For me, what is literal in the Bible is
"For me?" 2 Peter 1:20 "But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation,"
Scripture is not "up for grabs". There is EVIDENCE of what is what.
to love your enemies, the existence of God, and many other things. But Genesis—I don’t think Genesis makes sense when taken literally.
Why not? Why not that believing in deep time make much less sense?. Given that gasoline is still usable and not rendered useless by time, there is nothing beyond blind faith to assume millions years is real.
Distant starlight? The light rides the CMB to get to us. Or quantum something something. Or time mechanics. God could have created "time fields" where time blows by faster, that would explain why stars that supposedly last gargantuan lengths of time blow up and we see the starlight when the universe itself is only 6k +/- years old.
Or mabye God delivers the light right to us. Mabye us seeing starlight in real time is not because of physics, but because of a Supernatural Act of God.
Oil and organic-based fuel resources were made in mass quantities by the Flood.
When something dies, it decays and or gets consumed by consumers and decomposers. It does not magically lie around for oodles of time to become fuel.
Bones lie on the ground, and need to be buried to fossilize. The bones would not lay around for oodles of time completely unntouched.
The naturalistic story is way too wishy washy and all chance thrown things together. THe Genesis TRUTH (not allegory) is much more cohesive, coherent, explainable, and very cause-and-effect.
Yet, it makes total sense when taken as a metaphor.
It makes sense that God wastes words? That He establishes His reputation as a simply fanciful storyteller, instead of establishing it as an All-Wise, Omniscient, Trustworthy source of all information, be it about the past, present, or future??? History can be used as allegory like a hammer used as a tool or as a decoration, but allegory cannot be history.
Yes, it definitely makes sense (not!) that God wishes to woo us with a story instead of establishing Himself to be taken seriously.
If you want a whole race of sentient beings (who you know will one day ask questions about you) to take you very seriously, instead of saying something that means something else, you establish yourself as being very RELIABLE. Right?
Imagine being a witness to a crime, then talking about a criminal. The judge makes a decision, but right before he does you tell him its an allegory. Really? The judge could get pretty upset about your allegory that was not made clear to be an allegory til later.
The allegory view of Genesis was not adopted til later, plus it comes not from the text but , largely, people's desire to please the new Status Quo of the naturalistic, anti-God regime that has infected science-related things/people/places/organizations with scientISM.
Not just that, there are deep meanings in those metaphors that we have still not begun to unfold.
"There's many deep metaphors in your reply. You mean none of what you say, you are talking about a whale and its journey in the ocean. Your posting about "the earth not the center of solar system" is actually just referring to how a naracisstic whale should discover he isnt the center, he needs to help other whales too." - using your view on your reply!
See how flimsy, floppy, the allegory view is? It holds like a mesh submarine in water.
The virgin birth also makes "no sense" to those who are asleep. I don't see Genesis Allegorizers trying to morph THAT into an allegory. Why all the inconsistency? If we accept Jesus' Miracles as literal in the NT, why aren't we accepting His Miracles in Genesis?? (Jesus is God)
If you dont believe God about the history in Genesis, why do we take any of the rest to be true, and not simply more and more stories?
Genesis allegorizers are supremely inconsistent and have a really tough time. Contrast that to YEC. Why is this so if Genesis is, as an objective FACT, an allegory??
John 3:12
The Tower of Babel... what an excellent metaphor for what is happening now.
Can be USED as a metaphor: Yes.
It IS a metaphor: No.
The fact we have different languages today smashes "Babel was a metaphor" into a bunch of tiny bits. Around 7,000+/- bits.
That explains why we have language groups. The languages formed at the Babel event did not magically form
on their own over spans of time. God is the One Who made the first new languages.
God confused the languages. After that , those languages were eventually edited , merged, or even lost over the centuries.
If people understand what it means, we would not be in the situation we are in now.
Now there's something i can agree on. Fun fact: IT MEANS WHAT IT SAYS!!
Genesis allegorizers 'don't see what's in front of them'.
But if you think it literally means not to build towers, then obviously, you are missing the core of the message.
Obviously. It means what it says. One lesson we learn from this History is that pridefulness is a sin.
Perhaps you don't get what the literal view is? No YEC ive ever heard of gets "dont build towers" from that account.
