Quote:
Originally Posted by OccultHawk
Well if you don’t ignore the supernatural **** you might as well be reading Tolkien. Any serious reader should be looking for what the legit philosophic message is. A charismatic central figure goes around talking about turning the other cheek and loving the poor and he doesn’t lift a finger in his own self-defense when crucified.
That’s the forest.
The trees with with no literary merit are his mom was a virgin, his dad was an invisible sky man, he could heal people and walk on water, he came back from the dead and so on.
I get that the way it’s peppered and pasted together it seems like the main idea is for the reader to find the path to salvation but a discerning reader should be able to see what the real authors meant before they retarded it up.
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I get what you mean in terms of the symbolic message you can gleam from certain parts of the bible in isolation. But you are projecting when you say the original authors only meant to use the supernatural stuff as a metaphor. They were literally a religious cult who believed whole heartedly in said salvation.
The same hippy who said not to cast the first stone said he came to bring the sword. To divide families against one another. To set things right once and for all.
And that's how christianity was practiced. Very predictably. If you take it at all serious you can't ignore the underlying ethos which is the strict mosaic law that man is so incapable of following that it requires Christ to redeem humanity.
I'm not saying a secular reader can't derive positive insight from the Bible. But that doesn't make them a "good Christian.' if only Christ were compelling us all to be more like him, that would be true. But instead he laments the fact that he knows we won't.