If not literal then what?

This is probably at least the third or fourth time over the years that you’ve posted pretty much this exact same post, so you must feel strongly about it. 🙂 It’s cool, since it’s an excellent topic.

Personally, I find lots of good in literal interpretations of many things if I’m not sure whether or not they happened – and almost no good in literal interpretations of some things even if I’m not convinced they didn’t happen. If I am convinced a story didn’t happen literally (like God commanding Joshua and the Hebrews to commit genocide – don’t believe that one at all), I don’t even try to find personal meaning from a literal interpretation (no good comes to me from believing that story as a literal, accurate account) – although I have no problem finding meaning in it if I am talking with people who do believe it literally (in most cases, but not the one I mentioned above). However, I find even more power and meaning in quite a few things that I few strictly as mythological or figurative.

For example, I have no belief that Noah’s flood really was world-wide (although mythological flood narratives are so omnipresent throughout history that I do believe catastrophic floods have been used to teach great principles in many societies) – and I can find wonderful meaning in the morals I see in the story. The same is true of Job and Jonah – and when Jesus was said to have walked on water. Once they are free from the confines of literal interpretations, I am free to create meaning for myself (even if most other people then and now don’t see it the same way I like to see it) – and that is powerful and liberating to me.

The best example of this probably is the story of Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac. I don’t think it even happened, but, either way, I like to read it as a test that Abraham failed. That reading is incredibly powerful to me, regardless of whether or not it is historically accurate.

For me, the mythological or figurative often is more powerful than the literal, since I have more freedom within the first category to find meaning that resonates within me, personally. I’m not confined by what makes sense to someone else.

cadence,

It’s a very good question. I think part of it for me is that many, or most, of those stories had a meaning way deeper than the recounting of what happened. Even when I believed them to be literal, it wasn’t the story, but what it meant to me that resonated. When I started to look at things as less certain, I realized that the meaning was still there. When I looked at things as ‘certainly not’ it became a little tougher, but the meaning remains.

Lots of good examples, but I’ll pick on Lot’s Wife, ’cause it’s a brief story. Like you, I have a past version of myself that would have simply accepted that Lot’s Wife was turned to a pillar of salt. End of story. Obey or God will kill you. Move along. Later, but while I was still a believer, I realized that the story wasn’t real, or at least if it was real it didn’t matter, and that there was a message in the story… and that the message was more important than the details of the story. After leaving the world and setting out on the Path of God, we can still fail by turning back, as she did… or as Jesus might have said, ‘have an eye single to the glory of God’. Now as a full non-believer, I look at it as still having the same meaning. I can layer on top of that curiosity about the origin of the story. I wonder to myself if there was a pillar of salt out there in the desert and the story was told that that was Lot’s Wife, for whatever reason. But all my thinking about that doesn’t change the meaning of the story. In fact, in a way, my myth-analyzing is just a substitute for my earlier literal interpretation. But the meaning of the story transcends the arch of my changing reception of the story.

I think, in all honesty, that I like the NT more now than when I was a believer. To me it offers a “something to believe in” concept. Jesus has made it possible, according to the NT, to attain God-centered living and to rise above worldly concerns. The weird thing is I still think that is spiritually possible, even if there is no God.

For me, both of the above examples are made freer and more applicable to me by releasing them from the notion of literal history.

This is probably at least the third or fourth time over the years that you’ve posted pretty much this exact same post, so you must feel strongly about it. 🙂 It’s cool, since it’s an excellent topic.

Not exactly the same question but close. Glad someone is paying attention.

It also begs the question why God supposedly has to use fabricated stories to make a point. He could have just told us straight up how things work. Makes me wonder if scripture is anything more than the musings of men. Are we trying to apply meaning to something that is less than we think it is. Are we elevating random stories to larger than life lessons because we think god had a hand in them.

I wouldn’t use “fabricated” to describe the stories, just because of the automatically negative connotation most people will put on that word. My answer would be what nibbler said – that telling a story or setting something to music is incredibly powerful for a whole lot of people, much more powerful than merely relating factual information.

I believe strongly that “scriptures” are the best approximation possible from the people who wrote them – and that those that last do so because they resonate with a large number of people.

If by “less than we think” you mean “not actually dictated word-by-word from God’s mouth to the writer’s brain to the fingers that wrote the words to the page from which we read” – absolutely, I agree with that. However, if they really are a people’s understanding of God and their relationship to God, I think that is significant and worthy of study and contemplation – even if we end up viewing what they wrote differently than they did when they wrote it.

I also see scriptures often as a people’s ideal, even when it conflicted with their reality. It’s the same kind of thing as the American ideal of “all men are created equal” – penned by males only who owned slaves. The irony is incredible, but it doesn’t have to detract from the ideal they wrote – and it even can add to the “mystique”, if you will, that they wrote something they weren’t living at the time. The idea that all men are created equal can’t be interpreted literally in any way that is objective, so, literally, it is not accurate – but it still is empowering and ennobling and liberating as worded. It’s a myth, and always has been – unless it is imbued by something other than the objectively observable – unless it is stripped of any literal understanding.

I don’t mind at all elevating stories that I feel should be elevated; I don’t like elevating stories I don’t think should be elevated. I guess that’s because I’m human and, in the end, not that different than anyone else, conceptually.

Cadence are you by chance an engineer? Your discussions mirror so much of what my husband says.

Not an engineer. Maybe I should have been, but I came into logic latter in life. I use to be so much into the metaphysical until it failed me time and again. Then I turned to critical thinking and it has served me much better. Hard to be disappointed when you are dealing with tangible proven theories.

We believe the BOM to be the Word of God… That is a BIG issue for me now that I believe differently. The magic is gone out of it for me. Maybe I’m still too angry to try to find or see the value. The church holds everything about it out as coming directly from God, until caught in the lie, then they alter it to someone “speaking as a man” including the very keystone of the religion. For me the fact that the scriptures don’t live up to their literal truth claims seriously devalues them and the organization that promotes them as something they are not.

Cadence, I am really enjoying this thread. Thanks for starting it. I am learning so much. Thanks everyone for posting your honest thoughts. You have opened my understanding. :thumbup: