You imply that I am calling the Hebrews retards because I believe most of them believed outrageous myths. On the contrary, there has never been an age when most of the human race did not believe outrageous myths. I include the current age, though science and education is slowly improving on that sad state of affairs. You will not convince me with assertions that human beings are smarter than that. We are not. We are an ignorant and gullible race, tending to believe most of the nonsense our moms and dads and priests tell us.

Internal flaws and contradictions remained present in the Genesis narrative even after the Redactor finished with it. Genesis 1 still doesn’t really agree with Genesis 2. The story of the patriarch passing off his wife as his sister is duplicated, once with Abraham and his wife, the second time with Isaac and his wife. And so forth. One doesn’t need science to spot these flaws and contradictions. Any “educated person with intellectual integrity” who studies Genesis closely is going to spot these issues and have problems with them. He may not publish his doubts to the world, but he will have them.

Anthropological investigations since around 1970 have made it fairly clear that most primitive peoples do understand their myths to be myths, not literal histories. Unless you are solidly convinced that the Hebrews were retards in comparison with most other humans, it is reasonable to believe that the Hebrews also understood the myths of Genesis to be myths, not literal history. It is likewise reasonable to believe that the Europeans of the Dark Ages, being very close to primitives themselves and having their own tribal myths to compare with Genesis, understood the myths of Genesis to be myths, not literal history.

In short, the refusal to read Genesis literally did not begin in earnest with the rise of modern science. It has always been around. Judging by the stories that have come down to us, it was far more common for people in the Middle Ages to draw on the Bible as a source of metaphor than to take it as a literal account of history. The insistence on taking the Bible seriously as an accurate account of history began with the rise of Protestantism, after the early Protestants compared the teachings of the Bible with the misrepresentations and misbehaviors of the corrupted medieval Church. You can search the writings of earlier generations of Christians and Jews as much as you please, but you will not find an insistence there that the Bible has to be regarded as literally accurate at all points.

What science undermined was a literalistic understanding of religion. It literally disproved Genesis as a historical account. So it is no longer possible for educated people with intellectual integrity to believe Genesis as a historical account, which is how it had been understood by most believers for thousands of years.

I think I use the word “God” perhaps a little too freely, to name all of that about life, love, ethics, how to be, that is unnamed and unnamable. I never (well, rarely) actually think of it as a being with intent (and then only as a metaphor) but I find that I use the word easily, perhaps because I was brought up in a somewhat religious context, and while the “facts” that I learned at my catholic school never quite meshed into anything touching reality, many of the nuns really did show me through their lives, and how they talked to me, what kindness and love and even faith mean, and the power of those things.

So, when I feel “right with the world” or a sort of peace or love that I first recognized in them, I can call it God, because they did. I get confused when anyone suggests that it’s tied to belief in Jesus’ divinity, or belief that his body got up and walked away from the crypt. - but I recognize something, from a time before I had many words for it, and I can be okay calling it God.

And I wwonder if I’m lying. Sometimes to call this non-entity that I know “God” seems underhanded in the same way referring to my girlfriend as my “boyfriend” (because the people I’m talking to really just mean relationships, and they would be confused if I tried to actually speak to my whole truth….) - I would never do that, but would I say something ambiguous? “partner”, “lover”, “sweetie”? - I do it all the time. Am I lying?

I feel often as if I know God, it’s just not the God of the Bible, it’s not nameable, and it’s not even consistent. It’s not a being, or an intent, or a set of rules,

I most often think it’s “only” (such a dismissive word for such a powerful thing) love, sense of community, what can happen if we truly hear each other, work together. it’s glimpses of quiet perfection, it’s the amazing sliver of difference between living things and dead matter.

It occurred to me once, when I was trying to explain it, that the birth of a child is a miracle. You can know exactly when it happened, how it happened, every spec of the science behind it. You can even have MADE it happen - I know plenty of people who went to a cryobank and bought frozen sperm, We all know at this point that God didn’t make it happen in some way beyond our grasp, and NONE of that takes a bit from the wonder of it. It’s all small potatoes in comparison, as far as I’m concerned.

Would it be possible to scientifically map the quantum physics of a gathered meeting, or a leading? Would that really diminish it?

The bottom-line, revolutionary findings of evolution, however, are very well established and will not be blown out of the water: 1) Evolution occurs and can be directly observed; 2) all life on Earth today is descended from simple one-celled organisms; 3)once self-reproducing life emerged, natural selection took hold as one (perhaps not the only) immensely creative and completely natural method for more complex life forms to emerge. There are still huge holes in the details of our knowledge of all the particular mechanisms of evolution, but any such findings will refine and extend evolutionary theory, not contradict its fundamentals. The evidence is overwhelming.

The same goes for the findings of Galileo and Copernicus. Indeed, by Einsteinian standards their descriptions of celestial motions were crude and primitive, but they were not fundamentally wrong. The jury is still out as to how quantum physical theory will extend Einstein’s findings, but no one is seriously suggesting it will prove him wrong. It does seem to reveal deeper levels of reality, but that does not discount the levels of reality closer to the surface.

I try–often without success–to live my life in accordance with the best impulses of my heart, being attentive to everything around me in the world. The existence or non-existence of God or a Great Whatever really doesn’t figure into it very much. I don’t know anything about God, so I have to talk instead to you, my Friends, and listen to the world in all its diversity and complexity.

In any case, I heartily agree with you,

The real question remains: How does your understanding or relationship with God or the Great Whatever affect how you live your one precious life?

Which is, perhaps, why I care so little whether someone calls that relationship one with “God” or “the great whatever” of “mystery” or “love” or “being” - I have seen people who call it all different things radiate light and I have seen others with all the various understandings who can only use those understandings to sow hatred and division.

peace
Pam

It isn’t enough to say that evolution is a good metaphor for understanding how life originated on Earth. You must believe that evolution is THE way life originated and grew and that any other belief in, say, a Creator is false or at best fictional.

Someone will someday blow Darwin and Copernicus and Galileo out of the water (if they haven’t already), and will consider their explanations to be helpful metaphors but not “really” the way it is.

The real question remains: How does your understanding or relationship with God or the Great Whatever affect how you live your one precious life?

Tentatively though I would question whether your “bad” meaning of love is the most common meaning of love. I’d say there’s a pretty even mix. And if there was the same mix among users of the word God (half using it the way the current overwhelming majority use it, and half using it in what for me would be a more acceptable way), I might not have a problem continuing to use it.

But I would still argue that even the other authorities you cite — the scriptures, group discernment, faith traditions — are wholly or mostly human themselves, and so the problem I tried to point out still exists, though admittedly on a less urgent level (i.e. linking superhuman authority with earnest human group discernment-derived opinion is much better than linking it with unreflective human opinion).

And you must admit that even among the great majority who do own an intermediate authority between them and God (the Bible, their church, etc.), there still is a spectrum of more and less humble folk. Some can become completely certain that God is speaking through a Biblical text (or their own personal revelation), and equally certain that they are understanding the message correctly — and those are the people I find terrifying. Then there are people who are less cocksure, and at the other end of the spectrum are the radically apophatic theists who realize any human opinion, no matter how well reinforced by another authority, is ultimately inadequate and partial (like Pseudo-Denys and more recently I believe Merold Westphal).

Which is why I included the more “apophatic” sort of religious folk, in my last comment, as among the people who to their credit don’t perform the linkage I was describing. By which I meant to say that I think I can get along with theists who do have a strong notion of their own fallibility. Which I hope we all do.

(Said another way, at the theoretical level I was wrong and you are completely correct in your reply, because almost every religion or sect is officially “apophatic” enough to not trust their own prereflective opinion. But in practice, especially at the popular level, there is more of a range, and I think on that level what I said last comment is not entirely unfair.)

The thing is, Copernicus and Galileo and Darwin blew completely out of the water the notion that Genesis could be true, at a time when the vast majority of believers believed it was true. Long before these scientific revolutions, there were always mystics who warned against literalistic understandings, but Armstrong and others make the mistake of reading those mystics as representative of the religious views of their time, rather than reactions against those views.

It is science that undermined the literalist approach to religion. The world is still shaking, the literalists and fundamentalists are still fighting, but it is no longer intellectually defensible. That is what has changed.