This tissue of incompetent blasphemy is right up your alley.
Thanks for the ping.
As much as I despise the "scholars" who enjoy deconstructing everything in the TaNa"KH (doubtless while insisting that Holocaust-denial should be a punishable crime), I don't find them anywhere near as utterly loathsome as the smirking jackasses on the sidelines who insist that arguments over historicity "miss the point" because the Bible is merely a collection of Aesop's fables (the predominant position of your co-religionists in the ancient liturgical churches, as you know).
I think that the name of Mircea Eliade can be added to that of G.W.F. Hegel as "ruling the world from the grave." Just as Hegel's pantheistic vision of a universe creating G-d (rather than vice versa) paved the way for all "progressive" non-Theistic moral/ethical/ideological systems, so Eliade's redefination of religion has entered the collective subconscious and become the dominant religious paradigm. According to Eliade, religion began as groundless ritual (called for by something deep in the human psyche). As time passed and people began to ask questions myths and scriptures were created to explain and rationalize the rituals. But the important thing is the rituals, not the myths or scriptures (according to Eliade). This means that now that we have "matured" (in the Comtean/Hegelian sense) we can admit that our myths are so much nonsense because we realize that it's the ritual that matters.
Sure enough, this "the Bible is mythology" is strongest in the highly liturgical, ritualized religions while the churches most committed to the literal truth of Scripture are the ones lacking ritual of any kind. The clergy of ritual religions smirk at the "nineteenth century positivism" of Protestant Fundamentalists who don't realize how "modern" and "unhistorical" their Biblicism is. It's an open secret that many priests in the liturgical churches are agnostics making a good living by acting out a pantomime. Meanwhile Fundamentalist Protestants are despised and detested for mistaking the text of the "pantomime" as history.
Did you see President Ford's lavish, Episcopalian funeral (at which the eulogist alluded to the upcoming schism over sexual issues)? It's no wonder that these ancient churches, whose pomp and ceremony would seem to indicate ultraconservatism, are the very ones who can't make up their minds what to do with homosexuality. After all, sure, the text condemns it, but the text is secondary to the ritual (and its moral anachronisms are as "charming" and meaningless as its linguistic ones). Who are we to deny participation in the ritual to our brothers and sisters based on a few archaic lines in the ritual's text?
Did you read the recent post in which some writer engaged in a tirade against Mormons because their religion isn't old enough to have turned its "myth into meataphor?" "Freedom of religion" has come to mean freedom of practice, but actual belief is more and more circumscribed. Woe betide those of us unfortunate enough to have been born into a culture whose religion was all text and no ritual. We are apparently entitled to none of the respect given to the agnostics who hang on to the meaningless clutter of their "faith traditions."
I hate liberals!