@Rob48
I understand. Just tossing in my two cents.

@Rob48 Sorry but no, the whole, "it's a metaphor, it's symbolic" thing did not take hold till the 19th century. The Books of the bible were written to be taken seriously and literally and were for 18 hundred years. Even suggesting that the words of the bible could be reinterpreted could get you burned alive for heresy.

@LenHazell53
“...the whole, "it's a metaphor, it's symbolic" thing did not take hold till the 19th century”

It did not “take hold” in conscious awareness perhaps, but one could argue it hasn’t really taken hold yet in any but the most esoteric circles.

The writers of all world religions were illustrating the same psychological relationships and archetypes without conferring with each other on the matter. They may well have thought it literal themselves, but we (some of us) now know it wasn’t, and moreover, we know it was metaphorical, then and now. It was from the beginning an expression of the collective unconscious, no matter how it was taken then or is taken now by the majority.

There have always been a few individuals who understood this, Spinoza for example in the 17th century, and it didn’t originate with Christianity for that matter. They borrowed it from the Greeks before them.

@skado You say. "It did not “take hold” in conscious awareness perhaps, but one could argue it hasn’t really taken hold yet in any but the most esoteric circles." I would say that it has taken hold and that it is quite an old well established view, held by many.

Because unfortunately the problem is that it is not just limited to academic "esoteric circles". If it was, I would have no problem with it, but in fact is that it is widespread and deep rooted in many church establishments. Yet here is the rub. When a literal believer, of which there are many, gets up from the pew and reaches out to put money in the collecting box, does the priest say. "Stop before you do that, you do understand the metaphorical meaning of the verses I just read, don't you." No, of course not, and that is the heart of the problems. First the massive dishonesty, especially towards the huge numbers of often poor and vulnerable people, who are often led into making huge contributions of time, effort and money they often can not afford, and which could make big differences to them and in their communities, by those who only fake their belief. Secondly because the supporting of religion by such people, normalizes and extends the scope of religion, thereby creating the vast pool in which the fundamentalists, often of the worst type, swim. The metaphorical believers can not absolve themselves form the harm that religion, including the literal kind, causes indeed they are at the core of it. And thirdly, because of the massive lazy failing of those within religion and taking the metaphorical view, to educate, which should be everyones responsibility.

And yes I have studied religion as metaphor and enjoyed it as a study and learned much from it, but if someone asks me are those stories true, then I reply, not in any way, though you may use them as poetic understandings of human nature, but you can use any myths for that.

@skado JUst for the sake of clarity, when I say "take hold" in this context I mean that it did not start to be accepted and taught in theological circles, in children's Religious education and was not adopted by the mainstream churches ie. The Roman Catholic and Anglican churches until the 19th C.
I am not saying the idea was not purported by others, just that it was not purported for long but was silenced by the removal of a tongue of the crackle of the flames.
It is still taught that the creation stories are literal in Jewish educational establishments and Islamic ones as well as the more fundamentalist Xtain ones, where in all three an interpretive version is considered blasphemy, because in their teaching it was not the intent of "God" that be ever read as anything but divine truth.
Spinoza was a Jew and even today is reviled by his fundamentalist fellows for his idea the the scriptures may be allegorical, in his own life time he was condemned as an atheist by both church and synagogue (the pope tried to excommunicated him in advance in case he ever recanted and accepted christ, so great was his sin)

@skado, @Fernapple
"The writers of all world religions were illustrating the same psychological relationships and archetypes without conferring with each other on the matter."

The writers were Bronze age ignorami who were simply passing on their own versions of much older pagan myths the idea that they were genius psychoanalytic teachers of doctrines that would not be formulated for hundreds of years after their time is frankly ridiculous.
These people thought that demons lived in dirty water and that this was how they got in you body and caused sickness. Now people have insisted this showed a fore knowledge of germ theory, it did not otherwise they would have figured out boiling or filtering the water made it safe, rather than deciding praying over it would make the demons run away and then drinking it anyway and saying lack of faith was now causing the same sickness.

@LenHazell53 I think that you are right, and that there certainly was no intent on the part of the original writers to write allegory, in part because they were people just like us, and I don't know about you, but none of my friends have written a deep allegorical novel in the last few years. But in skado's defence, I have to say, that I do not think he is saying that the metaphors are not modern interpretations, mearly that he wishes to keep his right to use them that way. My problem is however, with continuing to view them that way in the modern religious tradition, not with acedemic study. From personal experience I have known people who claimed to view those stories as just metaphor, yet still found no problem in still using that metaphor, in one case to justify the most extremme anti palestinian racism, and in another the complete negation of human and animal rights.

Metaphor is of course open to any interpretation you care to give it, always subjective, and it is therefore the most dangerous of all the routes to truth save blind faith.

@Fernapple
“I would say that it has taken hold and that it is quite an old well established view, held by many.”

If this is such a well established view, held by many, could you direct me to some of their writings about it? Because I’ve been looking for three years and haven’t found any that are accepted by “many”. I get the feeling we are talking about two very different things. What I have found when I go looking for “allegorical interpretation of the Bible” for example, is someone like Augustine trying to resolve conflicts within the Bible, or modern theologians trying to resolve the old testament to the new by claiming the old was allegory of the new. But that’s not at all what I’m talking about. I’m talking about resolving Biblical allegory to modern science. Before we can go further I think we need to clarify exactly what “it” is. Thanks.

@LenHazell53
Could you give me an example of what you’re talking about when you say “...was not adopted by the ...churches until the 19th C.” I have a feeling we’re not talking about the same thing.

@LenHazell53

“The writers were Bronze age ignorami who were simply passing on their own versions of much older pagan myths”

Have the writers been identified, or is this just your assumption? I thought we had no idea who the writers were. Of course people who lived two thousand years ago were ignorant of the Enlightenment thinking we take for granted, because it hadn’t happened yet, but that doesn’t mean they were any less capable of observing the human condition than we are today.

Evolution doesn’t change much in two K years. The ratio of really smart people to people of average capability was probably about the same as it is now. I’m not aware of any evidence that supports the notion that the people who penned the most enduring book of all time came from the ignorant classes of that period.

“the idea that they were genius psychoanalytic teachers of doctrines that would not be formulated for hundreds of years after their time is frankly ridiculous.”

Now these are your words, not mine, and you’re framing it in a way to make it sound ridiculous. You don’t have to be a genius psychoanalyst to write poetry that resonates with your fellow humans for millennia, but somebody did write it, and it is still resonating, so there’s that. As for formulating doctrine, I’m still not sure what you’re referring to specifically.

@LenHazell53, @Fernapple

@skado No as you say. "You don’t have to be a genius psychoanalyst to write poetry that resonates with your fellow humans for millennia,". But writing poetry that resonates and has deep psychoanalytic meaning, especially if taken metaphorically, and believing in the literal truth of what you write, are not mutually exclusive. Indeed someone who writes with a strong belief in the literal truth of their words, is more likely to tap into deeper meaning.

Also as you say the authors could not have been aware of the "enlightenment thinking we take for granted" and in the absence of that, it has to be asked how else were they to see the world, except through the lens of their own time and the literal truth of the widespread beliefs of those times. Even today they are geniuses indeed, who can escape their own cultures.

And that is the deepest problem, which is that, as you also say. "Evolution doesn’t change much in two K years." People in the past were indeed just like us, and do you see huge numbers of books of metaphorical poetry being written today, and especially not having a major effect on society, in a world where books of any type, would have to be published in large numbers because of the large scale of the modern publishing industry. Yes there are one or two, I have seen several times on this site people quoting K. Gibran for example, but they are not many. For the most part most modern writing is everyday, and the vast volume of modern writing, by far the greatest part and sometimes the most influential part, is tabloid trash. The most important books of the last century, arguably, Mine Kampf, Das Capital, and The Protocols of Zion, none of them great poetic works. And the proof of this is surely is in the content, that the bible is filled with exactly the same sort of tabloid trash you can read in most cheap newspapers today, and yes of course you can with profit, read deep metaphors about the human condition into the contents of the tabloid papers, for the trashiest literature does indeed tap deepest into our inner secrets. It is not that people in the modern age are more advanced intellectually than people in the Bronze Age, for I believe that most progress is an illusion and that it is the curse of humans, to repeat the same mistakes of the past over and over again. It is not that I see the people of the past as different from us, quite the opposite, they were just like us, it is rather that the opposite view seeing books like the bible as having great intended metaphor, is guilty of setting up a 'Golden Age' myth, when the world of the past was the world of great heros and giants.

Also it is true that we do not know who the original authors were. What we do know however, is that all the books of the bible passed through the hands of many scribes and editors, before they became the finished versions we have today. And the laws of probability alone make it certain that most of those were people of only moderate abilities. While the surviving manuscript copies that we have of the new testament at least, show us that the further back in time that you go the more likely it is that scribes would alter texts quite freely, so much so that original meanings are soon lost, in the rewritings of mediocraties.

As to whether the metaphorical view is an established one held by many. It is true that for that, I only have personal experience to go on from my own contact with the clergy over the years, but please note that I was only referring to the clergy and not to the wider church membership.

@Fernapple
“As to whether the metaphorical view is an established one held by many. It is true that for that, I only have personal experience to go on from my own contact with the clergy over the years, but please note that I was only referring to the clergy and not to the wider church membership”

OK, can you give me an example of what kind of scriptural subject they thought was intended as metaphor and what that metaphor represented in reality, so I can see if we’re talking about the same thing?

@Rob48 The problem was his playdough had dried out!