Quote:
Originally posted by Dagnabit
Forever people have tried to explain away the minor incompatibilities between the bible and what we've proven to be true since it was written.
Why not just accept that it's a collection of fairy tales? That's a much more reasonable explanation than "gee, when it talks about the four corners of the Earth, that's just an expression they used at the time!"
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The mistake many people- believers and skeptics alike- make is to take everything written in the Bible as literal truth. Doing so does great violence to the text, especially when put into the proper context.
Let's rewind several thousand years, to a time when hundreds of thousands of Israelites stood at the base of Mt. Sinai waiting for Moshe to return from speaking with G-d. And, return Moshe did, with the law in hand. Not only the Ten Commandments, mind you- tradition holds that G-d, in effect, dictated the entire Torah to Moshe at that time.
Now, remember that these people are products of a Bronze Age civilization. Would G-d hand Moshe a book of high energy physics and advanced biology to explain how they came to be? Don't be absurd... as Maimonides wrote: "The Torah is natural history, cloaked in metaphor."
Taking the Bible literally, yes, it's a bunch of fairy tales. But give it a little thought- and plenty of people on both extremes can't be bothered to do that- and it's far more than that.
Again, I recommend <u>Genesis and the Big Bang,</u>
Z