The Foundations of the Debate

If I showed you a story in which the Wright Brothers get their ideas about powered flight from a talking iguana that lives on the Cliffs of Insanity, would you understand the story as 'a type of writing which uses a lot of symbolism' or as a story 'entirely styled in the manner of historical narrative'?The question is not rhetorical. I want to know how you would decide this.

---

ArcherAll species are transitional.

My point is to get an answer to my question. I want to learn how you decide such matters.Knowing only what I've told you about the story, what is your impression about the kind of story it would be? Do you expect it to be a historical narrative about something that actually happened in the lives of the Wright Brothers? Do you expect it to be some kind of symbolic story? Something else?And how do you decide?

---

ArcherAll species are transitional.

Reminds me of a favorite quote!

quote:

---

Power corrupts, and absolute power is really neat.

​

- Colin Powell

---

---

ArcherAll species are transitional.

Poor arts education is also part of the problem.The Bible is a book. A book is literature. Literature is art.You have many people who are so badly educated in art that they really do not realize they hold a work of art in their hands when they hold a Bible. And telling them doesn't help. They don't know what that means. They don't know how to treat art, read it, make sense of it. Say the Bible is a work of literature--a benign, obvious fact--and they will think you mean some disrespect.What they know is newspapers and tabloids and TV news. They know science is a good, smart thing to emulate. So they treat their Bible--to show their great respect for it!--like a newspaper (which they know how to interpret) or a lab report (which they don't, but wish they did). That's how they think God should talk to them.The Bible becomes a nearly closed book. The rich variety of ways it can communicate with them is lost. The result is poverty.And one Yeshua of Nazareth had something to say about those who take advantage of the poor.When one treats a work of art as if it were science, the result is bad science--and bad art..Edited by Archer Opterix, : Typo repair.Edited by Archer Opterix, : Typo repair.

---

ArcherAll species are transitional.

You have to consider history. A watershed moment was the Scopes trial in 1927. H L Mencken covered that trial for the Baltimore Sun. Mencken had a notoriously acid pen. He held up the creationists (most of whom were liberal Democrats in that day, as he was) to ridicule. Naive churchgoers, who were not much accustomed to media attention in the first place, suddenly felt scorned and humiliated in the eyes of the world. They withdrew.A boom in the formation of rural Bible colleges followed. Fortress-like school buildings were erected in remote places. Newsletters proliferated with titles like 'Guardian' and 'Fortress.' There, the Scopes generation of evangelicals, bitter and smarting, instilled in younger generations the idea that on the issue of Darwin's theory there could be no compromise. It was the source of every evil. It was the source of everything anti-God, anti-Christian, outside, alien, other. It was the fundamental ill of society. The young were told that no accommodation with science on this point could be made. If they gave ground on evolutionary theory they were giving up their faith, and Jesus, and heaven.Polarization takes practice, a desire to settle a score, and a loss of all sense of proportion.And it takes training.The students learned their lessons well. Many became preachers, and passed the lessons on. You see the results in this forum.

quote:

---

The parents have eaten sour grapes,
and the children’s teeth are set on edge.

​

Jeremiah 31.29

---

Edited by Archer Opterix, : Typo.Edited by Archer Opterix, : HTML.

---

ArcherAll species are transitional.