Biblical Literalism

Jesus was more interested in love than he was in rules. That was what got him into so much trouble with the fundamentalists of his day

The atrophying of our national understanding of secularism has dramatic implications for the country's well-being, including, most fundamentally, its ability to separate politics from religion.

Doubt has many roles. We sometimes forget that God is mystery and a life of faith is one that is lived in the tension of never fully knowing.

In the name of protecting Christianity from a secularism perceived as corrosive to the faith, the creationists are unwittingly driving the best and brightest evangelicals out of the church.

We're obsessed in today's world with facts. Every syllable uttered by people in positions of power is put under a microscope, and we, the general public, love nothing more than to have subterfuge reveal in the media spotlight.

In the world of Christian scholarship, for example, to read the Bible literally is regarded as absurd. To call the words of the Bible "the Word of God" is more than naïve.

By killing all preconceptions we have about who or what God is, we do indeed free God simply to be, as stated in Exodus and by great theologians and philosophers ever since.

With several new English-language Bible translations that have been published in recent years -- including ones that use gender-neutral and conversati...

Having spent the last several years writing a book about people who search for the Garden of Eden on earth, I am a little sensitive about the topic of apples.

Do people find in Genesis independent evidence against evolution and against global warming, or is it a matter of finding evidence for the one that strongly suggests the truth of the other?

By Daniel Burke Religion News Service (RNS) In recent weeks, an arcane and scary-sounding religious term has crept into the lexicon of the 2012 ca...

Critics of religion enjoy pointing out how many wars and how much suffering has been caused in the name of religion. But only science has given us the tools to kill each other in ways never before imagined.

Why should anyone be dismayed that all the evidence ever collected points to the implausibility that two persons named Adam and Eve once lived in a paradisiacal garden and gave birth to all humanity?

The Bible is not a book. It is dozens of very different books bound together. The assumption that identifying one part as fiction undermines the factual character of another part is ludicrous.

I don't pay much attention to creationism for the same reason that I don't watch much television -- it's boring. Real science is far more interesting than an amateurish knockoff.

In our zeal to honor the importance of the Bible and extol its usefulness, we may unintentionally do the opposite. We may reduce the Bible from God's revelation of himself to merely a revelation of divine principles for life.

I was a little shocked to discover that three in ten Americans read the Bible literally. I don't read the Bible this way, and can't imagine doing so. Here are four reasons why.

As individuals read the Bible, "Frequently, I think, people come to a new position, or find some nuance in what they already thought," he said.

The opposing sides of the Bible wars talk as if there were only two choices. Fact or fiction? Is the Bible factual in every respect, true for all time, or is it not? The conflict has raged for many decades, and it seems irreconcilable.

Reading Biblical stories as mythology gives me the freedom to understand their underlying meaning in a way I never did when I was taught as a child that these stories were factually true.

A new Gallup poll reveals that three out of ten Americans believe the Bible to be the actual word of God, to be interpreted literally, word for word. ...

While some people think of science and religion as being inherently in conflict, I think it's because they tend to define "religion" as "blind acceptance and complete certainty about silly, superstitious fantasies."

As someone raised evangelical, I realize anti-evolutionists believe they are defending the Christian tradition. But as a seminary graduate now training to be a medical scientist, I can say that, in reality, they've abandoned it.

Organisms evolved from simple forms by natural selection. This includes humans. We are the end result of a long, slow, natural process of development. Moreover, there never was an original pair.

What we say about the Bible inevitably says something about us -- about what we believe or don't believe, and about the place faith holds or doesn't hold in our lives.