Why read the Bible literally: take two

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"And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him."

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What is the necessity of this mark? It's not like there are a lot of strangers out there.

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Actually, the mark was not intended to make Cain recognizable. If people didn't recognize who Cain was, then they wouldn't have a motive it kill him, right? The mark was to protect Cain from the people who would recognize him as the murderer of Abel.The mark was intended to be a sign from God that Cain was under his protection.

Well, according to Matt. 22:30, Jesus said: And if lawful sex requires marriage, then that is that.

Don't ask me. I don't understand the first thing about all of this sin and laws and rules and stuff. Evidently God likes some stuff and hates other stuff, and when you get to heaven you're going to follow his rules, and you're gonna like it.

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I know of creationists who have been kicked out of scientific organisations because they didn't toe the party line re. evolution, despite not signing anything ahead of time.

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Under what circumstances can a scientific organization "kick out" a dues paying member? I haven't heard of such a thing before.

Where did you get your information? The statistics don't seem to work for lists of actual flood stories that I have seen.-

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None of these stories contains the beauty, clarity, and believable detail given in the Bible, but each is meaningful to their own culture.

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Why should your opinion of "beauty, clarity, and believable detail" be considered as evidence of the veracity of any particular story?-

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Anthropologists will tell you that a myth is often the faded memory of a real event.

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I hear this mostly from people who aren't anthropologists.-

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The only credible way to understand the widespread, similar flood legends....

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The only reasonable way to understand the utter lack of any physical signs of a global flood -- a flood, by the way, with no source for water, nor no method of its elimination -- during historical times in the geological and archaeological record is to accept that there was no global flood.-

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But, of course, this is not the view of most modern scholars.

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Not surprising, since most modern scholars are trained to examine actual evidence and try to figure out how it fits into what is known about reality.

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Well, much as I would love to argue that with you, it has already being pointed out that scientific evidence re. a Flood, does not belong on a 'why take the Bible literally' thread.

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Neither did your post about flood legends in other cultures (which was a false statement anyway, as I pointed out).-

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Of course, you fail to mention the fact that many of the originators of their ideas from the 18th & 19th century were doing so on the basis of trying to undermine Biblical authority.

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The reason I failed to mention it is that it is utterly false. (And also off-topic to this thread.)

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Are you saying that there weren't 200 Flood stories that had that kind of agreement??...all your post proved was there were more than 200 stories

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Are you saying that 200 flood stories were purposely cherry-picked in order to provide skewed statistics?-

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I know otherwise, and can prove it but can't argue about it here, because, as you said, it is off topic.

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Maybe someone should open a new thread to discuss this.

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Why do we need to interpret the Flood in any other way, in your view??

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Well, it didn't happen.

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt

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Using the story to illustrate their point doesn't automatically mean they took the story as an actual happening as written.

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Heck. Even I will use a Biblical story to illustrate a point that I am trying to make. And I'm an atheist, so it surely does not indicate that I believe in the literal truth of the story!

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt