That’s all true but maybe not the complete picture. If we knew nothing about science, a scattered pile of dinosaur bone fragments mixed with modern animal remains and industrial contaminants may be useless as a guide to understanding dinosaurs.

But a patient and methodical sifting and analysis of those fragments can tell a story about reality that may not be obtainable elsewhere.

A scientific attitude does not dismiss any scrap of evidence, no matter how tattered or contaminated, once it understands how it can shed light on the hitherto unknown.

Ancient religions are archeological sites that can yield information about human psychology that, at minimum, can serve as useful corroboration of other sources, and potentially open doors to aspects we have no other sources for.

The untrained amateur can use those chips of bones to assemble any monster his imagination can conjure. Only the scientist, working against a backdrop of accumulated knowledge, knows how to piece the puzzle back together in a way that reflects factual reality.

@skado True, but how can any of the millions of christians look at the bible in a scientific way, since its culture is so deeply rooted as to prevent any objective study, only a none christian could do that.

@Fernapple
Christians who can do that may be in short supply, but they do exist. And It doesn’t matter (to science) if the person is Christian or not. Science is relevant to all humans, whether they believe it or not. The scientist can’t be worried about the popular acceptance of her work. The work must proceed.

@skado Yes, and as I said before, I have no problem with the academic and scientific study of religion as such. My problem is with the pseudo-science of theology when it claims to work within the Christian cultural tradition. Because by so doing it supports and fosters that cultural tradition and all the evils that go with it. Some things are just not acceptable even in the name of science. The theologians are guilty of the same sort of moral blindness used by those scientists and pseudo-scientists who collaborated with the Nazis in the death camps, because that would allow them the chance to conduct experiments on living humans. The experiments of the theologians are not so immediately inhuman, and take place at one step removed, yet they still share the guilt for all the deaths and miseries caused to millions which religion inflicts every year, because they remain one of the main props of religion.

@Fernapple
Yep, the bad boys are bad. But from a scientist’s point of view, theologians don’t own religion - Homo sapiens does. I’m not willing to allow the bad boys to define what science defines better.

@skado Fair enough.

"Symbolic imagery has a much longer history in the human story than literal, descriptive prose does." Is merely an assertion based on a subjective judgement about early writings, there can never be objective evidence for the motivations of any authors without their own direct testamony to their intentions. Before accepting that, I would like to get in your time machine with you and go back to observe for myself, when you interview one of the authors of a book like the bible please. Until then I will go with another literary figure from the past, L. Tolstoy, when he said that human nature does not change with the passage of time. At least not on historical time scales.

And the Bible at least does not fall into that early period, certainly from the six century BCE until the fall of classical culture, literature was as rich and diverse in forms as it is today. From the early objective science of Aristotle, to the overt political propaganda the Pharaohs inscribed on their many monuments, to the tabloid gossip of Herodotus, the beautiful objectivity of Euclid, and the careful studies of the human condition made by the Stoic philosophers. (Yes, I do know about Plato too, but even his thoughts are a mixture, with many direct objective inclusions.)

To say that. "Symbolic imagery has a much longer history in the human story than literal, descriptive prose does." Is either to deny the great richness of human creativity, and see people in the past as belonging to a primitive race not truly human as modern people are. Or to go the other way, and if you believe that the literature of, "symbolic imagery" is in some way a higher form than others, then you create a Golden Age myth which is equally false.

And yes of course most of human subjective experience is totally meaningless, though I would not put it as high as 99%. Because so is most of human thought, including our best attempts at being objective. Just because something is expressed subjectively does not mean that it is correct, only that it does not offer itself to objective disproof.

I like eggs, omega 3's, protein and they taste delicious. Assuming they are fresh. Over time they become old, stale and rotten. Even if they had any nutritional value the illness wouldn't be worth it. No problem there are plenty of fresh eggs.

@Fernapple
Do you dream in the written word?

@skado No why ?

@Fernapple
Our brains, still, here in the 21st Century, speak to us at night in their native tongue, which is primarily visual and non-rational. Our daytime mental gymnastics with words and reason are the thinnest of veneers over our millions-of-years-old other brainparts which think in visual metaphor.

Everything we think and say and write, even today, is still only a last-minute gloss over a substrate of imagery and symbols, the literal meanings of which we are generally only dimly aware.

@skado Yes but biblical times are today, in evolutionary terms. It is unlikely anything has changed in that short a time.

@Fernapple
Yes, that's exactly right. Evolutionarily, our physiological substrate has changed little, if any. That's why the overwhelming majority of our population is still as superstitious as ever. What can and does change is our culture. Clearly there was very little popular pressure to apply the scientific method to one's thinking in the first century, because it wasn't invented until the 16th or so. So people's worldviews were awash with metaphor that they could, on average, barely distinguish from objective fact. And even today, we see that tendency is still very strong.

It wasn't until maybe the 19th Century when the general public felt any significant pressure to justify their thinking by scientific objectivity, and I don't think anyone would argue that the populous at large has any great skill at it yet. But those few who have developed such skill have unwittingly taken it up as their new messiah (because that's how our brains work) and are living in (very unscientific) denial that we are all still metaphoric thinkers, feelers, speakers and dreamers at heart, and will be for the foreseeable future.

The implication here is not that we should therefore give up on rational thought and embrace superstition, but rather that we should apply that newfound rational faculty to the deciphering of mythological imagery, instead of denying its existence and its importance in our struggle for well-being.

@skado And as I have said before I have no problem with that. What I do have a problem with is the idea that the bible was written with metaphor as its intention.

I do not dream in written text, neither do I write while sleeping, whatever my sub conscious motivations may be when writing my intent when writing is quite conscious, and wholly contained within what you call the veneer. As it was in biblical times. The authors intent has nothing to do with the hidden motivations behind it, whatever others may read of those motivations. And since much of the bible is political propaganda, concerned with the claims that the Jewish people made to ownership of the lands. I am pretty confident that any suggestion, that the propaganda was anything but objective and rational, would, had you made it to a biblical author, have been met with a strong rebuttal if not a violent one, just as any suggestion of the sort about today's political propaganda would. It is simply too great an oversimplification to suggest that a book as complex as the bible is all of one sort, and has always to be read in just one way.

@Fernapple
I don’t think the Bible was written with any single intention. It’s a collection of writings by many different people over hundreds of years, compiled by yet other people after the fact.

It addresses many different issues, from many different angles, with, no doubt, many different motivations.

Neither do I think that any of the writers necessarily consciously thought of themselves as encoding psychological insights into metaphorical verse.

What I do think (and I doubt I am expressing it well) is that many of the ideas in the Bible, especially those directly related to the big issues of our relationship to God, Heaven, Salvation, Eternity, etc. bear the imprint of archetypal relationships evident, in some form or other, in the wisdom traditions of other peoples, separated by centuries and continents. Cultures that knew little or nothing of each other - reporting the same imagery, only dressed in local clothing so to speak.

And these written accounts were based on oral traditions that preceded them for millennia. The storytellers who could be said to have originated these themes are so far back in the mists of time as to be unidentifiable. But, the world over, they told conspicuously similar stories about unseen worlds, peopled with gods and demons that played with our fate.

These disparate ancient people didn’t, each independently, invent out of whole cloth, the same complex story themes, about the same issues. I’m not the first to claim that these navigational archetypes are likely encoded in our DNA much the same way our capacity for language is - the capacity itself being universal, while the specifics are left up to local habit.

The story of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection is the archetypal Hero’s Journey story found in all civilizations throughout human history. Some dude in first century Jerusalem didn't just sit down at his desk one day and rationally devise a story of his own invention, for the purpose of subjugating the peasants, as so many here claim, AND it just happened to resemble stories from all over the world.

Other parts of the Bible were, no doubt, written for other purposes, but the core story, and much of its surrounding mythology, consist of patterns repeated in time and across populations. They don't come from God. But they don't entirely come from man either. They come from the same place almost every other human trait comes from - natural selection.

@skado Yes I agree wholly with that, that is my view too. (See my first comment on this post.) One of the things that make it interesting is the rich mosaic, of many different forms. The largest part being myth, with in addition some poetry, some tabloid trashy gossip, some genuine history, some news reportage and a few quite deliberate lies of political and religious propaganda intended to mislead. But that is why reading into it an intent on the part of the authors to do any one thing, including the deliberate writing of metaphor, just as much as thinking it to be literal truth, is so wrong. The authors, editors and translators, were so many, that their attitude to the mythalogical elements must have varied greatly, from regarding it as metaphor themselves, through simple literal belief, to seeing it as useful lies.

@Fernapple
I’m not saying it was deliberate. I’m saying it was unavoidable.

@Fernapple
All that stuff is in the mix of course. So weighing and sifting is also unavoidable. So I look for common denominators. When I’m looking for causal influences, the one common denominator that seems most difficult to dismiss is the fact that these themes are present in all cultures of all historic periods of record. I can think of only two “possible” reasons for that being the case: either “God did it” or it is genetically encoded in our DNA by the processes of evolution. The latter seems more plausible to me, but in neither case would it be meaningless gibberish.