The Bible must be very important to you, to provoke such an impassioned response.
So funny how believers seem to think that they can provoke some kind of anger or irritation response by saying that religious things are "important" to the unbeliever. You think I care how "important"
you think The Bible is to me? Seriously? How strange that would be.
You say you object to some of it’s content; as it consists of many books by many writers, compiled over many centuries, this is hardly surprising. Are there any books, passages or verses within it that appeal to you? If so, why focus on the bits that offend you?
I can tell you exactly why I focus on the negative - because there are so very many people surrounding me with this daft notion the The Bible is inerrant - and they don't even know half the content I bring to their attention when I do bring the more sullied bits up for discussion. So I spend very much of my time focusing on those negative bits, for sure - to make sure that I have ammunition of all kinds to bring at the believer when I inform them that I do not believe their stories, and for when they make that fatal mistake of saying how great all the content of The Bible is. It is all too easy to smash their delicate hopes for the text to pieces at that point. Though normally it doesn't go that far - because they fear the implications too greatly, they normally choose instead to bow out of the conversation entirely.
And as for the bits that
do appeal to me? I'd have to think about it - maybe even re-read it. I have so very many problems with very much of its content. Even the "love they neighbor as yourself" bit. If it were just "love thy neighbor" then it would make sense... add "as yourself" and you have broken any coherent sentiment a paraphrasing may have been able to muster. It is foolishness. I like the story of the "good Samaritan," I suppose - a person who isn't necessarily a believer in the Abrahamic sense who provides merciful or beneficent help to a stranger. Some small admission that people can be good of their own accord, in a sea of other proclamations that the only "good" to be found or gained is by following and believing. Huge swaths of self-propagating propaganda is most of the rest of it.
You decide what’s true for you; I’ll decide what’s true for me, thanks.
On the surface that does sound "right," doesn't it? However, peel back a layer, and you realize that all throughout our history, people have been correcting the thought processes of one another in all sorts of beneficial and important ways. Such as coming to the germ theory of disease. How many people has that little nugget helped out since the discovery of how viruses and bacteria operate, and the gaining of knowledge of how to avoid or combat them? If a person who believed in blood letting, for example, were to just decide that blood letting was "true for them" - well... that's just asinine as we can see it now, from our relatively advanced perspective, now isn't it? That's how this
really works. Not "what's true for you is true and what's true for me is equally true." That's just a nice-sounding sentiment that doesn't really mean or provide us anything.
Maybe we’ll find some common ground, but probably only if we’re both willing to look for it. Shouting, or the unnecessary use of block capitals, won’t help.
Why is everyone on this site so afraid of a little emphasis? I want to make sure people get what I want them to out of what I write. So sue me. I don't care what you think about capital letters, honestly. Can you read them? Yes? Good enough for me then. Christ. What a thing to complain about. I'll try and keep everything lowercase for you, and make sure that I use only italics, bold and underlining in order to protect your delicate sensibilities. How's that?
No idea where you’re coming from with the black and white stuff, or how you got to that from anything I said.
We'll examine what you said:
RestlessSoul said:
Shakespeare, Milton, and the King James Bible form a trinity that has informed, inspired and underpinned English literature for four centuries.
Most of what these various works bring to bear (and especially what your "trinity reference" relies on) is symbolism. To be an inspiration and underpinning, without being the thing itself, is to rely on the symbolism of the thing(s) to drive you forward. So, we might say that something Shakespeare, for example, wrote had some profound meaning or implication to the human condition - but it isn't the human condition, obviously - it is only a caricature, hyperbole or exaggeration for effect. The reason I called on "black" and "white" and the symbolism that has been applied to those colors - also for centuries (probably even
more than four I'd wager) - was to provide an easy example that displays how the symbolic meanings applied to various things (
especially literary tropes) are not the things themselves, and very often that disconnect leads to people taking various things for granted (such as how "nice" it would be for people to love their neighbors like they love themselves), or creating ridiculous stereotypes (such as the idea that flies or goats represent evil, or are somehow "bad" compared to other creatures), or propagating foolish bits of "knowledge" that make them believe they are "oh so clever" because they have picked up on idiotic things like this, that writers likely never meant as intellectual providence in any objective sense, and call them "true."
Are you making a point about cultural hegemony? I’m not going to apologise for history; no one in my family made any money from English imperialism or the slave trade - I come from peasant stock.
Haha... of course you took the black/white dichotomy to be a reference to skin color. Of course you did. Likely so triggered by even the mere mention of even slavery's
symbolism because that glaring hole of support for immorality is one of the easiest things to pick on about The Bible. What I said about "black and white"
had nothing whatsoever to do with slavery. It had to do with attaching completely unnecessary or certainly "not necessarily true" meaning to things like colors - or literary works.