If folks read religious texts "symbolically" -- seems like claiming an easy escape route nowadays in a world where it's really hard to prove the supernatural -- well, why not read The Odyssey "symbolically" and put it on a high pedestal as well? The Enuma Elish? Your daughter's bad LiveJournal poetry?
The fact is, some verses in the Qur'an, Bible, etc. -- the crazier ones -- are "symbolic," it seems -- while others ("Thou Shalt Not Kill" -- or that you must fast during Ramadan) are meant to be taken literally. So, who decides which is which? It seems awfully selective, and to the benefit of the religion in question.
Yoshie mentioned how folks "can reconcile faith and science." Well, sometimes people reconcile humanitarianism and warfare. They do so at the expense of consistency most often. And at worst they're willfully disingenuous in their convolutions.
-B.
sharif islam wrote:
> On 2/27/07, Yoshie Furuhashi
<critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> [.....]
>> The thing is that
>> most people of any religious faith are not
fundamentalists, so they
>> don't read the texts literally, which is the reason
why they can
>> reconcile faith and science.
>
> I have to disagree with the statement that most
people don't read the
> texts literally -- at least not the Muslims I know.
The main problem
> is, as others mentioned, depending on the context
and history, certain
> verses could be literal or symbolic. So mainstream
religious folks
> usually don't have the time and knowledge to
decipher all the
> intricacies. Now this may or may not make them
fundamentalists. But
> it is easy to go for the literal interpretation
which usually provided
> by religious leaders. Verse 3:7 (Surah Al-Imran) in
Quran is a good
> example. I blogged about it here:
> http://khepa.livejournal.com/58797.html
>
> --sharif