Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Thor Q. Mada · 05-02-2008, 08:18 PM

I think it was to be taken literally as it conformed with scientific knowledge and the morals of the time it was compiled. Taking it literally now is so rediculous that there is basically no adjective strong enough to express it.
Poor fundies. An uphill task everywhere but in the US.

Buck Laser · 05-02-2008, 09:14 PM

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Originally Posted by makerowner

OK, I should probably clarify what I said. I obviously don't think that Psalms for example was written as history. What I should have said is that I see no reason for the ostensibly historical narratives of the Bible to be interpreted as allegorical.
And I agree with you about the Song of Songs; it's my second favourite book of the OT, after Ecclesiastes.

I guess we're on the same page, then. Kings, Chronicles and the rest are definitely historical. The accuracy of the history has be be judged by human standards, not divine. Frankly, of all the OT, the historical books are where my knowledge is weakest--maybe I should work on that.

GakuseiDon · 05-02-2008, 09:23 PM

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Originally Posted by Dentarthurdent

One of the things that non-fundy Christians always say in defense of their religion is that the Bible was not meant to be taken literally. I disagree. I think the Bible was meant by its authors to be taken completely literally, just as every other mythology in history was taken literally by their respective believers.

So, what do you think?

Why do non-fundy Christians have to defend the Bible, if they don't think that it is true? IOW, moderate Christians (like myself) CAN say that books like Genesis was meant to be taken literally. We don't need to defend the Bible as being "true", either literally or metaphorically. I think claiming that the Bible is all true -- either literally or metaphorically -- is the province of the fundamentalist. I had a debate which touched on this earlier:
http://iidb.infidels.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=222543

smugg · 05-03-2008, 11:02 AM

I imagine that, much like today, the ancient Greeks, Hebrews, Algonquins, &cetera could be grouped according to class and education and that membership in one or more of these groups would be an indicator of whether a person accepted their society's myths as literal. While Plato, a man of letters as well as a brilliant thinker, saw little reason to hold conversations with Demeter, your average Hellene farm worker probably felt it was one way he could influence his success and safety.

patcleaver · 05-03-2008, 11:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dentarthurdent

One of the things that non-fundy Christians always say in defense of their religion is that the Bible was not meant to be taken literally. I disagree. I think the Bible was meant by its authors to be taken completely literally, just as every other mythology in history was taken literally by their respective believers.

So, what do you think?

If Mark was intentionally writing fiction, then he just wanted to entertain people.

If Mark was writing pagan anti-Jewish propaganda then he knew he was making it up and he was hoping that it would be take literally.

If Mark was writing midrash, like Honi the circle maker, then he would think that his allegorical references to the Jewish Scriptures would not be taken literally, but would lead his audience to spiritual truths.

If Mark was just reporting urban rumors that he had heard then he might not have believed them or at least he may have had serious doubts.

If Mark thought he was somehow mining truth from the Jewish Scriptures, then he might have thought that it was true, or he might just have wanted to see whether other people might think it was true.

If Mark was writing down an oral tradition then he may or may not have believed what he wrote. He may have been preserving an oral tradition that he did not personally believe.

We have no idea what Mark was thinking or what Mark believed. We do not know who Mark was, why he wrote his gospel, when he wrote his gospel, who his intended audience was, or what they believed.

jeffevnz · 05-03-2008, 02:33 PM

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Originally Posted by karlmarx

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Originally Posted by jeffevnz

Then there's the fact that the Bible is very detailed, which is unusual for a metaphor. It lists numbers of animals, tribes, who begat whom, etc. You normally use metaphors to avoid details and just capture the main ideas...

That's not how myth works. Myth thrives on detail. Consider the richness of Greek mythology, for instance. Consider the various contradictory myths in Greek culture: they could not all be factual. We're talking about a time before mass media and before science: myth had a role to inspire and also entertain, not just teach. Did Greeks believe the details in the Odyssey to be factual? Unlikely. Yet they would have argued that it nevertheless contained universal truths, as indeed it does.

The Odyssey is much more of a legendary history than a religious belief...

As to whether the Greeks believed their myths to be literally true, the fact that they executed people for heresy would be pretty hard to understand otherwise.

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And all of that ignores the obvious question of why the Bible would be written as a metaphor. Why couldn't the writers just say what they meant? Why wouldn't they? At best, it's an unjustified assumption.

They could hardly express what they meant in modern terms that would satisfy you, particularly in regards to cosmogony myths. What would you have them say?

A mediocre author could write, "Man is the plaything of the elements, and life is a homecoming filled with suffering". A better author would write the Odyssey. Which do you think is more effective?

The problem is not with the authors, but with the readers.

I would have had them say nothing, because they didn't know what they were talking about. And if they did somehow have access to information about how the world was created (say, by divine inspiration), they certainly had the language available to decribe it more accurately than they did. Eg, saying God created the Earth for a few billion years, then created plants at some point, created animals a few hundred million years later. It's not like they lacked the words for any of this. As I said, they just didn't know what they were talking about.

And no, the problem is not generally with the readers, nor with the authors. The problem is with the people who believe what the book says without even having read it. And the problem is with the people who have read it, but have done so with the assumption that it's divinely inspired, and therefore haven't noticed that it sounds like ignorant, bronze-age nonsense.

Solitary Man · 05-03-2008, 02:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeffevnz

Quote:

Originally Posted by karlmarx

That's not how myth works. Myth thrives on detail. Consider the richness of Greek mythology, for instance. Consider the various contradictory myths in Greek culture: they could not all be factual. We're talking about a time before mass media and before science: myth had a role to inspire and also entertain, not just teach. Did Greeks believe the details in the Odyssey to be factual? Unlikely. Yet they would have argued that it nevertheless contained universal truths, as indeed it does.

The Odyssey is much more of a legendary history than a religious belief...

As to whether the Greeks believed their myths to be literally true, the fact that they executed people for heresy would be pretty hard to understand otherwise.

Quote:

They could hardly express what they meant in modern terms that would satisfy you, particularly in regards to cosmogony myths. What would you have them say?

A mediocre author could write, "Man is the plaything of the elements, and life is a homecoming filled with suffering". A better author would write the Odyssey. Which do you think is more effective?

The problem is not with the authors, but with the readers.

I would have had them say nothing, because they didn't know what they were talking about. And if they did somehow have access to information about how the world was created (say, by divine inspiration), they certainly had the language available to decribe it more accurately than they did. Eg, saying God created the Earth for a few billion years, then created plants at some point, created animals a few hundred million years later. It's not like they lacked the words for any of this. As I said, they just didn't know what they were talking about.

And no, the problem is not generally with the readers, nor with the authors. The problem is with the people who believe what the book says without even having read it. And the problem is with the people who have read it, but have done so with the assumption that it's divinely inspired, and therefore haven't noticed that it sounds like ignorant, bronze-age nonsense.

They didn't execute Socrates for heresy. They executed him for corrupting the youth. And such an execution was a very rare event in Athenian history.

Solitary Man · 05-03-2008, 02:44 PM

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Originally Posted by Toto

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Originally Posted by makerowner

Sorry, I don't want to read a whole book on the subject just to see if you've got a point or not. Can you explain some of the evidence for this in say, a couple paragraphs?

I have previously used the argument that Matthew and Luke's treatment of Mark is evidence that they thought Mark was fiction. Nice to see SM coming around.

At one point I tracked down a copy of Vines' The Problem of Markan Genre: The Gospel of Mark and the Jewish Novel (or via: amazon.co.uk), but I discovered that Vines is an evangelical scholar who makes certain assumptions about historicity, and his book does nothing to solve the question of whether Mark (whatever its genre) has anything to add to the problem of historicity.

There is a review of Vines here:

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For the author, what works best with Mark's chronotope is comparison to the Jewish novels. It might come as a surprise to a reader that the content so specifically highlighted by the book's subtitle is really addressed only here, toward the end, in about sixteen pages. The Jewish novels depict a world that is considered open to divine intervention, although such intervention hardly ever actually appears in the story lines. Instead, representatives or emissaries of God do the work. They are characters typically beset by weakness or marginal social status, depending on God and risking their lives in such dependence as they act. Unlike apocalypticism, the Jewish novels are more realistic. Their chronotope is therefore "realistic-apocalyptic: the anticipation of divine deliverance and the actualization of divine sovereignty within a realistic time and space" (153).

Like the Jewish novels, aspects of Mark's story have the sense of eschatological fulfillment: Mark 1:2-3, with conflation of prophetic texts about God's coming; 13:26, about seeing the Son of Man coming on the clouds; and 14:62, about someday catching sight of the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power. However, Jesus is depicted as genuinely disenfranchised in Mark; he is in conflict with many other enfranchised powers, always apparently on the verge of fulfilling nothing too much or too obvious. The chronotope of Mark is in "real, historical time," which is different from the Jewish novels that are set in "pseudo-historical time." Mark also differs from the Jewish novels in that, unlike the protagonists in them, Jesus in Mark is pictured neither as pious nor ritually observant. Even so, Mark and the Jewish novels still share the same basic chronotope, and by the author's lights that puts them into the same genre.

I'm not "coming around". You just have reinterpreted my opinion, steadfast for years now, to fit yours.

karlmarx · 05-04-2008, 12:54 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeffevnz

As to whether the Greeks believed their myths to be literally true, the fact that they executed people for heresy would be pretty hard to understand otherwise.

Someone already explained that Socrates was put on trial for corrupting the youth, not for heresy.

Maybe an example could have been Anaxagoras, who was executed for impiety. However, he had also been closely associated with Pericles - and his enemies sought to discredit the student through the teacher, bringing up trumped up charges against Anaxagoras. This shows that many of these charges are a cover for more mundane reasons.

However, it is significant that in these sorts of cases, the accusation was of "impiety" (i.e. disrespect to the gods), not "heresy". It's understandable that a superstitious society sought to eliminate the possibility of angering the gods. This was what charges of "impiety" related to.

"Heresy" is a different issue: it relates to unorthodox religious teachings. There has never, as far as I know, been a case of a charge of heresy been brought against someone in classical Greece.

The classical world was a melting pot of cults and religions: many of the myths that were told at the time were contradictory, yet people did not see a problem with this because they were not interpreted literally. Ancient religion was syncretic: myths from minor cults were absorbed into the main religions, gods of different religions were identified with one another - and there was never an issue of which myths were "genuine" and which were "false". If it were true that the ancients believed myths were history - then how can this be explained?

Quote:

They could hardly express what they meant in modern terms that would satisfy you, particularly in regards to cosmogony myths. What would you have them say?

A mediocre author could write, "Man is the plaything of the elements, and life is a homecoming filled with suffering". A better author would write the Odyssey. Which do you think is more effective?

The problem is not with the authors, but with the readers.

I would have had them say nothing, because they didn't know what they were talking about.

Unfortunately, they could not have known this. They were addressing issues of immense importance, issues that had to be addressed. The reasons for life, suffering, death: everyone must deal with these in some way or another. If they believed that the subject under discussion was beyond the ability of humans to verify or disprove, then it's entirely appropriate that they deal with the issues through myth.

The ancients didn't create myths about subjects that they thought they could, in principle, learn about: they created myths about subjects that they thought transcended their experience.

The fact that they were creating myths about subjects they couldn't know about wasn't a problem for them - they KNEW they couldn't know about these subjects, which is why they resorted to myth. The problem is with the modern interpretation of myth-as-false-history, which attempts to reinterpret myth through post-Enlightenment glasses.

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05-02-2008, 08:18 PM	#31
Thor Q. Mada Veteran Member Join Date: Sep 2001 Location: Asia Posts: 3,558	I think it was to be taken literally as it conformed with scientific knowledge and the morals of the time it was compiled. Taking it literally now is so rediculous that there is basically no adjective strong enough to express it. Poor fundies. An uphill task everywhere but in the US.

05-03-2008, 11:02 AM	#34
smugg Regular Member Join Date: Oct 2000 Location: Texas, USA Posts: 270	I imagine that, much like today, the ancient Greeks, Hebrews, Algonquins, &cetera could be grouped according to class and education and that membership in one or more of these groups would be an indicator of whether a person accepted their society's myths as literal. While Plato, a man of letters as well as a brilliant thinker, saw little reason to hold conversations with Demeter, your average Hellene farm worker probably felt it was one way he could influence his success and safety.

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