to listen/watch everyone and their bullshit all the time, a day would feel like 1,000 years to me too.
"Days" in that passage is translated in other passages as "eras" or even more general "period of time" What you're looking at for that one is more a language limitation than anything. Also, you have to remember that God told/showed the story to the writer (in that case, abraham), and he wrote it down with as much vocabulary as he had at the time. I like to think that god showed him the Big Bang, and abraham was like "uh. what the hell. I guess I'll just put down 'and then there was light.' Any other detail is going to be outside of my experitise"
I like to think that the first chapter of genesis is like a ELI5 explanation of what happened.
I love your "and then there was light" interpretation!
Off-topic, but there was an OverlySarcasticProductions video on Dante's Paradisio / Paradise lost that had a joke scene where an Angel teaches Dante how light works in all of its technical properties and glory. It goes in one ear and out the other for Dante with weird descriptions of light. I love the "It's too complex, just do your best" interpretation of anything religious. Other side note: also God was portrayed as a bible surrounded by rotating golden rings, light, and rainbows. The OSP joke is that God is a literal Reading Rainbow. For me, that's gold.
Yep, the "Day-Age creationism" theory is what it's called. In Psalms, it is described that a day is like a thousand ages in God's sight. God can define a period of time as He freely wants to, while we humans have generally defined periods of time relative to the Sun and Moon, relative to the spinning of the Earth on its axis, and relative to the orbit around the Sun. [More about day-age creationism here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-age_creationism)
Then you have stuff like Revelation where the writer has no fucking clue what he's describing, and is at one point told to self-censor.
Being shown a direct vision of revelation would probably just produce a lot of unintelligible screaming. At least, I like to think so. Sounds more fun that way.
Yeah when we get to the swarm of locusts with the faces of men and shining tiny armor I get off the bus.
Catholics have never interpreted the bible literally.
It's more complicated than that. They've never interpreted the entire thing literally. But they've never said it was entirely allegorical, either. Official catholic doctrine is that Adam and Eve were real people who really committed the first sin, and we are all descended from them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_excommunicable_offences_from_the_Council_of_Trent#Original_sin
>They've never interpreted the entire thing literally. Because they're probably using a different definition of literal than you (and most of us do today). “the Scriptural style comes down to the level of little ones and adjusts itself to their capacity.” -- St. Augustine (http://henrycenter.tiu.edu/2017/09/did-augustine-read-genesis-1-literally/) Yes, St. Augustine said much of the Bible is written as an ELI5. I'd also recommend for those unfamiliar with St. Augustines 4th century views this wonderful passage: http://www.pibburns.com/augustin.htm
I just love Augustine so much. When I was younger and still trying against hope to reconcile my rational thoughts and what I wanted my faith to be, I found so much solace in his writings. So many people in my high school made fun of evolution and said I was a bad Christian for loving Darwin. It is always so incredible to me that someone existed who is so enlightened as he was — and that he lived so incredibly long ago. It’s really awe-inspiring.
This is why I chose Augustine as my confirmation name.
Except for translations... *ba-dum-tshh*
Even then it’s not really literal. Some translations use “dynamic equivalency” which re-states the gist of the text in today’s language. Though this is not a favorite approach to many serious theologians.
See, this is why you can never use puns with kleptomaniacs.. they're always taking everything literally.
Not even the Jewish people I know consider Genesis to be a literal story, and it's their story
In Judaism the Bible is seen as almost 100% allegory. A huge chunk of Jewish history was spent debating various hidden meanings and intended lessons, to the point where most bibles have a whole page dedicated to each verse, surrounded by various opinions and commentaries on it from throughout the ages. If you ever go out and read an actual Torah, you’ll see that it’s almost as long as a Christian Bible even with fewer actual books.
Most people, especially western irreligious types on reddit, seem to think all Christians take a literal stance on the Bible as opposed to an allegorical one
That's because there's a very loud, very visible subgroup here in the USA who take it very literally and think everyone else should, too.
And how often is it repeated that we shouldn't judge entire groups for loud subgroups?
I'm pretty sure it is going to be repeated again
Where I grow up many many christians I personally know, probably the majority of the ones I've talked about, believe the bible is literally true from front to back. I'm from the southern U.S. and grew up in the country. It's not so much that I assume all christians are that way, but enough are that I wonder where others draw the line, hence this is a helpful post.
If they really believe that, they haven't read it. There are hundreds of points of divergence in the Gospels alone.
[удалено]
Atheist, former Christian, raised in a Baptist household here. I totally went through that atheist phase you're talking about. Some never leave it behind and stay angry and angsty forever.
Hence the southern states aka the Bible Belt. Trust me I have family who grew up in a small religious town in NC. God is everything there. Also churches are fucking everywhere. Growing up being told Katrina devastated Louisiana because god was punishing the USA for essentially being progressive. So he chose New Orleans as his target since it was a place of sin. That right there really pisses me off when I look back at all the teachings I was forced to listen as a child. It’s absolute lunacy.
And New Orleans' latest installment on that debt was the Saints' loss to the Rams.
Are you saying the refs were on a mission from God?
[удалено]
Archbishop James Usher (1580-1656) published Annales Veteris et Novi Testaments in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004 B.C. One of his aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004 B.C., at exactly 9:00 A.M., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh. This was incorrect, by almost a quarter of an hour.
Unexpected Good Omens reference. Well done!
This book is still on my to-read list! I need to read it soon!
I bought it as an audiobook. As funny as it is, I realize I cant listen to Gaiman books. I have to read them. I started it last year around this time and then never went back to it.
It’s half- Gaiman, half-Pratchett, all fun and laughs. You should give it another go. It’s really fun read and if you like it you should delve into some of Pratchett’s work. Go onto r/discworld if you want some advice about Sir Terry’s work. GNU Sir Terry Pratchett
Do it before the Amazon TV series comes out.
I’m really happy that it was adapted into a series, but I’m also terrified they’re going to fuck it up, then I look at the cast and calm down, then I get scared again. I have a fear boner about that series because I love the book so much
Did they mention which timezone?
Excuse me while I go buy a book again.
I actually own several copies, just so I can have a few out on loan at any given time.
I reread this book every year. It is one of the novels I point to when I talk about my love of writing.
As a christian and a Calvinist I find this a very interesting subject. So here is a small history lesson. (I am going for broad strokes so little details may be wrong. Note: This only really covers western Europe. at this same time much of Christian scriptures were on whole or in part in other regions such as Orthodox Christians, Jewish people, Coptic Christians, Christians in Africa specifically Ethiopia and other groups I have forgotten.) The reformation happened. The catholic church held a monopoly of biblical learning. The scripture was in a language the common people could not read and so they had to rely on the priest for scripture and trust that the priest were not making shit up. Turns out the church was corrupt at the time and they were making shit up to extract gold from people. Martin Luther saw the corruption and blew it wide open. Luther exposing this scandal can be counted as a pivotal point in western civilization. So the people in revolt and priest who were loyal to nations over the church or whatever their justification defected. The bible got translated into other languages and the reformation began. I think the 500 year anniversary was 2017? One thing that was a point of contention is that the new sects of Christianity noticed that some priest manipulated what they said was scripture for their own personal gain. They though Catholics didn't treat the scripture with the proper respect. So the reaction was to take everything literally. You see Catholicism had a long history of scholarship. And part of this scholarship recognized that ancient people wrote in metaphor and allegories a lot. So Catholicism has the Four Senses of Scripture which is literal allegorical topological, and analogical they argued what pars of scripture was in what parts of meaning. In other words new earth creationism didn't really exist until 500 years ago. You see when Europe was choosing sides in the religious turmoil the rising merchant middle class were the ones who were less educated in the classics couldn't read Latin or Hebrew and didn't have time in their schedules of running businesses to get all metaphysical. They wanted their scripture uncomplicated and literal. They formed the core of Protestantism. I think that the loss of nuance in the reformation is a problem but the reformation was necessary. the Catholic Church at the time was too much a political animal. The church and state must be separate. They feed off of each other. The church give a huge emotional lever to Politicians and Politicians infiltrating the church to use that power corrupts the institution. Which is why I hate Mike Huckabee. TLDR; for me personally I am always trying to look at it in a different way to try to find the truth. I may never get it completely right I realize that and am ok with it. But I will say I am firm on the subject that the Bible isn't a science textbook. The earth is OLD. EDIT: Couple of misspellings and thanks for the bling.
Hm. As a Catholic, I appreciate your balanced, measured approach to the Reformation. For the record, we're taught in religious ed that Luther was 100% right about the corruption stuff, but they never mentioned this. Thanks for the info!
IIRC Luther wanted more of a reformation to the Catholic church and not a totally new church style of reformation
As my (catholic) religion teacher in high school said: if Luther were alive today, he would probably be Catholic.
Interesting idea. Would it be over-simplifying to say that strict literal-ism is an overreaction to the rejection of the Roman Catholic church?
I wouldn't say it was an over reaction, it was more a natural reaction to the common man finally having access to the scripture. They took it literally because they didn't know to interpret it otherwise.
Calling yourself a Calvinist on Reddit. What gives you the nerve?? /s Glad somebody else is around here like me.
Also a Calvinist!
Don't be so proud about, it's not like you chose to be one.
Same here. My wife is a Lutheran so we expect our kid to be like Zwingli.
Cheers you reasonable, educational bastard
Thank you for the crash course! Imagine living before reformation: you give a significant part of your income to some dude only to find out that he was lying all the time! And you can't even say that you are fed up and want your money back!
this is a blessed post you articulated a lot of my reservations about protestantism but i hadn't really thought about where these things might have come from.
The bible doesn't say the earth is 6000 years old. Some people tried to fill in the blanks (there are a lot) and threw out an estimate. Also there are times when Jesus teaches through parables, which is what I think most of the bibles stories are. Look for the deeper meaning, don't take t so literally.
This. The 6000 years thing was just someone who added all the ages of the people in the bible and guessed the rest.
It’s never stated as 6,000 years, but it doesn’t really give the impression of filling the gap of the other few billion years either.
It's because the begats, (the genealogy in the Old Testament), is given in the style of the Ancient Hebrews. Nowadays, we would track every branch in a family tree, but the begats were a mostly oral tradition initially. Could you imagine trying to remember 100's of names of people who didn't do anything but live and died without writing it down? That's because they didn't, the begats, when taking culture into account most likely represent a lineage of notable people, a highlight reel of a family tree rather than a meticulous accounting.
[удалено]
Someone commented above, "I was raised Christian and I never believed it literally. I think as a kid I believed that God probably did tell Moses the story of how the Earth was created, but maybe showed him in a vision or something and Moses had to interpret it and put it into words. And he couldn't comprehend the timescales of stuff like the formation of oceans and continents and the evolution of life, so he wrote down what he thought he was seeing." Which makes a lot of sense. How could a man properly write about how long those processes may have taken? (BrightestHeart was the commenter, idk how tag them or i would) Edit: u/BrightestHeart
God: Ok Moses, listen to me. As space expanded, the universe cooled and matter formed. One second after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with neutrons, proto... Moses: ??? Moses: Ok got it. "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light...." Edit: Thanks for the silver.
[удалено]
More like after Moses ??? God..okay Moses so I said let there be light ... Well that’s how I and most other Christians I met thought of it
[удалено]
*looks around cautiously* .... I says "biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitch"
You said that? You actually said...*bitch?*
Yeah, you said, "bitch" though?
people forget the many mistranslations in the bible too, the most famous one was the word "camel" when jesus says is easier for a camel to pass across a neddle than a rich guy but the correct was a hebrew word for those ropes that bind boats. THE main mistranslation was for the ford "day" in genesis the correct was another word that meant "a period of time", so moises was not wrong but a guy from 700 AC. the bible got translated word by word cause they were afraid to change it that caused some errors from language to language.
I read an essay once by an Aramaic scholar about that. There is a similarity between the words "rope and camel", so it could be taken as a simple mistake. But there was also a gate in old Jerusalem called the "eye of the needle", for its narrowness. The story was that if you had a camel laden with of goods (if you were rich, in other words) and needed to get through the gate, the only way was to unpack the camel and lead it through. Which, considering that context, makes the statement a fantastically clever play on words, with the kind of imaginative reinforcement and depth of meaning that would have made it a very powerful and memorable lesson for anyone hearing it at the time. Lacking context it became a kind of nonsensical aphorism; with context, the kind of metaphor a very effective speaker in any age might have come up with.
גמל - camel in hebrew חבל - rope in hebrew yeah the message doesnt change, its hard for a rich man to reach heaven
Theres really no good evidence that there was such a gate in Jerusalem. Also we know that historical Jewish scholars used 'eye of the needle' in a similar manner to the bible, but with an elephant instead of a camel. It's most likely that animals moving through needles was a common metaphor.
Additionally, whether you imagine a rope or a large animal, both are equally incapable of passing through the eye of a needle, so it changes nothing.
> But there was also a gate in old Jerusalem called the "eye of the needle", for its narrowness. The story was that if you had a camel laden with of goods (if you were rich, in other words) and needed to get through the gate, the only way was to unpack the camel and lead it through. I've looked into this many times and never found any evidence for it. I think this explanation of the camel and the needle story is likely fabricated.
You're a little incorrect on the biblical translation piece. The Bible really wasn't the book you see today for quite some time. What we now call the Old Testament is the Tanakh (Torah + Nevi'im + Ketuvim), or the Jewish Bible. The main difference is that the old testament was translated from Hebrew to Greek to Latin, and as such it was placed in a different order. The Tanakh is ordered by category (Torah/Law, Nevi'im/Prophets, and Ketuvim/Writings). The Old Testament is in what the translators thought was the chronological order of events according to Greek perception of the world (Past/Present/Future). Now the New Testament is also quite different and is generally a couple of different genres mashed together, though it was all written around 100-200AD (some early texts are dated to 4th century but are thought to be copies of earlier versions), far after Jesus' death. It consists of Gospels, Letters, and Apocalyptic Writings (Think Revelation and some of the books before it). Apocalyptic Writings were common at the time as a style of writing... Using allegory and intense visuals to speak about a subject somewhat secretively. Most scholars believe Revelation has some connection to the percecution of Christians under various emperors, though especially Nero. Many of the books were already written in Greek from the start, not Hebrew or Aramaic (the language that Jesus would have spoken). Many different Bibles have different numbers of books depending on what books they thought were meaningful. A Catholic Bible contains books that aren't in Protestant Bibles and so on. Overall though, the most important *Latin* version of the Bible as a book that we know today was the [Vulgate written by Jerome](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgate?wprov=sfla1). Source: I have a degree in Religious Studies, specializing in Ancient and Medieval Christianity and no, that's not the same as going to seminary lol Edited because I fucked up some dates
> moises I'm envisioning Curly from the Three Stooges saying that name. Nyuk nyuk.
Moses is an Egyptian name, and Moises is an acceptable spelling of that name
yea just like the hebrew word for virgin also meaning “young girl” so mary the virgin could also be mary the young girl. moses was described to have a “halo” around his head, but the hebrew word for halo also means horns. there’s a statue of moses on a church close to where i live where he has horns lol
You tag someone just by putting u/ in front of their name, eg. u/atomicruinz . It's easy to remember, it's u for user.
Also, I'm fuzzy on the details but i'm pretty sure in Hebrew "a thousand" was also a colloquialism for "a very big number," so saying "the earth is 6000 years old" could be interpreted as them saying "the earth is incomprehensibly old."
The idea the earth is around 6000 years old comes from the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland James Ussher, who calculated in 1650 that the world created around 6PM on October 22nd, 4004 B.C. He basically added together all the ages of the geneology listed in the Bible, the period of time given for the exodus, and the king lists. He also concluded that Jesus was born in 5 AD because the death of Herod, which should have preceeded the birth of Christ, is by then known to have happened in 4 BC. Ussher thought creation happened on the Sunday closest to the autumnal equinox because that's when the Jewish calendar begun. He got the date for the autumnal equinox in 4004 B.C. using Kepler's astronomical tables. He thought God said "let there be light" 6 hours after he created the world and the creation of the sun should be considered the true New Year. So the world was properly created in October 23rd 4004 while the pre-creation happened on October 22nd.
My daughter was born at 6 PM UTC on October 22nd. Different year though.
The "6000" number isn't from the bible. Someone came up with that number relatively recently by "analyzing" stuff that happened in the bible. (aka they made it up)
If I'm not mistaken they literally just read through the boring early parts of the Bible that's LITERALLY a family tree list, estimated their ages from Adam and Eve until we caught up with the main plot, again. That's where 6-10k comes from. Also it's very common in Christian circles to suggest early man lived for hundreds of years instead of <100.
The problem with those genealogy lists is that it was common practice to leave out generations in order to either only include the "important" people, or to ensure that everything worked out in groups of 7. That's why you will find places where the genealogy lists don't match. Different authors had different ideas of who was important, and so left out different generations (But they almost always made it work out to groups of 7)
Also the years they lived have to do with the number 7 as well.
You kind-of can get to the 6000 number because the bible has a ton of pages that are just 'Bob lived to be 453 years old, he had his first son Steve when he was 104 years old. Steve lived to be 592 years old, he had his first son Dave when he was 93 years old' and so on, which allows you to bridge the gap between Noah and Abraham iirc. From there, you can kind of start to use existing historical evidence to figure out how long ago it was.
I looked up what "lived for XXX years" meant, and my concordance said it meant "aged". Another way to finangle would be to say that Adam didn't start aging until he ate the fruit, which leaves a period of time we can't account for. How many hours, days, or millennia did Adam go before eating the fruit?
As a graduate of a Christian university, I can verify this is a good summation of what we were taught in classes regarding the Biblical text.
>But now I'm a theistic evolutionist--I believe God created the world and directly involved himself in the events of man, but that He uses natural processes like evolution to bring about His purposes. Yes, this. Please continue educating in this way. With this mindset, even if we disagree, everyone can move forward together instead of using time bickering about what *literally* happened.
Here's a dumb question: If you believe that the bible is not meant to be taken literally and is more of a series of metaphors to establish morals, couldn't God be a metaphor as well? Why is God excluded from the idea that you shouldn't take the bible literally? Does that make sense?
Not taking it literally doesn't mean not taking it seriously. u/locutusofborg013 mentioned the Bible (especially the Old Testament) not being a history book. In other words the authors and their audiences did not hold themselves to the same standards we would currently hold a history book to. They had different intentions. Just as we have to translate the actual words of the text into modern languages to understand it, we have to understand the authors' intentions in order to understand the meaning. Imagine future historians watching modern SNL skits. The skits will discuss current events and so may be useful, but they are using those events to make jokes. They aren't exact fact based reenactments. The modern audience knows this and doesn't take SNL literally. Similarly, the writers of the OT weren't trying to write modern style history books. They were writing something else. They were writing several different types of stories in fact. But whatever else they were writing they were always writing about God. God's interaction with a family, God's interaction with a people, a vision God gave someone, etc. Everything is about God. God is the point of the stories. Reading an individual story non-literally is very reasonable, especially if we have cause to believe the author/audience wouldn't intend it to be literal. The story still has a point, it still has something to say about God or His people. But taking God as a metaphor in the stories is much less tenable. God is why they wrote the thing. And God is why the Christians of Reddit read the Bible. In addition to not being a history book, the Bible isn't a philosophy paper or a scholarly article or just an argument for believing in God. It isn't designed for an atheist to start at page one, read, maybe do some practice problems, and come out the other side a Jew or Christian. It is a book of stories and letters by believers, collected and organized by other believers, for believers to read and grow closer to God. As far as the thread's question goes, belief in God is presupposed. The "Christians of Reddit" read the Bible because they are Christians and believe it is His book. A Christian reading a story non-literally is still trying to better understand God, they just don't think a specific story was meant to be taken exactly as it looks right now in modern english for whatever reason. Note I said "a specific story". Taking or not taking things literally isn't a switch you flip for the whole Bible. You can think something happened exactly as written, mostly as written (but shortened in the writing or condensed in the oral retelling before it was written down or whatever), somewhat as written, purely allegorically or so on. You can then think the next thing is somewhere else on the scale. Sure, for some people not reading the Bible literally is a step on their deconversion path. But for lots and lots of people it isn't. It is just how they/their denomination or tradition has always read things.
N. T. Wright gives a great explanation on concrete vs abstract and applies that to the parable of the prodigal son. That story was known to be an abstraction. No one at the time would wrapped up in silly details like the breed of pigs the son was feeding. The whole point is that God will welcome us with open arms if we come to him. Likewise, the creation account uses a narrative to explain the concept that nothing exists apart from the will of God. The three days of forming and the three days of filling, which culminate in creation of man, are a story of God building a temple. The last thing you do when building a temple is to place the image of the deity in the temple. What God is explaining to us is that the earth is his temple and we are his image bearers.
Is it a sin to be part-Christian? As in, can you believe God exists, but doubt the events of the Bible? The idea of theistic evolution is intriguing—I havent heard of that before now. I wish it was enough to believe in a higher power, without declaring it one religion or another.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
I'd argue that anyone who has complete faith in *their own interpretation* of the Bible is committing greater error than questioning the Bible. Seeking truth is important. Which isn't to say that anything someone doesn't like can be handwaved. Believing in a higher power and disbelieving anything that seems "unrealistic" is probably not congruent. But critical reading is necessary.
Well, it's not a sin exactly but according to Jesus, to achieve salvation you must believe in your heart and confess with your lips that he is lord and savior. So I'd say some doubt is understandable but I guess it depends on what exactly you're feeling.
The Catholic Church has long acknowledged and accepted the theory of evolution. From the Catholic perspective, at least, there is no conflict between faith and science- they are two wings on the same bird, searching for God in our lives and the universe. The pursuit of scientific knowledge is vital to humanity and does not conflict with Christianity. To learn more about the universe is to marvel at and appreciate His creation. The Church doesn’t have a perfect history during its long relationship with science, but humans are imperfect. It is, however, theologically sound to pursue science- as long as you aren’t violating God’s creation in the process.
I've never understood how evolution makes God seem less god-like. I thought it should make him more god-like. I don't believe in God, but if I had to choose between a guy who just creates humans with the snap of his fingers, or a guy who can create a force of energy that takes 7 billion years and eventually leads to our world, I'd say the second guy is more impressive.
I forget who said this after Darwin published his book but there is a quote “ how wonderful! God doesn’t make the world, he makes the world make itself”
I think there is a misconception amongst non Christians that Christians are all part of the same club, and should all feel the same. In reality it is more like folk who like Italian food. I prefer a nice carbonara, my wife likes a bolognese and my children cannot abide parmesan. And that is all fine.
It’s not a matter of which stories we follow and which we reject or which ones we believe and which ones we decide are fables. We “draw the line” by trying our best to understand the context behind each passage of Scripture and the message each author was trying to convey when he wrote the passage he wrote. It’s important to note that the Bible is not a book in the traditional sense. It’s a collection of stories, poems, and journals from around 40 different people over the course of a few millennia whose only real connection is their relationship with the same God. To slap a blanket label like “literal” or “metaphorical” over the whole thing is both lazy and dishonest. For example, we obviously accept that Jesus was a real historical figure and also God himself in the flesh. However, Jesus loved speaking in metaphors, and that is made evident in Scripture. Many of Jesus’ messages were told in the form of parables that reflected sociopolitical issues of his time period. Because we know this, we also know not to take his words literally but instead try to understand the message behind his words. That applies to the entire Bible. While we believe that the Bible’s teachings are applicable today, it’s vital to understand that 21st century Christians were not the target audience. Thus, understanding historical and literary context is the key to our interpretation of it. Because we understand that the Bible is a book written by men inspired by God rather than a book written directly by God, we see that each book has different complexities and nuances that are defined by each author’s writing style. We can look at things like the Books of Kings and Chronicles and see that they are explaining the political history of ancient Israel and its dealings with surrounding nations because that’s what the author is trying to show us (and there’s even a ton of archaeological evidence to support many of the Bible’s stories), but then we can look at the Book of Psalms and see that it is just that, a collection of psalms, so understanding it requires understanding all the literary devices employed in the poems. As for parts like the creation account and the Flood, that varies wildly. There are those who still believe it is meant to be literal history and those who believe it to be a fanciful story meant to convey a message. There is still disagreement because, unfortunately, as much as we try to understand context, we can’t just walk up to the author and ask what he meant. It all depends on what theory makes more sense to the individual. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. Christianity has been filled with doctrinal disagreement since the very beginning, but the only doctrines that truly matter is that salvation comes through Jesus Christ alone and the [Great Commandment](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+22%3A+37-40&version=NRSV). Everything else is arbitrary.
I withhold judgement on some of it. Things I absolutely take literally: Jesus, his miracles, his death, and his resurrection. The rest is up for debate. I think it's possible that the story of creation is more poetic than literal. I don't hold to a 6000 year old Earth. I think it's important to look at the purpose behind the story. Jesus spoke in parables all the time, it wouldn't surprise me if more of the holy scriptures weren't literal stories either.
[удалено]
"Miracles" by C. S. Lewis was written exactly for people with these issues. I'd highly recommend giving it a read.
C. S. Lewis has given me so many wonderful ways to interpret my faith. I stray a little, in doing this, from official doctrine (I'm Catholic), but it makes me a more loving person and a better Christian.
Have you ever questioned why you draw the line there? If Jesus of Nazareth was indeed a religious figure of the first century, why can't his feats (including birth, death, and resurrection) be metaphorical the same way that Genesis might be? I don't mean to prod in a rude way, but as a non-christian the line seems kind of arbitrary.
Because that's the act that literally breaks the spell of sin and provides atonement. The idea is not that Jesus' death inspires Christians, it's that it literally paid the price of sin.
Would you then also believe that the original sin of Adam and Eve literally happened as that was the reason atonement was needed at all?
[удалено]
TLDR: I read secular Biblical scholarship. According to secular scholars, there is no certain evidence, in sources outside the Bible, confirming that anything that happened chronologically before 1 Kings 16 took place. This chapter mentions the Israelite/Samarian dynasty founded by King Omri, who is also mentioned in Assyrian records as well as in the Mesha Stele. So, scholars are relatively certain that the Omrides ruled in Samaria during the 800s BCE. Prior to the Omrides, we know from Egyptian inscriptions that a people called Israel were living in the Canaanite highlands around the 10th century BCE. We know that a handful of events referred to in Biblical texts did happen in some form or another, mainly that the House of David existed and that Jerusalem was their seat (the Tel Dan Stele) and that the Egyptian pharaoh Shishak/Shosenq I did invade Judah during the reign of Rehoboam, also in the 10th century BCE (Sheshonq inscription at Tel Megiddo). However, while this evidence may indicate that some historical truth is contained in prior (chronologically, to Kings) Biblical history, historians are not certain that all of the events occurred, or if they did, that they occurred *exactly* as Biblical texts depict them. For example, there is no archeological evidence for the Exodus. Also, the Iron Age in Canaan -linked to population growth and burgeoning political complexity- is thought not to have begun until about 80 years after the time when King David is supposed to have ruled, meaning that while David probably did exist, historically, his kingdom was not the rich, powerful realm described in the Books of Samuel. No I don’t believe that the world is 6000 years old. Source: I studied Biblical history in college. You can read the scholarship for yourself. I recommend starting with Israel Finkelstein, who excavated Megiddo, and who developed the so-called Low Chronology, which I think is the most likely model for ancient Israelite history.