An Example of Heretical Rationalization

                                                                  Vol. XXII, No. 9, Nov/Dec 2009

   It never became important to me to distance myself from biblical statements, either privately or publicly; I was merely content to accept the possibility that the writers of the Bible inhabited a more primitive culture in which fanciful explanations of events were more acceptable than they would be today. Many of the far-fetched descriptions of events given in the Bible, I was certain, accrued to those events over the centuries after they had happened. Somebody along the line gave a fanciful explanation of the Israelites' escape from Egypt or a prophet's recovery of an ax head that had fallen in the river, and it got written into the tribal account. As for the creation of the world, the story in Genesis was undoubtedly a beautiful, mythic response of some father or grandfather to his children when they said, "Grandpa, where did the world come from?" All of these were forgivable lapses from everyday truth as long as I didn't take the text too seriously, and didn't impugn the spiritual truth of the Scriptures.

[John Killinger, Ten Things I Learned Wrong from a Conservative Church, Crossroads Publishing, NY, p. 133.]