Who told the first lie? (page 19)

peacefulpete

Agreed. Then again, if the Jesus story was also allegorical, why have I abandoned my family or, given my savings to the church....

I tend to repeat myself a lot but recall the P version of the creation story has no Eden, no fruit, no snake, no 'fall' from grace, no curse of the ground etc. Rather it ends with God's blessing of the pair and declaring all to be good.

28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”...

31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.

2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.

2 By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. 3 Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.

I wonder what the world would be like if the compiler had only included this version.

Halcon

Tonus - The scriptures are fairly vague about this, though. Perhaps the one clear indication is that we are to spend eternity glorifying a being who doesn't need to be glorified.

Again, many folks do feel that need in their heart to show appreciation for their Creator. Not everyone is opposed.

Why go through a relatively brief life that doesn't come close to resembling the life we will spend the rest of eternity in?

For the same folks I mentioned above, this isn't a problem. Myself personally, I do think that things here are indeed a little vague. When I read the Bible, the line between spirit and material gets very blurry...will it be the same or different in 'heaven'? Not sure.

Halcon

Nicolaou - Whatever value can be drawn from these stories if they're treated as allegorical is lost the moment they're taken literally. I think part of it is the fear that not taking stories like the Fall literally will bring the whole house of cards.

In this thread's example, the snake could have been anything else...a butterfly, horse, a rock etc...the meaning of the story would remain the same to a christian. In fact the exact same meaning would have been expressed with a hundred different settings and characters.

Pete touched above on the human aspects that a story like the one discussed in this thread engaged...the intellect, the heart and the spirit.

It pantomimes religious concepts like obedience to religious law when at odds with individual and intellectual freedom.

Does the materialist discard the mind, heart and spirit? Yet they are the aspects of a human being that the scriptures place the most importance on. The line between literal and spirit is not so clearly defined.

Jeffro

Halcon:

Does the materialist discard the mind, heart and spirit?

Let’s see if you can provide a meaningful definition of ‘spirit’. (And it would need to be something distinct from ‘heart’ and ‘mind’ in the given context.)

Hehe...and what is behind cellular metabolism?

Chemistry.

Still waiting for any meaningful definition of ‘spirit’.

Jeffro

Halcon:

Spirit is what animates the physical elements (carbon, hydrogen etc) into a living human body.

Also, for the record, I’m not naive about the bait-and-switch in this distraction from the original vague intent of ‘spirit’ in the expression ‘mind, heart and spirit’.

Who told the first lie?

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