Paula

it would help if you would answer your own when you asked them. so I can see what kind of answer you seek.

I have no clue what this means. Are you actually saying I’m supposed to supply the answers to questions I asked YOU? How difficult is the question, “how do YOU decide what goes in the core?”

God exists and reveals God in the Bible

How do you know? What is there in the text that you recognize as fact, as opposed to allegories or moral tales?

I try my best to understand any book in context as an original reader would have, knowing I may have many challenges to doing so in some cases. If an original reader would have seen something as literal, then that is a big clue I should also, but things are also often described in the Bible by appearances, not actual reality.

Yet you presume that in the case of the Bible, “an original reader” was primitive and incapable of understanding certain things, or that they always wrote in allegory if they wrote of things you think were beyond them. This is hardly an established fact, and it still does not deal with genre. The text determines genre, not preconceived notions about the people reading it. And why would Jesus, so many centuries later, refer to Genesis in factual terms? Were the people of His day also too primitive, and didn’t Jesus know fact from allegory? Did Paul not really believe in a literal Adam and Eve, and if so, why would this allegory prove anything about Jesus the Last Adam? Is Jesus the last allegory?

And it still remains that even allegories point to literal facts. When John was given the Revelation he wrote in factual terms what he observed. The images he described represented realities: governments, people, judgments. These are not moral stories for primitives. Neither is Genesis; it is fact, written clearly, and I would challenge you to imagine how a factual account would have been written.

The church got this wrong with Galileo.

Oh please! Didn’t you read my blog on The Galileo Syndrome? It was SCIENCE that “got it wrong”; it was a clash between THE PREVAILING SCIENTIFIC VIEW, which the church adopted (sound familiar?), and OBSERVATION. You really need to study this and learn the real issues. Besides, this hardly amounts to justification for throwing out the scriptures as a hopeless mishmash of stories for primitives.

So “the earth cannot be moved” is not literal, even tho it appears to us as not moving

It’s an expression, one we still use today. Sunrise, sunset, etc. Are we thus primitive? More importantly, we are STILL REFERRING TO LITERAL FACTS, not moral tales for primitives.

Don, your mixing apples and oranges here. You don’t seem to know where expression leaves off and the facts they point to begin. And you STILL have not explained how YOU, not someone else, decide what is truth and what is merely a story.

Sorry Cheryl, I’m done. This is still going nowhere.