How can Christians not admit Christianity is all a pile of garbage when ...?

[coffeeveritas]

I would certainly tend to agree with your general view.

The only problem is that when it comes to the Bible, it's no different from anything else. You say, "I think the real difference is whether you decide to use those stories as something to inform your moral, metaphysical, and epistemological imagination,... or..."

But you may as well stop right there.

I would absolutely not use the Bible to inform my moral standards.

You see the harsh Old Testament stories, the insane stance on contraception, the condemnation of homosexuals, the weekly sermons filled with guilt and shame designed to manipulate people, and in light of all of that you don't want to get your morality from anywhere near all that madness. That's cool, I would avoid all that too.

I wouldn't actually try to derive moral "standards" from the Bible either. I was talking about imagination. I'm thinking of looking at the Bible the same way historians and scholars look at philosophers. They're only interested in the views that the philosophers held that were different than the culture around them, the others they were just copying and that's not terribly interesting. I think there are many beneficial ways that we can see life-altering echos of real love and goodness in the ways that Bible exemplifies grace beyond the world of its time. It's also more than just morality for me, i.e., the other categories that I mentioned. The people who need to have the moral imagination shaped are the ones protesting gay funerals.

And this brings us to a very interesting question indeed.

Why should a person need to seek somewhere else for moral guidance?

Is it assumed that people cannot possibly have a sense of morality of their own that they need to seek moral ideas from other sources?

. . .

So when a person even suggests that they are turning to religion for morality all they are doing is confessing that they have no clue what constitutes morality in the first place.

Well, psychologically speaking everyone gets there morality from someone else. There is no well of purely objective moral fact that anyone is drawing on, unless you have some sort of believe in a moral soul that was shaped by some sort of god. Evolutionary psychology tells us that humans learned to adapt "morality" as a way of functioning efficiently as a society and therefore increasing the likelihood that the tribe would survive. The codes for each tribe would vary widely and so the conclusion drawn is that each tribe inevitably influences what its members see as "moral." Everybody's getting the way they think and the sense of right and wrong from someone; humans are communal animals. Right now many people are being formed in that way but the media, but that still counts as ideas that are being put out there by another person. So even if you have subsumed your morality into your very being, you still got it from someone else.

When I say I use the stories of the Bible in an intentional way to shape my moral imagination (as well as other things, but you seem to be focused on morality), I'm deliberately choosing the things that influence me. I of course also have people that I am in community with that discuss these things, as well as books from authors I trust, and my own experiences and reflections that all serve to shape my imagination. I was suggesting the Bible as an ingredient that has been important to me, but there are lots of ways to find goodness, hope, healing, and love. So once again, you really don't have to use the Bible if you don't want to, you're fine.