[troutman]

Originally Posted by flip

for the record i personally feel that many stories in the bible are great to use for their message or to be analyzed metaphorically. (and many stories were intentionally written to be metaphorically like the story of abraham sacrificing his son was actually a protest to cultures that did sacrifice...its true!)

I agree, but why just limit ourselves to one mythology? I think this is the kind of spirituality that Joseph Campbell was proposing. I always return to this quote. Take what is good and useful from religion. Don't get distracted about the literal truth.

Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other people's myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts -- but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message. Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. Myth tells you what the experience is.
-- Joseph Campbell

Too many of our best scholars, themselves indoctrinated from infancy in a religion of one kind or another based upon the Bible, are so locked into the idea of their own god as a supernatural fact -- something final, not symbolic of transcendence, but a personage with a character and will of his own - that they are unable to grasp the idea of a worship that is not of the symbol but of its reference, which is of a mystery of much greater age and of more immediate inward reality than the name-and-form of any historical ethinic idea of a deity, whatsoever ... and is of a sophistication that makes the sentimentalism of our popular Bible-story theology seem undeveloped.
-- Joseph Campbell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell

Campbell writes:"...Mythology is often thought of as other people's religions, and religion can be defined as mis-interpreted mythology." In other words, Campbell did not read religious symbols literally as historical facts, but instead he saw them as symbols or as metaphors for greater philosophical ideas.