Originally posted by sbbqb7n16
Can you give me a verse?....
1 Chronicles 16:30
Fear before him, all the earth: the world also shall be stable, that it be not moved.
Psalms 96:10
Say among the heathen that the Lord reigneth: the world also shall be established that it shall not be moved: he shall judge the people righteously.
Or, consider the part where God stops the sun from moving. He doesn't change the way the Earth spins - he stops the sun from moving.
Suffice it to say that, for a couple hundred years, people *VEHEMENTLY* opposed attempts to argue that the earth moved around the sun, because that would imply that the Bible was false, and if you couldn't trust every word in the Bible, there was a real problem. People were *KILLED* for this.
But, since we were all raised to believe that the earth orbits the sun, we simply *AUTOMATICALLY* read these texts as mythical or allegorical, because we're not going to take one reading out of many over obvious experience and data.
The parallels between flat-earth and immobile-earth views, and modern young-earth creationism, are amazing.
The point I was making is that you don't have to believe that a single one of the things described in Genesis happened literally as described to accept the spiritual lessons it teaches us about God's nature and Man's nature. The literalist description is a red herring, which has the primary effect of driving people away from Christianity.
You would be well-advised to read Augustine's comments about Scripture and science, in a treatise titled _The Literal Meaning of Genesis_, written 1600 years ago:
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.
(end of quote)
Augustine was wise indeed.
