There are no answers in Genesis

[Anomalocaris]

if it's claiming to be a historical record, which I believe is most probable for the Eden story, then that's how I think it needs to be judged.

Yeah, I don't think we're going to agree on this.

I see no reason to believe the Eden story was ever intended as journalism or history. 

Affective, suggestive, spiritual literature, including scripture, just isn't meant to be read as a straight accounting of facts. That would be like reading Swann's Way as a factual listing of events. It would be like trying to make oneself autistic. Not to read it as spiritual just seems bizarre to me. 

I think that modern ways of reading have damaged our abilities. Somehow people think that every book should be read as if it were a physics textbook, and books which can't be read this way are failures. It narrows down the possibilities of human experience.

No, people just became less accepting of, or resigned to submitting to, make belief moral authority built on pure, and let’s not beat around the bush, purposed bullshit.

I see no reason to think any of the original ancient “spiritual” literature were ever meant to be taken less than literally, so as to create the illusion of great knowledge and wisdom on the part of the bullshitters and thus to advance their own personal and social agendas using faked credentials. 

The allegoric crap is nothing more than ex-post rationalization by those who seek to perpetuate the influence of the bullshit long after it has become clear just how bullshitty the supposed “allegories” really were.