Do you believe the Bible is literally true?

Nope, i think its fake. The first time i picked it up (i only got a few pages in) i thought it was a load of crap. And i still think so.

Not in the least, then again I'm Atheist so that's kind of a given how I'd feel.

All of it? No. Some of it..Maybe.

Of course its true. God wrote it. Well, I mean, he told people to write it. Isn't that enough?

Come on, how many "yeses" do you really think you're gonna get from CHUD readers? Though I suppose even one will be enough to stretch this post out to a few bile-filled pages.

I'm sure there are threads of historical fact -- I certainly don't doubt that there was a charismatic leader named Jesus who caused all kinds of problem for Roman rule in the area, but was he the Son of God? I don't know.

Being an atheist and very bitter ex-Catholic, I'm gonna have to say no.

Not really the best place to expect a very diverse discussion, but as an agnostic who attended Catholic school for 13 years, I can say that most Catholics don't believe in a literal interpretation of the bible. I myself look at it as more of a book of virtues than a history book.

Fuck. No.

Biggest babboozle ever.

Somewhat. I think some of the people mentioned may have existed. But the as a whole? No.

Which bits do you decide are plausible?

My biggest thing is that almost all of the people in the New Testement are named stuff like "John" and "Peter" and "Mary"

...I'm not huge into the history of that particular area of the world or anything, but weren't they named stuff like "Ezekial" and "Elijah" and "Zachariah"?

All 'holy' books have metaphors and allegories. If you take the entire book as literal, you're not giving much credit to the author, and the message of the book is lost on you.

Just my opinion anyway.

Well, if the book's filled with allegories then what exactly is it that makes it different from Beatrix Potter or a Grimm fairytale?

Yes I do. And so is Pet Semetary and Horton Hears A Who.

The Bible is not meant to be a history book. It is NOT meant to be taken literally, but too many narrow minded so-called Christians use it to justify hatred, bigotry and persecution of anyone who doesn't believe their beliefs.
Jesus himself did not believe what everyone else believed. So he found his own truth and preached it. Now he's being blamed for the subjugation of free thought when he originated it. That's where Christians get it all wrong. I'm ashamed to have been one and I no longer use that moniker myself.

tony young

Very well said. I also agree that the Bible is too often the crutch for narrow-minded thought. Metaphors are to be found, like in any fantasy tome, and it is up to the reader to determine what each story means to them. It's the church and their tactics of ruling through fear where the issue lies.

i've been raised in a catholic family and went to a franciscan school were criticism was rather welcomed...

i don't think the bible is literally true. i even don't think that -for a christian- it is existential to believe that jesus was born in betlehem nor that adam or eve actually existed. the truth in these stories is what matter for me...

as much as i hate the exaggerated institutionalism of the church, as much as i hate men denying women their right to become priests and lazy tradition overruling reason....
....i personally cannot live my faith alone. i need other people who share a similar point of view, which demands a certain amount of organisation.
also it's not the worst thing to have some "rules" describing what your religion and faith actually consists of.

well...it's a complicated issue...

You're kidding right?

How is it faith if you need other people to qualify it?

Lifelong Baptist here....

The Bible is split into the old and new testaments. The old testament was written in Ancient Hebrew, which is considered an allegorical language. So Ezekiel seeing the wheel, Noah and the flood, the tower of Babel reaching toward heaven...nearly everything in it....can be considered to be allegorical to some degree. There are some sections...the bloodlines....that you can consider to be absolutely accurate, as that was of primary importance to the Jewish society.

The new testament was mostly written in greek, which is generally considered a literal language. So unless the passage states "Jesus told them a parable..." the stories therein may be considered pretty straightforward. The intention is that what was written is what was meant.

The old testament (minus the apocrypha) is what most of Christianity has accepted as a historical basis for their faith before the coming of Christ. But really, as far as I can tell it's more a treatise on how to keep your nation together as a whole. Proverbs, Psalms, the prophets, the history contained within the pentateuch....all of it scans as a manual for the Jews to refer to so that they can keep their culture grounded as they spread into various countries.

So....to answer the question asked: Do I believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God to the nth degree? No. I don't have to. As long as I'm covered by the covenant between Christ and his believers offered in the New Testament, then I can accept the history and sources of my faith as much as I need to.

God is big enough to not be bothered by my doubts or questions. And, honestly, I can easily imagine that God would have a problem with the way people have interpreted passages over the years.

You thought I meant *what*? You're shitting me, right? Wow. Did you not even bother to use a little brainpower on any of this at all?

Maybe it speaks truths, after all, there are some good lessons to be learned. Some, mind you, not all. But the events and the history that happened in them...can't believe in them. But hey, that's why it's called 'faith', yeah?

Jesus is real, people. I ran a marathon with him once. I totally got my ass handed to me.

"The Bible isn't about making sense, River, it's about believing in something." - Shepherd Book, Firefly

Logic and religion don't go together, if we all just shut up, stopped thinking and really had faith we'd be a lot happier.

And a lot dumber.

What is Jesus being the son of god a metaphor for? Did they mean that to be taken literally?

What about Noah's Ark, Adam and Eve etc. You are not supposed to take those literally because they're in the old testament, I guess. Ok, that's cool, but what is the point of those stories then? Just an interesting fiction work like Harry Potter or something? Don't really see what the religion aspect is there anymore than going to the church of Planet of the Apes would be considered a religion. And if everything is metaphorical and they are just kidding around with the fact issues involved, shouldn't they mention that is the case. Do they? If so, where. I mean, they should start off by explaining that it's fiction in those cases. Was it in the fiction section of the ancient Barnes and Noble or were they selling it as non fiction. It seems like they thought it was non fiction. Because why would they say things like the earth being 5,000 years old if they actually knew it was more like 5 billion. The reality is that people from the old days didn't know what the fuck was going on, and we will comparitively not know what's going on to people 2000 years from now (hopefully). What about the Greek Gods system, we call that mythology and think to ourselves "oh, those silly ancient greeks, they were so cute with there dumb god system" but back then they thought it was the real deal. People used gods to explain things they didn't know and to give them a little ego comfort of feeling like they had a handle on life in general. A lot of people still do the same thing today just with a different system.

In some way my own existence is only qualified by other people and their existence. How would I know that I am if there wouldn't be any other men?

Of course faith tends to be something that can't be put into words nor can be limited to a set of rules. And still just that happens if faith is institutionalized.
I see this as some kind of a tightrope walk.
In the end no fucking bishop or pope can qualify my faith or disqualify it. But in some way the church suggests what I think of as god and what I declare as my believe.

I think that faith is something individual and social at the same time. Even if I say that I share the same faith with other people I'm sure that everyone of us has his and her own personal believe.
Still our faith is described by words that are a common denominator. I need those common denominators to develope my faith, to describe it. Otherwise, for me, it would be some wishy washy (i hope you can say that conglomerate of believes that are not very reflected (But I don't want to deny some poeple their believe) and stay shallow. But I want to deepen my faith and explore it, which is only possible with others.

(*sigh*...all this blahblah...it also demands some discipline to explore and develope your faith. I spend too little time to do this, actually and am preoccupied with other stuff and lazyness...)

right.
and still i tend to believe in god.
i don't know how god created the world. how he initiated some sort of big bang. and you can call the fact that christians explain this lack of knowledge with their "unexplainable" "undescribable" "unimaginable" image of god, stupid or you believe in it.
in the end faith is a transcendental thing that goes beyond fact. i don't think, though, that to follow this means to stop thinking.

If you feel you don't need facts, then yes, you've stopped thinking.

I think it's less a lack of need for facts that an awareness that eventually we may be able to get closer to the full story.

The spanish had "firesticks" that just REEKED of unknowable magic to the Aztec sorts. I figure the universe is more or less an order of math countless times higher than we can decipher at this point. Nothing wrong in trying to cull as much info as you can about it.

No, I was actually serious that time.

You're fucking retarded if you think the Bible is anything more than mythologized history. Unfortunately that describes most of the planet, and probably plenty of people on these boards too scared to defend their beliefs.

And "faith" is a big crock of shit. Theists use reason until it no longer suits them. Biggest cop-out ever.

They weren't called John, Mary, etc., because the bible wasn't written in English, dude. The names are translated from the original text which has names very much in keeping with that time. "Jesus," for example, is for some reason translated as "Jesus" even though in the original text his name is "Joshua" - which means "God the Savior"

I suggest you look up Mithraism on Wikipedia. It's a religion citing adherence to a sun-god that quite significantly predates Christianity. It also contains so many details of the story of Christ, that it makes the two religions almost indistinguishable. So I'm not quite certain the New Testament is indeed fact, unless of course you're open to a fuckload of coincidence.

EDIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraism

Ok, so why not use the original names, then?

Why the translations? The names in the OT are original, aren't they? Why just the NT?

Well as far as I know, Both the old and new testaments' names are translations from the originals, often-times phonetically - except that the OT's names are translated from the original Hebrew (Jonathan = Jah Nathan = "Gift of God") and the NT's from names that were typically Roman (Paul = Paulus), seeing as it was written years after Jesus's death and in a different language to the OT.

Oh, and I just realised that Jesus isn't "Joshua" but rather "Jezia". Sorry 'bout that.

Well, see...that's what I'm talking about.

I've been raised in the Christian tradition, so I've been hearing "Jesus" all my life. But, I feel a certain amount of anger at the thought that the guy didn't even answer to that name...and we keep on ascribing it to him.

Why not go back to the original name?

As we type, Devin Faraci is wearing a big red clown nose and masturbating with furious delight.

Devin Faraci = Mister Mxyzptlk

Even the "yes" voters, I think, would have to admit that there are too many contradictions in the Bible for it ever to be taken as literal truth. Mythology, anology, parable and fable, sure....but literal truth? Not so much.

I just don't see how anyone on the face of the planet could get onboard with that.

(and this isn't a slam on faith-based people)

Even though I am a Christian, I voted "no." The Bible itself doesn't treat itself as all "literal"; it's filled with poetry, proverbs, stories, and mythic tellings. It was never written to resemble our modern encyclopedias, and I find the dichotomy of "100% literal" and "completely false" a straw man choice.

While I am a Christian, I don't believe in a "young earth" or seven literal days of creation. I don't see the theory of evolution or a billions-year old earth as particularly challenging to my faith; the opening chapters of Genesis were written in the mytho-poetic language of the time and place, and were never meant to be scientific treatises on the origin of matter.

As far as Jesus' name...if we use the language of origin, ancient Hebrew, we'd say something close to Y'shua. If we were using the Greek of the New Testament, we'd pronounce it something like Ee-ay-soos. "Jesus" is the Anglicization of the Greco form of "Joshua" - which means, as pointed out above, "God saves" or "God will save."

I agree, The Bible itself doesn't treat itself as all "literal".

Mat 9:17 Neither do men put new wine into old wine-skins: else the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins perish: but they put new wine into fresh wine-skins, and both are preserved.

The first eleven chapters of Genesis are total allegory. In fact they are all semitic allegories retold with a Jewish moral system attached. The book of Job is total allegory also. Psalm is a book of songs started in the time of David, it why it got his name on it, but took hundreds to be finished. Ecclesiastes is a book of philosophy. Proverbs is a book of sayings, or wisdom. Song of Solomon and Lamentations are books of poetry. The rest of the OT books are a mix of history and allegory. For most of human history not only could fiction be allegory, but history could also. It is only with the advent of science did the need for history to become 100% fact.


As a Christian the only books of the Bible I try to 'sell' are the gospels. Read the four books for yourself figure out what Jesus is saying, and decide if he was lying or telling the truth. If he was lying forget about him. If he was telling the truth, then you must accept him as the way and only way.

I personally detest organized religion, because it is anti Christ. You have no ideal how many church goers I have pissed off, by using the bible to show that the Tree of knowledge of Good and evil is the Law. It like I just pissed all over their Golden Cow or something.

So is the whole immaculate conception son of god thing not to be taken literally as well?

I'd argue that it is, because the way the Gospels are written. Luke is written in a completely different style from Revelation; one is a narrative culled from interviews, tradition, and witnesses; the other is a wholly or almost wholly symbolic series of images and events. Revelation is not a "literal" book, and its original readers knew that. Luke, on the other hand, purports to describe actual historical events.

This is the point I was trying to make. Whether you think it's all crap or you think it's the divine Word of God, anyone with a lick of reading skill can understand there are a wide range of genres in the Bible, and a fair number of them were never meant to be read "literally," that is, as the BCE equivalent of reading a story in Time or Newsweek.

I've seen this kind of stupid reasoning from fundies, who insist on a "literal" approach to reading the Bible, and thus when reading the Psalms intuit that God wants us to hate our enemies and that dashing the heads of babies of an invading army's race is a good thing. As CS Lewis said, people who don't understand books for grown ups shouldn't read them.

It depends what you mean by immaculate conception? Was Marry divine and with out sin(the mother of God bit)? That is not in the bible. Do you mean was Marry impregnated by God? Why not it not like we can't make a virgin birth happen right now. Jesus says he was the Son of God, the living word of the Lord, who created everything.

Of course not. The Bible, like everything else touched by man, includes a little of everything: Symbolism, Allegorical Tales, Anecdotal Stories, Actual History, Half-Truths and flat-out Falsehoods and/or Heretical blather.

It's misguided and fruitless to believe and claim that everything in it is 100% true, just as it is to do the exact opposite.

"Going back" is the key. Translating the names served a purpose once, which was to make the religion easier to assimilate, but literacy and oral profficiency have evolved to a point that the original names can be used.

But really, what's the point? What matters are the ideas within the book, not the "characters' names".


PS - As for the voting: No, it's a very small basic (and true) story enlarged by parables and myth, in order to get the ethos across.

Ok, maybe to you. But I'd rather I had the name right when I'm staking a large piece of my current existence and the rest of eternity on something.