Is the Bible necessarily supposed to be taken literally?

[Riedquat]

"It's not meant to be taken literally" - isn't it? Or is that just a convenient excuse since we've later discovered how incompatible taking it literally is with all the other evidence around us? Was it intended to be taken literally when it was first written?

It feels very much like a cop-out.

[KuudereKun]

The thing I've learned is that Literal vs non Literal is the wrong dichotomy to begin with.

Acting like there is some logical inconsistency between taking the Virgin Birth literally but not he Parable sis just bad reading comprehension.

[McAvoy]

However imagine, you are not me. You are placed in a more strict church environment where not only do you go to church on Sunday mornings but evenings, but also on Wednesday nights. Your whole local culture revolves around this. Even your own schools semi-helps with this because you are in a Bible thumping area. Your family also has directly benefited from the charity of your church.

You grow up knowing, not thinking that your church is normal and the correct way. Atheists you were taught were God haters. Evolution is false, we didn't come from monkeys. You were taught cherry picked passages your whole life, you may have read the Bible once but you rely on just those Bible passages that was hammered in your head.

You now view the world from nearly entirely of your religious upbringing. You were taught that elevated feeling when you sing and talk about God and Jesus that is them in your heart. So anything that runs contrary to your worldview based on those decades of indoctrination is false.

Now combine that with politics.

Well, there is one way out of that mindset, which I know because I experienced it: reading the Bible too much. (It is possible that being a huge nerd may also be a requirement, as you'll probably notice from the rest of this post.)

Here's what broke my little brain at 11 years old or so:

Matthew 1 has a genealogy of Christ. In order to say that Jesus is descended from King David, it goes down the line of the Kings of Judah; David, Soloman, Rehoboam, Abijah, Asa, etc.

But, it screws it up. It says that Jehoram was the father of Uzziah. That is wrong. Uzziah's father was Amaziah. And Amaziah's father was Joash. Joash's father was Ahaziah, and Ahaziah was the one who's father was Jehoram. Now you could make the point that since Uzziah was ultimately descended from Jehoram, Jehoram could be in some way his "father", but then Matthew 1:17 goes on to say:

Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Messiah.

It specifically calls out there being fourteen generations from David to the exile, and that's just wrong. You only have fourteen because you skipped a bunch of them! Somebody fudged things to make their numerology work out. What the heck.

The rabbit hole then goes even deeper when you notice that Luke 3, famously, has another genealogy of Christ, but it has him descend from one of David's other sons, not Solomon, so the whole genealogy is different. Well, almost all different! The first two post-exile names in the Matthew geneaology, Shealtiel and Zerubbabel, show up in the middle of the Luke one for some reason, another wtf.

(Of course, the standard received wisdom on the two genealogies of Christ is that one of them is of Joseph and one is of Mary. But this also doesn't stand up to a literal interpretation, because both gospels specifically say that they're the genealogies of Joseph.)

Anyway, there are of course lots of weird inconsistencies like that you can find in the Bible, but that's the one that set my brain off way back then. The irony of it all is that I probably never would have noticed any of that, and consequently might even have still been Christian today, if my religious grade school hadn't made me memorize the names of all the kings of Israel and Judah.

I read the Bible too. Read it a few times. One of my issues going through Bible study was trying to figure out what the church wanted me to say when I read a passage. I would read it multiple times and just not got that message.

Like the account of Jesus rising from the dead. The eye witness account wildly varies in the Bible. No one talks about that.

[KuudereKun]

There are answer to every alleged contradiction, they often show up on Google Searches before any Atheist talking about them. Yet people continue to claim Christians just ignore them.

[Durandal_1707]

There are a̶n̶s̶w̶e̶r̶ excuses to every alleged contradiction, they often show up on Google Searches before any Atheist talking about them. Yet people continue to claim Christians just ignore them.

Fixed that for you.

[Scififan]

I was a Christian for a long time; I still am up to a point. I stopped going to church because when I went to a men's bible study, I had to sit through the first hour hearing about how the election of 2020 was rigged and stolen and that the Corona virus was a hoax.

I haven't been back to church as it seems that the mainstream has gotten so caught up in politics that if Jesus came back today he would be labeled a radical leftist.

[Durandal_1707]

And that's also part of it. They will stamp their feet and shout "No! The world was created in SIX TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR DAYS because The Bible Says So! ... but bring up one of the passages where Jesus says we should maybe actually give a damn about the poor and then suddenly the apologetics come out.

[hammerofglass]

The literalist churches think the Pope is a radical leftist because he said normal mainstream Catholic things like "helping the poor is good". I honestly don't know why they still call themselves Christians, they actively hate everything their Christ ever said. Mention the sermon on the hill or the beatitudes and they hiss like vampires.