I appreciate your thoughts on the subject, but you can't blame people for holding it all literally. The bible typically doesn't differentiate between the literal and the figurative, so it CAN be a bit hard to discern. Also, at the time that the individual segments of the bible were written they were pretty progressive. In the New Testament (the part with Jesus, I don't want to assume how much background knowledge you have) women could own property and not get married, which was a ridiculous notion in the first century. The New Testament also holds everyone as equals, where nobody is any better than anybody else. A Christian is only better off than any other human being because we've been forgiven our sins after seeking that forgiveness. We're still sinners, just sinners who get our slate wiped clean as long as we strive to improve. I know too many of my fellow believers who put themselves on a pedestal, an act which the bible specifically condemns. It's not the bible's fault that humans are fallible, it's our own.