Reading the Bible, Literally

THE NEW COOK at the senior where I volunteer is a pleasant young lady, and I am glad they fired the three truculent employees, and replaced one of them with her. when they replace the other two, I can go home less exhausted. The new lady is thirty six, a millennial, half of whom do not identify with any religion. She does. She didn't show much interest in my background, but for some reason I want people to know that I work in the kitchen because I want to, not because I have to. As retired college instructor, I've made my money. Without conversation a kitchen van become dreary drudgery, so I told her the story about the time I lost my high school teaching job because I told a class that Thomas Jefferson was, in effect, an atheist. I love that story. The principle called me in, asked why i was telling teenagers in a small southern town such a thing, and I invited him to take a wild guess. For Jefferson, as for many men of science, the term "god" is interchangeable with the terms "nature", and hence, from the Biblical Christian perspective, he was an atheist, a non believer. I asked the new help if she was disappointed. I don't recall what she said, but she made one fact perfectly clear: people who do not accept Jesus as their lord and savior in this lifetime, people who do not accept the truth of the Biblical doctrine of god's judgment, when such people die, then, they most certainly will. I remarked off hand that I feel the same way, that I can hardly wait for the time to arrive when everyone accepts my religiosity as universal truth, and drops the primitive religions crap. I mentioned that in 1797 congress passes, unanimously, a law prohibiting the United States from being a "Christian" nation, the law intended to support the first amendment. I mentioned that the Bible says that the world is flat, and she told me I might have to show her that in the good book. I don't think I'll bother. I can read her Isiah twelve all day long, about "the four corners of the earth", and she would point out that the term "flat earth" does not appear. No, it doesn't, but only a flat , non circular surface has "corners", and, if the Bible is the literal word of God, then, corners means corners. The quite devout do not believe in evolution, in they do not believe in God's word as the literal truth when it reveals god to be a liar, or ignorant of planetary geometry and geography. they believe that if humans descended from monkeys, there would be no monkeys on earth now. they think themselves clever for this formulation. I must refrain from telling her that neither Darwin, nor any evolutionary biologist since ever said than humans evolved from monkeys. they said, and still say, that humans and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor, an animal which in fact no longer exists, which, in a limited sort of way, justifies their belief that monkeys do not or should not exist in an evolutionary paradigm. The Christian resisted accepting the sun as the body around which the earth revolves, and now it resists evolution an climate change, just as it has always tried to deny scientific fact. But four corners are four corners, and that can only happen on a flat square four sided surface, which, by the way, according to the bible rests upon four pillars. As for the stars themselves, they are either pin pricks in the dome of heaven through which God takes peaks at us from heaven, or shiny trinkets hanging from the dome which will, when the Lord returns, fall from the sky and smash to pieced upon the ground like glass ornaments, depending on which book, chapter and verse you happen to quote.