Dear Biblical literalists: After-the-fact rationalization is easy.

Well, we do have an interesting dialogue going today regarding various aspects of religion, but none of the comments seem to address a burning question of mine: How do I know which parts of the Bible to accept absolutely literally, and which parts to treat as analogy, or metaphor, or whatever? So I have a challenge to my devoutly religious readers.

If you take the entire Bible (both Old and New Testament) literally -- every word, that is -- that puts you in the awkward position of having to defend some real idiocies in books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and I'm assuming you don't want to do that.

If you take the position that the Old Testament is superseded by the New Testament, this puts you in a somewhat different awkward position because it means that you have to explicitly reject a whole lotta God's word (including some parts you folks seem to really like, such as homosexuality being an abomination). So that's also not a great choice for you, is it?

What you folks seem to prefer is cherry-picking the best parts to treat as literal, and glossing over the rest. The problem with that is that we interested bystanders have real difficulty knowing which category a given passage belongs in, and we're always having to ask for help in figuring it out.

Let's take a pasasge I referred to earlier: Thou shalt not wear clothing which is a mix of linen and wool. Now, if I was coming at this from the position of a total neophyte, how would I know whether or not to take that admonition literally? Seriously. If I knew nothing about Christianity, what litmus test would I use to decide if I should obey that bit of Scripture?

See, you Christians have had it easy all this time. Rather than having a cogent set of rules for deciding which verses to accept, you've always just sat back, waited to be presented with a verse, and then you made your pronouncement. All very subjective. All very convenient. But not any more.

What I want from one of you folks is a fixed set of rules that I can apply against any passage from Scripture that will tell me if that passage is to be taken literally or not. I want that set of rules, and only after I get them will I produce a few choice bits of Scripture that I will test them against.

See, until now, your set of rules has seemed to be little more than, "If it sounds reasonable, take it literally. If it sounds totally stupid and indefensible, then don't." That's hardly what I'd call the foundation for a rational system of faith.

So how about it? Anyone got a set of rules they'd like to submit? The requirement is that the rules be internally consistent, yet universal enough that they can decide on any passage from Scripture whatsoever. And once I have those rules, we can test them on various Scriptural tidbits to see how well they work.

You folks have gotten off easy for far too long. Let's see those rules.

PERHAPS YOU NEED AN EXAMPLE: I'm thinking some of you need a simple example to show you what the problem is here.

Consider, for example, the 12-word admonition of Leviticus 18:22: "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination." Seems clear enough, right? It's only 12 words; how hard can it be to figure out what this means? Well, apparently, it's tricky. Apparently, you need several pages to clarify how no one really agrees on what that passage means.

You would have thought God would be somewhat more articulate.

ON SECOND THOUGHT, the example directly above wasn't really appropriate for this article. The original point was how one could decide whether or not to take literally fairly clear admonitions from the Bible. The example I gave above posed a different problem -- how to interpret maddeningly vague passages that different people might understand differently. So it's a different issue.

Let's just stick with the "Do I take that passage literally or not?" conundrum for now.