Posted: Nov 27, 2013 2:36 pm
CharlieM wrote:Well written or not, which books of the Bible do you consider to be storybooks? Even if you consider all of them to be story books, 66(protestant) or 73(Catholic) are much more than a story book.
Do you really consider it relevant that chapters of a book are referred to as 'books'?
Seems like pedantry to me.
CharlieM wrote:tolman wrote:While it might contain some cultural heritage, much of that is self-serving and of dubious historical value.
And not really related to my culture.
Why should I care any more about Jewish creation myths or Jewish land-ownership-myths than African or Indian or Japanese or Native American ones?
You shouldn't care if you don't feel like caring. But does your lack of interest make any of these subjects "childish"?
No, my lack of interest doesn't 'make' any subject anything.
If I considered something good or bad or fascinating or boring or adult or childish, my attention would depend on those assessments, not the other way around.
Similarly, I assume that someone who had been made to read the bible as a child and who decided not to bother reading it any more as an adult likely wouldn't be declaring the book childish because of their lack of interest, but would have a lack of interest because they saw little content in the book relevant to their life as an adult.
CharlieM wrote:When I was at school I was put right off Shakespeare. Even at that time I knew that my dislike was not so much due to Shakespeare, but due to my ability to understand his writings. If I wanted to blame anyone other than myself it would have to be my English teachers and not Shakespeare. I now appreciate the wisdom in Shakespeare's writings although there is much of it I still don't understand.
Possibly if people were faced with teachers and/or parents demanding that they believed the stories Shakespeare wrote were all definitively correct, more people would grow up seeing Shakespeare as some childish thing to be put to one side.
CharlieM wrote:And do you think that immoral stories are necessarily childish?
No. I think that a book which has immoral actions passing as moral doesn't qualify to be a moral guide in the way many believers would claim it did.
If people are able to look at the tales and work out the good from bad for themselves and remember the tales as illustrations of good and bad morality, then it is no more a guide to morality than a newspaper full of stories of good and bad behaviour is.
CharlieM wrote:Again people who have no interest in Juvenal would not tend to call his writings childish.
As above, if people had something forced upon them while children with a demand they saw it as Perfect Truth, then once they come to see the flaws in it as they grow up, they are likely to see it (and the people who promoted it) as more being childish than they might have appeared with a different presentation. That's one of the downsides of attempted indoctrination.