Do you believe that Jesus was a baby sheep or a cat with a tawny mane?  Do you think that a ten-headed dragon is going to crawl onto the beach at the end of time?

If you answer No, then you do not believe in a literal interpretation of Scripture.  Each of those are symbols used by the Bible: the Lamb of God, the Lion of Judah, and the Dragon of the Apocalypse.  Dedication to a truly literalist interpretation would force you to answer Yes to the questions above.

Even so, many leaders of the Christian community who would certainly answer No to the above questions still insist that their interpretation of the Bible is “literal.”  Clearly their claims are either dishonest or deluded.  Even worse, the fact that Jesus taught with fictional parables clearly shows that stories do not need to be literally true in order to be spiritually valuable, which means that the attitude of some church leaders that religion requires the Bible to be historically and materially factual implies that Jesus was a fraud.

So why do so many insist on scriptural literalism and bibliolatry?  Continue reading →