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You can't have it both ways, archpaladin. Jesus is reported in scripture to have validated, as true, everything in the Old Testament. Therefore, to not accept that Jonah was indeed inside the belly of a whale is either a direct refutation of what Jesus said, or an admission that Jesus was misquoted.
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You misinterpreted what I said. My statement was that belief (or lack thereof) in certain aspects of the Bible have no bearance on your salvation because they are not related to your beliefs in the ressurection of Jesus and his claims to being the son of God. At the time, I made no claim as to their accuracy. (If you were interested in my beliefs, I assure you that I believe Jonah's story and the rest of the OT to be true.) This is why I said that the more one has conviction about the Bible being the inspired word of God, the more one is likely to take a single-interpretation stance. People are capable of believing in God and being saved while still wrestling with what the rest the Bible says.
As to Jesus's validation of the OT.......Jesus at least validates the story of Jonah in Matthew 12:39-40 when he speaks of the sign of Jonah, so perhaps my example of the belief in Jonah's story was not well chosen. I believe there are also a few other instances where he validates other OT passages, but they do not come to mind at the moment.
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i understand the idea that the bible must be interpreted literally to be at once the absolute height of arrogance and almost mind-boggling in its naievete.
arrogance in that it assumes direct communication between finite understanding and the infinite.
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Not to sound accusatory or argumentative, but I think this is a veritable load of crap. When the infinite speaks in terms of the finite, the finite can understand what is being said. The infinite does not have to disclose all of its nature for the finite to grasp at least a portion of what it talks about. Indeed, the very relationship between the infinite and the finite prevents the full understanding of the former by the latter, but some understanding still is possible. As to naievete, I defer to the Biblical historians. They shall do a far better job of arguing the position than I.
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the notion that divine inspiration could be twisted around to imply that the texts are written in such a way that someone who does not read with any particular regularity or intensity could understand what is going on seems to me folly. or vanity.
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This is why religious individuals read their scriptures on a constant basis. I imagine that whomever you got this notion from is a little misguided themselves about religious practice.
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at the very least, moderates would have to emphasize the diversity of positions within christianity--in others words, christianity is not a single thing, despite the commonalities of belief in theological terms---and the right does not get to define it.
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I defer to loganmule's response to my own earlier statements. Definitions are concrete things - the identification of something is done by observing both what it is and what it isn't. The right must therefore be capable of defining what Christianity is, because that sets one of the extremes on the belief spectrum and very ardently says "what is" and "what isn't". Concordantly, I think it's the moderates who do not get to define what Christianity is, becuase many do not take a solid stance on the matter, and a definition shrouded in vagueness is no definition at all.