Cricket: Excellent post. As a Catholic, I interpret the Bible contextually and not literally (meaning, I don’t believe Moses lived to be 900 years old; I believe that was simply a way of saying he lived a long time).
Further, there are significant amounts of extant and apocryphal writings that the Nicene Council never saw fit to include in the Bible, which takes a great deal away from the claim of complete inerrancy. The Council, like all human committees, was riddled with problems and the “final” Bible is a testament (pun intended) to that.
Which means, if one’s faith is to be complete, one has to consider the oral traditions of the Church in the centuries that proceeded the Bible, as well as all of the writings that support the mission of the early Church. Baruch Spinoza provides an excellent criticism of the Bible and his words are compelling.
For me, where evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity breaks down (like fundamentalist Islam) is the slavish adherence to a literal translation that has been debunked to a great degree and the use of the Bible as a weapon, not a tool.
When I was in high school (Catholic), I received an assignment in Comparative Religions to study Sufism and the poems of Rumi. To say that the assignment was enlightening was to damn it with faint praise. It was incredible and I realized that the path to God and spirituality does not know one denomination or religion or path. Enlightenment comes from acceptance that true knowledge, regardless of source, is pure and to embrace that.
To me, Faith and Reason do support each other. They are the “two wings of enlightenment” and BOTH are necessary.
