Yes, zealotry was one of the problems with Catholic doctrine

All that pope commicated was this: "none of the shit we are talking about is grounded in immediate experience. Regular people who mostly live in the immediate should be excluded so we won't have to face the inconvenience and have to deal with it."

That was preciselly it's more subtropical attitude

maybe that's got to do with the fact that they directly colluded with the Roman government to import POCs

thus bringing the subtropics to Europe in the first place

But never forget that Catholic Church was way less partisan and proletarian than what came to challenge it

The "depth" of the Bible is the product of abstraction and reason. But ultimately this is all removed a degree or more from the narratives in the Bible. So getting back to the stories gets us back to world we actually experience

@vigil#3835 You are giving "depth" the meaning that masses attribute to it, namely, the weight of emotional lessons

Or "foresight into achievements of contemporary science" at best

no I'm talking about all the theological fluff behind Catholicism

The stuff that pope is defending against the assault of the layman and his immediate experience

I certainly agree that Bible is best read without Catholic dogma in mind

But not from the same reason that Atheists do

Atheists read it literally not figuratively as intended

Even if they read it figuratively they still don't get it, but neverind

Yeah it's besides the point

That exactly is the point, that every story can be read from many different angles and with many different ambitions in mind

Reading and discussing the Bible is best done with somebody who isn't a complete normie

You can take a Bible story and contemplate on it from political perspective, from perspective of symbols, from historical perspective, from all these combined

From ritual perspective etc

I disagree the Bible is written the way normies think about the world, as figuration

the bible is written the way constantine wanted it to be so he could make a cancerously expanding dalit empire

and the new testament is probably 75% outright forgery

Hmmm I'm always in dilemma about the worth of NT myself

Revelations for example

Esoteric symbolism in disguise of prophecy

Or deranged phantasmagoria of the type of personality which Nietzdche has described as "man of resentment"

Saying that you are 100% certain on it's worth wouldn't be appropriate atm

I mean, some people are certain and decisive in what they will take from a certain work and what they will dismiss

Varg has a simple answer

Archaeologically and culturally, Bible isn't *us* hence screw everything written there

for some reason I was always quite drawn to the bible

I don't know if it's because my family was catholic for generations and generations and it had become congenital, or what

It has to draw you to it

Think about it

It's was written in the era, in the hotspot of mixed cultures and societies, and above all, mixed worldviews and spiritual proportions

It describes conflicts, agitation, breakdowns and rises of groups and ideas

It gives pages and pages of testimony in politics, religion, society, war

It deals with some of the most important societies to have existed, namely, Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian

And forces you to read between lines, since you are aware that narrator is being subjective

And forces you to take every symbol and study it, since it has got to have had both a significance, and a different meaning than a modern man, due to his separation from such a mode of thinking and speaking, cannot comprehend