Is Allegorical Religion better than Fundamentalism?

[John 6IX Breezy]

Finally, it is a commonplace of Christian belief that when God unfolds the events of history, he does so in the way that a human author writes a novel. The author may describe an event which is clearly understood by the reader to have more than literal significance. Christians say that God does the same, so that the defeat of the Moabites, for example, is a literal event which has an allegorical meaning inherent in it from the beginning. (I understand that non-religious people will not accept the origin of these meanings, but it shows how allegory functions for believers.)

I think it is also worth noting that narrative is how our brains perceive and interpret the social world in much the same way that science is how we understand the natural world. Events get abstracted into stories with plots and characters and other literary devices including allegory. So, these aren't merely artifacts of literature, they are cognitive maps for representing the world. And I would argue that a God that wanted to communicate something to us in the most effective way possible must do so in the form of narrative.

So yeah, I agree that Scripture presents itself as a compilation of literal events whose happenings were allegorical from the beginning. But there's also a sense in which these events were selected specifically because of their contribution to the greater narrative. And you can see this in the Gospel of John, for example, who says that Jesus did many other things besides the ones he is writing down. In other words (and to address Vulcan's concern) John is telling us that he is only telling us events that carry narrative and allegorical value.

Edit: Neo posted at the same time, and he explained it more concisely lol.