[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Belacqua]

Like I wrote earlier you must explain the way you can discern truth amid the metaphors.

Some truth is expressed metaphorically. Truth and metaphor are not mutually exclusive.

As to how a person discerns the best way to read any given sentence: by using his brain. 

Who said it was supposed to be easy? 

This is particularly difficult for Christians, because the historical evidence for Jesus - that is, for a real person around whom the myth accreted - is thin.

Then they had better use their brains a lot. 

 And evidence for Jesus as the son of God is unconvincing

To you it is. Not to a lot of other people.

resting solely on the assertions of the Bible and interpretations of people writing decades after the events described in the Gospels.

Now you're back to sola scriptura literalism... 

There are a lot of different kinds of Christians. Some of them will be happy to call the events of the Gospels allegorical, although you may declare them not to be Real Christians. It's well known that many tropes in the NT are standard for Greek narratives, and that writers of the time were more interested in the spiritual than the journalistic meaning. 

Hermeneutics is hard. If an omniscient existence "wants" to hand over all the meanings on a platter, it will type it all out in an easy way. If it "wants" people to do it for themselves, it will make hermeneutics hard. I AM NOT SAYING I KNOW WHAT IS TRUE. I am saying that you don't either.