No. of Recommendations: 7
Everyone here knows the book is a word salad of often opposite thoughts; it makes no sense and has no relevance to any society that has progressed beyond the goat-herding stage.
It's processed cheese, full of stories made up by terrified peasants, handed down verbally across generations, written down hundreds of years later, edited and revised in the 3rd century, rewritten and rewritten, exorcised by Kings who didn't like certain parts of it, translated from one language to another to another to another, and then finally passed out in hotel room bureaus where hookers and politicians hang out. How charming.
Jordan Peterson takes a Jungian approach and is impressed by the bible as the primary example in western civilization of the stories that have meant something to humans at the deepest level for the longest time. That the stories were changed as they were passed down for centuries before writing, and even after writing, is "the imperfect copying mechanism" that evolution requires. That the parts copied both orally and in writing would be "filtered" with the most powerful parts being passed down more readily and widely than the weaker parts is the "selection mechanism" required for evolution. If biological evolution can "tell us about life" by showing us the product of evolution in the cheetah, the whale, the sequoia, the cockroach and the modern virus, what are the chances that the bible has nothing to tell us about humanity?
It is completely possible to to find the bible to be an amazing thing without having to think it describes the supernatural part of nature with any fidelity at all.
I'm not really used to this board so I may be barking at the wrong fire hydrant bringing up something like this here. Unless "atheism" has a dogma that goes beyond, well, not believing in god, would big tent atheism allow for someone finding in the bible things of value? Sort of post-traumatic version of atheism?
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