What is metaphorical?

I have thought it interesting how we pick and choose what we take as literal and what we take as metaphorical. So often we take the stories from the bible and rehash the stories that fit our literal view as much as possible and disregard all the others and never really talk about them, yet they are there…Anyway I thought this cartoon was hysterical. It points out so well how we are literalist until it becomes painful to be so, then we switch to the metaphorical.

I think dragons and unicorns were a mistranslation in the King James Version but newer translations typically refer to something like jackals and wild ox. However, this cartoon sounds about right the way it describes how many people insist on trying to defend a strict literal interpretation of some of the most offensive or absurd stories from the Bible while at the same time they don’t hesitate to ignore many other examples that would be inconvenient to take literally. It’s almost like you can’t avoid picking and choosing which passages to focus on over others in many cases because there are so many contradictory ideas in the Bible that make it hard to try to take it all literally at the same time.

Actually, I wouldn’t even call many of these stories metaphorical because that would imply that there is some hidden meaning or value in them and maybe it’s a way to claim that they are all still inspired and directly approved by God even if not literally true in a historical sense. Maybe that is true in some cases but to me many of them look more like the product of primitive men recording stories based mostly on hearsay and legends rather than first-hand accounts of actual events or any kind of “revealed” truth.

They would almost need divine intervention to preserve 100% accuracy under these conditions but if that were actually the case then why do these stories contradict the evidence in so many cases? I could see God maybe intentionally testing people’s faith within reason but expecting people to believe in a literal interpretation of stories like Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel against all logic and evidence seems like a bit much to me. The unnecessary assumption that the Bible should always be right only complicates things when you really start to look at it closely.

It’s almost like you can’t avoid picking and choosing which passages to focus on over others in many cases because there are so many contradictory ideas in the Bible that make it hard to try to take it all literally at the same time.

Exactly. To me, that is why “Buffet Mormon” is not offensive…I don’t see how you can NOT be in order to make sense out of anything.

i loved this this cartoon/thread/idea — it’s what keeps me coming back to this website — just good old fashion common sense and logic.