Christian apologist: CS Lewis dealt with this kind of infantile, wooden literalism [used by skeptics to criticize the Bible] in Mere Christianity in this case the imagery used to describe heaven and the afterlife (harps; crowns; gold; etc.) and people who argued against heaven by saying that they didn’t want to spend an eternity playing harps. Lewis answers by saying:
“The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them.”
Lewis closed his argument by saying:
“People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.”
Gary: “Jesus told His disciples, “In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:2-3).”
I suppose we non-theologians, non-scholars should also stop believing that Jesus is preparing a mansion/home/room for each of us in heaven. In fact, maybe heaven isn’t even a real physical place. Silly us. Maybe heaven is simply a state of mind in another dimension.
This is what modern scholarship has done to the lay person’s faith in the Bible. We cannot trust any claim of fact in the Bible, even in regards to something as simple as the characteristics of heaven, without checking with the local Bible scholar first to make sure we aren’t being fools for believing that the Bible literally means what it says. Good Christians should stop reading the Bible, and in its place, read books by scholars who know what God really meant to say but didn’t say it clearly enough for the average Joe and Jane.
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End of post.
Escaping Christian Fundamentalism 
1 Corinthians 1:27 But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;
Stop with the foolish things, and get onboard with understanding.
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I’m going to follow Lewis advice and conclude there is no heaven or afterlife and it’s just a metaphor for how we should live on earth. No literalism here, just good ol’ metaphor.
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I’m not sure what exactly the author of 2nd Peter 1:20 meant when he said “But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation.” Can someone interpret this for me, I don’t want to be a wooden literalist.
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It’s a lame excuse to say this or that in the Bible is intended to be taken figuratively. How do the ‘childlike’ followers of Jesus know what’s figurative and what’s literal? I’m always impressed how commands like ‘give to all who ask’ and ‘love your enemies’ are obviously meant to be metaphorical. How convenient!
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And when an imminent apocalyptic movement fails, the literal becomes figurative. The train was supposed to reach the station in a few months or at most years, but thousands of years later, the carry-on bags has been converted to checked luggage.
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Very good!
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I think you would find this conversation interesting, Epicurus:
https://www.joeledmundanderson.com/francesca-stavrakopoulous-god-an-anatomy-a-book-analysis-series-part-2-main-arguments-and-laying-the-groundwork/#comment-6155
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Too bad Freeman didn’t really address your point about other religions not believing the resurrection even though they don’t have an anti supernatural bias. He just seems to lump them in with secular skeptics. Probably because deep down he thinks anyone who isn’t a Christian is in rebellion and can’t reason properly – the noetic effects of sin. The whole conversation is pretty long, I hope to read it all this evening.
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I plan to ask him about his own biases very soon.
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As in DUSTPOJ — Do you sense the presence of Jesus. My new boring acronym!
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Here is his answer and my response:
GARY: I have a question for you, Lee: Do you perceive the presence of Jesus Christ within you?
LEE: This again? Yes. I do. But I wouldn’t use it as evidence for the bodily resurrection of Jesus.
Gary: But can you see why non-Christians might see this as a source for a probable bias? If you can perceive the presence of the spirit of a first century person living within you, it has to influence your objectivity regarding the historical evidence for this same dead man’s alleged resurrection, don’t you think? You may not recognize the bias, but most people will believe it at least affects your views subconsciously.
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I guess it’s really a rhetorical question as we know they do believe they sense Jesus, and will ultimately answer in the affirmative when pressed. But it’s a necessity in order to make the assertion stick that their objectivity is compromised.
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I then said this:
Imagine if I claimed that the spirit of Jimmy Hoffa lives within me, telling me in a still small voice that he never died; he is hiding out somewhere. How objective do you think I could be about any evidence which indicates that Jimmy is dead?
The owner of the blog, theologian Joel Edmund Anderson, did NOT like that comment.
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They don’t like it partly because Jesus has been elevated to full divinity and equality and essence as God. So any comparison to a pop culture reference just seems intuitively wrong and blasphemous. It makes me think of Ehrman’s statement on his blog several years ago that he had always rejected Crossan’s assertion that Jesus’ body was most likely thrown into a shallow pit with other criminals and would have wound up eaten by dogs. Jesus is so elevated in our culture that even though he had stopped being a Christian, Ehrman said he couldn’t accept that idea regardless of evidence. But he eventually did come to believe Crossan’s explanation eventually.
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Interesting. I didn’t know Ehrman originally felt that way.
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In approximately 330 BCE Alexander the Great conquered the Jewish nation. With his conquest, Greek culture and Greek thinking (philosophy) began seeping into Second Temple Judaism. A religion which formerly held no view of an afterlife, soon adopted a (Greek-like) afterlife. Jews began to worship Yahweh using a Greek translation of Hebrew Scriptures in their worship services. Greek philosophy even influenced the ancient Hebrew concept of God: Descriptions of Yahweh became less anthropomorphic and more metaphysical.
In the first century CE, a new Jewish sect, Christianity, adopted this same “pagan” Greek philosophy. .
And this Pagan Greek philosophy continues to influence modern Christianity. All vestiges of an anthropomorphic God are gone. He does not sit on a throne. He does not live in a “place” with golden streets or gates of pearls. No, God is not “out there”, at the edge of the universe. God is ubiquitous. He is everywhere. Heaven is just empty space in another dimension.
Dear lay Christian: Stop dreaming of walking streets paved with gold; living in a mansion; having a crown with stars; and reconnecting with your loved ones who have died before you. Jesus and the authors of the Bible were speaking figuratively. They didn’t really mean what they said. Your dead loved ones are not waiting for you in a literal, physical place called “heaven”. Their souls are in soul sleep, floating around aimlessly in another dimension. When you die, you will end up “asleep” in the same void; the same dimension free of any physicality! Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?
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Both liberal and conservative Christian’s aim is to make Jesus look good. Picking and choosing when a passage is a metaphor or a literal description will depend on which process accomplishes that result. Then they will say their interpretation is obvious. Then they will start qualifying it, as with the practice of asserting that the Bible had to speak to the people of the time (Divine accommodation) and doesn’t care about those who come later ( Lee’s quote that “Anyway, the gospel resurrection accounts weren’t written primarily to convince 21st. c. skeptics that Christianity is true” pretty much sums up why these discussions exist).
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The fact that the evidence that their belief system is so poor seems so obvious, but they just can’t see it.
The problem: They (desperately) do not want to see it.
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NT scholar, Joel Edmund Anderson: I’m just not interested in your little games, Gary. But what am I? Moderate? Liberal? Evangelical? Conservative? Over the years, you’ve thrown all those labels at me. lol…
Sorry, I’m just not interested in trying to reason with someone who insists on reading the entire Bible with the exact same wooden-literalism all the way through. You’re like Ken Ham, who says, “If you don’t believe in Adam and Eve, then how can you believe the resurrection claims?” The answer is simple: Because I know how to read.
Gary: Wrong. You know I don’t read everything in the Bible as literal. You are attempting to silence me by labeling me as an uninformed, ignorant, fundamentalist, a common tactic used by Christian apologists against skeptics whenever the skeptic has backed the apologist into a corner. You are backed in a corner, Joel, and you know it! To avoid answering my question, you are using the same tactic used by the Emperor’s tailors. They didn’t convince the people of the existence of invisible cloth with evidence. They convinced the people of the existence of invisible cloth by intimidating them into silence: “If you don’t see what I say is true, it is because you are too stupid and uninformed to see it.”
You have not provided one shred of evidence that you know as fact the intent of ANY ancient author, whether it be the author(s) of Genesis or the author of Matthew. You simply insist that we accept your expert opinion as fact. Sorry, university educated people do not accept one expert’s personal opinion as fact.
I do not read ancient texts with wooden literalism. When Homer talked about cyclops, he was speaking figuratively. And when a Bible author states that Jesus is going to tell his disciples a parable, I accept that the story is an allegory. And when Jesus spoke of being the “bread of life” and the “door”, I understand that he was speaking metaphorically. But when the author of Matthew tells us that dead saints were shaken out of their graves to walk the streets of a major Roman city, how do you or anyone else know that he was speaking literally or figuratively? We don’t. And the same is true of other stories in the Gospels of people seeing a walking, talking, broiled fish eating corpse. These stories could all be allegories; stories invented for theological purposes. But you can’t admit that, can you, Joel?
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God didn’t give us a preface or introduction to the Bible. He didn’t say which parts are literal and which aren’t. He spoke through ignorant, superstitious, xenophobic people of an age so far gone and different from ours that almost all of what they said is irrelevant to us and our lives. Yet some Christians think they know which parts are metaphorical and which aren’t, even though other groups of Christians both past and present would disagree with them.
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Yet some Christians think they know which parts are metaphorical and which aren’t ❤👏👏👏❗
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