Indicating to me that you have no interest in dialogue on this topic.

Correct.

Can the other tales in both Testaments be interpreted as metaphors or literally, in whatever fashion the Catholic chooses?

This seems a little too loose especially concerning the story of Jesus. Or can Jesus be viewed metaphorically? That's a bit too far for the Catholics, I think.

So, where does a Bible-reader draw the line? Which parts can be metaphors and which parts must be literal?

This all stretches this issue beyond any rational understanding. My opinion, of course.

If something is generally used metaphorically, one might assume that it is intended as metaphor.


And we cannot know with certainty that the author intended it as metaphor.


Jesus often preached using parables, a clear use of metaphoric language.

My view is that, in the case of the flood story, the author was probably referring to a local flood.

The whole thing is likely fiction to teach a lesson.

We differ on this.

Before that, a pope said,

Do they believe Jesus literaly did all the things it says. Cure the sick, raise the dead, walk on water, turn water into wine...?
Were any of those metaphore?
And what about all the miracles performed by Saints? Did all those things really happen?

What does the RCC say about the nativity story? Literaly true?

As to the rest, that depends on who is reading.

Was Jesus born? Available evidence suggests yes.

even for you.
I listed many things from Jesus' life, including the nativity story, all of it, not whether he was born or not.

If you don't want to answer, just say it, instead of inefective snark.

I am concentrating on one incident.

But do you think a Catholic cn read the story of Jesus as metaphore and not all literal?

"Basically, a Catholic is free to read the story as literal or metaphoric, or a combination of both. "

And, per your line, yes she did.

One can read Genesis as metaphor, and it makes more sense to me to read it in that way.

Just trying to introduce some fact and nuance to the rhetoric.

metaphorical understanding all at the same time. Dual understanding.
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Jesus said that He came not to bring peace, but with a sword. My view is that His clear meaning was that His message would divide people. So the sword is meant as metaphor.

And when Peter literally drew his sword to protect Jesus in the Garden, Jesus told Peter to put up his sword.

The same with Genesis, and Adam and Eve. The meaning of the names Adam and Eve in Hebrew is a clear sign that metaphor was intended.


Speaking of duality, think of Jesus Himself.

One singular 'father' and one singular 'mother' of humanity?

Jesus, Son of Man and Son of God.
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Myth has a meaning that is much more than just the common usage of the word. Myth is a category of stories that generally mean they are stories that come from our prehistory and implies there is meaning beyond the surface story. There are many cultures of the past with flood myths. And they all reflect the characteristics of the culture from which they come. My impression of the bishops' statement, however, is that they are dancing around the subject. As if they don't want to offend anyone, neither literalist nor metaphoralist (I made that last word up... I think).

On top of that, I think their statement is a little more than condescending and dismissive of many good, intelligent people who have lived on this earth prior to European Christianity and its influence. For example,

The world because this god doesn’t like the way it’s creation has turned out. In doing so this god “metaphorically” slaughters all land animals.

So what exactly is this story of an awful god committing an awful petulant act of slaughter a metaphor for?

That's how I take it from Guy's "cleansing" statements.

They lived in a harsh world. War, plague, flood or famine could come without warning and wipe out entire civilizations. They had no way of predicting, mitigating or controlling any of it. In such a world, a harsh God who at least offers a possibility of redemption might be the best they could imagine.

Now that we live in a better time, and can at least understand the forces of nature and control some of them, the harshness of their world is outside of our experience. We need a more loving God in accordance with our much easier lives. But we are stuck with the story so we just change the meaning.

You're still left with people blaming natural disasters on "sin" and a vengeful creator applying a correction. It's no different than Pat Robertson blaming tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, terrorist attacks, and meteors on teh gays. The only understanding it furthers is that people are often quite hateful and can't manage to keep their base emotions from trumping rationality.

Like the Catholic Church tries to do. It's actually more enlightened to try reinterpretation, but we still end up with a lot of homophobia and archaic ideas. I am not sure what the answer to that is. It's not like they are going to just change their minds or go away.

Robertson's approach is at least consistent. The bible says it, ergo it must be correct. The RCC allows for some rationality, but only for the parts that don't hurt anyone.

The answer is to introduce criticism to hateful belief. Eventually they will change their minds or just go away so long as enough decent people are willing to call bullshit.

There needs to be a deeper change. People have psychological needs that drive them to certain solutions. Unless they are given a better a solution, they will keep what they have.

Some people are so invested in their hate it's unlikely they are ever going to let go of it no matter what you do.

However, when certain attitudes are deemed unacceptable people tend to either abandon them or retreat from openly expressing them. You may not be able to keep everyone from hating, but you can marginalize them to the point at which their hate ceases to have any significant impact.

and motivated thinking. When people are challenged in their beliefs, they tend to dig in more rather than change their minds.

We are not the rational, self-interested creatures that the Enlightenment assumed we are. Rather, we are emotional wrecks, prone to follow our illusions and biases.

Making certain ideas socially unacceptable just drives then underground, where they wait patiently for an opportunity to reassert themselves, sometimes with a vengeance.

The only two things I am aware that can really change behavior are teaching people to be more empathetic and teaching them to recognize their own cognitive biases.

What is unacceptable today may not have been so 20 years ago. And 20 years prior to that there's another set of previously acceptable attitudes and behaviors which are out the window. In 1984, spousal rape was legal in every state and widely accepted. Today the exact opposite is the case. Gay marriage followed an even more sharp legal trajectory and public opinion is following closely behind. Cannabis legalization is another example of rapidly changing societal attitudes.

People may be hard to change individually, but society can and does change. Confirmation bias and herd mentality go hand in hand.

Attitudes towards gays started to change after the Stonewall riots. People saw how ridiculous it was to go into bars and look for people who aren't hurting anyone. It started to be safe to come out of the closet. Then Harvey Milk got elected and he wasn't a psycho homo trying to convert children. Then he become a martyr at the hands of a psycho homophobe.

Even more movement came after Matthew Shephard got killed. Again psycho homophobes were the danger, not the homosexuals. More people came out of the closet. Turned out more people were gay than anyone realized. People found out their perfectly normal friends and relatives were gay. And frightened. And wanted to have families. So finally we were ready for gay marriage.

It took a long time. Not all of us are there yet. They need more time. But at least even they agree that murdering a homosexual is still murder. Which is itself an important change.

It's bullshit to kill gay people for the sake of being homosexual. It's bullshit that homosexuality is a mental illness. It's bullshit that homosexuality and pedophilia are related.

Is that the only way to change attitudes? No, but it shouldn't be excluded because it is effective. Most people don't hold on to a belief if they know it's wrong.

I don't think calling something bullshit changes attitudes. I've never seen a case of it being effective. Demonstrations, matyrdom, arguments, personal contacts, education, even violence is sometimes effective. But I've never seen anyone change their mind just because someone else thought their position was bullshit. Or even if a lot of people thought it was bullshit.

The claim was that the story of psycho-Yahweh going on a rampage because he didn’t like his little world is a metaphor - so it has to be a metaphor for something else.

So what exactly is that something else for which the Flood is a metaphor?

Here is a metaphor:

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances.”

Shakespeare is not claiming that the world is literally a stage, he is instead referring metaphorically to the continual real life drama of human existence.

So Psycho Flood God is a metaphor for...

If we take it as a metaphor, then the point is not the disaster that God visited on the world. That's the reality they feared or experienced every day. The point is that even in the worst possible disaster, there is a chance for survival. If you obey God's rules.

Psycho-Yahweh. Sure. But the story came from Mesopotamia. A flat land between two rivers with mud brick buildings. Devastating floods swept away entire towns and their crops, leaving the survivors homeless and starving. That's psycho alright. So follow the rules and maybe God will save you. Because the Cajun Navy is 4,000 years away. That's the message.

If we just leave out the appalling part “then the point is not the disaster that God visited on the world“ - then what we are left with is not a metaphor at all, it is exaggerated recounting of a big flood.

Seems to me the fact that Yahweh is acting to correct his world is sort of central to why this story is in the Bible.

They lived in an appalling world. The Bible records what the world was like. The book of Joshua PROUDLY recalls a genocide. Archeology doesn't support support the story. But history does record genocide as a normal occurrence. Nobody knew how to stop floods. Nobody thought God wouldn't approve of genocide. It was clear God DID approve of genocide. Because it happened so much. The goal was not to stop genocide, the goal was not to be a victim.

It's only today we don't approve. So some religionists need to change the metaphor. Except for the literalists who, ironically, actually understand the original metaphor better than the people who say it's a metaphor.

“If we take it as a metaphor, then the point is not the disaster that God visited on the world.”

They lived in a dangerous and mysterious world, an angry God was not the point and not a metaphor, it was a reality.

Put yourself in the mind of a Bronze Age peasant. Your daily life is of backbreaking labor.You didn't retire, you worked until you dropped. The king or lord has the power of life and death over you.

If you got seriously ill, you probably died, except in a few mysterious cases, people suddenly got better. You could expect most of your children to die before adulthood.

Sometimes there was drought and famine. Other times there were floods. You never knew when the rains would fail, when they would return, or when there would be too much rain.

Foreign armies could show up at any time and gleefully slaughter your village. If you were lucky, they let you live in slavery. If you were really lucky, they only raped your wife and stole all your possessions.

And you think the point of the story is that God gets angry? That's like saying the point of Mutiny on the Bounty is that people sailed in wooden ships. Of course they did, there wasn't any other kind of ship. And in the Bronze Age, there was no time or place safe from an angry god.

filled with violence and really strange behavior. The flood myth is one such that is about destruction and renewal. There is strong evidence that the world has suffered major cataclysmic floods in the past with the melting of glaciers from ice ages in the not-so-distant past and some suggest that the multitude of flood stories from around the world - as told in their cultural myths - is a remnant in our collective memory of the occurance. It makes sense to me but I'm not the expert on that. As for metaphorical meaning, I'd recommend reading Joseph Campbell if you want a more thoroughly researched explanation that isn't bound to a specific dogma. I can tell you what it means to me but I don't claim any authority.

Death and renewal, following "the voice of God" (one's inner connection to the power and wisdom in life) as a means of getting through troubled times. The death and destruction of everything and everyone else is symbolic of the loss of the many things we hold dear as we pass through troubled times. But we come through it to a life that is renewed. The ark and the animals are symbolic of protecting that which sustains us in life as we go through the journey. Being a global flood means that the process is a power greater than what we as individuals can influence or stop. We have no choice but to go through it. That God does this because of the wickedness in the world implies that this may be a process of recovery from our own "wicked" ways and what we can expect to encounter on the path to getting back in tune with nature.

To take it absolutely literally puts one in a position of having to explain the absurd with the absurd. I'll leave that to those who insist it be that way. But why this ties into a possibly real event of a great flood, I surmise it has to do with the way we humans make stories which comes from our own experiences. Hunter cultures have hunting stories, agricultural people would speak in metaphors related to their own practices. And our collective memory (the knowledge that is passed from generation to generation) is what is preserved through these stories. In past cultures, many had a tradition of preparing certain people to tell the stories of their ancestors. Those who took it seriously were very precise in teaching how they should be told. This may be the roots of religious practices. With the advent of writing, much of that tradition has been lost. And it seems to have had some strange results, such as the burgeoning of religions centered on "holy scriptures" that then somehow end up being dogmatically interpreted as "this really happened in this way" no matter how wild or outlandish the story. I think that's a mistake.

That quote reads like "mythology isn't the right word instead *defines mythology*"

The RCC also believes that the wine and bread literally become the flesh and blood of Jesus, so I would suggest to take everything they cliam with some heavy skepticism.

I'm pretty sure Jesus said that.

"I said that." - Bob Dylan

Wasn't Jesus but I'm sure someone said it.

Why?

...

1) What do I believe the RCC says about the great flood, or

2) What does the RCC say about the great flood?

If the latter, you might be better served posting your inquiry here:
https://upload.democraticunderground.com/?com=forum&id=1221

If the former:

so naturally they need to start a couple new ones to "prove" that they're right somehow, by arguing against a straw man.

Same old same old.

Seriously. We have a pope that is a raging homophobe. Let's focus on that, shall we?

The Catholic Church has managed to rationalize the Great Flood post hoc? WOW. AMAZING.

about it according to the Vatican. It simply doesn't matter. Now, Ken Ham...everyone cares what he thinks and he's a Bible literalist. Right?

So. Again. Who cares?

And even if your response means something, why is the flood important?

And nothing about the raging homophobia of the pope?

And how it can be interpreted.

And the RCC approach to the matter.

If you read the Bible Abraham is portrayed as an incestuous, lying, cowardly psychopath. Not exactly the best choice in my regard to be the father of a religion of love and peace...