Posted: Aug 21, 2018 5:20 pm
aban57 wrote:Wortfish wrote:Genesis, however, is not one of them. It is a creation myth used to explain God's purposes.
Who decides that exactly ? Who decides what has to be taken litterally, and what is myth ? And how do these people know they're right, compared to the other people having a different interpretation ?
I mean, if you believe the Bible is sacred, transmitted to us by God, who are you to say that some parts are myths ? Shouldn't you believe it to the letter ?
This has been a slow, steady retreat by (most) religions over the last four centuries, as scientific progress has destroyed one myth after another, at which point those myths have been reclassified to the status of "oh that's just allegory", where they were previously required to be accepted as gospel truth. What remains now as required truth is the more vague theological obfuscations that are not susceptible (yet) to scientific examination.
Hence God is now not an angry Jewish man sitting on his throne controlling the weather, but instead is a vaporiferous-cloud-of-essence, a consciousness-existing-outside-of-time-and space, an all-encompassing-love-field, and similar blobulous wibble. I don't think there has been an orderly examination of what bits of scripture are true and what are, erm, subject to discretionary interpretation. Instead the retreat into the far reaches of epistomological deep-space has been piecemeal, forced by the somewhat uneven breakthroughs in our empirical knowledge of the world around us.