Why are literalists literalists?

Because the audience the authors wrote do not think the adam and eve story is history, they consider it a story to reflect god and his power and tell people why they have to work and have painful births, oh as why snakes have no legs. Also the newspaper is verifible - you can go out and meet the people the front page is talking about. you can read other works by people who met darwin. You can read verifing information about hitler. Faith i thought someone who has been here this long would know how to debate by now. it is never the person quesioning your claims job to show its not history, its your job to show its history. As i said before all your examples are verifible from evidence, and you can't use the bible to verify the bible it makes no sense.the bible stories are stories they show the same features that you would find with any relgious stories. Many of them reflect influence from relgions around the hebrews, i mean look at the first line of genesis - god forming the world from the waters of the deep, well that was a very common canaanite story as well as babylonian. The waters represented chaos, just like tiamat - leviethen represented chaos.genesis is a later story anyway, i have been reading that they started from a point during the exodus and added creation myths after they got to israel - thats why they parallel many other creation myths

i guess thats it then, we can close down the debate forums and go back to burning folks as witchs!if the human mind is fallen faith than how can you know you are right? maybe the devil is tricking you into thinking what you know is right when its not?
It seems literialists have been told over and over again that everything in the bible is 100% true even though the first part of it isn't even counted as 100% true by the people the authors came from. If the jewish people consider adam and eve to be a story why would you think its all history?
because they are wrong? i'm not sure how you can argue that, other than the stance of they are wrong, becuase i say so!

I guess declaring something truth makes it the truth? I think not faith. So i guess germs do not exist since they arn't in the bible, or a lot of things, but since you can adamently just dismiss anything you are right then. I just look at the bible and wonder do people just close thier minds off to the fact that the bible stories are just like other religions stories? i guess if you ignore how science decides how they fit togather then yes, you would think its a leap. but then again you never bother to read how they do things, do you faith?
we don't see older things in newer strata so why would you think they are from the same time? by the way the reason it stuck is it works and is shown to work, just because you like to ignore what has been shown doesn't mean it didn't anyway this is OTas i said before people who are literalists because they have been taught to be and are never exposed to any other view point and if they are they deny it as satan or a fallen mind

where did einstein say this and how is this relevent? i guess if you want to put forth this strawman of how evolution works go for it i guess paranoia wins out in the end, you seem to have little grasp on what evolution intails at all. the goal of evolution is survival in the area of the animal. anything else is subjective science is a human endever so humans designed the tests, and the reason the tests are considered right is because they work and you can make predictions from them if you mean god making it old then god is lying for no reason if you are a literialist they have to be 100% true, but there is no evidence for most if not all of the stories if you go by how the bible tells them. Scientists know some of the biblical figures existed we have evidence of them, but there is no evidence for the stories in the bible about them you see the thing is its not what the experts have to say, but whether what they say matchs the evidence. if there is not evidence for what the person says then why would we believe them? This is why people like ron wyatt, hovid and gene scott will never be taken serously by the science community, they have no evidence to match to what they are saying see theres the problem the ToE isn't undermining the word of god, it is undermining a literialist version of genesis. Which is a story and not realityThis message has been edited by ReverendDG, 03-04-2006 11:30 PM

he could have, but it wouldn't be written by human hands or be lost if it was, at least if he cared about teaching us through this book the problem i see is he could have, but the text we have doesn't show this at all, theres too much in the book that shows cultural myth, plus cultural based teachings that do not hold up to time i would mostly agree with this, but it doesn't really show spiritual truths for this time anymore, it doesn't answer a lot of questions people have, but only a few which are universal through-out all religions.
It mostly answers spirtual truths from the times of its writings, i mean how much do you worry about babies getting burned for moloch or whether a woman teaches men? only if you already feel those things are bad, the bible just reinforces them, it doesn't help you with them all that much i disagree, maybe if he wrote it himself it wouldn't be, but god didn't write it man did and man had little understanding of nature when it was written. why do you think people complain about evolution now?
its not because they can't grow wings on a pig, but becuase they don't understand it, just like most of the bible

so is the story of how the earth was created by odin, so was the creation of the earth by eriki and EL, infact very much so like how genesis is written
what about the story of the striped animals, or samson are those history?
i've read flood stories that read just like genesis and seem more realisicwhat about gilgimesh?
all of those are all real to the authors and the people who were of the religion or people they were written for
if the bible is history then so are all of those, if you define things as being true because people believed them
this means albino alagators live in the sewers of new york, lots of people believe this, as well as people dying from drinking pop rocks and coke!
based on how you believe things you have a double standard, you believe a majority of the bible is history based on 3500 years of believers, but you don't accept anything else that way?
don't you think thats a bit absurd?

sorry but thats just plain strange, what does genesis have to do with loving people and believing in god? why does genesis have any bearing on what jesus taught about god?
so what if the authors of genesis didn't get how god created the universe, they did it from what they could understand. being that jesus grew up as a jew, you would think he would learn this story, but it doesn't say he believed it, it says he taught the story.
why is it that he has to believe it for it to have meaning?he never says "i believe genesis is true!" he says something along the lines of "as you know from the torah, god created man and woman" do you think they would understand things like "god took some goo then over billions of years caused it to turn into man and woman"?
or would he use stuff they know to make a point?sorry but if this is how faith has to work, i'd rather stick to nonfaith, this arguement is just weak imo

any evidence for this at all? in all the readings about church fathers and sects and groups, there were more arguments than agreements
i mean if they agreed throughout time why did protestants and catholics have so many problems?
maybe the early church before luther agreed enough, but no they didn't really, orthodox was very different than catholicism
face it Faith, the idea of a unified church on major issues much less minor ones never happened, human nature and thought and interpretion, makes it impossible Edited by AdminPD, : Off Topic Warning