From: aaron@space.ualberta.ca (Aaron Humphrey)
Subject: Re: The Nightstalker makes an observation
Reply-To: aaron@space.ualberta.ca
Organization: University Of Alberta, Edmonton Canada
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL4
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 17:30:51 GMT

Alfvaen sticks his head into the warmer discussion in Callahans, saying, "I 
remember an Isaac Asimov short-short story that always gave me a giggle when
thinking about Genesis.

"In it, Moses is dictating to his brother, Aaron, about how the universe was
created in five billion years, etc.  Aaron stops him, saying, 'Can you compress
it a bit?  I don't have nearly enough papyrus to handle that long a timespan.'

"Moses says, 'How much time do you have paper for?'

"Aaron says, 'Seven days.'

"I've always been willing to believe that, if the Bible was divinely inspired,
that there would be some parts of it that would be wilfully distorted by men,
merely because the real explanations didn't make sense.  For instance, the
'world is flat' thing.  If God told Moses(or whoever)that the world was round,
and Moses said to himself, 'If I go around saying that God says the world is
round, not flat, nobody will believe me,' then he might skim over that fact as
much as possible, and maybe try to hide evidence of the Earth's roundness in
the scripture so that it's not obvious to casual inspection.  Not intending to
belittle Moses or anything, but it sounds like a human thing to do, and I do
believe that Moses was human.

"The same thing might have happened with pi...poetic license that thought that
saying thirty cubits was close enough, and sounded nicer than thirty-one cubits
plus four times a cubit cut in ten, etc.  Cubits being far from an exact unit
anyway, nobody would really care.  As somebody said, there was no International
Standard Cubit.

"This is not StM's problem with the whole thing.  His problem is that some
people take the whole bible to be completely true.  Nightstalker is defending
the bible in a general way, and StM is attacking a group of people who look at
the bible in a specific way, and use it to circumscribe their thinking, and
try to use it to circumscribe the thinking of others.  (This is your point,
isn't it, StM?)

"The Bible is not a completely literal text.  It contains many metaphors, many
in the form of parables.  But the parables are different, because they're not
descriptions of actual events, but more like fables recounted by Jesus.  As far
as I'm concerned, there's a very good reason why the Catholic Church decreed
that commoners shouldn't be able to interpret the Bible--because they didn't
have the background for it.  The Church has, as I recall, been examining the
text of the Bible and interpreting it(going as far back to the original
translations as possible)for hundreds of years, finding out what is metaphor
and what is literal, etc.

"I still believe the evolution thing to be something that has suffered in
compression.  Premise 1: Evolution existed.  Premise 2: God exists.  From this,
if we assume that God was interested in giving Moses(or whoever else)the
literal truth, then Moses either understood it imperfectly or converted into a
more palatable form for others.  Or God knew that this would happen if he told
the literal truth, and converted it to a simpler form himself.  I think that
the easiest interpretation of Genesis is as an allegory--after all, otherwise,
where did Cain's wife come from?  Or any of the other people's wives, for that
matter?

"Those who interpret Genesis, for instance, as literal truth, should have
somebody explain things to them a bit better.  I see it a creation myth, like
that of any other mythology, but that's my own personal view.  I see the birth
of Christ the same way--as a myth, created so that Christ would fulfill the
prophecy of the Messiah, or at the very least spun from real events that were
exaggerated wildly.  But that's my humble opinion, and I respect the rights of
others to their opinions on it, as long as they respect mine.

"When other people say that their beliefs are right and mine are wrong, and
try to restrict me on that basis, then things get ugly.  And that is what StM
is on about."

Alfvaen then tries valiantly to think of a good soapbox joke, but the structure
collapses beneath him before he can...

--
---Alfvaen(a.k.a. Aaron V. Humphrey, Page of Newts)
Canadian Network For Space Research, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
"The Center is missing..."
Current Album--Talking Heads:Remain In Light
Current Read--Eileen Kernaghan:Journey To Aprilioth
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