[VRWC_minion]

Its not meant to be an argument. I maintain that most scripture is meant to be simultaneously understood on several levels, literal and metaphorical being two of them. To accomplish this they are not entirely satisfactorily read on either level. Knowing that atheists love to pick apart scripture like apes picking knats, I hedged the literal.

[Southflanknorthpawsis]

You might enjoy this.

Scroll down to the Eleven Principles of the Literal Method of Interpreting Scripture.

[Yeti]

Its not meant to be an argument. I maintain that most scripture is meant to be simultaneously understood on several levels, literal and metaphorical being two of them. To accomplish this they are not entirely satisfactorily read on either level.

Strange that recently my own thoughts have been in a similar vein recently.

Where many truths coincide by semblence and symmetry, metaphor, detail, emotion, understanding ... there -- where meaning and fact are overlayed and intertwined in many intricate ways -- such bits of reality may be blurry, but, like tiny fragments of a large hologram, the truth is there.

A nugget of truth like that is more true than can be expressed in boolean or statistical terms.