So if I do as you do, I can selectively choose from the Bible what is true? Do you not see a slippery slope here? How come you see “Jesus loves people” is true but when I see Jesus warning people of Hell that is “not true” to your (subjective) eyes?
This is easy to answer. Because hell is a mythological construct, whereas love is not.
For your clarification however I should add that I accept "hell" as a
metaphor of separation from the divine. I just don't accept it as a literal "place" one goes to after you die where your are tortured endlessly for your shortcomings in this life. Likewise, I do not accept "heaven" as a literal place you go either where you walk on literal streets of gold and have a great big house and all that jazz. I think the
metaphor of heaven however is valid. It speaks of the divine dwelling within us. "The kingdom of God is inside you", says Jesus. Even he, when speaking of the kingdom of God said it's not here or there, but inside you.
I would commend your strong stance here except that the Bible itself suggests orderly study, orderly worship and orderly understanding. If it’s modernist to not play fast and loose with truth, you may call me modernist.
That's not what defines modernity. What one of modernity's downsides is, as he points out in that essay I quoted from, is a lack of imagination. It's the literalist mentality being applied to religious symbols and faith! Noah's ark becomes less about the metaphor and more about the magic, turning metaphors into scientific facts and thus
killing God. "God is dead", literally is what happens when you turn symbols into mere facts. They become dead metaphors.
Now, as far as your comment, or suggestion that what I am doing is playing "fast and loose with the truth", I disagree with that on very many levels. I think this again in one of these main cruxes of our difference we keep coming to in our discussion with each other. I want to focus a bit on this as it's important to understand.
You recall I've mentioned several times that there is a relationship between truth and fact that is weighed and balanced in our conscious minds? That mind includes the mind of the heart, I need to clarify, not just mere reason alone attempting to tell us what is truth. That latter approach of reason alone is what is thoroughly modern, and a bad interpretation of Positivism. It is a "logical positivism" as opposed to a scientific positivism. What fundamentalism is doing is it poorly coopts that logical positivism into its "Bible studies" in order to find out the facts of what the text says to get to the "truth" of it. And that is what I call an error, and that is what that essay from Conrad Hyers goes after which I linked to earlier.
Facts are important. Yes. But facts do not tell you the meaning of a thing. I think there is a whole world of other factors that go into our truth seeking, far, far, far beyond just merely using the tools of science and reason to analyze the words on a page in the hopes it we will see the truth if we can only, just manage to get to the facts of what it says. That is the error. Again to quote from Umberto Eco whom you admire, “
Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means.” You contradict this by saying we must understand what it says to know truth.
As I've said many times before, even if Jesus literally believed in the literal historicity of Adam and Eve, and he may very well have as I don't see a reason he wouldn't have being a man of his culture in that time of human history, that does not mean the meaning he was speaking to does not
transcend the facts of their being a literal human couple that did or did not actually exist. The "truth" of Adam and Eve is
not dependent on the facts of Adam of Eve. Can you see the difference here or not?
So even if the Biblical writers were factually wrong, it does not mean that they did not speak
truths which transcend the facts on the ground! This is the lens I read all of scripture with. I am able to see that truth transcends facts. It does not need to deny facts in order to support and sustain itself. And this is where you will see me also recognize that that very selfsame truth we see in the symbol of Adam and Eve, for one example, also is seen in other symbols used in other cultures. These are "human truths" that are not dependent on the facts being literally factual or not. The stories are simply vehicles to carry that truth to us with. It could be another story, a completely different origin myth and carry the same truth right along with it.
My concern for religious faith which insists that these truths be
fused with and inseparable from facts is that that is what is the slippery slope into fact-denial. And when that starts to happen, your faith is at grave risk. At such a point where you can't deny the facts any longer, and you were unable to see the meaning of the symbol apart from the symbol itself, the baby of spirituality gets thrown out right along with the bathwater of mythic-literal beliefs. And that is where many go into things like neo-atheism, busily trying to get the facts right this time (as well they do), in pursuit of finding truth and meaning through finding facts. You are doing exactly what they are doing.
The scriptures are clear that Jesus healed the sick AND ALSO the possessed. Some people who hear voices hear God, some the devil, some need mental wholeness counseling, of course.
But I do not. And yet you have repeatedly insinuated I get my information by hearing voices in my head. That is patently untrue. I do not suffer from a mental illness. Why do you continue to suggest I do?
Now as the Bible writers speaking of both the sick and the possessed, sure yes, they had progressed to the point they recognized things like the common cold or a flu was not the result of demonic attack (at least I think they had), but they did still attribute strange psychological ailments to demons however! We have more knowledge about these things now than they did! It's just that simple. Really.
Now, as far as the purported healings of those who suffered with these mental illnesses (understood as demon possession back in that day and age), there is a great deal we are learning about the mind and body relationships in our modern scientific age, and I am a firm believer in that relationship. What we tell ourselves symbolically can have a very direct impact on our overall health and wellbeing! Absolutely! This is where I see things like guilt and shame have a serious impact on our mental and physical health! If someone through faith believes instead they are loved and forgiven, it will have a very positive healing impact in their lives.
So the truth of these "miracle" stories is
faith itself and how it can heal the mind, the heart, the body, and the soul. Jesus said clearly to the woman who touched him, "YOUR faith has made you whole". It is our faith that affects these positivities in our life. I could devote a whole chapter to that. Do you see how I was able to take the truth of the stories and transcend them from the "facts"? If we are to be dependent on the "fact" of demon possession to find truth in the stories, then you're going to run into a wall pretty soon as we discover the causes are in fact not supernatural.
Things like cancer are in part preventable and are caused by lifestyles.
Well, I'd say the lifestyle of living in a modern age with all it's poisons everywhere are the main causes.
It's really unavoidable as we don't yet know all the actual causes. You could be a monk doing everything right, and still get it. But yes, in part by avoiding stuff like smoking, that's a huge step in prevention.
You may have forgotten the scriptures proscribe healthy eating and avoiding overmuch alcohol, meat, etc. Sounds familiar when we speak of cancer prevention, of course.
Sure, a lot of these dietary laws prescribed by "God" were the result of people recognizing the negative consequences of certain behaviors, both to the individual and the society itself. No real miracle there. That is where these laws like this come from. Some make sense, and some are pretty ridiculous or outdated. You have to take them with a certain degree of skepticism of course. This is where modern science will either validate or invalidate these things. But again, modern science is not perfect, but certainly neither is the Bible in these regards!
I’m having trouble discerning what the “different level” is you refer to here. It sounds subjective and nebulous, and there is much subjectivity in human spirituality, but apparently you have discovered “higher truths” like Jesus did not resurrect, does not judge, and is not consigning the unredeemed to eternal hell.
All truth is subjective ultimately, even that truth itself. It sounds nebulous to you, but to me I see it quite clearly. If I was to try to describe it I'd say it's "transparent", the light shines through it rather than bounces off of it. It's multi-faceted, like light refracted off little jewels of sand the light hits and splinters into many truths. There is this great quote from the mystic poet Rumi I came across a couple weeks ago I think captures this well.
Truth was a mirror in the hands of God
It fell, and broke into pieces
Everybody took a piece of it
And they looked at it and thought they had the truth.
If what I am saying sounds nebulous this is why. All I can do is point and the rest is what we open to in ourselves through that pointing. Even if you have a piece of that mirror, you are only seeing one facet of truth itself. That truth can be understood in many ways, in many pieces of that broken mirror.
