Most people who are interested in spirituality don't believe one word of that stuff, John. After all, it does derive from an extremely primitive tribal era in a very ancient time...and it was written by those people. They had different ideas back then about a lot of things. To transport it all, literally, into the modern era is to engage in a very peculiar form of mental gymnastics indeed.

It amazes me that anyone can do it. But....when they were young they were told that the Bible is the one and only and perfect "Word of God". That was someone's arbitrary opinion, based on the fact that someone else told THEM the same thing at an earlier time...

Thus are the sins of the fathers passed on to the sons, yea, even unto the 777th generation! ;-)

How anyone can reconcile the entire Old Testament with the New...or either one of them (literally) with the modern era, is beyond me.

At the same time, there is much spiritual truth in both of them...if you can sift it out from the bizarre ancient cultural stuff it is mixed up with. That takes a bit of thinking...something that people in fundamentalist churches are not much encouraged to do, I suppose.