Thoughts on Buddhism

[Angrboda]

Just a minor point, but it's not clear who actually wrote the New Testament, nor that they would be what we now consider Christians. It's not known specifically which traditions the separate writers of the New Testament belonged to, nor that there even was a tradition that was recognizably Christian at the time of the writing. To assume the writers of the New Testament were Christian is an anachronism which is still hotly debated.

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There is no hope for saving the biblical picture via mere interpretations.

It's far more problematic that this.

Take the very basis for the whole tale (i.e. The fall from grace)

Gen 3:14 And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:

As written, there isn't much to "interpret". It either means what it says, or we need to appeal to grossly abstract metaphors to avoid accepting that it actually says what it says in an effort to try to pretend that it says something else, (something preferably far more reasonable if we're trying to support the myths) But to do that would be nothing more than to blatantly attempt to make these fables into something they aren't.

I respectfully disagree. I just Tuesday had a spirited discussion with a handful of Christians about interpreting the Genesis narrative which I found meaningful, sensible and profitable. I think you are letting yourself be hamstrung by an overly strict and stereotyped hermeneutic.

What sense would it be to pretend to change a story so completely via highly unrelated abstract metaphors that the story we end up supporting has no relevance to the original scriptures?

All reading requires interpretation, whether it's the Genesis narrative or a set of stereo instructions. You may be disinclined to follow the post-modernists in concluding that reading is rewriting, but there is no such thing as an uninterpreted text, nor a neutral interpretation.

Above, in Genesis 3:14 we have this God cursing a demon, (supposedly a serpent), for having beguiled Eve into eating the forbidden fruit. What does this God do to solve this problem?

Again, we see the failure of your hermeneutic principles. There are at least two interpretations common here. The Christian interpretation reads the snake as a demon; there is nothing in the actual text to suggest this, and I'd have to check, but I doubt interpreting the snake as demonic is consonant with historical Judaism.

You're mixing your specific interpretation in as a standard by which you measure other interpretations, without any justification as to why your interpretation is privileged above other interpretations.

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And the rest is just more bollocks based on your apparent misunderstanding of principles of hermeneutics and literary analysis, so I am not going to continue my point by point analysis.