So you think Jesus is a metaphor? I don’t. It certainly doesn’t logically follow that if a person uses a metaphor then everything they say is metaphor. It most certainly is true that Jesus used lots of metaphors but it doesn’t follow that everything Jesus said is a metaphor. It most certainly is true that the Bible uses metaphors but it doesn’t follow that everything in the Bible is a metaphor. In Matthew 13, where Jesus explains that He uses parables and metaphors so that people who don’t want to see, hear, or understand are free to close their eyes, ears and minds. So the key here seems to be whether people want to know the truth, and if they do then they look at the evidence honestly with faith rather than fear.
Ah… that sounds like confusing goodness with comfort and easiness. They are most certainly NOT the same thing and how you can possibly get such nonsense from the Bible is incomprehensible to me. The Bible talks about a God who routinely uses death as a tool of providence and restoration – wiping out a world full of people with a flood, commanding genocide, and demanding that Abraham sacrifice His only son Isaac. So is God simply cruel and sadistic because that is just His right, or is God simply like a surgeon who must shed blood and cut things out in order to cure and make things better?
All of my experience (both in life and reading the Bible) tells me that the ends are not independent of the means and therefore it is incorrect to think that God’s omnipotence means He can do anything you say by whatever means you care to dictate. The very essence of life is a self-organizing process which grows from something small and incapable, to learn to do more and more things. Certainly the medieval idea of life as a magical animating force or stuff is nothing but a fantasy of alchemy - there is no such thing. But learning requires exploration to find out what does work and what doesn’t work, which means it is founded on a reality based on fixed rules – a reality of success and failure. Thus there is no life, learning and success without mistakes, failure and death – and the attempt to avoid this reality is kind of a mental illness.
Furthermore, you might as well say that God is evil because a baby must leave its womb and come out into the world. The physical world is nothing but a second womb and it is only natural that we should one day leave it to be with God who is spirit.
Besides this there was more explanation in response to another query above.
Incorrect. God told Adam and Eve that on the day they ate of the fruit of a certain tree they would die. So by this God tells us that Adam and Eve knew what death was. But Adam and Eve did not die on that day – not in the usual sense. So did God lie? No. All throughout the Bible there are two kind of death such as when Jesus says in Luke 9:60, “Let the dead bury their own dead.” Adam and Eve died a spiritual death on that day. And that is the only thing which makes physical death a bad thing at all.
Indeed it should, for God put all of creation under our dominion and with our sinful habits we are not only destructive, abusive and corrupting of ourselves but of everything we touch.
Correct! It does not say “as is” or remaining their own kinds but created after their kinds. So when God created living things, they already had kinds because God did not create them from nothing but from living creatures which already existed and were the same kind. All the thousands of species of birds from flying creatures which were already there, and those from feathered creatures which were already there and those from hollow boned creatures which were already there, and those from four fingered creatures which were already there, and so on in a branching tree just like we observe in all the fossil evidence.
Incorrect. We are talking about huge portions of the text being the same. So it is more like the irrefutable evidence used to convict someone of plagarism because whole portions of text were simply cut and pasted into the newer book.
The only thing which is true of that story, if anything, is that a cowboy foot was fossilized and put on display to show how something being a fossil does not mean that it is very old. And if you don’t use an appropriate dating method then you will not a meaningful result.
That is like saying, because the Bible is interpreted there is no such thing as the Bible. This is, of course, nonsense. What makes the evidence objective are the written procedures which anyone can follow to get the same result no matter what they believe. Interpretations may be subjective but none of them can change the numerical results of these written procedures. What you are really saying here is that you are free to close your eyes and mind and refuse to see those results if you choose.