There are no answers in Genesis

[emjay]

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.

And as I said, for me it's the inclusion of mundane, factual details, such as the river names and locations, that suggests it was indeed intended as a factual/historical record of some sort. If it were not for that I would have little difficulty in seeing the story as, or at least potentially as, allegorical (notwithstanding my Christian upbringing which was basically YEC and the term allegory was rarely, if ever used).

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.

It's not the case that I think everything, or the Bible in particular, should be read as a physics textbook, but where something is or appears to be making a factual claim, which as I said, I think those instances in the Eden story are doing so, then I think it should be treated as such. So I disagree with your last sentence there; it's not that I can't enjoy literature, on an emotional and psychological level, what you may or may not be referring to as spiritual, but as I said when something appears to be making a claim, then I'll treat it as a claim. For instance indeed, I enjoyed reading Dante a long time ago... and it was indeed strangely transcendent in weird ways - made me feel all sorts of things - but I never had any issues with it like I'm describing here for Genesis, because there are none of these apparent historical/factual claims. It's something you can just accept as either the result of a vivid imagination (my view), or 'inspired [by God]' (presumably yours), but either way it doesn't affect the value of it as interesting and thought provoking literature.