The existence of God

[emjay]

Yes, this is one of my biggest problems with it too, and as I see it, the more willing you are to go down the allegorical/metaphorical route of interpreting it, the greater this problem becomes, almost exponentially.

This is only a problem if you want one to pick one version as TRUE. Of course this is what a lot of believers do, but I don't see why we have to do the same.

Is there anything important in life where we can settle on just one version of things as definitively true? Politics, art, psychology, economics, ethics... do you believe that one school of thought has won the battle of ideas in any of these fields? And if not, does that mean we give up?

Religion provides a wealth of variation that enriches our thinking. To rule it all out because people disagree would be to impoverish ourselves. 

The other day I was reading some early aesthetic theory from India, from the tradition that was later named Hinduism. What they said was similar to, but also in some ways a challenge to, Kantian aesthetics from 700 years later. Having both, without knowing which one is THE TRUTH, is a good thing.

At the moment I'm reading about how much of Marxian thought has roots in medieval mystic writings -- people like Meister Eckhart -- through the German Idealists. This provides us with so many unexpected concepts -- which we would never come up with if we just watch the news and accept the standard beliefs of our own time -- that we can be grateful for the many varieties of religious thought that have never been settled into just one, so that we have to reject all the others as worthless. 

If we really mean it when we say "think for yourselves, sheeple," then we have to be grateful for the fact that the dialectic is ongoing.

I'm not saying I don't think you can get value from multiple sources... multiple schools of thought in different or the same subjects for instance, but when something is making a claim, which I take the Bible to be doing so (do you not?), then you have to evaluate that claim on its own merits, and in that case imo vagueness and multiple interpretations doesn't help.