and how do you define it.

***God gave the Torah to Moses. Not clear if it was all at once or a little at a time over 40 years. Moses only wrote down ten sentences- twice- as he broke the first set. The rest of the Torah was transmitted orally for many generations before it was written down in the Babylonian exile. The parts of the Torah that you wish to take literally, the two creation stories, were prevalent in all of Babylonia at the time of the exile. I think those parts were only inspired to the extent that the major events in the creation of life on this planet are recorded there, but it is not so inspired that even the the order is exactly correct.

The parts of the Torah that are much more important to the jewish people as it defined their daily life are all the 613 commandments. These they were much more careful to get transmitted correctly. And of course the first ten (really the second ten)commandments were in the temple intact until the exile. These commandments are much more exactly inspired by god.

One of the commandments is the birthday of the creation of the world. God said when giving the commandment of when to celebrate this world birthday, that it is for all men and for all time to be celegrated. This is what you should be taking literally. Yet all Christians ignore this holiest day of all holy days.

So you do not take all the Torah literally, just the least inspired portions of it. Shame on all who do not obey the commandment from god to celebrate his creation of the world at the time of his chosing. SHAME.

That is my complaint with all fundamentalists. They take what they want literally and ignore what they do not want. That is most dishonest and I think most offensive to GOD.***

Does that mean God gets exactly what He wants in the book or....
mostly but the writer can mess up a few things.

I must admit I am curious.

***As above the rabis got the commandments more exactly than the cosmology***

You said:
If you accept that the new testament is written in parables, not literals, and that Jesus is god talking to us, then why do you insist on thinking that the Torah is any more than metaphor with messages, not historical fact?

Because Jesus spoke of them as if he believed they were literal.
Do you wish references?

***Yes. Show me... Is a Camel passing through the eye of a needle literal?***

You said:
Sedimentary rock is dated from when it became a sediment. It would date a world wide flood, if there were one.

It wouldn’t if the trace radioactive elements were not given a chance to escape before being buried. The resulting sedimentary rock would have all the trace elements of the older rocks they were formed from.
False assumptions of slow gradual process give false results.

***The radioactive elements do not escape. What is dated is the newly formed rock in each layer, mostly from plants. But I do not claim any expertise in carbon and other methods of dating***

You said. I do not think it matters to god whether you believe in the literal truth of the bible or not.

So the ten commandments are really the ten suggestions?

***Covered in my new thread today plus what I wrote above. I think god may prefer the ardent and honest and charitable atheist to the average believer***

You said.
I do not think it matters to god whether you believe in the literal truth of the bible or not.

So the ten commandments are really the ten suggestions?

***They are not the first ten commandments which Moses destroyed. There is no way of knowing if the second set was the same as the first. Maybe the first set contained the commandment not to lie and in the second set it was softened to not lie about what your neighbors have done. But you are allowed to boost about yourself, like in your resume. Moses did tell us how to refine the commandments in the oral tradition.

Jesus when he said that "looking at a woman with lust in your heart is committing adultery+ he changed the whole context of commandments. That would mean that bearing false witness against your neighbor should be extended to not lying about yourself as you should love your neighbor as yourself- another commandment given to Moses. So Jesus is saying that you should be as honest and as pure as possible to keep all the commandments as well as possible.

Previously the commandments were like boundaries you could not pass over, but you could go right up to the edge. Now Jesus tells us that it is important to stay away from the boundaries. That means the original set of 613 commandments were like suggestions that require refinement by other messengers from god.***

If I took hell to be a factious place and it turns out to be real, that would be a nasty surprise.

***Hell is the lake of fire that the False Prophet and the Anti-christ were destroyed in. That means that their souls were terminated. They did not experience anything anymore.

For most of us, we get to be born again (and again) before getting into heaven permanently. There is no jewish belief that persons go to hell for sinning or any other reason, or even go to heaven for that matter. Jesus introduced the concept of going to heaven to western religion.

What happens according to eastern religions is that your vibrations (whatever that means) are rearranged into spherical layers at death so that the coarser vibrations are on the outside of your sphere and the most refined and pure vibrations are on the inside at the center. So what your experience first after death is the interaction of the most evil parts of your life with the correspondingly evil parts of the supernatural world. That may seem like hell for a sinful person. A pure person will never experience it.

So heaven and hell are not places. They are experiences that happen automatically and the experience depends on what karma you have accumulated in the past life. These vibrations are gradually radiated away, and so your experience of the supernatural becomes more and more pleasant. Whether you stay in that world or not depends on what is left after the coarse vibrations are gone. If little is left you will be born again. If a great deal is left, you will be given work to do in heaven. If in between like most of us, you will be given the opportunity to work off some karma and to experience what is unsatified in your past life. Then your may have to be born again anyway, or you might pass the audition for that job in heaven. There is no free lunch***

Sincerely,

Richard