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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2453 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 8, 2025

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I’m not demanding a literalist view of the Bible, in fact it’s a naive reading. But I don’t really think it’s a problem to suggest that certain events were highlighted or downplayed by the author to be more memorable and appealing to the audience they were writing for. It’s a narrative story, and any story humans tell will highlight and downplay elements to make the story appealing or to make heroes look better or villains look worse. I don’t find the early church reading the Bible with the kind of literalism that modern evangelical fundamentalists use in interpreting the text. Not that they don’t believe the Bible and the stories in the Bible are true, but that they are not literalists insisting that everything described is absolutely meant to be literal.

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