Clearly Bahrain is very confident that Islam is true.

United States: "We absolutely condemn recklessly kicking around deadly balls in the presence of Israeli peacekeepers."

Yeah, some lawmakers said stupid things. The app is still getting banned.

You mean noun cases. And yeah, English speakers struggle with that. See: whom.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Just smoke the epic weed, dude!

Are you having a stroke?

If they want to treat men and women equally, why must only men register for the draft?

Oh, yeah. I can see why it is funny.

If I've come across as hostile at any point, I apologize. It was not my intention. It can be hard to communicate tone in text.

I strongly disagree with the idea that it's a modern concept, but I'll check out your articles.

> As in, his argument hinges on symbolism not "I can prove it, travel to so and so and you'll see where it was".

But doesn't that simply presuppose its truth, rather than disregard its truth? They all took the Torah as authoritative, so Paul didn't see the need to back up his claim that Adam and Eve were real people and their lives happened as described.

> the true/false distinction in a text is a product of a separation of language into the 'literal' and the 'metaphorical' where the literal is objectively factual and the metaphorical is subjective and arbitrary

Are you suggesting that the distinction is a product of our culture? I don't think that's right. The idea that a story can say something false isn't a novel concept. The Bible itself talks about people not believing in it.

> in other words to use the text symbolically did not mean it had to first be separated as non-literal, partly because other explanations (e.g. darwinism) didn't really exist.

It is certainly true that Paul believed Old Testament stories had hidden messages for Christians, but as you say, that isn't the same as believing they didn't happen. The literal meaning is important if you want to take the text as authoritative, because you can read meanings into whatever you want, as Paul himself demonstrated.

> the literal-materialist interpretation that 19th-20th century fundamentalists have applied to it did not exist until fairly recently.

The Hebrew Calendar is based on a literal reading of the story.

> Simply that's its fundamental role is theological rather than literal. In such a time the distinction beyond that simply didn't exist.

Can you clarify what you mean by this? Are you saying people at the time didn't understand that something in the Bible could be false? That can't be right. The Bible itself gives commands for punishing people who don't believe it, and the New Testament complains about scoffers. 1 Corinthians 15:14 mentions the possibility that Jesus didn't rise from the dead. Paul was not suggesting that was really the case, but it shows he understood the difference between literal truth and theology.

You can interpret the story in a way that appeals to you, but that's not the same as it being true. If we take the story as representing the invention of agriculture, as the article suggests, then it definitely isn't true. Humans were not immortal egalitarian vegetarians before the invention of agriculture. Not remotely to any of those adjectives. It's also very strange that the author suggests Paul didn't believe Eden was a real place, and though he acknowledges that Paul made several references to Adam as a person, he seems to say that Paul somehow didn't really mean it as referring to a real person? He appears in Jesus's genealogy in Luke, so the idea of him as a person was around in early Christianity. The narrative in Genesis describes real world rivers in relation to Eden. Josephus referred to Adam and Eve as real people and Eden as a real place. It seems like the author is projecting his view onto ancient people.