{"id":6003,"date":"2017-04-20T07:18:05","date_gmt":"2017-04-20T11:18:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=6003"},"modified":"2017-04-20T13:18:22","modified_gmt":"2017-04-20T17:18:22","slug":"biblical-literalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=6003","title":{"rendered":"Biblical literalism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I pointed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=5983\" target=\"_blank\">a few days ago<\/a> to a piece by Molly Worthen that links conservative Christianity to the national disgraces of &#8220;post-truth&#8221; and Donald Trump&#8217;s presidency.  Now comes a former <i>New York Times<\/i> religion editor to say the yahoos number far fewer than the piece suggests.<\/p>\n<p><center><img src=\"http:\/\/www.BobFelton.com\/images\/NYT_2017-Apr-19_letter.JPG\"><\/center><\/p>\n<p>Nice try.  America&#8217;s largest denomination is the Southern Baptists, and they are emphatic about inerrancy, recognizing that once you go the way of allegory and metaphor in interpreting the Bible you undermine a lot of orthodoxy.  Just 2-mlles from my home is a near mega-church where it is taught that the earth is less than 10,000-years old; that good, decent, godly people are always prepared to betray their family and friends on command, like Abraham; that the goal of the godly life is self-annihilation &#8212; the total elimination of self-interest and self-direction because the <i>self<\/i> is evil.  All of this should repel anybody of ordinary intelligence and decency, and yet all that may be said is that there isn&#8217;t a word of this degrading nonsense that isn&#8217;t totally commonplace amongst Southern Baptists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I pointed a few days ago to a piece by Molly Worthen that links conservative Christianity to the national disgraces of &#8220;post-truth&#8221; and Donald Trump&#8217;s presidency. Now comes a former New York Times religion editor to say the yahoos number &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=6003\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6003"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6003"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6007,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6003\/revisions\/6007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}