Thank you, I read all of those. What I find is that you are able to focus on some of the non-propositional uses of religious language—like cheering for one’s affinity group—yet your attitude toward such utterances is still to treat them as false propositions. I would suggest that someone who emphasizes the absurdity of her own language (that is, absurdity from a factual, propositional perspective) is trying to shift attention away from the propositional and toward an aesthetic sensibility.
If we expect science and get art, we will be disappointed; but if we look at linguistic behavior in its variety, we learn to expect more emotional expression and social interchange, less representation of facts.
I also find that you concentrate on fundamentalist or other strange examples, never the work of thinkers like Buber, Merton, Campbell, Watts, etc. I would especially recommend to you Wittgenstein’s views on religion, as found in his essay on Frazer’s Golden Bough.
There is a wide range of ways of interpreting mythic material, both between religious communities and between members of a single community.
In two of the three branches of American Judaism, as well as many varieties of Christianity and amalgams such as Unitarianism, not to mention Buddhism, etc., respect for science is encouraged—and thus the stories must be held to be stories, even if they are very special stories for the community. Such communities are radically different from those in which the Bible is treated as a source of scientific knowledge.
Nevertheless, there are communities in which the children literally believe in Santa Claus, while the adults know it’s a myth. And there are countless other ways of mixing up more and less literal interpretations. The same parent who disbelieves Santa Claus may take the story of Jesus’ resurrection literally. And a group of people can recite language together, which some of them treat metaphorically and others literally.
So the point isn’t what is “typical”, nor how a majority might have approached the text at a given point in history, it’s that there are examples of religious thinking that are, for those who understand them, orthogonal to questions of fact. Historically this has often been reflected in the difference between exoteric and esoteric subtraditions. Those who know the “inner meaning” of the texts no longer treat them literally. Such esoteric subtraditions are far from a modern phenomenon, as Eliezer’s argument would imply.