Cerebralbore101 said:
o_O.Q said:
did you not read what i just posted?
the scientific method is to observe a particular phenomenon multiple times to ensure that the end result is always the same
for example if you throw a ball you can be fairly sure ( not absolutely sure ) that the ball will fall to the ground due to gravity - agree?
we've determined as a result that there's something causing objects to accelerate towards the earth's surface and now we call that a law something we can be fairly certain is concrete
i'm saying that the same thing applies to human behavior - we can analyse different ways of living life and determine over time which ways of living life lead to prosperity and which lead to ruin
over time we can then determine which values man should live by for prosperity - the difference here is that a method to communicate these values to the widest portion of the population possible has to be devised
and I think that in the past people realised that encoding values into stories and associating them wtih gods was the easiest way to have people digest these values and that's where books like the bible in part came from
you have such a visceral reaction to the idea that the scientific method can be associated with these concepts that you aren't even looking at what i'm posting
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Ok now I understand your argument better, and I agree with it. You're saying that the bible stories were all made up in order to teach moral principles. That makes sense.
But that wasn't what I was asking for. Whenever a literal interpretation of the bible disproves christianity, apologists will claim that *that* specific passage was never intended as literal. But how do we know which parts of the bible were intended as literal, and which parts were merely stories to illustrate a moral point? What if Jesus' ressurrection on the cross wasn't meant to be literal, but was just to illustrate a moral point? That would undermine all of Christianity. There needs to be a clear cut set of rules for determining which parts of the bible were meant as allegory, and which parts were meant as literal. Otherwise a Christian can just convieniently claim that *that* passage wasn't meant as literal, and an Athiest can claim that Jesus' whole life story wasn't meant as literal.
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you determine what means what with the scientific method, testing to see what works over and over again, but the problem with that is that you first have to understand what the intention of the original passage was, if you want to do a comparison and i think a lot of that information has been lost or at least that its not taught widely
"What if Jesus' ressurrection on the cross wasn't meant to be literal, but was just to illustrate a moral point? That would undermine all of Christianity."
i do think that was metaphorical and yes it would undermine christianity because christianity to a large extent has lost its way, its placed significance on the wrong things
then there's the fact that the origins of the bible and how its been altered have to be taken into consideration
