LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

The Slactivist talks about the error of taking the Bible literally:

The story of the Good Samaritan is a good story, a beautiful and well-crafted story. It is a story that conveys important truths. But it is not a true story. Jesus never claims to be retelling an actual event that actually happened.

It's not the kind of story that anyone could tell as a "true story." There was no journalist present to offer such a report. No one was present to witness all the elements in this story, which is told from the perspective of an omniscient, third-person narrator and not from the perspective of an eyewitness.

If your response to the tenth chapter of Luke is to set out on an archaeological expedition in search of the actual site of the actual Good Samaritan's Inn, then you've completely misunderstood the story. Not only would you have utterly missed the point, but you'd be inflicting other, different meaning on the passage. This is a refined and elaborate form of illiteracy, but it is still illiteracy.

Many Christians insist on this same illiterate approach to the first chapter of Genesis. They insist on reading it "literally," by which they mean taking a story that is not a journalistic eyewitness account and pretending that it is one.

A commenter put it in succinct words:

Huston Smith has some very valuable things to say about Logos and Mythos. They are the two categories of knowledge, and have been since the beginnings of human civilization.

Logos is the knowledge of number and fact.

Mythos is the knowledge of symbol and metaphor.

Both exist side-by-side, or hand-in hand. Or they did, until Reneé Descartes. Mythos got thrown out with the bathwater, because you coudn't "prove" such knowledge.

Logos is deductive. Mythos is inductive,

Logos is…logical. Mythos is intuitive.

The Bible is Mythos. We treat it as Logos at our peril. And it doesen't help that John uses Logos, "the Word" to describe Jesus.

It's too bad that the Biblical literalists do not understand this. I believe that understanding this would bring about a lot of peace, if minds could be changed.