There .... a slight correction to your post just to make it more accurate.
There is a difference between reading something the way it is written and recognizing the metaphor that the WRITER PUT THERE and reading something and INSERTING one's own metaphor in there.
Any messy or embarrassingly stupid or vile or heinous bits in their scriptures become open to interpretation metaphors to god knows what, and allegories to no one knows what, except of course the one who is claiming allegories and metaphors since he, as a theist who spoke to god in one of his sessions with god obviously knows how to interpret those metaphors and allegories and mistranslated bits that ought to be taken in the paleo-sociological and paleo-geographical and paleo-anthropological and paleo-theological context which he of course knows how to do better than any mere atheist could ever do.
If you are sure the Bible is a load of hogwash then all this claptrap about how to interpret it is as immaterial or material as interpreting the 1001 Arabian nights... no?
But the bible is believed by over 5 billion people to be the word of god.
That is precisely why the Bible has caused DISCORD and HAVOC for millennia... because every moron can interpret it his way and justify execrating and extirpating other morons who are interpreting it differently but equally as arbitrarily.
Which goes to prove that either the book has been written by the devil or that it is just another book no different than the Iliad say, but that the people who believe it is the word of god are just stupid.
If god had anything to do with the bible - whether authoring it directly or inspiring it to the writers who just jotted down what he was inspiring them with or even general inspirational outlines after which he left the writers to fill in the blanks - s/he/it should have at the very least ensured its correctness and comprehensibility if not also its continued validity along the ages.
If there is any divine spark in the Bible then either this divinity is the most incompetent fool or the most heinous devil.
And all this talk about metaphor and mistranslation and interpolation or missing bits or scribal slips should not pass muster with anyone who is not trying to alleviate a most severe cognitive dissonance.
If an omnipotent omniscient omnibenevolent being is involved in giving humanity a book that is supposed to convey his wishes and commandments and moral edicts as the path to ETERNAL SALVATION then the book should be utterly and totally comprehensible to anyone who reads it even if the pages were in fact BLANK PAGES let alone in the right language or correctly transcribed.
Even if the pages were EMPTY this divine book should convey the correct message to its onlookers.
And the message conveyed should be RELEVANT to the reader's culture and epoch as well as current knowledge of reality.
And any metaphors or allegories should be interpretable in the correct way regardless of what they say or how they are read or who is reading them.
Even if some scribe slipped or mistranslated or deliberately forged it, the MIRACULOUS words should be self-correcting.... in fact there should not be a need for words in the first place.... the DIVINE book should miraculously show the words in the correct language and so forth to its reader.
Of course that is assuming that the Divinity is in fact omnipotent and omniscient but above all omnibenevolent.
If a divinity wanted to cause strife and mayhem and schisms and atrocities between humans throughout the ages I doubt he could have done any better than the Bible/Quran.
Now have a look at
this post.
