They truly believe everything stated happened.
You almost certainly live in America, and almost certainly in the South. "Everything in the bible literally happened the way it was written down" Is a completely unhinged heresy that has only ever existed in America in the last century or two. It's spreading to places where Evangelical fascists have a lot of influence, but it's still a new, utterly insane, idea.
Catholics don't (shouldn't) believe it, The vast majority of protestants don't believe it, Orthodox don't believe it, Coptics don't believe it, Nestorians don't believe it but Idk if they're still around.
The only "denomination" that believes the bible is a literal account of things that literally happened are American Christian Fascists.
The bible isn't "A Metaphor", it's all kinds of crap. Accounts of lineages, quasi-histories, law codes, morality tales, The gospels are increasingly inventive psuedo biographies. The weird apocalyptic shit is mostly religious zealots writing political tracts at each other using religious language they understand but that would be completely opaque to the Romans oppressing them back at the day.
Most of the shit in Revelations is about the Roman Empire. It doesn't have anything to do with whores or dragons, those are just memes you don't understand because you weren't on 4Chan in 200ad.
The conflict between Rome and Christians was and remains extremely important bc it's a conflict between a big evil empire that grinds people up and spits them out, and a small community of righteous people who reject that evil empire and refuse to collaborate with it. This got a little confused when the Empire declared that it was now in charge of the religion, but the essential conflict between Empire and Christ is still being played out in places like Liberation Theology. Every century or two a bunch of Heretics start saying "Wait maybe we shouldn't be imperialist assholes who justify our war crimes by saying God is with us? Also we should stop having sex
and be vegetarians." Then whatever the dominant political clique is in power crushes them because it challenges their rule.If you let unhinged fascists tell you what the religion is you're going to get an unhinged fascist view of the religion. If you don't spend a lot of time studying a really complicated and weird phenomena stretching back like 6,000 years ago you're going to come to a lot of reductive and unhelpful conclusions.
Most of the shit in Revelations is about the Roman Empire. It doesn't have anything to do with whores or dragons, those are just memes you don't understand because you weren't on 4Chan in 200ad.
this made me laugh hard
It's almost literally true. There was this whole thing about having prophetic and relevatory dreams, and there was a whole set of coded language used to talk about that, and combined with some prophecies and cultural stories and stuff, if you moved in those circles Revelations would make a lot more sense because you understood all the memes and metaphors and cultural references. Iirc it mostly translates to "Nero is a fucking asshole and God is definitely going to kick his ass any day now". It's like the Punished Bernie meme circa 200ad. Imagine what the someone in 4100 ad is going to think about this shit
Yeah when revelations talks about a beast with seven heads and the seven hills, it's refering to Rome. And specifically making references to currency/coins with the seven hills on it, and with Nero on it.
It would be like modern day leftists joking about "in God we trust" and
being on the US dollar.
Nestorians are still around! There are some in China and the Assyrian Church of the East has Nestorian elements and counts him as a major Saint.
Cool. It's weird think about how institutions from deep history have survived in one way or another.
You almost certainly live in America, and almost certainly in the South. "Everything in the bible literally happened the way it was written down" Is a completely unhinged heresy that has only ever existed in America in the last century or two. It's spreading to places where Evangelical fascists have a lot of influence, but it's still a new, utterly insane, idea.
That's not particularly true. Evangelical Protestant Christianity has a massive foothold in Sub Saharan Africa. In part thanks to colonialism and old school missionaries, and also thanks to modern missionaries and American support. It's why you see news about Kenya or Uganda trying to pass some new homophobic law. Or stories about churches in South Africa spraying attendants with bug spray and raising people from the dead. So many people here take the Bible almost completely literally, and have done so for a long time. Sometimes even completely detached from American Evangelical ideology in their literal interpretation of the Bible.
And also no one, including the most steadfast evangelicals, takes the Bible 100% literally. If they did, the religion would collapse by Genesis already. They have to believe that Satan somehow possessed or is represented by the snake to make the garden of Eden story work, as the Bible makes no mention of it. Also, unless they believe that it never rained on earth until the flood with Moses (some really crazy people actually do believe it never rained until then), they have to see the part about the rainbow afterwards as a metaphor.
And also no one, including the most steadfast evangelicals, takes the Bible 100% literally.
Oh yeah, it's totally incoherent, inconsistent cherry picking. The point is that they claim, and they believe, that everything in the bible is 100% literally true. And they don't have the self awareness to realize how hypocritical and dumb they're being, or they don't care.
I was raised in a church like that, believed the Bible was 100% the literal word of God. And was very Christian, even worked for the church. But by the time I was 14-15 years old, I figured out most of it was nonsense, and managed to push some of the pastors and youth pastors into awkward positions. Got one older guy to believe that dinosaurs and humans rosmed the earth together, and that it never rained before the flood of Moses, and that the earth was encased in a bubble of water. Another guy eventually gave up and gave me the "you can still be a Christian, believe in evolution, not be homophobic and Islamophobic, and think the Bible is metaphorical, even if we don't do that at this church" talk.
Of course people approach the Bible metaphorically, even Evangelical Bible-thumpers. "The snake in the Garden of Eden was Satan acktually" isn't mentioned anywhere in the Bible. Taken literally, it's just about how the snake lost its legs. All that Satan stuff came much later. Taken literally, the Song of Songs is some generic love poem that has little theological significance. Like, God isn't even mentioned in the poem at all. It doesn't really tell us anything about Solomon outside of some chick wanting to be with him and even that's disputed because it's never explicitly stated in the text that the man she's pining for is King Solomon. "But ackutally the woman is supposed to represent the early Church and Solomon is supposed to be Christ" Nah, that's shit that got added later because people had to find a reason why some secular love poem where the man poetically describes wanting to fondle her titties is part of a religious canon. Seriously, go read the poem.
In general, it's virtually impossible to completely take any substantial text literally. What's happening is what people from every single culture and time and place have always done: they pick and choose what part of the text to emphasis and what part of the text to pretend doesn't exist. More intellectually dishonest people will also shamelessly make shit up out of thin air like "Acktually, "the eye of a needle" is a name of some gate, so a camel passing through the eye of a needle is acktually really easy to do."
All I have to say is that religious people trying to use science to explain what are supposed to be miracles is so weird to me.
In Sunday School, I described Moses parting the Red Sea the way it's depicted in Prince of Egypt, and our Sunday School teacher goes "oh no, that's just Hollywood, it was probably just low tide, one day a year the tide in some spots of the Red Sea gets so low you can walk across it."
And I remember thinking "then why are we acting like Moses did something magic?"
Showing up while being persued by an army at the right hour on the right day to make use of a crossing that one appears once a year could be construed as a miracle. That said, my understanding is that the Exodus narrative was probably written in ~600bc during the Babylonian exile and the ancient Hebrews were never enslaved in Egypt. Apparently there was a concern in the Hebrew exile community that they were becoming too Babylonian and the Exodus narratice was written as a kind of very early nationalist founding myth to try to re-unify the Hebrew peoples. Take this with a grain of salt it's been twenty years since my religion classes.
I'm not translating from the ancient hebrew or anything but the text is pretty clear that in the story moses literally parts the sea. that's a good scientific explanation, but not what it says in the bible. what denomination was this?
oh lol see there's my christian-centrism, i assumed you were talking about a christian teacher who just didn't care about the "old testament" as much.
At one point in time, people generally understood how religious metaphors functioned - but then the protestants fucked everything up by printing the bible in the common languages, and suddenly every one of the faith's biggest grifters decided that they knew better than the priests who'd spent their entire life studying it all. The understanding of the bible as a metaphor is still alive in some circles, but in the modern culture you don't even need a grifter to tell you their interpretation anymore because the modern faithful almost all just come to whatever conclusions they like based on whatever fragments of religious education they get as kids. That's why you have self-professed Christians who believe in reincarnation and karma and crystals and shit - they're just grabbing whatever they've heard of that they like.
And it turns out that the people who are most likely to attend mass every week (which by the way is a relatively modern phenomenon - even medieval peasants generally only attended mass once a year) are also the ones most likely to assume that everything in the book was intended by its original authors to be taken literally even though those who've studied it have also read contemporaneous sources saying the opposite.
IMO this all stems from the material condition of the Church being pretty irrelevant politically. At one point in time there was a superstructure to force everyone's beliefs to conform more or less to a certain dogma, but capitalism has rended all of that apart.
I’m sure somebody could find (or force) a throughline from “printing the Bible in vernacular” to “climate deniers claiming climate scientists don’t have authority”.
Like, an evolution of rejecting the opinions of the priestly class to rejecting the opinions of the scientific class.
I grew up in a very religious and very conservative area, I was never taught that the bible was a hundred percent literal and that most of the bible was cobbled together by using various accounts and retellings. The priest that we had in religious studies even told me that I shouldn't take the bible so seriously, when I asked him if Sodom and Gomorrah could happen again.
Important Soddom and Gomorrah note: the crime of the Sodomites wasn't gay sex. It was violating sacred hospitality. Once the Messengers were invited in to Lot's house they were his guests. According to an ancient and sacred law that was once nearly universal and still applies across much of the world, once you invite a guest in to your home you are absolutely responsible for their safety, comfort, and wellbeing. In a time without cops when roads stretched through long areas of wilderness and banditry was a constant threat this sacred hospitality was important in ways that are difficult to explain to most Westerners. It was one of the foundations of civilization.
According to the law of sacred hospitality Lot had to do anything he could to defend the Messengers from the mob. And I really, truly mean anything. It's that important.
The crime of the Sodomites was attacking people who were guests in their town, who had been invited in to one of their neighbor's homes as guests and were under his protection. This was once of the worst crimes you could commit short of patricide. Like just a shocking violation of all norms and customs.
The Hellenic Greeks had a whole aspect of Zeus called Zeus Xenia, Xenia being derrives from the same root used in "Xenophobia" and meaning strangers. Essentially "the Zeus of stranhers", who looked after travellers and ensured that the laws and customs of hospitality were observed.
It's a really good example of the cultural context of a passage being lost or ignored as centuries or millenia pass. The idea that any stranger could knock on your door and request food and shelter and that you would be obligated to take them in probably sounds insane to most Westerners, but that's how large parts of the world used to work, and as I mentioned some places still do.
Can you share some sources on this? I'd love to pass an article or two along to my "not homophobic, just religious" sister.
Based on your use of the word "priest," is it safe to assume you grew up either Catholic or Anglican? Because that's definitely not the sort of messaging you receive in a Baptist church around here.
I've always felt like metaphorical interpretations are way more meaningful than literal ones. If a story is metaphorical, then it's describing some general concept that is applicable to your life. If it's literal, then it's just some weird thing that happened once a long time ago, who really cares. Very weird to me that the most zealous religious people are also intent on stripping all meaning and significance from their texts, but then again, maybe not so surprising all things considered.
saying that scripture is all metaphorical isn't the same as saying that there were material reasons for religious doctrines. and also "metaphor" isn't the opposite of "real."
what i mean is it's not so much whether the bible is factual or made up as it is a continuum of reality
Most of the people I've encountered talking about it being allegorical or a metaphor are priests. I think they're fairly religious and show up to mass as well.
I used to try very hard to be a believer and went to a lot of church stuff as I was poor and it was free, so I've seen a lot about how the Swedish Church works at least. They're alright as Christian churches go and usually ahead of the curve when it comes to LGBT rights than society at large (they're openly supportive of transsexuals for example).
So while I never truly believed I'm generally supportive of them as a safe space.
I think a good way is to look at some other religions and their use of metaphor. The Hindu epics are alien enough to western readers that annotations about metaphor layers seem a lot more plausible. I'll also note that Catholicism will outright tell you a prophecy can predict two things, say, both Jesus and the Maccabean Revolt. This is a truly excellent dodge and one I'm very fond of.
Alternatively, you could just refer to Hexbear's official Religious faith, the Tribunal Temple from Morrowind, with this line-by line analysis of the game's central religious text. He goes on at length about the deliberate use of metaphor and imagery in religious texts, and how to read a text with that metaphor in mind.
Finally, you can just read the bible where it will describe a dream/prophecy/symbolic event, have the characters explain the meaning, and then show it to be correct. This allows you to begin constructing a symbolic language for metaphor.
Fequently some asshole will have a dream that's fairly nonsensical to someone not trained in symbolic readings, and it's all "This angel ladder means god is now directly communing with humanity" or "These sheafs of wheat mean I get to own you nerds and also I'm going to become minister for agriculture".
The one thing you have to remember about Christians (and religious or spiritual or superstitious people in general) is that they believe magic is real and they want you to believe magic is real too and some of them get really mad about the fact that other people don't believe in the same magic as them. You shouldn't take any aspect of Christian theology seriously.
I'm not a Christian but to me it seems like it's not that important whether things literally happened like the Bible says they did. If some guy miraculously fed thousands of people with a few loaves and fish two millennia ago and never did it again it has little importance for what happens in the world today. On the other hand, the moral story that there's enough for everyone if we share what we have is as relevant today as it was then.
Unlike Muslims, who believes that the Qur'an is the word of God, Christians recognise that the bible is a collection of texts written by humans about the divine. As such these texts that have been handed down from very different times should be interpreted and read critically to be understood properly. Generally, theologians from "serious" Christian denominations views biblical literalism as a simple-minded heresy.
Protestants and Catholics over here are pretty much in the "metaphor" camp, sure there are exceptions but they are rare. So kinda flipped to how you describe it? However the people not believing and going with the metaphor bit does fit.
