a.) In what sense are they extraordinarily good? Surely you've read the awful parts as well?
You ever read MacBeth? The Iliad? Even the ghastly parts are wonderful because they tell us the truth about ourselves. I mean, even the awful stories are amazing, for the most part.
b.) The OT stories are good because they are Jewish, and God is a Jew.... I'm not quite sure I follow.
Orthodox teaching is that Jesus is God and that, after his death, he was raised transformed, but still human. So, that makes him a Jew. Still.
At the end of the day, the myth is one and the same. I'm trying real hard to understand how you reconcile the myth with the reality.
No, no, no. Creation myths are attempts to say something about ourselves. When you have a creation myth that insists we are, you and me, ultimately the blood of dragons, that is a different understanding of humanity when measured against a myth that insists we are made by God breathing life into his own image. If we are dragon blood, the Heart of Darkness is our scripture, yeah? If we are clay that God breathed into life in his own image, well, something else.
Reality? Yeah, we are primordial soup that got struck by lightening or whatever and, you know, boom! That's great and all, but I'm not sure that tells us something more important about us than either of those creation myths. In the same way, The Iliad is more true than any history of whatever war happened during the time.
My question though is, what exactly from the Bible do you consider to be concrete truth, concrete reality? I don't know what better way to ask. I can understand seeking "spirituality", "meaning in existence", connecting in some seemingly profound way with the past, etc.
Do you mean something like: which bible stories do I take to be historically true the way we think of the term now? I think there really was a David who was a badass, who had a son who started a civil war (and who was not entirely unjustified in doing so), I think he stole a guy's wife and had him killed, that sort of thing. I think Abraham really existed and had a very hard to understand relationship with the transcendent Being; that he had a very odd experience near the oaks at Mamre; that his -- or his son's -- wife was taken by some powerful guy, etc.
What I don't understand is religion claiming to possess truth, and then having you claim that as a Catholic, you alone are reading the Bible the "right way".
Well, I think the JW / fundamentalist approach to scripture is a catastrophe for reasons that are probably the same ones you have. But, look, any reading of, say, the gospels simply must not allow itself to be amazed to find that the synoptics and John disagree on the day of the Last Supper. We Catholics put the NT together and we did it knowing very well that there are differences in the gospel acounts. I guess the fact that John and Peter (Mark) remember it differently must not be what we mean when we say both works are inspired.
Same with the OT. Jews have been reading it for a very long time now -- they know there are different traditions expressed in it. They have left them in because the importance of the Jewish scriptures is not diminished by that fact. Not to them, anyway. If you find that the presence of more than a single tradition in some of these stories makes you think less of those scriptures, well, you must not be viewing them in the same way Jews are. I guess you have that right, but that ain't the way the people who wrote / edited those works viewed them. So, yeah, you'd be doing it wrong.
