Catholic Church admits Bible is BS

The Pasta fairy ???

 

The Christians I take fellowship with regard the Bible as being, not the Word of God, but an anthology of words of men seeking God--with different agendas, at various periods of history, some of it compelling, others not so much. It helps to understand the historical context, which is sometimes difficult because it isn't put together in chronological order and it isn't always clear when a particular passage was written. Much of it is myth (not the same as falsehood) and like all mythologies, it's a set of metaphors conveying truths about reality. I'm a Christian because of Gen.1: 26: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness;" That passage triggered a chain reaction of cascading thoughts that took me through several world religions and ended up with Christianity. We could pick at it. Did God say that? Who heard Him? Who was the "us" he was talking to? Or was He using the royal plural and talking to Himself? Does this mean that God has fingers and toes, teeth and nose, etc.? No, no ,nobody, no, and no. What I got from it is that everybody is in a sense a reflection of God, and that each encounter with another human is an encounter with an aspect of God and should be treated accordingly. It's made going to WalMart a pleasant mystical experience. I don't go off the deep end with metaphors. I must say, it's hard to see anything divine in the Donald or his MAGA-hatted followers, but it does help in keeping my bestial impulses in check. Some of my friends and relatives are Retrumplicans and I've learned to live with them. BTW, I'm not admitting that the Bible is B.S., whatever the fundies might think.

 

You mean the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

 

the word of various, mostly well intended humans, at various times. to me, not just christianity, but virtually all religious beliefs are this, none with any more nor less authority then another, nor more nor less the beliefs yet to be imagined, nor those all but entirely forgotten. i don't believe in exceptionalism, and i don't believe in the goodness of wishing to be feared, nor owing anything to what any of us tell each other, but the yes, to be creative, to have the impulse to be at any rate, is the only thing distinguishing sapience from mere sentience, if there is anything that does. i believe the unknown is unknown regardless, and in the goodness of strangeness, and that our world and our species, is no more the reason for the existence of the universe, then any other world and whatever species might happen to dwell upon it. gods can be anything neither physical nor imaginary.

 

Oh !!! and there's me thinking you are a Pasta-farian

 

Maybe not, but I have more respect for the Church for saying it. Protestants have been saying this in some of their premier seminaries for half a century, but the graduates haven't shared it with their flocks--apparently on the assumption that they "can't handle the truth". Catholic theology maintains that there are other sources, not just the Bible, for knowing God's truth: scripture (the Bible), nature (natural law), reason, and God's direct inspiration through the Magesterium of the Church, via church conferences and papal pronouncements ex cathedra.
As a Methodist, I don't believe the last part. We believe in Wesley's quadrilateral: scripture, tradition, personal faith through experience, and reason. Using the latter, Progressive Christians (of which I am one), think that "the Bible should be taken seriously, but not literally".(Marcus Borg.) We view the Bible from an historical-metaphorical perspective.

Genesis is a little of both, incorporating the metaphor of an anthropomorphic God who creates humans in the Divine image and likeness and places them in Paradise, and they can't get the forbidden fruit out of their mind: the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil which (they are told by the Serpent) will make them as wise as God. Instead, it gives them the ability to evaluate their condition and realize what they don't have (e.g., clothes). Paradise Lost. To me, this is saying in a different language what the Buddhists say in their doctrines of Upādāna (attachments) and Taṇhā (desire) which sum up the roots of human suffering. To treat Genesis as a scientific treatise--six day creation, the firmament, etc., misses the point.
Our free will gives us the choice to follow the paths of the Enlightened teachers (if we all did that, it would be Paradise on Earth again). Or follow our baser instincts and whore after the false gods of power, wealth, status, and sensual indulgence (if carried to their logical extreme, leading to a Hobbesian "war if all against all", or to Hell on earth.

The rest of the Torah gives us the folk history of the Jewish people, not necessarily historically accurate but important as their version of who they are and how they came to be . This is the part that leads atheists to dismiss the Bible as condoning atrocities, a wrathful God perpetrating them, and Christians who preach "inerrancy" to end up defending them.

Looked at from a more detached perspective, it is possible to trace the evolution of God (i.e., the cultural evolution of the Jewish concept of God) from the Israelite War God to Jesus' God of "peace, love and understanding" and John's idea that "God is Love". Even non-human species developed, early on, the instincts of reciprocal altruism and empathy. Unfortunately, they tend to be confined originally to the herd, the pack, and the band, and weren't extended to outsiders. Humans could not survive without society, so according to socio-biologist E.O Wilson, humans evolved separate modules for the individualisic needs of id and ego, on the one hand, and the superego (society) on the other. The depiction of humans as being torn between the voices of the guy in the red suit on one shoulder and the guy with the wings and white robe on the other may not be far off as a metaphor. With the advent of city-states and later empires like Akkad and Babylon, Egypt and eventually Rome, there was increasing need for universal values for diverse inhabitants. Commerce and conquest were engines for spreading these, and there eventually appeared the great prophets of the Axial Age, preaching universalism and social justice: Zoroaster,the Buddha, Lao-tse, and the Hebrew prophets. Eventually, Jesus came along. According to the New Testament, he taught that: (1) we should love our neighbor (empathy), even society's rejects like Samaritans, publicans and other sinners; (2) that the greatest commandments were love of God and Neighbor; and (3) that we should "Do unto others as we would have others do unto us (reciprocal altruism)".

Just last Sunday, at Bible Study, some in the group commented on how different these were from the Jewish values expressed in the Old Testament. I pointed out that they all came from the Old Testamemt:You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. Deuteronomy 6:5; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus19:18). as for the Golden Rule of reciprocity, the great Pharisee Rabbi Hillel, drawing on Leviticus 19:18) stated it, before Jesus, in a more negative form: " What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn." Blackburn tells us: "The Golden Rule "can be found in some form in almost every ethical tradition". Blackburn, Simon (2001). Ethics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 101.

The Golden Rule Poster – A History , reprinted from wikepedia.

So Jesus didn't exactly originate these concepts, but according to the gospels, He brought them together through his parables and teachings, and put them into practice through table fellowship with publicans and sinners and outreach to the poor, to lepers, prostitutes, demoniacs, and the dregs of society--challenging the Jewish Holiness Rules of the Sadducees and Pharisees.