"So is it reasonable to believe that the Gospel passages quoted above “speak more clearly” than, say, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to the question of whether Christians should interpret the events in Haiti as God’s punishment for some (spurious) 18th-century sin? I think it is. So do many theologians, ancient as well as modern, Protestant as well as Catholic, And the fact that Richard Dawkins and Pat Robertson both disagree tells us something, important, I think, about the symbiosis between the new atheism and fundamentalism — how deeply the new atheists are invested in the idea that a mad literalism is the truest form of any faith, and how completely they depend on outbursts from fools and fanatics to confirm their view that religion must, of necessity, be cruel, literal-minded, and intellectually embarrassing."
Ross Douthat, New York Times Op Ed
(HT: more than 95 theses)
PS: the problem here, whatever it is, has nothing to do with 'literalism.' The whole rhetoric of 'literal vs. metaphorical' is woefully inadequate and wrongheaded from the start.
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