Actually, I'm an alcoholic. I entered a 12-step recovery program rooted pretty deeply in spiritual awareness and growth and really needed a concept of God that I was comfortable with in order to relate to much of the literature. The idea of some sort of cosmic super-being never really sat right with me, so the metaphorical work-around started as a tactic to keep me from getting sidetracked every time the "G" word was mentioned. Still, after a few years of thinking it over, it makes some sense to me that the "God is within" approach saves me the headache of trying to reconcile a biblical literalist view with widely proven scientific knowledge. It comes down to just what sort of face I chose to put on the God of my belief.
That's cool. As an atheist, I have seen no evidence that there are gods, goblins, and faeries, so what remains is that everyone is born with the potential to have both good and bad in them. IOW, our gods n goblins are ourselves and we sponge up the events in our lives as we grow and process (mostly subconsciously) the information to develop our lives.
Some religions would have it that we are born bad (or born sinners, as it were) and have to fight it all our lives. Personally, I think that's a load of nonsense. Therefore, to me, the whole issue behind Adam and Eve and the apple has no factual basis, and is just an allegory indicating that we can sort of choose whether to be good, partially good, bad, or partially bad. But a lot of these religions tell us what is bad or good, rather than we ourselves figuring out for ourselves what is good or bad.
We are products of our environments, from parents teaching us that hitting another person is bad to the countless bits of information per second that our brains process (most of which is done without our even noticing) and if you've ever studied genetics, psychology, anthropology, etc. you may get the idea that exactly everything we are is dictated by our DNA and everything we do and feel is dictated by our brains; so we really have no such thing as free will, we just have cognizance. And we may think we can change willfully if we want to (upon recognizing we have something in us that needs to change), but it's just our brains directing us that we need to change as well as our brains telling us we have the will to change. So, IMO, we are simply what we are and there's absolutely nothing mystical and supernatural about us,, just a lot of stuff we do not know about yet.
What if there is more to the Bible than metaphor?
What if the Bible is a literary collection of narrative history, genealogies, chronicles, laws, poetry, proverbs, prophetic oracles, riddles, drama, biographical sketches, parables, letters, sermons, and apocalypses designed to communicate to all human conditions?
What if a superficial glance at biblical content without regard for form or context leaves a reader with the uninformed and uninspired impression that the Bible is one-dimensional and approximate in its presentation.
How can we know the contexts of a book of books written over a fairly long period of time by many individuals in a few different languages that have since authorship, evolved without knowing things like the environments, thoughts, ways of thinking, and a myriad of other factors affecting those ancient authors? We can't. We can guess, research, and guess some more, but we will likely never
know. So we are left with the just as large of a myriad of interpretations.
