https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=6s9M4n3fM9E
A lot of things people have issues with in the Bible in particular come from the literal interpretation versus symbolic or metaphorical or mythological. You know, people look at a lot of these stories and say, okay, they seem really harsh. While somehow it’s funny because we’ll give something like the Norse mythos a total pass. Nobody sits and goes, well, you know, Odin was cruel or whatever, so therefore I can’t enjoy some of those, you know, Nordic myths. And, you know, as I understand it, it’s, you know, just a story in some ways meant to be psychologically useful in helping people to make sense of and act in the world. Do you see the literal interpretation as being sort of a problem with religion and why people have difficulty with the Bible? Well, I think that I think I always kind of joke and say it’s not totally a joke, but I always tell people like there is no literal interpretation. In the sense that the reason why these stories are being told is because they have meaning. It’s like, you know, they were chosen out of an indefinite amount of things that that happened or didn’t happen or whatever. And they were chosen and put there because they have a specific meaning, a specific function, a specific piece of the puzzle in a bigger, let’s say, full pattern of being. And so I think that that’s how you have to see it. I don’t, you know, I always tell people like I think a lot of things in the Old Testament, I think a lot of the things happened, but I don’t think they happened in the way that, you know, like I drank my coffee this morning. It’s like there are different levels of how events can happen. And I think that especially as time goes by, the events get compressed into more and more compressed categories so that they can survive the centuries and the millennia. It’s like if I told a story about how I got in my whatever year Buick and drank a cup of latte coffee, that has a very short, that has a very long history. It’s like if I just say I got into a vehicle and drank my beverage, it’s like that compresses the categories and you can do that on almost like on a cosmic scale. And so some images become typed like the tree or the snake or the mountain or the or the, you know, like the rod or like there’s all these images that you can see that are like, you know, like the tree or the snake or the mountain or the or the, you know, like the rod or like there’s all these images that that kind of compress a whole bunch of information into one single image. And so in that sense, it’s like, you know, I’m not I don’t ask myself like I’m not I’m not even that bothered or or like preoccupied with what happened in what way did it happen. All I know is I have these stories and these stories were handed to me by, you know, thousands of years of people who took these stories as being the basis of their civilization. And so I take them that way and I look at them that way. And then I say, I’m going to be generous to these stories. First of all, it’s like this is the legacy of my ancestors. I’m going to look at them with with generosity first and not with this kind of constant suspicion people have been doing. It’s like, you know, people have it’s like there’s this attitude of of constant suspicion that everything that exists is there to trick you or to control you or to manipulate you. And it’s like, man, my goodness, like, how do you live in that world? You know, it’s a it’s a really oppressive world. Maybe some of those are. But let’s start by looking at them with a generous approach. And when you do that, like the stories kind of open up in a way that you didn’t expect. And you you start to see patterns and you realize that a lot of the stories, especially in the Old Testament, they’re not there to a lot of them are not there to give you examples of how to act. They’re there to show how the world works, like how the patterns of existence come together. And so there are no characters in the Bible that are just good, except maybe for Christ. Like all the characters in the Bible have a light and a dark side. It’s like, you know, the like if you think of any character like Abraham definitely has a dark side like he lied about his about his wife and he he does all these. He does shady things like everybody in the Bible has a dark side. So you have to just look at it and then try to take those characters and see how they relate to each other. And then slowly you just see like, oh, my goodness, this has this has more than what I was told. Like, if I look at it in terms of a story, it’s way more powerful. Why do you think it is that in, you know, in particular with Christianity that it’s been interpreted in a more literal fashion? I mean, I don’t know if the people in Scandinavia really thought of, you know, Thor and Odin as being people that somebody met, you know, 10 generations ago and existed and had those kind of arguments or if they really thought of it as more purely a mythological thing and were aware of that. But Christianity seems to be much more, you know, it’s I can see how people would get concerned and bogged down and whether or not they’re literal. I think I think we have to be able to differentiate Christianity with the 19th century. It’s like Christianity is 2000 years. If you read the Church Fathers, if you read St. Gregory of Nyssa, who talks about, you know, the Old Testament stories, he talks about how their discussion about the soul and the struggle and the virtues of the soul and the struggles of of the person against his passions. And so it’s like he’s not he doesn’t care whether whether there happened or not. Like he probably does think they happen, but that’s not the focus of his interpretation. Like the focus. Why would you why would you tell stories? Why would you care about these stories if all they were were things that happen? Like who cares about that? They’re they’re really something else. And so what happened in in in the West is that as the kind of the let’s say the scientific mind grew after the Renaissance, you know, with the scientific revolution and then the Enlightenment, it’s like it’s as if Christians felt the need to constantly defend their or. It’s like they got tricked into thinking that what their tradition was about and what the Bible was about. It was about the same thing that these scientists are talking about. And so they’re they’re trying to keep those two on the same par and trying to show, you know, like crazy stuff like you do in the 19th century. Christians were saying just insane things about about, you know, like trying to interpret these the Old Testament text and trying to historically show that that this person at that date and trying to date it precisely. And it’s like, man, you’re not this is not helpful. It’s not helpful for anybody. And so when that broke, when that broke, finally, let’s say in the 19th century, it was and also the Enlightenment kind of was trying to break it when it broke. It was like all of a sudden there was just this this wave of derision towards religious stories and how silly and superstitious they are and how they’re not they’re not scientifically scientifically accurate. And it’s like they never were meant to be scientifically accurate. And sadly, we have in North America, especially we have this whole group of evangelicals that still think they still live in the 19th century and they still continue to like defend like tooth and nail their, you know, like six day literal six day creation. It’s like, dude, in the second century, origin was already telling you, you know, it’s like you can’t have grass before the sun in terms of just mechanical, mechanical reality. It’s like this is second century stuff, people. It’s like they already knew like origin was saying the same thing. It’s like they knew that it was talking about reality in a different way, in a very powerful way. That story in Genesis, it’s like, dude, the whole car, the whole world is contained in that story. When I say the whole world, it’s like the whole way in which we exist in reality is contained in that story. But it’s definitely not a scientific description of how things happen. Right. Yeah, it’s it’s kind of a shame that people still, you know, do pull those more literal interpretations or stick to that with their, you know, all guns blazing with it. Because if you look, you know, I’m listening to somebody like Jordan sit down and discuss Genesis. I went, oh, my God, like what was I had this ridiculous childish interpretation of this before and I was attacking it on the on the basis of it being some, you know, exact literal thing that needed to be broken down scientifically, which was silly. Because again, I wouldn’t do that if you told me the origin story out of North Norse mythology or pretty much most other religions. I would never sit there and go, well, did that really occur? You know, it’s it’s yeah, it’s it’s, you know, the usefulness of the story and the, you know, the psychological level of it in the mythical manner is just, you know, goes so far well beyond that. And it’s it’s unfortunate that it’s been kind of maligned or misinterpreted. One of the one of the difficulties and it’s a real difficulty is that is especially today because of how the people think today is that there is in the Bible, especially in the Bible, there is a historical drive. That is, there is a sense into which the cosmic truth, let’s say the transcendent truth will manifest themselves in the world. That is that it’s not these opposed things like that. You have these stories that are patterns that say that are kind of transcendent patterns, then you have reality and they’re separate and they just kind of run their course. It’s like, no, the biblical way of discussing the world is that the create, let’s say the manifest world is is a manifestation of those transcendent principles. And so if you look at the world, you will find the patterns manifesting themselves. And so some of the stories, that’s what they’re showing. But they’re not doing it in a scientific way. Like I said, they’re doing it in they’re doing it by compressing these stories and sometimes describing things which are very difficult to describe in terms of a phenomenon. But using words that connect to higher meaning and doing it at the same time. So it’s like, for example, for Christian, it is important that Christ, the historical figure of Christ was a historical figure. But it doesn’t mean that the stories that that are told in the gospel are told in a kind of forensic, you know, how someone would describe a crime scene to a police, a policeman would describe a crime scene. Obviously not because there are contradictions between the different gospels and the and the people who put the gospels together knew there were contradictions and they didn’t they didn’t resolve them. They just left them there. You know, like there are things that know the same event, like things seem to happen differently. It’s like because the point isn’t to be to be accurate in describing an event, but to describe an event in a manner that shows how it connects to those higher principles. And to do that, you have to condense them because that’s what it means. That’s what it means for the higher principles to appear in the world is that they they they bring things together like they clump phenomena into a narrative. Like I told you, like they that’s the idea of the logos like the logos takes all this indefinite field of phenomena. You look around the world, you look around you. There’s a million things that you could look at like there’s there’s an indefinite amount of them. But your experience tells you that’s a tree. It’s not a million leaves and, you know, 100,000 branches. It’s a tree. It’s one thing. But it’s not an obvious it’s not obvious that it is one thing. There’s something in our consciousness which pulls it together. And that’s the same process which pulls these stories together in the Bible. You.