I stumbled across this for the first time years ago, and I think of it often. I think of things I said, and even genuinely believed. It was my extreme fortune that nobody ever made fun of me for it, even outside the “Christian bubble.” They just thought it was an interesting perspective that I thought there was an equal amount of scientific evidence for a young earth as there is for evolution. But I look back now at all the years I wasted believing this stuff and I wish it all could have been different.
Obviously I was seriously misinformed about science, but sometimes there are things that I still haven’t thought to question, where the fundamentalist programming hides undiscovered until something brings it to light and I have to change my whole worldview yet again.
The group I was in viewed the entire Bible as 100% infallible and always to be taken as literally as possible. So we believed in the Garden of Eden, Noah and the ark, Jonah being swallowed by a big fish (not a whale), Balaam and the talking donkey, Enoch and Elijah ascending into heaven without ever dying, and every single wacky story that quite possibly was meant to be metaphorical at the time it was written or composed was, to us, absolutely a literal account of real life things that happened. There are a lot of these wacky stories by the way and a lot of them aren’t even mentioned in atheist videos because there are just way too many stories to cover them all. But you’d better believe there are at least 100 children’s Bible cartoons available on YouTube for every single story explaining why it is literal and true.
I digress. I’ve been aware for a while now that these mythological accounts were not actual history just like young earth creationism is not actual science. But I thought that a lot of other things were just history. It turns out that the chronologists writing the Bible took a heck of a lot of creative liberties.
And I knew there was a lot of serious question around the historicity of the gospels but had never considered it from this perspective:
Here’s an interesting take on the epistles. I’ve heard all kinds of theories about how they came up with the Canon, but I never thought to take the authors’ intention into account.
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxskNoVg4MbPYHol4OPgIz9SGJic9XJ-G4
(Would you rather be a Mormon or Calvinist? Theist Thursday., PineCreek, 2022 May 5, Clip of 18:00-18:40)
Anyway, returning to UsefulCharts, it was interesting to me to hear an actual historian’s perspective on the Bible. I didn’t know there were such fine-tuned ways to find out what actually happened that long ago in any reliable or unbiased way.
So in sum, I’ve been watching scandalous YouTube videos to keep my mind busy and not ruminate on the many unknowns that will happen this week. Both the videos and the approach I need to take to discharge involve embracing a lot of uncertainty so maybe that’s what’s drawing me to them now.
