Originally posted by fd ski
capt. apathy,
with all respect to your train of thought, which is more then most people in this treat, do you suppose that this sort of open interpretation applies to all portions of the bible and religious dogma or to whichever ones we find to "need fixin" at a given time ?
I personally have a big logical problem with people "interpreting" the bible, because depending on will and skill of the person doing the interpretation, you can draw any conclusion, just to suit your desired result.
Which makes the book meaningless.
Recently i read and article about virginity in relation to catholic tradition. There was this girl who would only have oral and anal sex but not vaginal, before the marriage, because THAT would be a sin.
See the sillyness ?
interpretations are useful, different points of view help widen your perspective. the trick is to not let any persons (or church hierarchy) interpretation over-ride your own. read for yourself, and think for yourself. listen to what others say and consider their opinion but don't give any mans interpretation more weight than your own.
my main point is we were gifted with important information, and instead of focusing on that we tend to spend all of our time arguing over some nit-picky little piece of the text and avoid the bigger issue.
more often than not I've found that the majority of people who are overly focused on the literal word instead of the big picture are either trying to avoid dealing with a message that makes them uncomfortable, or they are pushing some kind of agenda other than a better understanding of Gods word.
it's not hard to picture how this argument could have started.
the Catholic Church (who tends to be the most public in their efforts to interpret the Bible for us, and occasionally come up with rules that I am hard pressed to find reference to in scripture) has never been big on new ideas. they see (or at least have in the past) new knowledge as dangerous, a threat to Christianity, or a threat to the power the church controls here on earth.
at various points in history the idea of a spherical planet, gravity, or the earth orbiting the sun could have got you in a bit of trouble.
so the theory of evolution gets batted around and the church sees it as a threat and condemns it. but the only real problem with the theory is the conflict with the word 'day', so thats all they can really focus on.
instead of pointing out that they seem to be missing the bigger point, the scientists get suckered into the time frame argument and start parading around evidence that supports their position of a more lengthy time span.
the end result is it breaks down into a us vs them argument where nobody really listens but just keeps stating that they are right and the other side is full of crap.
there is a lot of relevant info that gets completely overlooked while we argue back and forth about a small discrepancy that is based on what definition of the word 'day' you choose to use.
the creation passage not only tells us where we come from, it shows how the earth came to be and if you are paying attention you'll see the stages that progressed until we were created. for me, one message I get from this is our dependence on all of the things created before us. how everything from our solar system to the plants and animals on this earth are the foundation that we are built on, and if we screw them up we'll likely suffer for it.
we argue about a word interpretation and completely blow off the fact that the theory of evolution confirms through science what God told us in Genesis.
it also raises the question as to how that information got into the Bible several thousand years before science brought us the theory of evolution. how would an atheist explain that? Lucky guess?
