Two people take religion literally:
1. Crazy religious nut jobs
2. A section of Neo Atheists
Everyone else is busy living their life either ignoring religion or selectively using religion. My personal take is religious texts are context driven.
But even if we adjust for the context we can find many problematic things in religion. But the key is honesty. One has to be honest in reading religion. In fact if one has an open mind they can actually enjoy religious texts as you take a lot & leave/reject a lot.
I personally read religious texts as just books written by ancient people. It is like an anthropological journey into the mind of ancient people. How they thought, how they expressed their emotions. The technologies they had or they wished they'd have. Very interesting stuff.
In fact even when it comes to religious language and its meaning there is so much debate for years. Like the logical positivists would say religious language is all non sense. But then Wittgenstein in his later work through language game theory would defend religious language.
The funny part is the logical positivists used the early work of Wittgenstein to declare religious texts to be meaningless non sense. Textual analysis of religion has a lot of booga booga. But in between the booga booga is a lot of fascinating stuff which can teach us a lot.
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