To be or not to be? (literal, that is)

A question I like to ask my religious friends, and especially preachers, is the following: Do you take the entire bible literally? And when I say literally, I mean literally and when I say bible I mean the ENTIRE bible. That includes leviticus, revelations, numbers, all of genesis...... Usually immediately, sometimes after a few examples from my side (2 Kings 2 anyone? Exodus 25?), they tell me "no". They do not take the entire bible literally.

So my next question is: how do you know which bits are literal and which bits are not? How can you tell that genesis 1 and 2 are stories and not true accounts? (science tells us, would be the correct answer here) How do you know that the children were not really eaten by bears and this was a something written by a human being who was not inspired by a deity? How do you know Revelations have metaphorical intentions? And then they do not know....

Oh, don't get me wrong. Most do not allow that little tidbit to stop them! There is usually a bit of mumbling, loads of examples of things that are literal, but in the end there is no real answer. How do you decide? o you trust your instincts, your conscience, your own feelings? What if you are wrong? Worse, when you are a preacher, you end up teaching incorrectly to your congregation.

So what is the solution? As an atheist this does not really concern me. I do not believe there is a god and I do not think we need a bible for anything except keeping those in power who are now in power (not sure that is a good thing BTW). But if I were a Christian, this would be a topic of great concern to me.

For centuries the bible has been taken literally. Nobody in the 6th century thought of asking "hey, Sarah getting knocked up at that age, surely that is impossible?" It was even blasphemous to ask such questions. The bible was the infallible word of God, how dare you think differently?

So why did we change? Why is 'taking the bible literally' no longer popular? Well, probably because it is not believable anymore. When the Catholic Church abolished the Index Librorum Prohibitoum in the 60s, it was said this was because of the church's new stand on 'open inquiry'. Of course, it was widely understood that people were finally able to grasps the notion of censorship. Today, with the standard provided by science, we can easily see that the bible is not infallible. In fact, the bible is downright wrong on a lot of accounts. The bits in the book that can be tested are clearly incorrect. So the choice is to either shut your eyes and ears to the scientific movement (and turn into Ken Ham), discard the bible ..... or give the bible a new interpretation.

So, biblical scholar quarrel on which bit should be included (infallible or not infallible) and they come up with all sorts of ways of 'telling the difference'. Most of these methods are unscientific at best, utter bullshit in the other cases. And the problem is: Christians KNOW. People know they are picking and choosing and they know they do not have the best reasons for it. They have doubts, they are scared they are interpreting the text incorrectly.

And to the outside world the church loses its credibility. When you look at the phenomenon from a distance, two things become very clear:

1. Religion consists of special pleading. Christians pick and choose from the bible, without a good reason to include or exclude a story or a fragment except for the marketing value. The 'intuition' religious people often refer to is nothing less than 'can I sell it?' If not, it must be taken as an anecdote. The standard that people would hold for stories such as Greec myths, or Gilgamesh, or Kalevara, or Beowulf to dintinguish between fact and fiction is not applied to the canon.

2. This picking and choosing causes division. There are so many different types of christianity, and every strand has its own set of rules, its own interpretations of the text. And while these denominations are bickering and fightening, we can only look in amazement how the one moral rule everyone should understood is thrown overboard: treat others the way you want to be treated yourself. Or as Shakespeare says: "Treat a man to his 'desert and who shall scape whipping? Treat every man after your own honour and dignity. The lesst they deserve it, the more merry is in thy bounty."