>>Even without considering any of this above, the commentators on this text you refer to always refer to the literal English text we have in front of us. They take the text and come up with a conclusion that is absolutely contrary to the imminent English context of the text. And they don't question the accuracy of the text itself, and yet any child can spot their blatant error. If somebody says he does not believe it at all, that is one thing I can understand. But if someone says the text means one thing while the text says literally quite the opposite, I wonder where he has left his brains.
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>>Like this are many things related to faith: It is either true or it is untrue. But people like to settle somewhere in the middle so they can switch sides at the appropriate time if someone comes to call for it.
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>IME such dichotomies are very often artificial or sometimes willfully declared to make a distinction or set a border, masking an underlying interval scale. I try to find the "grey areas" where I go almost totally by belief due to no data and also try to consciously probe the area of "common wisdom" for perhaps underlying motives making such "wisdom" suspect. When data is null, refraining from calculation is best - and if you have to calculate, faith is employed, or to say it in a more agnostic manner, in random choice the chance for picking truth exists if it is in the set of choices ;-)
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>But to my world view having one totally sacrosanct book to be taken literally in every sentence calls for a very petulant almighty god - which I refuse to believe in. IF there is a singular, monotheistic god following the broad judaistic/christian/islamic blueprint, I sure hope he thinks of holy books more in line with Bahai tradition - there are some books with religous context and truth - like Quran *and* Bible -, written by prophets who have a better grip on such matters than most.

I can imagine there are several points of grey area in one's personal faith and practical life. Perhaps I should have been more clear in what I meant, that if someone states that the Bible in its entire is without error, and perfect, then that means one cannot say that parts of it are not really true. If someone were to say the Bible is partially true, then how do you define for yourself what is true and what not: would it not be better to discard the entire book because of its multiple errors? The Bible itself says about its own content that it is perfect and inspired by God. If that is true, (or you believe in that statement), then that would mean every single line in the book must be correct. If you believe that this statement is incorrect, then the Bible cannot be trusted because this statement alone invalidates itself and the writers of the Bible would be entirely deceptive and morally questionable. If everything has been lost in translation, does this not mean that God's work was in vain anyway, and if he knows the future why did he start with it in the beginning?

For instance it is often said about the creation story that the "days" are not literally days but thousands or millions of years. However the story explicitly states that on the third day God created the vegetation, while on the fourth day (so millions of years later?) God created the sun and the moon. If that was indeed a few thousand years later, how did the vegetation survive for so long. Somebody is trying to reconcile the biblical creation story with the slow evolution theory and tries to explain the age of the universe and at the same time preserve the story of the Bible. I would prefer not even to try that and to say believe either one of them, but don't try to make them both true, because they both strongly contradict each other. Same thing in the story of the camel going through the eye of the needle: the text says clearly that it is "impossible" and the answer of Jesus to that was that with God "all things" are possible, even though they appear to be impossible with man. That was the basic moral of the story, and if someone tries to make it possible for the camel to go through the eye of the needle, the rest of the story does not make any sense at all, because then why would it be such an impossible thing if it were possible and why would a miracle of God be necessary if it is not needed in the first place. That is the part where I believe it's a binary choice, and you can't have it both ways unless you sacrifice reason.