From: Arcadia (arcadia@lynchburg.net)
Date: Tue May 07 2002 - 08:40:48 MDT
Hermit
> "As far as I'm concerned, nothing in the Bible is meant to be taken at
face
> value, but instead the stories are more like parables than factual
stories."
>
Kharin
> In which case, I hereby nominate Aesop's fables as the new holy book of
christianity. A vast improvement, I feel.
>
This reminds me, the Aeneid was taught to school children in ancient Rome as
literal history. Now, if anything, the 'history' books of the Old
Testament, like Joshua, Judges, Samuel, etc read a bit more like a real
account (however garbled) of some sort of real events than the Aeneid. And
as for being derivitive, anyone could see even then that as masterful as
Vergil was, much of his material was borrowed from Homer.
Still, serious people ran a vast empire believing they descended from gods
and goddesses and heros suckled by wolves, etc. (It seems that having
highly implausible ideas of who one descended from or of the history of
one's people does not prevent good sense and pragmatism and technical
advancement in the present.)
By comparison, believing in a phantom enslavement, which could well have
been based on real events, though vastly inflated in the telling of the
story for all the reasons that the cruelties of one's enemies are always
inflated, actually seems somewhat reasonable.
I see both the OT and the Aeneid as equally valid expressions of the
collective self images of the peoples that produced them. Whether the
accounts themselves are true, in letter or in spirit, we'll never really
know, but that people believed they were true and that this belief affected
them, that is solid testable fact.
Similarly, what we believe about where we came from has an effect on us,
irrespective of whether these beliefs are 'true.' We believe that all life
descends from some single common ancestor, and so we and all life are
brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles. Radical idea, eh? Yes, and that
is why the theory of evolution scares some people so profoundly. Most folks
have not fully internalized the new paradigm in all its implications, even
those who say they believe it. What do we believe about where our
countries came from? Did Wise and Strong Founding Fathers Wrest the
American Continent From the Savage and from Untamed Nature, Setting us on
the Honorable Course of Subduing Her with the Whip Forever? Not anymore,
but here again there's resistance to accepting the truth that national
boundaries occur where rival gangs of thieves and pirates got too exhausted
to fight anymore.
Matt
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