[GreekPete]

For example, people used to believe the Book of Genesis literally, and now (I believe) most denominations take it allegorically. I wonder how many similar stories like that will we have in the future.

For me, it always felt like the interpretation of the Holy Books are changing through time as we understand science more and more. And it feels ironic to me.

[mensetmanusman]

Jewish Old Testament scholars haven’t taken Genesis literally for more than 2 millennia.

[ithkuil]

That's true. But even leaving science aside, and focusing only on non-falsifiable aspects of human ethics, there are many examples such as slavery where Christianity for example has changed over time quite radically (and not even linearly)

[snypox]

I asked about slavery in Reddit's DebateAChristian forum. Most Christians say that those part of the Bible needs to be understood in the context of those times where debt slavery was quite common and not considered evil. So we can't apply today's morality there. Well, at least these were the most common answers I got. There were also a person who told me that what "moral"/"good" means is _completely_ subjective (which is true to some extent), so I should not judge Exodus 21.

[orestarod]

Religious people asking others to judge the Word Of God by whatever standards humans happened to have at the time the books were written is an implicit acceptance that their religion is completely made up. What happened, God Changed their mind in the meantime?

[ithkuil]

FWIW, slavery in antiquity was rarely purely a "racial" thing. You became slave because of losing a war, which often was waged in response to some a refusal to just pay some reason indecent amount of taxes or whatever one side insisted was "due".

Surely all christians today believe that tricking somebody with dubious pretexts into debt-based slavery (as often happens with human trafficking of sex workers, where women have to formally pay up their debts and incurring the costs that they captors incur in hosting them in sub-human conditions).

[pyuser583]

Literal interpretation of Genesis is a fairly recent phenomenon. Fundamentalism is a modern religion.

[pdonis]

> Literal interpretation of Genesis is a fairly recent phenomenon.

Um, no, it isn't. It's how Genesis was interpreted by most people of the Jewish and Christian religions throughout most of the time since it was written. What is a fairly recent phenomenon is people of those religions not interpreting Genesis (and the Bible in general) literally.