I don't think you answered my question: what's the underlying principle?
I'm not actually sure.
I do think that there's really incredibly good evidence that the Adam and Eve story is not literal, that it's rather meant as a fable, to illustrate some important point. (It may be some sort of heavily mythological coating over an internal grain of historical truth, but if so, then it's pretty deeply buried).
I'm not entirely sure what that point is. Part of it may be "the rules are there for a reason, don't break them unless you're really sure". Part of it may be intended for children - "listen to your parents, they know better than you". (And yes, some parents are bad news; but, by and large, the advice "listen to your parents" is very good advice for toddlers, because most parents care about their toddlers).
And Adam and Eve as portrayed in the Genesis narrative don't seem to have been anything like as incapable as you were when you had no idea why scribbling in one book might be worse than scribbling in another.
I do wonder, though - how old were they supposed to be? It seems that they were created in adult bodies, and gifted from creation with the ability to speak, but they may well have had a toddler's naivete.
Would your parents have put toddler-you in a room with a big red button that launches the missiles, sternly told you not to push it, and then left you alone?
Not if they had any option.
If they had, what would you think of someone who said "oh, it's all CCC's fault that the world is a smoking ruin. He pushed that button even though his parents told him not to."?
Toddler-me would probably have expected that reaction. Current-me would consider putting toddler-me in that room to be horrendously irresponsible.
It certainly makes more sense that way than as history. But even so, it comes down to something like this: "Remember, kids! If you disobey your parents' arbitrary instructions, they're likely to throw you out of the house." Ah, the piercing moral insight of the holy scriptures.
I see it as more "obey your parents, or you're going to really hate what comes next". It's not perfect, but it's pretty broadly applicable.
on that day your death will become inevitable
That's an interpretation sometimes put on the text by people with a strong prior commitment to not letting the text have mistakes in it. But does what it says actually admit that interpretation?
If you know ten words of Hebrew, then you know ten more words of Hebrew than I do.
In short, I have no idea.
there's really incredibly good evidence that the Adam and Eve story is not literal
Do you mean there's incredibly good evidence that it's not literally true, or there's incredibly good evidence that it's not intended literally? I agree with the former but am unconvinced by the latter. (But, for the avoidance of doubt, I have absolutely zero problems with Christians or Jews not taking it literally; I was among their number for many years.)
ten words of Hebrew
I started writing a list and realised that maybe the figure is more like 30; the words I know a...
[Originally published at Intentional Insights in response to Religious and Rational]
Spirituality and rationality seem completely opposed. But are they really?
To get at this question, let's start with a little thought experiment. Consider the following two questions:
1. If you were given a choice between reading a physical book (or an e-book) or listening to an audiobook, which would you prefer?
2. If you were given a choice between listening to music, or looking at the grooves of a phonograph record through a microscope, which would you prefer?
But I am more interested in the answer to a third question:
3. For which of the first two questions do you have a stronger preference between the two options?
Most people will have a stronger preference in the second case than the first. But why? Both situations are in some sense the same: there is information being fed into your brain, in one case through your ears and in the other through your eyes. So why should people's preference for ears be so much stronger in the case of music than books?
There is something in the essence of music that is lost in the translation between an audio and a visual rendering. The same loss happens for words too, but to a much lesser extent. Subtle shades of emphasis and tone of voice can convey essential information in spoken language. This is one of the reasons that email is so notorious for amplifying misunderstandings. But the loss in much greater in the case of music.
The same is true for other senses. Color is one example. A blind person can abstractly understand what light is, and that color is a byproduct of the wavelength of light, and that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation... yet there is no way for a blind person to experience subjectively the difference between red and blue and green. But just because some people can't see colors doesn't mean that colors aren't real.
The same is true for spiritual experiences.
Now, before I expand that thought, I want to give you my bona fides. I am a committed rationalist, and an atheist (though I don't like to self-identify as an atheist because I'd rather focus on what I *do* believe in rather than what I don't). So I am not trying to convince you that God exists. What I want to say is rather that certain kinds of spiritual experiences *might* be more than mere fantasies made up out of whole cloth. If we ignore this possibility we risk shutting ourselves off from a vital part of the human experience.
I grew up in the deep south (Kentucky and Tennessee) in a secular Jewish family. When I was 12 my parents sent me to a Christian summer camp (there were no other kinds in Kentucky back in those days). After a week of being relentlessly proselytized (read: teased and ostracized), I decided I was tired of being the camp punching bag and so I relented and gave my heart to Jesus. I prayed, confessed my sins, and just like that I was a member of the club.
I experienced a euphoria that I cannot render into words, in exactly the same way that one cannot render into words the subjective experience of listening to music or seeing colors or eating chocolate or having sex. If you have not experienced these things for yourself, no amount of description can fill the gap. Of course, you can come to an *intellectual* understanding that "feeling the presence of the holy spirit" has nothing to do with any holy spirit. You can intellectually grasp that it is an internal mental process resulting from (probably) some kind of neurotransmitter released in response to social and internal mental stimulus. But that won't allow you to understand *what it is like* any more than understanding physics will let you understand what colors look like or what music sounds like.
Happily, there are ways to stimulate the subjective experience that I'm describing other than accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Meditation, for example, can produce similar results. It can be a very powerful experience. It can even become addictive, almost like a drug.
I am not necessarily advocating that you go try to get yourself a hit of religious euphoria (though I wouldn’t discourage you either -- the experience can give you some interesting and useful perspective on life). Instead, I simply want to convince you to entertain the possibility that people might profess to believe in God for reasons other than indoctrination or stupidity. Religious texts and rituals might be attempts to share real subjective experiences that, in the absence of a detailed modern understanding of neuroscience, can appear to originate from mysterious, subtle external sources.
The reason I want to convince you to entertain this notion is that an awful lot of energy gets wasted by arguing against religious beliefs on logical grounds, pointing out contradictions in the Bible and whatnot. Such arguments tend to be ineffective, which can be very frustrating for those who advance them. The antidote for this frustration is to realize that spirituality is not about logic. It's about subjective experiences that not everyone is privy to. Logic is about looking at the grooves. Spirituality is about hearing the music.
The good news is that adopting science and reason doesn’t mean you have to give up on spirituality any more than you have to give up on music. There are myriad paths to spiritual experience, to a sense of awe and wonder at the grand tapestry of creation, to the essential existential mysteries of life and consciousness, to what religious people call “God.” Walking in the woods. Seeing the moons of Jupiter through a telescope. Gathering with friends to listen to music, or to sing, or simply to share the experience of being alive. Meditation. Any of these can be spiritual experiences if you allow them to be. In this sense, God is everywhere.