The Senate’s report on the CIA’s torture activities has recently been released. Morally, we recognize that torture is wrong and yet so many religious believers have no problem defending their imaginary deity when their religious holy books advocate for eternal torture.
Tag metaphor
Many more progressive religious believers and a few misguided atheists insist that religion isn’t really the problem; the problem is merely how some extremists interpret religion. They claim that atheists like me want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I disagree. I just don’t want to drown the baby in baptism.
Yes, A Christian actually told me that atheists take the Bible too literally. I burst out laughing because as an atheist, I don’t take the Bible literally at all; I take the Bible factitious!
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The Bible contains a lot of extremely silly and ridiculous claims and unless you are a diehard Bible literalist, that should be pretty obvious. When religious believers come face to face with these silly and ridiculous claims of their religion, they typically fall back to the old, “that part is a metaphor” card. Let’s examine that briefly.
For starters, I would like to inquire about this so called “metaphor.” What exactly is the claim a metaphor for, exactly? I mean when Jesus says that it is better to pluck out your eye and chop off your hand rather than to steal or feel lust, he prefaces it why saying that it is better to lose these body parts than to have one’s soul tortured for all eternity. So what exactly is that a metaphor for? Maybe that wasn’t one of those metaphor parts of the Bible?
There is an atheist meme that states that any part of the Bible that contradicts science or is just blatantly ridiculous is obviously a metaphor. Basically, this meme is making light of the ever sliding scale of biblical credibility.
The old “metaphor” card seems to be the new “God of the Gaps” excuse. It seems that as time goes by and our scientific understanding of the universe grows, there also seem to be more and more metaphors in the Bible. Funny how that works out.