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The Book of Genesis is full of profound meaning, but many of these fundamentalist-literalists can't find the woods for the trees. What is important about the Garden story is not that a snake talked, or that a literal Adam and Eve lived in a physical garden in India, or Ethiopia, or wherever some people think it was. It tells us how Satan and temptation usually work: Not through threats and brute force, but with soothing language which plays on our hopes, fears and weaknesses. (Sounds like 0bama, doesn't it?)

You hit the nail on the head, Hellbender. While I do believe in a literal Adam and Eve, I also believe, as you do, that there is a deeper meaning behind the story. C.S. Lewis called this the mythic element. You understand literature and you know that calling something a myth does not imply that it did not happen. It simply means that there is more meaning to the story than just the facts. Many of the fundamentalists insist on a wooden, hyper-literal interpretation of the Bible that ignores the deeper meaning behind a mere recitation of facts.
Jesus spoke in parables and, while the parables contains deep truth, some of them may not have literally happened. That doesn't make the parables any less true.
For what it's worth, I do not doubt that Jesus and other Biblical performed real miracles. However, most of the miracle stories involve more than just a recounting of history. The story of the centurion and the woman who touched Jesus' cloak come to mind.
I'm certainly glad that you're on this thread.

Your mind and mine seem to be in perfect synch! I hesitated to refer to things like the Garden of Eden as mythical, because many people react emotionally, thinking that myths are false by definition, and can't express truth. Also, Biblical stories are obviously far more profound than the silly folklore of American Indians and other primitive peoples, or the Greco-Roman gods, for that matter. I used to know an English major who pointed out that Genesis was far greater as literature than the Iliad or the Odyssey. The classical gods, or the pagan Germanic ones, were just big, evil, selfish people, basically. They never made moral commandments to people or to themselves.

Like you, I believe that Jesus and the disciples did perform actual miracles. I think the Bible shows that God does not perform or authorize miracles on a routine basis (otherwise, they wouldn't be miraculous), nor does He bail out every believer in trouble. Miracles are mainly used to advance the Gospel and the church at critical moments, when it might otherwise have been extinguished.

I think whenever one reads the Bible, esp. the Old Testament, one should always think: What is the moral of this story? What is the real point?