re: #106 Nyet

Oh, they do fail at literalism, both because of politics and because it’s impossible to literally interpret a self-contradicting series of texts. The point is, they try (self-deludingly, if you will) to stay literal, whereas the “liberal” approach has been reveling in rejecting literalness, branding large continuous parts of the Bible figurative, non-historical, even going so far in some cases as to get rid of the whole OT or Paul.

The literalists are the ones claiming literalism, but you never, for example, hear them talking about the message of the Sermon on the Mount. Nope, it’s Leviticus and the Epistles for them. So, they may not brand large parts of the bible as figurative. They just ignore them.