If you aren't a Bible hater, then my bad. You sure go out of your way to discredit it, thought it seems.
If you're going to say you're attempting to help me re-examine my belifes in it, then I will say I am more than comfortable. I aint your run of the mill "what ma pasture say" type church goer that follows and does everything some dude in a robe tells me from his elevated platform.
I don't go out of my way to discredit it, I simply think attempting to interpret it from a literalistic perspective is grossly disrespectful to the source.
From the evidence we have, the events of the Bible did not happen in this world exactly as described, word for word. The point is it doesn't have to. The Bible can inform our morality, inform our understanding of history, of philosophy, of the desires and dreams and fears and failings and aspirations of the peoples described therein. It can provide us comfort and hope, and yes, even faith even if not in a literal God in the ideal that man can strive to become.
The Bible is a work of philosophy, a work of poetry, a work of both great love and great hatred, of joy and of despair. It is so very closely linked to the human condition as we know it I find it not at all unsurprising it appeals to so many. The Bible, I would say, more than anything else, taken as a collective work has driven the development of modern history from the final days of the Roman Empire through the middle ages of Europe where the European mentality then took on a global scope in the colonial period and the enlightenment. Even the most disparate cultures in the world such as Japan and China have westernized considerably and westernization cannot be divorced from, if not religious, at the very least cultural Christianity. Christianity is the heart of civilization as we know it.
That all said, like my initial point said, it is incomplete. Unfinished. Jesus said to sin no more and that is what we can aspire to. To better ourselves. To take the lessons we learn from the Bible and apply them to the world as we know it. To apply them to ourselves. The Bible is a reflection of the moral and spiritual truths as they were known to a certain group of people many, many centuries ago, and to me that presents a choice. We can either assume these people were the absolute pinnacle of human morality, that their writings reflect an absolutely perfect understanding of how things were and should be, or we can assume they were imperfect humans who did the best they could in the world where they lived and that we can take the lessons they teach us about loving our neighbor, about caring for the less fortunate, about forgiving those who trespass against us (paraphrased Matthew), and strive to be better than they were. To make a world that better reflects those values and to maybe instill in the generations that come the drive and the capacity to do better than we did.
What it isn't is a science book, a literal telling of history word for word as it happened. Nor, for that matter, was that what it was intended to be. When you start to get into arguments about is the mustard seed the smallest, when in fact we know it isn't, is to lose the fucking point. Once you get bogged down in the minutia of trying to find ways to make the words of events as described conform exactly to reality with things like the Earth having pillars or bats being a kind of bird or why we still have trees after the flood you aren't looking at what makes the Bible important, what makes it useful, what makes it even worth being understood at all. Those are stories, built of the knowledge of the day by flawed and in many ways ignorant human beings who were trying to teach greater truths.
For example, does the tale of Noah teach us to stick firm to our convictions, our missions in the face of ridicule? Does it teach us to be beneficent to our neighbors even when they do not return the kindness? Does it teach us to persevere through great hardship and tragedy even as the world comes down around us? Does it teach us to look out for our family? If the answer is yes does it matter one fucking whit if the entire planet was under water at some point?
Do you believe the Bible loses some value if the parables it uses to teach aren't literally true? You remember Jesus himself taught in parables pretty much every time he taught, right? Why should the rest of the work be different?
My problem isn't with the Bible, it is when people start treating the Bible like a text book causing other knowledge to be obscured and losing track of the important points to begin with.
