You asked so kindly, and I respect your thinking, so I’ll respond.
You don’t assert literal interpretation - others did.
You don’t rely (absolutely, perhaps somewhat) on direct revelation - but others did.
You espouse an Historical-Grammatical method, which is basically what I was advocating. It is essentially the method used by the Catholic Church, which maintains lots of scholars with a long formal vetting process, augmented with lots of prayers for guidance. It is imperfect, as any human system will be, although with with checks and balances built in.
When you rely on such an approach (Historical-Grammatical), different scholars may still reach different conclusions (interpretations). New facts may be discovered, which would alter earlier conclusions. For example, you mentioned Heliocentrism in a earlier post, where thinking changed over time. Some points may simply not be decisively resolvable based on the limited information known.
The bottom line, is that such an approach (Historical-Grammatical) does not provide the absolute inerrancy claimed by the other approaches.
Please note that this is (inherent) imperfection in human understanding, not to accuse imperfection on the part of God.
Without an absolute certainty of divine understanding, I believe it wise to be circumspect about passing judgement on others. That is what I found lacking on this thread, and why I spoke up. The absolute certainty that many seem to claim is expressed as intolerance and bigotry, disrespect and derogation of others - a quickness to declare heresy, akin to takfiri muslim fundamentalists.
So whether folks rely on literal reading, or a priori agreement on a fundamental set of dogmas that they assert to be absolute certain truths (as you propose), or acceptance of absolute rules for interpretation (as do takfiri muslims); by emphasizing the aspect of absolute certainty of understanding, they will naturally engender a higher degree of such intolerant hubris in their followers. That is an inherent downside of Fundamentalism. Not necessarily a fatal flaw, just something to guard against.
Folks have argued that we should discount certain things in the Old Testament, because God can change the terms at different times and different people - yet they deem it out of the realm of possibility that God might provide Mary or a brown scapula to benefit certain people of a certain time.
Devotional and mystical practices are more emotional and experiential, rather than analytical or logical. Yet they can powerfully move some people and benefit them greatly. Throughout history, and around the world, people have engaged in such practices. Some percentage of any population will have a naturally greater attraction to, or talent for such religious experience.
It seems to me that, like muslim fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists tend to take particular exception to much of devotional practice as superstition or magical thinking, while being ambivalent about mystical practice.
Every human, and probably every mammal, has deep feelings and instincts concerning their mother and being mothered. Maternal love has special ability to calm fears and soothe pain. So many people in this world are subjected to horrible pain and terrifying prospects - we are all going to face death and the deaths of our loved ones at some point, and God only knows what other horrors we may experience in this world - there are plenty.
In my experience, some people are naturally attracted to Mary, but many more are helped with Marian practices when crushed with pain (e.g. mourning) or facing great fear (e.g. combat deployments, terminal illness).
Probably the biggest Catholic Marian practice is praying the rosary, which is akin to the “worry” beads which other religions use to count repetitions of prayers or mantras. In Hindu, Buddhist and muslim traditions, such repetition practice is considered particularly suitable for the the same kinds of challenges (pain and fear), as well as for people who are not intellectual by nature or lack high intellectual capability. I don’t know Jewish practices well enough to compare them.
But there is an emotional reaction to dogmatic/intellectual/legalistic attacks on Marian practices, that is not so much due to intellectual disagreement. Marian practices are often associated with very sympathetic situations, such as with people who are dying and in pain.
The Hail Mary (Ave Maria) is traditionally offered at funerals - it includes the request to “pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death” So when people attack these practices, the association is with sensitive memories, like saying goodbye to Grandma, where these practices are the main balm that is shared to soothe the pain. It comes off as really harsh, cold hearted - even cruel.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I do think I see where the difficulty lies, and I do not see it in the same place you do. I will try to explain, but please know it's OK with me if we do not see eye to eye. If we can disagree amicably, I will count that an accomplishment unto itself.
Now, on with the discussion.
1) On the question of literalism:
I understand you are seeing an apparent inconsistency, where some on the evangelical side are claiming literalism, versus my claim of Historical-Grammatical method. I think this is just the natural variance in eyewitness testimony. As an attorney, I expect some testimony to appear different at the outset but be reconcilable when examined closely. I have been in the trenches with almost all the evangelicals posting here, and I know for a fact they too are using the Historical-Grammatical method, only some with more rigor than others. FR is after all little more than a digital block party. People show up as they are, and if the atmosphere is right, everyone can learn. If it devolves into a food fight, that usually doesn't help anyone much and it wastes all that good food. So I would urge you to withhold judgment on the nature of the purported hyper-literalism of the evangelicals here until you have a more fully developed experience of our range of discussion.
As one prime example, consider our frequent debates on the Eucharist. The Catholic contingent is prone to accuse us of inconsistency on this issue because we hold the Lord's Supper to be a metaphor of our spiritual feeding on (believing in) Jesus and what He literally and spiritually did for us on the cross. This is confusing to some of our Catholic friends because like you they expect us to be pathologically literal in every interpretation. They consistently misunderstand us on this point and the conversation typically degrades quickly from the point of misunderstanding our hermeneutic. The responses are frustrating. Often, a recitation of "This is my body" is tossed back at us without commentary, as though we should accept it as literal, when in fact anyone using the Historical-Grammatical method can see that this statement, in context, reads very well as a direct metaphor. Yet we are the ones who are supposed to be the rigid literalists. It is ironic. We get used to the straw man, as we've seen him and burned him to a cinder probably hundreds of times, but like some bad zombie movie they keep reviving him. So we get our matches ready for the next encounter.
As you can see, that kind of environment is not conducive to a conversation that actually goes somewhere. People start taking the matter personally, believing (incorrectly) that no reasonable person could possibly be so stubborn in the face of clear facts, and so guilt is assigned, and the spiral spins down to an even deeper and uglier turn.
But all of this is not the fault of true truth. Which leads to the next topic:
2) Infallibility versus Unknowability
One cannot be a classic theist without believing God is capable of delivering His message to the people He wants to receive it. Yet people are, as you say, fallible. But it is itself a fallacy to suppose that human fallibility renders God unable to communicate truth. If we believe that God exists eternally as the supreme, sentient, personal being, Creator of all, we are duty-bound to believe He is as powerful in His ability to communicate truth as He is in His power to create truth. Therefore, we have to believe that even our fallibility would not prevent Him from telling us His truth, nor prevent us from receiving that truth.
However, the downside is that not everyone receives truth in the same manner. Sometimes this is just innocent natural variance, such as two witnesses seeing the same crash and reporting it each from their own point of view. It is the same objective truth, but the reporters when taken together give a fuller view of the matter. But other variation is the result of different attitudes toward the truth. Sometimes it is something we don't want to hear, or something we have predetermined we will not allow to affect our life choices.
And again, the fault is not the trueness of the truth. The fault is in us. Which is why we can have an infallible record of God's message to us, and yet come up with so many different responses to it. The difference is, we can believe that message is infallible, and study that message, and come to believe that message, and be truly correct in how we have understood it, and still be lost, because we have not embraced it as the basis for our life. As James says, even the devils believe in one God, and fat lot of good it does them! That's a paraphrase. :)
This is where faith comes in, because it is faith that takes us past truth as mere facts, to a place where truth becomes the vehicle by which we find our relationship with God. Jesus described truth as the prerequisite to spiritual freedom. We cannot become free of the sins that condemn us until we come to Him. He is the truth. To deny Him is to deny truth, to accept slavery, to embrace eternal loss.
As evangelicals, we are not prepared to do that. Our quest for truth is not negotiable, because it is how we come to know and love Him and each other. Which leads to our next topic:
3) On Tolerance
I agree with you in principle that we should approach differences of opinion with humility. But not a false humility. Moses is said to have been the most humble of men, yet he led Israel under God's direction. He was not afraid of truth, nor of the dissension that might follow if some did not see it. He had received an infallible message from God, and in his humility he acted on it. This is humility because he did not presume to judge God, but elected to trust God no matter how foolish it might make him look to his peers. In other words, his ego did not get between him and the truth. That is true humility, and a great place to be if one can get there. It is the secret to fearlessness.
But none of us claims to be Moses. But we do have an infallible revelation from God in God's word. Humility requires first of all that we not allow our desire to be liked to control our view of the truth. Jesus did not say that a relationship with Him would make everyone like us, or at least think we are nice, tolerant folk. Just the opposite:
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
(Matthew 10:34-37)
See, the problem is, we've been dropped into the middle of a war zone. We have a real enemy, Satan, whose pattern of thought is widely accepted in the world, and so it puts the world against us, just for being friends of Jesus.
If you believe Christian truth, that is. If one has rejected the supernatural altogether, rejected it as part of the "pathological literalism of fundamentalism," then none of this is going to seem reasonable at all. I get that. But this is the view from inside the Christian mind, and I think it is well-grounded in reality.
Which is why we can appear intolerant. What we are not tolerating well is that which is opposed to reality. Let me show you this by an analogy. We love our children. When they are young, we let them pretend to be able to do amazing things. But we do not let them act out their pretending in dangerous ways. When she was young my sister hurt herself jumping off the neighbor's barn. Not life-threatening injuries, thank God. But she had imagined a reality that wasn't true, and tried to act on it, and got hurt. Likewise, we wouldn't let a child run out into the road and "pretend" some oncoming vehicle was just a big fluffy pillow that would do no harm. We would be "intolerant" of that because we love. If we were "tolerant" of such dangerous behavior, we could rightly say such tolerance was in truth a kind of hatred, a calloused disregard for the well-being of another, and a massive fail for one claiming to be a follower of Jesus.
Because Jesus was intolerant of harmful falsehoods also. He had a better way of getting at the truth than we do, but he was not reluctant to go there in the name of love. When he confronted the rich young ruler, who thought his conventional goodness was enough, conformity to the rules, Jesus broke right through that delusion and challenged him where it hurt, his love of possessions, his violation of the law, thou shall not covet, which is a lack of love for one's neighbor. The man went away disappointed because Jesus had not tolerated the man's self-deception. But the man did end up with something much better. He had the truth, and he had the love of Jesus.
Which gets us to our next and final topic:
4) On the Origin and Nature of Marian Belief
I thought your analysis here was very good, though I still end up seeing it differently than you do. The profound link we have with our mother-figures no doubt does feed the emotional commitments of any form of religion where the female achieves superhuman status. This is probably a major psychological element in all of the goddess religions, from Ashteroth, Queen of Heaven, to Dianna of the Ephesians, to Gaea of the modern new age religions. Each of these groups have shown great passion in defending the mother-figure, and it is easy to see how this could be at play in the elevation of Mary to a status well beyond what God describes for her in His word to us. The defensiveness is palpable. We evangelicals are routinely renounced for our alleged disrespect to Mary, simply because we seek to align our views of her with how she is presented in Scripture. At one point, it was even indirectly implied to me (by a poster who shall go unnamed) that I was anti-semitic for rejecting the Catholic version of Mary. Exactly how that makes me anti-semitic is unclear to me even to this day. But there you have it. Defensiveness on steroids.
But the question is, what to do? Your argument, as best I can understand it, seems to be that if it hurts to talk about it, then leave it alone. The underlying premise of that is that absence of conflict is the greater good. I contend it is more harmful to leave some things alone, in the same way it was harmful for my sister to falsely imagine she could jump off that barn, with no one to challenge her error of belief. Falsehood can do more to hurt you than an honest challenge to believe the truth. I wish someone had told her not to jump off that barn, and if I had been there, I like to think it would have been me.
So if you have Jesus telling people to put all their eggs in His basket, that their eternal life depends on it, and some johnny-come-lately comes along and says, no, give some or maybe all those eggs to Mary, then yes, that looks like exactly the sort of situation that needs a truth intervention, based on well-established truths of Scripture. No, we don't presume ourselves to be infallible. But when a parent sees a child doing something which is obviously dangerous, they don't wait around for an epistemologically perfect environment in which to act. They just put their ego aside and go out there to protect the child. It's just in a parent's nature to do that. It comes from love.
Again, I know the impulse is to say, but how can you know they are in danger? What gives you the right to decide you can help them? But that begs the question. Look at your own attempt at intervention. Was it not motivated by your belief that you had some truth that could help us all? And such a motivation is a good thing. I am not putting it down at all. But if you can decide something is true enough for you to act on, why then is it wrong for someone else to act on the truth they have come to know and confidently believe, just like you?
In any event, I have to get going. If we end up agreeing to disagree, that's fine, no hard feelings. I wish you all the best. :)
Peace,
SR