Leave Your Biased Opinion at the Door

I don't know about most of you, but I feel that the hardest thing about correlating a story to the bible is the fact that I'm openly biased about what I believe to be the "truth". Mrs. Whitley is trying to get us to separate the misconceptions from the fact in the Creation story. So one day, I'm in class taking notes and we're talking about how the apple isn't really an apple and that it's probably a pomergranete and I'm like cool cool interesting. And then she goes on to say how Eve is often wrongly portrayed as a seductress and I'm like yeah yeahh that's true. BUT THENNNNNN she says no where in the bible does it say that the serpant is the devil and Lorena and I are like whattttttttt????????? Surely it says the serpant is the devil. I mean all my life I've been taught serpent+deception=devil. That's simple to understand right? It makes perfectly good sense right and NOBODY likes snakes so it makes even more perfectly good sense ;).But then I realized that in the western world snakes are usually seen as a negative thing but what about in other cultures?? Then she pointed out how the serpant or a dragon is a good sign in some Asian cultures. Which brings me back to my title "Leave Your Biased

Opinion at the Door". When we read literature we often bring to it our ideals, beliefs, and the social norms of the time. But contrary to what we believe not all works of literature were written for us to teach only our time period and era. Maybe the writer or reader at the time shared beliefs that we now can't relate to. So that's why it's so important to understand the history surrounding a piece of writing because in doing so we can better understand the writing itself. Use history to escape the societal beliefs of this day and age and explore new ones openly but more importantly leave your biased opinion at the door.