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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tagline potential
me too.
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.
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.
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.