I'm not an agnostic and I don't believe that 'literal truth' applies to every bit of the entire Gospel narrative; either. Were the Pharisees REALLY snakes/vipers as Jesus said?
I think you misunderstood me. I didn’t identify myself as AN ‘agnostic’; I said that I was ‘agnostic’ as to the literal truth of every bit of the Gospel narrative; so we seem to agree in some ways.
And I was thinking of different ‘literal bits’ than ‘snakes and vipers’.
(We suggest that certain political figures are ‘snakes and vipers’ every day, here. We don’t mean it literally.)
My original question was: What in the Bible do you take Literally? And what do you NOT take literally; and how do you determine the difference? Do you take it all on the authority of your Church leaders or founders (which I doubt) or is there some subjective intellectual discrimination going on there?
Do you believe that there actually existed an ‘Adam and Eve’, who literally ‘ate of the tree’?
Do you believe that Noah actually put two of every animal in an ark - including all the insects, etc., and all of the food necessary for those animals to survive the duration?
I’m curiously interested in what the members of various traditional denominations believe; because I don’t have that background.
I was raised until about the age of 11 or 12 in the Presbyterian church - late 1950s, early 1960s.
At about the age of 12, I was introduced to Christian Science and became fascinated with that interpretation.
Ultimately, CS didn’t ‘take’; but I became convinced by other ways of thinking that also came down to us through the American Transcendentalists: Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott; and ultimately writers like Thomas Troward, G. W. Plummer, Quimby - the list goes on and on.
These ‘old guys’ started something that I believe will be the 21st century wave of Christianity. And there have been remarkable scientists who seem to believe similar things: Jean-Emile Charon; Mario Beauregard; that list could go on as well.
A lot of people will think this is ‘funny’; but my old Granny always declared Luke 9:26, when she spoke of her belief; and even though she may have had a simple understanding of it, the saying stuck with me.
Regardless if my honest conclusions have come down to ‘funny’ in the eyes of others, I can’t deny them and remain honest with God and with myself.