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To know that the Biblical stories have a phenomenological truth is really worth knowing because the poor fundamentalists, they're trying to cling to their moral structure and I understand why, because it does organize their societies and it organizes their psyches so they've got something to cling to. But they don't have a very sophisticated idea of the complexity of the idea of what constitutes truth, and they try to gerrymander the Biblical stories into the domain of scientific theory, promoting Creationism for example as an alternative scientific theory. That just isn't going to go anywhere, because the people who wrote these damn stories weren't scientists to begin with. There weren't any scientists back then. There's hardly any scientists now! Really, it's hard to think scientifically. Even scientists don't think scientifically outside the lab, and hardly even when they're in the lab. You've got to get peer reviewed and criticized. It's hard to think scientifically. So however the people who wrote these stories thought was more like dramatists think, like Shakespeare thought. But that doesn't mean that there isn't truth in it, it just means you have to be a little more sophisticated about your ideas about truth. And that's okay. There are truths to live by. Okay fine, then we need to figure out what those are because we need to live and maybe not to suffer so much. And so if you know what the Bible stories in general are trying to represent is the lived experience of conscious individuals, like the structure of the lived experience of conscious individuals, then that opens up the possibility of a whole different realm of understanding and eliminates the contradiction that's been painful for people between the objective world and the claims of religious stories. (en) |
