Shimrod - Yes, it is a problem that some people do that, as you say. I just do my best to avoid dealing with those people.

As in the case of the Bible, for example. I regard almost everything in the Bible as poetic metaphor...not history (although some of it certainly connects to history of the time it was written in...but usually in a highly symbolic fashion). It was normal in the Mystery Schools of that time for the spiritual scribes and writers to tell symbolic tales that demonstrated some sort of moral, ethical, or spiritual principle (sometimes on a number of different levels). This probably escaped the common people who, like many people now, tended to take things very literally. But the common people weren't concerned with analyzing spiritual writings. Like most people now, they were concerned with putting food on the table, and other prosaic and practical matters, so a literal view of religion came naturally to them, I would suspect.

Spiritual adepts in the Mystery Schools, on the other hand, were accustomed to looking beneath the surface of things...the books were written for them...and they were about the only people around (along with scribes and the well educated elite) who could read those books at that time.

The Mystery Schools seem to have originated in Egypt...long before the rise of either the Judaic faith or Christianity. They were still around during and after Jesus' lifetime.

Much of what is in the Christian and Jewish faiths can be found previously in Egyptian religious tales...so these were archetypal tales that were crafted to make certain points about life, death, spirituality, ethics, morals, and the purposes of life.

I find that very interesting. My interest in it does not require me to belong to any specific religion. It extends through all religions and cultures.

I'm not particularly interested in reactive modern movements such as atheism whose basic premise is a hostile reaction against the most fundamentalist and primitive forms of religious thought and practice...the result being that the atheist throws out the baby (rich metaphor and symbolic mysticism and spiritual philosophy from many great cultures) along with the bathwater (present rigidly fundamentalist religious beliefs and rigid outward practices).

I'm not interested in the bathwater. I avoid it. I'm interested in the "baby"...that is, the essential philosophy of life that lies at the heart of ALL great religious and spiritual traditions.

The above may include ideas about a deity or "God". It doesn't have to. Buddhism and Taoism do not propose a deity or God. They propose an existing order of things...but not a deity at the helm of it all.