Hi, and welcome to EvC!
dennis780 writes:
The big question I suppose to everyone here would be,
Not just to OECs? Well, it's actually a bit off-topic here, but okay, I'll take a stab at it...
was Jesus a physical factual person,
I dunno, could'a been.
who was the Son of God,
God is an implausible and ill-defined concept. "Son of God" simply expands the implausibility.
or is the crucifixion story ment to teach moral standards to humans...
What sort of "moral standards" are taught by the crucifixion story? Really, this baffles me. I can see getting moral standards from the Sermon on the Mount -- for sure, parts of that are clear, positively sensible, inspiring, very much worth emulating -- no argument. But the crucifixion? Nothing I'd want to emulate there...
in general, the bible is nothing more than visual accounts of Gods` workings here on earth.
Um, no, actually, in general the bible is nothing more than the agreed-upon (by one or another committee of authors and editors) written record of a much older oral tradition. In the case of the OT, the oral tradition was promulgated over many generations before a writing system was established by the Hebrews to "ossify" the narrative and preserved it from further "elaboration"; it is a "visual" account in the same way that Gilgamesh is a "visual" account -- considering that Gilgamesh and the bible cover some of the same stories, but from different points of view. This isn't any sort of "direct observation" we're talking about here. Especially so for those first two chapters of Genesis (ah! back to the topic, almost).
In the case of the NT, the time span between the events being described and the composition of the text is considerably shorter, but there was still plenty of time for embellishment and invention regarding "events" that were never (could not have been) directly observed by the authors -- e.g. the virgin birth. (I gather that the doctrine of the virgin birth is
not something on which all Christians agree -- but that's off-topic here. My apologies.)
{Added-by-Edit:}
I suppose if you believe Jesus was a metaphor, your soul, based on biblical teachings, should metaphorically go to hell.
And what if I believe that the soul (defined as some aspect of my individual existence that is immortal) is just another myth, like God and hell? No worries, eh? Please bear in mind that accepting/dismissing belief in an immortal soul has nothing at all to do with what we normally refer to as morality/ethics. There's nothing metaphorical about the latter, and they do exist independently of religious belief. (But again, that's for another thread, not in a Science Forum like this one.)
Edited by Otto Tellick, : as noted in text
autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.
™ Version 4.2
