Hi nlerd,
I don't mean to say that there is nothing of value to be learned from the bible, I'm just saying that you've got to know what is worth taking from it and what isn't.
And how are we to make that judgement? I consider some bits of the Bible to contain good advice. Other bits can only be described as evil. If we are able to tell the difference, then we must possess some independent means of assessing good and evil, some means that does not depend on the Bible. That rather undermines the Bible's alleged role in teaching us moral lessons.
If someone tries to take it all as literal they could miss out on alot while wasting time on something that was written 2000+ years ago by various people for unknowable reasons.
Just because some of the claims made in the Bible do not stand up to comparison with reality (your light example being a case in point), does not mean that we should assume that the claims were not intended literally. They might well have been literal, but erroneous.
There are good things that the bible can teach but the bible is not the only sorce for those things. The Lord of The Rings books have things that you can learn from in them but that doesn't mean you should believe in Hobbits and talking trees.
I agree with you here, but I would make one further observation; the LOTR does not claim to be a true story. It dresses itself in the trappings of myth, but it is clearly intended to be read as fiction. The same cannot be said of the Bible. The tendency for religious believers of all stripes to insist that their holy book of choice is
actually true clouds the issue. It makes it more problematic to use the book as a moral compass or source of subjective wisdom than pure fiction. Fiction does not distract us with concerns over its authenticity. I think that makes it a better bet when searching for truth.
Mutate and Survive
™ Version 4.2
