levy@princeton.UUCP (06/10/83)
[I intended to submit this as follow-up, but the religion directory seem to have been erased while I was writing. Can you post it for me? I will try to post it tomorrow (i.e. Fri) if you cannot do it. Thanks.] Darrell - thanks to your balanced response to my follow-up article. Here are the answers to your objections: If you honestly believe the Bible is historical fact, they why is it unfair to assume it is used as a history book? Because there is a vast difference between truth and relevance. The Bible is a book about man (i.e. humankind), about God and about the relationship between man and God. Not all of its contents are relevant in a world history class, or even in an average Bible study. I stated in my article what I think are the (most) relevant points in Genesis 1; an analogous list could be made up for the following chapters (for instance, the fall story teaches me man is not in his original state, or, in other words, is not what he is supposed to be). If you want to read a balanced Christian view of this kind of thing try Francis Schaeffer's "Genesis"; the author is evangelical, but Yoakum's method of irony and ridicule would certainly not get far with his (Schaeffer's) arguments. The point with the original article is, children are asking questions that NOBODY can answer! Isn't that what I said? You don't have to have children asking the question, just to make the teachers look like morons. If your point is strong enough, have an adult arguing for it! So you can teach a child why the moon does not fall on the earth. Can you teach me why there is such a thing as gravitation in the first place? We tell children it's silly to believe in ghosts, Santa Claus, Superman, etc., etc., because there can't be such things. [..] none of these things is any harder to accept than any other. Not because there can't be -- because there aren't! (I.e. those who tell children not to believe in them think there aren't.) It is easy for me to imagine a world in which they'd exist. Do they exist in *our* world? I have no reliable testimony to prove it. But if I had never heard of Santa before, I'd rather believe someone who says he knows him than someone who says in the whole wide universe there can be no such a thing. (Just imagine yourself in the Middle Ages claiming you could talk with me over the net, or <fill in with your favorite technological wonder>). Same goes for God, of course! There is such a thing as hubris, you know. (Taken from an Asimov short-short.) Someone who calls him or herself an atheist is guilty of it. I much prefer the agnostic position, which openly admits to ignorance (a- is Greek for Latin i-, in-, and the roots -gnostic and -gnorance are Indo-European cognates). Some agnostics are willing to learn, some are not; but at least they don't make such wild, unsubtantiated claims as "There is no God". This would imply that rainbows didn't exist before the covenant. It doesn't. If I set my backspace character equal to <character>, I'm not creating <character>, just assigning a new meaning to it. Ditto for the rainbow. See Gen 9:12 and following. We also know that you can't fit all the animal species in the world in one boat. Here I'm afraid you're speaking out of ignorance. The New International Version gives the dimensions of the ark in feet, and the total volume is ca. 1.5e6. Assuming there are about a million animal species, there's more than one cubic foot for each couple -- and most of them are microscopic! Most of what Christians call "Miracles" is known to the rest of the world as "magic" and I'm afraid I don't believe in magic. Hubris again! But whatever the nomenclature, the miracles told in the Bible are "reasonable". But that I mean they a) serve some purpose; b) are modeled after things that happen daily; c) are no more unbelievable to us enlightened people than they where when the Bible was written. When Jesus turned water into wine at Cana, he was doing something similar to what nature does when microrganisms ferment grape juice. It is an archetype. He had the power to do it immediately; but there is a logic behind it. When bread and fish are multiplied, the everyday miracle of reproduction is supernaturally reenacted. Also, Jesus clearly had a purpose in doing these things, and the purpose was good. When John found out that Mary was pregnant without having had sex with him, he got very suspicious! People then were no less keen in spotting the impossible than we are now. So it took John an interview with an angel to convince him his bride had not been fooling around. Maybe some people would dismiss the vision as a hallucination because angels (like goblins and Santa) just *can't* exist! I'll close with a letter I got about my article; the first paragraph is not *quite* relevant, but who doesn't like compliments? QUOTE: Can it be? A reasonable article in net.religion? Amazing! Your comments were excellent and well stated. One other possible note on the Flood-- apparently the anthropologists are fairly certain that there was at some time right near the beginning of the agricultural revolution a major flood covering a large part of the Tigris-Euphrates river valley, which is the probable source of the flood stories in both the Bible and the pagan faiths in the area. As usual in Genesis history, the events pictured are true, but presented in a way that will emphasize God's role in history. Precisely what you would expect from scribes working during the Babylonian captivity. -Joe P. [for Pfeiffer] UNQUOTE