How much of the Bible do you believe literally?

[TaraJo]

I kinda look at the Bible the way I'd look at the telephone game when I was little. For those of you who don't remember (or didn't play that), the first kid started by whispering something into the ear of the person next to him. The person next to him whispered the same message into the ear of the next person and so on until they got to the end. What always happened was that the message at the end wound up being wildly different from the message that was initially sent out.

Simply put, every time a story is told by a new person, it will change slightly.

Now, look at the Bible. The overwhelming majority of the stories weren't written by the people who experienced them. When you got a story like Noah's Ark, for example, there may have been a grain of truth to start out (I've heard rumors of a land owner who built an ark for his livestock when seasonal floods came around), but over time, as those stories are passed down from person to person, translated from one language to he next and adapted from one culture to the next, they tend to change. Eventually, the story that wound up in the Bible has no resemblence to the story that originally happened.