Scriptural Literalism or Scriptural Liberalism?

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From Sam Harris' book, The End of Faith:

I always felt like believing in large chunks of the bible were a bit like forcing myself to swallow poison. 'I have to believe this, it's what I've signed up for' at the same time as the rest of my being was rebelling against it. I think all Christians in the modern world have the same experience. The line that the conservatives take is that doing things you don't want to do is good for you and 'believing' things you don't want to believe is also beneficial. The moderates are not taking their medicine properly.

I decided I had enough with the self-torture.

Yes, I think taking absolutely everything completely literally with no thought is silly, but I also think a lot of people cross the line past common sense into just making excuses to ignore stuff, or thinking they know better than God. Is it really faith to only believe the parts that don't actually affect you, and the ones you don't mind? Personally, I don't think so.

I'm a buddhist but I face the same question. My aproach is to believe in those canonical texts which

1- Constitute the earliest record of the Buddha's words, acording to modern (secular) scholarship;
2- Don't contradict scientific facts (scientific assumptions, such as the mind being solely a construction from its physical support, are not included).

So acording to Sam Harris I'm a moderate. But while my position has much to do with my culture, for any buddhist who knows the words of the Buddha, he is encouraged not to accept things solely based on tradition, or scripture, or reputation of a spiritual teacher. He said to take experience as the decider of what is true and what isn't. In that perspective, it's much easier for a buddhist to adapt to a scientific aproach, due to these words, than a muslim, for example.

I suppose there are worse people to venerate than some harmless tubby bloke.

Scriptural literalism is stupid, scriptural liberalism is pointless. I say pointless because it often takes serious mental gymnastics to reconcile modern morality with these antiquated documents. Better to just acknowledge their limits and move on with one's personal philosophy instead of getting lost in nebulous metaphor and inference to support an idea clearly wrong

Is anyone seriously going to accept the OT dietary laws, endorsement of slavery and polygamy, the subjugation of women, or the call for genocide?
With the exception of the most extreme fundamentalists, the sane people who make up the rest of Christianity - even evangelicals - aren't going to accept most of those countless, often morally ambiguous rules.
And then there's the simple matter that Christ himself was hardly a literalist, and was greatly criticized by the fundamentalistic religious leaders of his day. To put love, charity, and compassion over the law is actually more keeping with Christ's message, rather than slavishly obeying the letter of the law.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer