In this episode, I continue a multipart series in which I adapt some of the lesson plans I used as I taught the Catholic faith for 30 years. I’m not here to convert anyone. I’m just sharing my stories. Having already talked about God last episode, this time we discuss human beings, a brief introduction to the use of mythology in Scripture, and the metaphorical use of angels and demons.

Hello, this is Chris Young. Welcome to Episode 89 of Contemplating Life.

In this episode, I continue a multi-part series based on my 30 years teaching the Catholic faith in my local parish’s inquiry program.

Whenever I talk about religion, I always include this disclaimer that I’m not out to convert anyone to my beliefs. As with all topics, my purpose is to educate, entertain, enlighten, and possibly inspire. But that doesn’t include trying to evangelize you into Christian or Catholic traditions. I’m just telling my stories.

We pick up where we left off last time in an introductory lesson based on an outline by my late pastor, Father Larry Crawford. In that episode, we explored who God is, how we come to know Him, and the limits of our ability to understand Him.

However, if we are going to understand our relationship with God, we need to understand what it means to be a human being. In our traditions, humans have two natures. There is our material nature, which is our physical body. There is our Spiritual nature, which we call the soul.

Humans have two powers – that is, ways in which we can act. One is our intellect, which can be thought of as the power to think. The other is our free will, which is the power to choose. Theologically, we believe both of these powers are gifts from God. God gave us the power to think and the power to choose, but it is up to us to exercise those powers appropriately.

While it is useful to think of the spiritual and materialistic aspects of human nature as separate things, there is a problem with that.

Father Larry would give an example of the kinds of things we did in high school biology class. We would be given some animal, such as a frog or a fetal pig, to dissect. That was quite educational. By taking apart the creature and looking at its organs and component parts, we learned a lot about how the animal worked. However, when we were finished, all that we had was a bunch of animal parts. We no longer had a frog or a pig or whatever, and there was no putting them back together again.

When we talk about human beings as consisting of a body and a soul, we are dissecting human nature, and that can be useful. We can pick apart portions of human personality, such as the ability to think or the ability to choose. The problem is that we are not just a bunch of disconnected, dissected parts. We are a whole being.

Once we have dissected human nature in this way, we often forget to put the pieces back together, and that changes our view of the world and our relationship with the divine. Once you divide human beings into component parts, such as body and spirit, there is a natural tendency to think that the spirit is close to God because God is spirit. The problem is that it leads us to believe that the body is far from God. That the flesh must somehow be the opposite of the spirit. If the spirit is good and close to God, then the flesh must be evil.

If heaven is where God resides, and it is our ultimate goal that our souls make it to heaven, then we falsely assume the world must be, by its very nature, evil because it is not heavenly. There is a tradition that there are three negative influences on our souls: The world, the flesh, and the devil. You’ll hear that phrase repeated a lot in religious literature. The world, the flesh, and the devil… Beware of all these things!

For reference, people point to Scripture passages such as these:

Ephesians 2:1-3 says, “You were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you once lived following the age of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the desires of our flesh, following the wishes of the flesh and the impulses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest.” In other words, you followed the evil right is of the world and the desires of the flesh and that was sinful.

1 Peter 4:1-4 says, “Therefore, since Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same attitude (for whoever suffers in the flesh has broken with sin), so as not to spend what remains of one’s life in the flesh on human desires, but on the will of God. For the time that has passed is sufficient for doing what the Gentiles like to do: living in debauchery, evil desires, drunkenness, orgies, carousing, and wanton idolatry. They are surprised that you do not plunge into the same swamp of profligacy, and they vilify you;” This implies that flesh suffering is redemptive. Again another example that the flesh is the opposite of the holy. Only by destroying the flesh can we become holy. That’s what the Scripture implies.

1 Peter 5:8-9 says, “Be sober and vigilant. Your opponent the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion looking for [someone] to devour. Resist him, steadfast in faith, knowing that your fellow believers throughout the world undergo the same sufferings.”

A couple of other passages I can refer you to are James 4:1-7 and 1 John 2:12-17.

These passages warn us against the temptations of the world. That is entirely appropriate. We are tempted by material possessions, power, and a desire to be popular.

Similarly, Scripture warns us against the temptation of the flesh. That doesn’t necessarily mean sexual temptation but any kind of physical temptation such as food, alcohol, drugs, and, of course, sex.

Scripture warns of temptation by the devil. This one gets a little more complicated because it depends on what we mean by the devil. We will get into this more later in this section, but for now, think of the devil representing any evil influence.

Although it is appropriate to think of the temptations presented by the world, the flesh, and the devil, we often take it too far. We adopt a puritanical view that everything in the world is evil, everything related to our bodies is evil, and we see the devil behind everything.

This all stems from thinking of the body and the soul as being completely separate entities, with the soul being inherently good and our bodies being inherently evil. Yet, this ignores the fact that the world and our bodies are created by God.

Nature, the world around us, and the bounty of the world’s resources are all good things that God has given us as gifts and given us dominion over the world to make use of it for godly purposes.

Similarly, our bodies are created in the image and likeness of God and are part of the universe He created. Scientists tell us that all of the atoms here on Earth were forged in the explosion of a supernova billions of years ago before our solar system formed. We are literally made of stardust. We are intimately connected to the universe and are part of creation. There is nothing inherently evil about our bodies. There is nothing inherently evil about our sexuality.

So, how do we view the world? The Hebrews look at the world holistically. They understand that body and soul are inextricably connected. On the other hand, the Greeks are more analytical and tend to dissect human nature into its component parts. For better or worse, much of our philosophy is handed down from the Greeks. That Greek analytical nature led to the period of enlightenment, scientific discovery, and our advanced civilization. However, when it comes to understanding human nature and our relationship to God, we need to take a more holistic approach and realize that the spirit and the flesh are two sides of the same coin.

We are creatures created by God. God doesn’t make junk.

Just as it is inappropriate to split our bodies into a good soul and evil flesh, neither should we divide the world into heavenly and material domains, which are good and evil, respectively.

Temptation is real. Evil is real. We need to be on guard against those things. But we cannot let our fear of temptation lead us to believe that the material world is inherently bad.

So, what do we do?

To be fully human is to be fully integrated: body and soul are one. Be vigilant against temptation, but don’t presume that the material world, including our body, is inherently evil.

Moving along…

The next part of Father Crawford’s outline in his opening lesson plan briefly introduces how we understand Scripture. We will get into Scripture much deeper and later lessons, but consider this a sneak preview.

Most Christians believe in three attributes of Scripture. Let’s look at these three attributes individually.

First, they believe that it is the inspired word of God. The problem is that it largely depends on what you mean by “inspired.” Fundamentalists believe God somehow communicated to the Sacred Authors exactly what words should be written in a sort of divine dictation where the authors were merely scribes who did the writing. The Catholic Church, as well as many mainstream moderate Protestant denominations, believe that human authors put into writing the oral traditions developed by their community as they experienced God in their everyday lives and their historical events. It was God’s will that these stories be told, but the writing was done entirely under the free will of the authors. So, in some respects, God is the author of Scripture, but there is human authorship as well.

Second, most Christians believe that there are no errors in the Bible. This is easily demonstrably false. There are historical, geographic, and cultural errors throughout nearly all Scripture. Scripture routinely contradicts itself. As you will soon see, you can’t even make it through the first two chapters of Genesis without encountering significant contradictions.

Finally, most Christians believe the Bible is univocal – that is, it speaks with one unified voice. Which is just another way of saying that it doesn’t contradict itself. If God is the ultimate author, everything in the Bible comes from one inerrant source. This ignores the fact that countless authors produced the Bible over the course of centuries. Each sacred author had different backgrounds, cultures, biases, and intended audiences. There is nothing uniform about the Bible.

The field of explaining or defending one’s religious beliefs is called “apologetics.” Many Scripture scholars tend to look down on apologists because they’re trying to defend indefensible positions. Personally, I think there is a time and a place to defend one’s religious beliefs, and I don’t believe that “apologetics” is a bad word. I think the time to defend one’s faith is when others misrepresent it. I’ve often said that if everything that critics of Catholicism claim was true, I would not be Catholic. Too often, criticisms of any religious tradition are an exaggeration or a misrepresentation of the actual doctrine. I think that’s when you have to defend your faith: when you been misrepresented or lied about. I’m excluding from this people of faith who are hypocritical and do not practice what they preach. Hypocrisy should be confronted.

Let’s briefly examine the creation story in Genesis 1-2 to illustrate how and why Scripture contradicts itself.

There are two different creation stories in Genesis. One runs from Genesis 1:1 through 2:3. The other runs from 2:4 to the end of Genesis 2. These two stories came from separate oral traditions, which were later written down and then, at some later date, were edited together in an attempt to make a coherent, consistent narrative. But they originated from two completely different sources. I’m going to skip read through portions of these two different accounts of creation and I want you to think about what these stories tell us about the communities that originated these oral traditions.

“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth— and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters—Then God said: Let there be light, and there was light. God saw that the light was good. God then separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” Evening came, and morning followed—the first day.

Then God said: Let there be a dome in the middle of the waters, to separate one body of water from the other. God made the dome, and it separated the water below the dome from the water above the dome. And so it happened. God called the dome “sky.” Evening came, and morning followed—the second day.

Then God said: Let the water under the sky be gathered into a single basin, so that the dry land may appear. [Skipping] Then God said: Let the earth bring forth vegetation: every kind of plant that bears seed and every kind of fruit tree on earth that bears fruit with its seed in it. [Skipping] Evening came, and morning followed—the third day.

Then God said: Let there be lights in the dome of the sky, to separate day from night. Let them mark the seasons, the days and the years, and serve as lights in the dome of the sky, to illuminate the earth. [Skipping details about creating the sun, moon, and stars] Evening came, and morning followed—the fourth day.

[Skipping on the fifth day God makes fish and sea creatures and birds of the sky.] Evening came, and morning followed—the fifth day.

[On the sixth day God begins by creating land animals of all varieties. Continuing…]. Then God said: Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth. [The remainder talks about how human beings have dominion over the earth and its resources.] God looked at everything he had made, and found it very good. Evening came, and morning followed—the sixth day.

[Note that at the end of each day God says he looked at what he had done and declared it good. But after completing his creation with human beings as the pinnacle of that creation he declares it very good. Then it explains on the seventh day, he rested thus making that day holy.

Here is the second story of creation beginning with Genesis 2:4 and following…]

“This is the story of the heavens and the earth at their creation. When the LORD God made the earth and the heavens—there was no field shrub on earth and no grass of the field had sprouted, for the LORD God had sent no rain upon the earth and there was no man to till the ground, but a stream was welling up out of the earth and watering all the surface of the ground—then the LORD God formed the man out of the dust of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. The LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and placed there the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the LORD God made grow every tree that was delightful to look at and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. “

[Wait a minute… Up until this point, one could argue that Genesis 2 is simply filling in some of the details that we skipped over in the broader narrative of Genesis 1. But now we get a serious contradiction. Now we are making trees and plants AFTER we have already created a man. In the previous narrative, everything else was created first and then he created humans after everything else was done. You might argue, “Okay, he created some plants but this is only talking about the plants in the garden of Eden.” But you have to do some heavy explanation to get to that point. It next describes location of Eden relative to some known rivers. Let’s skip.]

“The LORD God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it. The LORD God gave the man this order: You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except the tree of knowledge of good and evil. From that tree you shall not eat; when you eat from it you shall die. The LORD God said: It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suited to him. So the LORD God formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds of the air, and he brought them to the man to see what he would call them; whatever the man called each living creature was then its name.“

Wait a minute… After God created man, he “formed out of the ground all of the wild animals and all the birds of the air.” In Genesis 1, he created animals and birds before humans. Note that this doesn’t just refer to the animals and birds in the garden of Eden. It says, “ALL of the wild animals and ALL of the birds of the air.” You can’t get around the fact that this directly contradicts the first creation story told in Genesis 1.

So, we only got to the second chapter of the Bible before we found something that was obviously and grossly contradicted. That only presents a problem if you insist that the Bible is inerrant and univocal. Most fundamentalists insist it’s telling just one perfect, consistent story when it obviously is not.

As mentioned previously, these two different accounts have their origins in different oral traditions that were written down independently and then later edited together in an attempt to make a consistent narrative. Scripture scholars say that Genesis 1 came from the community that they call the Jahwist or J source material. Genesis 2 came from the Priestly or P source material.

At this point in my lesson, I would assign the only homework of the entire course. I would ask the participants, “By reading through Genesis 1 and 2, what can we infer about the people who wrote these two obviously distinct narratives?” I will invite you to consider that question as well.

Skeptics and critics will use this contradiction as an opportunity to say that the Bible is a worthless bunch of made-up stuff. However, neither of these creation stories is intended to be a historical or scientific account. They are a form of mythology. A myth is a story that is told not as a historical fact but as a means to illustrate a deeper truth. So when you hear the word “myth,” don’t necessarily jump to the conclusion that we are talking about something completely false. There is a deeper meaning in these stories.

It’s not about how God created. It’s not about six days versus billions of years. If we get bogged down in the details of the mythology, we miss the deeper truths that the story is trying to present using the literary genre of myth.

When we read the Bible, the challenge is understanding the deeper truths and not getting sidetracked by the details that ancient people wrote with a limited understanding of the universe. They are trying to make sense of the world they live in. Do they understand the science? Of course not. But that isn’t the point they are trying to make. This is theology. This is about God. This is about our relationship with God and the universe. And there is truth to be found here.

What is the basic message of Genesis? The point is that there is a God. God created everything. Ultimately we are a part of that creation and arguably the pinnacle of God’s creation. And all of that is VERY good. The world and the flesh are good because God made them.

It’s not about the order in which things are created, how many days it took, or the process. If you try to read Scripture literally, you get bogged down in those things. That’s why I now understand that there was wisdom in teaching us from the catechism rather than directly from the Bible. Go back to those first questions from the Catechism. They are summarizing the essential parts of Genesis. We are creations of a loving God who created everything. We don’t have to worry about how it happened or in what order. We don’t get the conflicts with science.

The Catholic church believes that the Bible is inspired and true, but what we mean by that is that what it says about God is reliable and true. We conclude from reading Scripture that there is one all-powerful God, even though Scripture itself doesn’t totally claim to be monotheistic. Case in point, one of the 10 Commandments exhorts, “You shall not have other gods before me.” These days, we take these “other gods” as metaphorical, such as making a god out of material possessions, money, or power. But there’s every indication that when these words were written, they literally meant “other gods.” There were multiple gods out there, but ours is the one you should follow.

When we say we are monotheistic and the Bible says so, that’s not really accurate. We have deduced from reading the Bible that there is one true God. So when interpreting Scripture, we have to be careful to recognize what the Bible really says, specifically in which part of our beliefs are simply dogmatic beliefs that we have derived by interpreting Scripture.

I want to introduce you to a YouTube creator named Dan McClellan. He is a scholar of the Bible and religion who received his PhD from Oxford. He has over 2000 videos on YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook, and I STRONGLY encourage you to follow him. He also has a podcast titled “Data Over Dogma,” which is excellent. On April 26, 2025, he is releasing a book called “The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues.” I can’t wait to start reading it. I have my copy preordered. I will be linking lots of videos from Dan and basing some of my comments on things I’ve learned from him.

Dan has made it his life mission to point out that so many things we think are in Scripture are not really there. He makes severe distinctions between the data of what is actually in the text and the dogma, which are our beliefs derived from interpreting the text.

Dan says that Scripture has no inherent meaning. The meaning comes from what we bring to the text. The text instills inside us a response that depends on our experiences, values, and beliefs. As I have learned in my writing class, this is true of any written text. Each audience member brings something of themselves to the process. Ultimately, what the author intended easily becomes secondary to what the reader brings to the process.

Yet, when it comes to Scripture, we have placed vast importance upon the text. So, it is essential that we do our best to understand what the original author intended to communicate by that text. In our next lesson, we will talk about ways that Scripture scholars help us to understand the text in the context of its human authors and their intended audience.

We have one more brief topic coming from Father Larry Crawford’s opening lesson from our RCIA curriculum.

We’ve covered God and human beings, but we need to address one more part of creation: angels and demons.

Let’s discuss the Church’s official position on angels as explained in paragraphs 328 through 336 of the modern Catechism of the Catholic Church. Briefly, those paragraphs state, “The existence of angels — a truth of faith. The existence of the spiritual, non-corporeal beings that Sacred Scripture usually calls ‘angels’ is a truth of faith. The witness of Scripture is as clear as the unanimity of Tradition. Who are they? St. Augustine says: “‘Angel’ is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is ‘spirit’; if you seek the name of their office, it is ‘angel’: from what they are, ‘spirit’, from what they do, ‘angel.'” With their whole beings the angels are servants and messengers of God. Because they “always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven” they are the “mighty ones who do his word, hearkening to the voice of his word”. See the link for more details on the Catholic Catechism’s doctrine on the existence and nature of angels.

Although it is the official position of the Church that angels are real, biblical scholars and theologians recognize that nearly everywhere you hear of an angel delivering a message to someone in Scripture, you could just as easily say that God delivered the message, and it doesn’t change the meaning. As previously explained, in pre-Christian times, the idea that God would speak directly to us seemed impossible. It was easier to presume that there were spiritual creatures called Angels who would come to earth as messengers delivering the word of God.

Ultimately, it is also credible to simply look at angels and demons as metaphors for good and evil. It’s hard for us to wrap our brains around abstract concepts, yet imagining creatures embodying good and evil is easier.

The bottom line is that good and evil do exist. There is an ongoing battle between good and evil on many levels. That battle is waged throughout the world between countries, within societies, within cultures, within organizations, and ultimately even within ourselves.

We often refer to “appealing to our better angels” or “battling our own demons.” Does this mean that we really believe angels and demons live within us? No. We understand that these are metaphors for good and evil. So then, are not angels and demons in the broader sense metaphors for good and evil?

Despite the official position of the Catholic Church, which is that angels are real, both Father Paul Landwerlen and Father Larry Crawford taught that, for the most part, angels and demons are metaphors for good and evil. I found this particularly ironic given that they were pastors of a parish titled “St. Gabriel the Archangel.” So what are you saying? You don’t believe in angels, even though one of the big ones is your parish patron? Yeah, in some respects that was their position. Well, I won’t say they didn’t believe in angels. But they were open to the possibility that it was simply a metaphor. That is my position as well. I think of angels and demons as metaphors.

Then comes the bigger question… If we use mythology to understand our relationship to the universe and our creator, and if we understand angels and demons as metaphors for good and evil, is it possible that God is simply a metaphor for order out of chaos and for the ultimate good?

We will leave that as an exercise for the reader to answer on their own.

After the lecture, Father Larry gave the group the following questions to discuss at their tables, somewhat facilitated by the RCIA team members.

1. How would you describe what you perceive as your purpose in life?

2. How do you conceive of God? What, for you, is God like?

3. Can you understand why an all-male image of God might cause problems for some people?

4. What best makes God’s presence real in your life? What are you going to do this year to become more aware of God’s presence?

5. Does the use of myths in religion make sense?

6. Are angels a reality for you? Is the demonic, the devil?

7. A scientist at a meeting of Catholic university faculty said that in our technological age, we have lost our sense of awe, wonder, and mystery. How are you best aware of God’s wondrous presence in creation?

Some interesting things to think about, don’t you think?

In our next episode, we move on from the introductory lesson taught by my pastors into the first of four lessons that I taught for 30 years.

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I will see you next time as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.