The prize for the Most Obvious Revelation Ever goes this week to the Catholic Church, who recently told the ranks of its faithful that the Bible isn't meant to be read literally, and that the account of the world's creation in Genesis and its end as described in Revelation should instead be interpreted symbolically. Also no longer valid is the infamous curse uttered in Matthew 27:25, "His blood be on us and on our children,” which has been used for the better part of two millennia to justify anti-Semitic thought, speech, and acts -- in The Gift of Scripture, the document being promulgated by Catholic theologians describing the changes in attitude toward scriptural fundamentalism, we learn that this was the equivalent of a gangland taunt between 1st century Jews and Jewish Christians, who were always at each other's throats -- literally -- in a knock-down, drag-out fight to see who got to be most second most-despised minority in the Roman Empire, rather than the first.
But why stop there? If all of a sudden we're told that parts of Scripture aren't literally true but in fact metaphor or (in the case of Matthew's blood libel) "dramatic exaggeration", what makes the rest of the Bible sacrosanct? The Church may have thought that it was doing itself a favor, when it fact it's put itself on an extremely slippery slope. How long before they have no choice but to admit that the whole darned thing is just one big parable about being nice to one another and not being a jerk?
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