I have been studying the Bible much more intensely than I ever have in my entire life and I have found a very strange but very compelling correlation to the way that people think as well as the way that people are able to process that thought.
What I have always misplaced as a method of understanding is the art of metaphor and allegory. Or rather... The bi-product brought on by understanding is such.
I questioned a lot of the times why it was that Jesus was much more well known by others because of the stories that he talked about instead of the message that he actually conveyed. I was the type that had to grow up in Sunday-school so it was always taught to me in a very mature fashion what the stories were all about. The crucifixion not being something that the adults would hide the gritty truth about... In essence, I was well aware of the consequence of murder from an early age.
Nowadays I have come to the realization of my true ability to take just about anything that I know and to apply it into a metaphorical aspect of thinking. What I do try not to understand as a relevant matter for other people is that my own understanding can universally be applied. In fact I have come to train myself to be able to look at what others know and to assimilate it into my own understanding so that way I can relate or otherwise attribute emotion to something I've never experienced myself.
But I have recently become troubled by the inability of people to look at an allegory and still see the facts. Such as historical reference used in an allegory. What analogy would be complete if it didn't have some truth to it? I detest such examples of metaphors that use some wild example of imagination that doesn't have truth behind it... Somehow people think that philosophy is just a matter of subjective reasoning. I argue that if one has to be able to philosophize anything that he should be able to do it in the manner in which he has been taught all logical methods of deduction. Otherwise it's just some fancy-relayed fairy tale that has as much meaning as the phrase 'happily ever after'.
My prime examples right now are the Garden of Eden.
I am becoming more disconnected with the people of faith who can not look at that or the story of Noah as a matter of historical fact. I think just because of their frivolous pursuit of scientific truth in the text has yielded an absence of evidence, they then turn to an explanation that otherwise doesn't convey the truth of their own emotions--which is that they feel failed if not completely lost to what their faith dictates.
I myself can't express the level in which I felt lost in certain matters of faith when people showed me that the scriptures in which I categorize as my foundation don't say what I thought or was taught to believe. Because of my own struggles in certain personal matters I have found that there is no way to categorize the scripture as allegorical unless the style is apparent or otherwise states it as such. Quite frankly... The Torah doesn't express much allegory as many would assume. Does this count as blasphemy? I am starting to wonder considering the implications of what their other thoughts start to produce.
So there really is something to look at here... If the Bible is just a big allegory, how then isn't our lives? The hardest thing to come by in this universe is a sense of realism. In fact, if it weren't for all the strange things that we look as phenomenon, we wouldn't have a grasp of the real. It is the consistently predictable aspect of physics and understanding of thought that produces a world in which things that are real can be perceived differently than that which isn't real--such as dreams. Otherwise... We are all lost to the nature of the surreal and the nature of imagination.
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