Is the bible supposed to be taken literally, or is it supposed to be taken spiritually ( As is using it as a guide)? Or is that negligent, and the bible is supposed to be taken as a book used for only authoritarian gain.
Whenever it contradicts reality, you take it spiritually. Anything questionable is allegory. Keep this in mind and you'll do fine.
Extremist stances that Bible should be taken only literally or only as a metaphor are cancer. There are things that are obviously literal ("David was crowned as a king") and some that are obviously metaphors (parables for example are outright explicit metaphors).
>>1420763
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Christians traditionally interpreted the bible as simultaneously being both literal and allegorical. For example Augustine wrote about how the dimensions of Noah's ark corresponded to the dimensions of the human body, which is the body of Christ and in turn the body of the Church while at the same time defended the literal reading, with arguments such as the ark being measured with Egyptian cubits rather than Latin, so it was bigger than people thought, and could in fact hold all the animal species.
the bible is the word of god. you can decide yourself how much you want to follow the word of god.
>>1420881
Except the ark is a myth the Hebrews took from the Babylonians and there's no archeological evidence that it really happened. So all you've got is your "allegorical" or "spiritual" interpretation, which for some reason you had to take from Babylonian mythology, but hey, believe whatever you want as long as you do so in the privacy of your home and in your church.
I feel like it's kind of like hieroglyphics.
There's a message behind the image in hieroglyphics. Only the message in the Bible is behind the image of what the words generate in your imagination as you read it. I don't think that's on accident either.
To me its different than modern literature, where words paint a picture of a story on the surface of your imagination and that's it. Modern literature is easy to follow, good guy gets the girl, beats the bad guy and the environment is painted vividly with words. And that's it.
But in the event you read something that looks strange in that book, that you can't understand, depending on your faith you can ask God, if you're not there yet you can look up commentaries.
Annnnd to some extent, the layers to it are worth the reward of keeping that book in reaching distance.
To think that book is for authoritarian gain though, if you mean for man to gain authority and reign over you...no.
But if there's one thing that book does, it gives an engineering perspective on human nature and what evil is and why God, the creator of all things commands us not to avoid it all costs.
