gjm comments on A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies - Less Wrong

113 Post author: Yvain 13 May 2009 10:51PM

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Comment author: MugaSofer 15 January 2015 07:45:41PM *  0 points [-]

There's also the problem of people taking things meant to be metaphorical as literal, simply because, well, it's right there, right?

For example (just ran into this today):

Early in the morning, as Jesus was on his way back to the city, he was hungry. Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, “May you never bear fruit again!” Immediately the tree withered. Matthew 21:18-22 NIV

This is pretty clearly an illustration. "Like this tree, you'd better actually give results, not just give the appearance of being moral". (In fact, I believe Jesus uses this exact illustration in a sermon later.)

And yet, I saw this on a list of "God's Temper Tantrums that Christians Never Mention", presumably interpreted as "Jesus zapped a tree because it annoyed him."

Except that I think another reasonable interpretation is: whoever edited the text into a form that contains both stories did notice that they are inconsistent, didn't imagine that somehow they are both simultaneously correct, but did intend them to be taken at face value -- the implicit thinking being something like "obviously at least one of these is wrong somewhere, but both of them are here in our tradition; probably one is right and the other wrong; I'll preserve them both, so that at least the truth is in here somewhere".

Ooh, I hadn't thought of that.

Comment author: gjm 15 January 2015 08:17:46PM 2 points [-]

I would not generally expect clear thinking and intellectual rigour from a list of "God's Temper Tantrums that Christians Never Mention", any more than I would in a list of "10 Ways Atheists Are Just Rebelling Against God". I would expect it to be a list of everything the author thought of that could fit that description, the more the merrier.

Accordingly, the presence of an unconvincing entry in such a list doesn't seem to me to be much evidence for anything.

I have to say, though, that "obviously this is metaphorical" makes an unsatisfactory answer to complaints that something's inconsistent / contradicted by more recent discoveries / silly / immoral, unless there is actually a good reason why the metaphor in question should be there. In this particular case, I think it's fair enough; zapping a fig tree as a vivid illustration of the danger of not "bearing fruit" seems like just the sort of thing someone with his head full of, e.g., the doings of Ezekiel might think of. (Though it's curious that no explanation of the context accompanies the description of the zapping; it looks as if the author hasn't really understood what Jesus had in mind. Which brings up problems of its own. But I digress.)

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