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Quote by: Zhavric  Nope. Not without sacrificing any and all intellectual honesty.
I haven't read the thread yet, but I'm willing to bet my mustache that no one has pointed out the fact that the bible was written by human beings who were absolutely clueless about the natural world. It's disingenuous to believe that were implying evolution in the chapters of genesis the way they were implying ship building in the fairy tale of the flood.
Furthermore, this line of reasoning falls apart when we look at how most Christians treat the rest of the bible because you're establishing a dangerously honest precedent. What you're effectively saying is "a passage in the bible that science has determined to be impossible is likely figurative and doesn't literally mean what it says." However, you still need many critical bits of the bible to be literal for Christianity to work. If you have a figurative fall of man then why do you need a literal savior to sacrifice himself. For that matter, how can you claim that Jesus came back from the dead? Isn't coming back from the dead every bit as impossible as the Earth forming in a day or Noah building an entire ark with his bare hands?
You're better off embracing intellectual honesty and discarding the whole mess. |
The literal savior was not saving people from sins, but fullfilling the Golden Rule (do unto others). Allowing God to suffer via the person of Jesus all the hardships that creation suffered. Therefore God is not above his own golden rule. For God suffered sickness, judgement, and death as in that story via and through Jesus, along with a number of other things that I did not mention, such as rejection and temptation, and speaking but not being comprehended such as what happened to the people at the tower of Babylon. The story is not fully understood yet, by some relgions.
The Noah story has it's symbolic messages that are used to eplain a number of things.
Now Mary M. had a vision of Jesus after he was put to death, that he returned. Many people feel the presence of a loved one after they die, and some might even vision a ghostly image of that person, or see them in the faces of other people. That is not uncommon. It was a vision simular to the dream that a diciple had about Jesus walking on water. Dreams and visions are all a important part of any religion. Daniel had a lot of them. For such visionary dreams are the terminology of symbolisms that can be interpreted once one knows how to do that with success. And that is part of how things work relaitive to the human phyic.