It’s not like I’m pure as the driven snow on this one, either. When someone tells me I’ve devoted my life to ‘believing in nothing’, I tend to come back with something about imaginary friends. Sometimes, though, we unbelievers will say these things just in an attempt to get believers to understand how the whole situation seems to us: imagine that most people either believed or professed to believe in a flying spaghetti monster, and felt sorry for you because you didn’t. I mean, that’s it’s like at times, but if you illustrate it that way, people think they’re being mocked.

Mocking has a long honorable history. I’m not student enough to mention ancient practitioners of it but certainly goes back to Greece and Rome. More recent American practitioners would include Mark Twain, H.L Mencken, Steven Colbert, John Stewart, P Z Meyers, Bill Meher. Lots of people mock lots of things. In a nut shell holding up to ridicule is perfectly OK by me. Not everywhere every time. For example I would not mock a religious wedding ceremony or funeral I might be attending, good taste would shut me up. But religion is to be mocked, I mean, just look at it. They can’t even get their stories together. My God!

If we see the Bible as having “poetic truth” rather than “literal truth” and we get down to “of course, Jesus didn’t *REALLY* turn water into wine, it was a metaphor” and “of course, Jesus didn’t *REALLY* rise from the dead it was a metaphor” you may eventually get to “of course, the deity isn’t *REALLY* an Abba figure, it’s a metaphor”.

And metaphor upon metaphor leads you to God being something that you can’t *REALLY* have a relationship with but only a metaphorical one. Given, of course, that God doesn’t *REALLY* exist but he’s a metaphor.

I’m not yet sure I’m with Chris in holding that the classical understanding of the Bible was always metaphor-y. It seems more likely to me that people with faith and education have learned to appreciate the Bible as metaphor, and seek to give their approach more weight by holding it to be the real ancient view. The reason the Fundamentalists seem new is that they never would have had to make their case before – there was no need for them to be vocal advocates for the literal truth of the Bible because that literality (?) was a generally accepted fact.

I mean, it has the ring of truth. Think about the world before science came with explanations. Hey, crazy stuff was happening all the time! A big flood would come for no reason, people would get sick for no reason, there was a night sky full of all these lights…. OK, the guy walked on water…. why not? I mean, has our perception of what is meant by ‘real’ changed, or have we just become more educated? To where we have explanations for so many things that we’ve developed a need for evidence? In fact, can you see a bit of that progression from the Old to New Testaments? The Old Testament God was quite an imp, and, you know, there were seven headed beasts everywhere. Seven or eight centuries later things were very different – it wasn’t this phantasmagorical world, but a recognizable world in which the odd miracle was performed. Could that just be the result of a different calculation of what would be believed by the audience?

Your comments are very much welcome, so no fears there.

Yeah, I meant they lived in a world where it such events were simply assumed to be real (whatever we mean by that term).

Karen Armstrong’s book The Battle for God lays out the case that fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon and assumes (unlike traditional ways of thinking/believing) that what is real is what happens. What can be materially proved, dug up, scientifically categorized, etc. Her new book on the subject also covers this topic.

Northrop Frye’s book The Great Code: Bible and Literature lays out the case the plain sense of the Scripture is metaphor and forms the basis of Western literature.

Miracles. Technically The Gospel describe “wonder stories” or wonder events. They are a common form in ancient Near East. They are not “miracles” by our modern definition. Miracles is really language starting from the later Middle Ages and picking up steam in the modern period. It becomes conflated with rising new science and the idea of “Laws of Nature.” And whether said events contradict said laws. (David Hume of course wrote on this extensively).

People who became “modern” believers said (often) yes, they did occur. They really did happen. People opposed said no.

But neither position asks about the meaning of the story. The truth (or falsehood) of the story is thought to reside solely in whether it happened or not.

Wonder stories, in sum, that when the divine enters the human sphere wonder takes place. Wondrous things happen. That was responsive to an era prior to a scientific medical system so usually the way in which that story is told is through bodily healings. This is still common in many places on the planet without such medical care systems. But the meaning can be extricated and understood separate from its application (if our world has shifted socially and materially).

You know, I think we might have to agree to disagree on what was the classical view of biblical reality. Unless you can point me to a source – I would like very much to read about how the intended audience of two millennia ago would have received the miracle stories. I would be fascinated to read a scholarly account of how literal interpretations of the Bible are a modern aberration from what was, before that, a widespread understanding of its nature as a collection of useful and instructive, but not necessarily literally true stories.

I hope it’s clear that I don’t participate here just to be quarrelsome – my family includes a lot of believers, and so this is all of strong interest to me. I really want to understand belief.