10/05/2005

Very interesting

The headline is misleading, and I suspect the article is more than a little colored by British perceptions of organized religion. It's not so much about "true vs. false" as it's about literal vs. allegorical.

It also gives a decent definition of "intelligent design" as it's commonly used. That's for whoever was asking about it - Dan, I think.

A good laugh to round things out

# posted by Brandon at 1:34 PM 2 comments Home

2 Comments:

Blogger Justin said...

Funny, my psych. professor brought up this news today when I was talking to him about individual differences and biological influences on cognitive abilities (we just went over Darwin last week in class). He said something about the Catholic church now being more open-minded than other Christian branches.

I particularly enjoy the end of this article- where they list UNTRUE things, like creating Eve from Adam, and then TRUE things, like, for example, the Ten Commandents.

3:45 PM  
Blogger Brandon said...

Yeah, again, it's more along the lines of "allegorical" and "literal". But even then, you get into trouble.

For example, there's a story in Joshua 10 that talks about the sun and the moon stopping in place. The question "did this literally happen?" belies the nature and purpose of the story. Yes, on a very basic level, you could argue that of course it literally happened, and was designed to show people the power of God, etc.

Well, these days natural disasters and other such things hardly faze us. I shouldn't say that - rather, we understand them. We have Accu-Weather forecasts and nice little diagrams that show us how earthquakes work. We don't necessarily know why certain things happen, but we almost always know how they happen.

So the meaning of the story has changed. When Joshua says "the sun and moon stood still" does he mean that literally, or is he using language to describe something he doesn't fully understand?

I would argue that the details are not important. Whether it was a natural occurrence or the physical manifestation of God, in essence the God of the Bible would have set any such natural occurrence in motion anyway, right? So the point of the story changes, especially since it was written in a time and culture so far removed from ours that it's not possible for us to relate to it directly. It sounds a little inhumane to be slaughtering all these people mercilessly, right? It's easy to say that from our vantage point. If we had grown up in that culture we might think differently ... it doesn't make it any more "right" or "wrong", but those labels tend to cause more trouble than they are worth anyway.

I'm not trying to prosetylize here, I'm just saying that a lot of things that people get so worked up about (i.e., the literal and factual truth of every letter in the Bible) are really not worth fighting over. Thinking about, yes, but not fighting over. Ten Commandments in the courtroom? Who cares? It has absolutely no impact on my personal life. Even if I were arrested and put on trial - even if it was for something unconstitutional - even if it was for something egregiously in violation of my basic human rights - having a list of things that Jewish people are and are not supposed to do hanging on the wall isn't going to do anything for my case.

So it is interesting to hear the Catholic Church say things like the Bible is the word of God translated into human language and therefore full of inconsistencies and inaccuracies that we don't understand. I think that's a valid point, in fact I was discussing this not too long ago. But it's weird that the Catholics would acknowledge this - of course, it's a step forward, definitely. Anything that combats fundamentalism and legalism is the right way to go.

I think it's about time that Christians got their minds off such shallow things and onto the real issues - stop putting people down for what they don't believe, and start accepting people for who they are.

4:28 PM  

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