Dear runner,

It takes blind faith to believe the Bible account. Part of the job of the scientist is to follow the evidence whatever it indicates. An honest scientist rejects previous theory if new evidence shows it not to be valid and rejects experimental evidence if it is not reproducible. Evolution is simply fact. The fossil record shows that as species have been replaced by other species through time, and experiments with fruit flies and other organisms with short life spans have shown evolution happening within human life spans. The theory suggests mechanisms by which this can happen.

Dear Pynchme,

I agree that the Bible can have spiritual meaning even though much of the material is legendary or inaccurate. I don't agree that the inaccuracies lend it authenticity.

Dear Mitchell,

Look at the article again. The words in Italics are quotations. The paragraph you cited is part of the Kramer quotation. Actually I am old enough to have read Scheil's work in 1945 as I was 20 at the time, but I didn't. Kramer did. My picture in the article was taken about 1928.

My point was "To study any work of literature one should be aware of the cultural matrix in which that work was produced." I stated that point in the second paragraph of my article. The Bible is no exception.

Dear crabsy, Rhian, Ho Hum and suzeonline,

Thanks for your appreciation.

Dear David,
I do apologise--I bet Derrida never glossed and misinterpreted anyone's prose like that!
The horsehair shirt for me today.

Suzeonline

<<<< How did all their ancestors live in such a Godless world before the apparent son of God came among us and saved the Christian souls?

Oh yes, that's right. All those that lived before the Bible's times must now be burning in the fires of hell.....right? >>>>

I have pondered the same conundrum myself - that until the 'creation' of Christianity, humans could not have been 'saved' by Jesus, therefore, they must've been consigned to the pits of hell.

Or, maybe the Jews are right.

Or, maybe there is no single 'correct' religion.

Which could mean....

.... that religion was created by male humans for male humans.

Severin wrote:

"Or, maybe the Jews are right.

Or, maybe there is no single 'correct' religion."

Jewish belief is that there is no single 'correct' religion.

From "What is a Jew?" by Leo Tolstoy

"As concerns religious toleration, the Jewish faith is not only far from the missionary spirit of converting people of other denominations, but on the contrary the Talmud commands the rabbis to inform and explain to everyone who willingly comes to accept the Jewish religion, all the difficulties involved in its acceptance, and to point out to the would-be proselyte that the righteous of all nations have a share in immortality.

Of such a lofty and ideal religious toleration not even the moralists of the present day can boast."

You know what happens to stories that get passed from person to person, you end up with something entirely different. Women came from a chop; i am having trouble visualizing that let alone believing it.
Hand me down stories; that's probably why someone ended up living in a whale.

Desmond

It is hand-me-down stories, not history books, that shape our culture and values.

Our identity as Australians, for example, is more bound up in the semi-historical national myths surrounding the ANZACs and Ned Kelly that chronological milestones like Federation.

The bible contains some authentic history, but its authors’ purposes were not primarily the transmission of historical (or biological or geophysical) data. It also contains a wide variety of literary forms – allegory, myth, poetry, song, correspondence, narrative etc.

The naive fundamentalists who insist that it’s all factually accurate are a pretty small minority among Australian Christians. They are easy to mock, but they’re not representative.