You don't do the Bible, or any human being greater honor, or understand them better, by taking them literally.

To take something "metaphorically" doesn't mean that we treat it as just a fluffy literary decoration.

In mathematics there's a term for what a metaphor does: it's called "a mapping." A useful metaphor says that one thing has a similar structure to another thing; they behave alike in analogous circumstances. One of them can be taken as a useful hint toward…

The word 'spiritual' gives a lot of people problems, and I'm not going to define it. I'm not even going to claim I understand all that it entails.

But one description that works: "If you can't define something; if you can't reduce it to a combination of some other categories or interactions between them" -- words like say, Truth, Beauty, Love and the like come to mind --

then it very likely is spiritual.

Friends have a lot of trouble with the word 'Truth' anymore. It…