Posted by ant on September 09, 19102 at 17:17:21:
In Reply to: Re: symbolic/literal posted by Joshua on September 08, 19102 at 19:35:21:
The symbolic nature of the Bible is obvious once you see that the archetypes, situations and images are the same as every other mythology in the world, just told in a different way. At first, thse stories may seem to be very different, but when you read them more carefully, they are consistently similar. Once you know this, you can see that these are all symbolic manifestations of basic human impulses, needs, fears, and desires. Just because your system of symbols claims to be the ultimate truth doesn't make it so; every other person's religion is saying that too. But that's not the point. The point is to realize what these stories and images are saying about our collective human experience. I'm not saying your religion is wrong. I am saying that all religions are right.
But no one can let go of their images, they interpret them as fact, and now we have the three great religions of the world (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) all fighting it out because they have different names for the same biblical god. Each group thinks they are the chosen of god, they are stuck with their metaphor and don't realize its reference.
It isn't a bad thing to see your religion as a system of metaphors. People who study mythology and comparative religion often find that it strengthens their faith; the true meaning of the myths come through for them after seeing their context.
As for sin and punishment, they are primarily bad because they make us think that every natural impulse is to be squelched, at least in the biblical reading. Note that Christianity seems to be the biggest purpetrators of this. Taking the consequences of your actions is one thing, seeing everything in nature as something to resist is another.
And what is a false future? All futures are false. Everything we know about the future is guesses, inferences, and predictions. Only the present is ever real, the only thing you can experience. Even as I wrote that, that "present" is now gone forever, and I, like everyone, is constantly in this fleeting, present moment. It's amazing to think about it, how quickly it comes into being and dies, faster than we can imagine. Or, you can think of it as one moment that lasts indefinitely. For most people though, the future and the past seem more real than the actual present in which they are living. It seems we can't appreciate the present unless we have some promise for the futre; either a good time tomorrow or a heavenly reward beyond the grave. This gives the mind great anxiety.
Besides, there is no real evidence that Jesus is any more or less a reliable source of information about the afterlife than any other religious scripture. People are still finding new passages and translations lost over the millenia. This is why there are so many versions of the Bible.
The images of Jesus' story and teachings, however, hold much merit when you read them metaphorically, and are able to relate it to the stories and teachings of other religions. His is a story of death and rebirth, a theme that pops up everywhere, and this theme is something every single human being experiences. There's no room to go into it here, but every culture has stories meant to impress upon us the reality of our own death and rebirth. We are constantly dying to ourselves, and there is the important idea that there is no birth without death, and vice versa. So in this sense, the teachings of Jesus ARE correct, when you realize that they are not totally unique to him, and that there is a reason for this.
Good and evil are different from right and wrong. Right and wrong are terms that evaluate what people do of their own free will against others or even against themselves. But there is no great inexhaustable source of all "right" deeds (good), and wrong deeds (evil) at work in the universe. People always seem to confuse right with good, and wrong with evil.
Things like murder are not morally neutral acts, and certainly acts have varying degrees of positive and negative effects. And we are still human beings, and we all have a sense of justice. But in the end, the background against which we play all these things out, there's no such thing as good or evil as most people seem to understand it. It's when people define things in terms of their "goodness" and others' "evil" that they do things like murder and damage the earth. But someday, we, and our concepts of good and evil, will vanish from the earth, and there will be no one left who remembers us, just as there has never been a human being who can recall the age of the dinosaurs. And negative and postive things will still continue to happen.
We must try to live as honestly as we can, and save each other from horrible things, because this is how we get the full experience of existing. It has nothing to do with believing in a higher moral source. These aren't moral commands, but human needs. They are our spiritual potentialities, something else that the study of mythology and religion tells us. There is no actual immaterial being who has passed down these commands to us. We can be given more credit than that. Why must there be such a being? Are you saying that without it, these ideas would never have occurred to us? People have a need for harmony and relation, but there is also a destructive force that we all have to some degree. Myth and religion are visual manifestations of, among other things, this conflict.