Opinion of the Churches of Christ

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It's routinely stunning to me that religions criticize the fundamentalists within their own ranks. If you really think that your special book is the revealed word of God, shouldn't you be following that thing to the letter?

These hot takes are growing so tiring.  Every atheist thinks he's the first one, and no one else has thought of the idea.

You can believe in a religion and believe that certain parts of an overall holy book were either made up as allegory or mistranslated.  That should not be stunning to you.

Then what is the basis for your faith?

I don't necessarily agree with this or think it tells the whole story myself, but many liberal Christians would say that the basis for their faith is the figure of Jesus rather than the specific literary content of the Bible.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It's routinely stunning to me that religions criticize the fundamentalists within their own ranks. If you really think that your special book is the revealed word of God, shouldn't you be following that thing to the letter?

These hot takes are growing so tiring.  Every atheist thinks he's the first one, and no one else has thought of the idea.

You can believe in a religion and believe that certain parts of an overall holy book were either made up as allegory or mistranslated.  That should not be stunning to you.

So basically, everything you like in the text is cherrypicked as "real," while all the stuff you disagree with is "mistranslated." How incredibly convenient for you.

The "mistranslated" talking point has always seemed stupid to me too, especially since we still have the Bible in its original languages so if people think something in it is mistranslated they can always just check other translations or consult people who can read Hebrew and Greek and translate it themselves. It's not like the Sanskrit Canon where like half of it only survives in the form of Kumarajiva's translations into Chinese.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I don't disagree with any of what you're saying; I'm not a Biblical literalist myself, not by a long shot. But I have seen people impugn the actual translation of the Bible from language to language as something that vitiates our ability to understand the intent of its authors, and I (falsely) assumed that that was the talking point that you were referring to. For that I'm sorry.