Because I can tell you with some authority that the bible you read from in church or the one on your bookshelf is not the same as the original collection of texts or even the extent texts and has gone through significant translations, interpretations and transliterations, there are several methodologies and scientific processes that are applied to the texts and how they relate to other examples, such as the Septuagint, Vulgate and Pentateuch, across several languages such as Koine Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin to name the main ones. In some of these languages, concepts such a homosexuality were not defined (there is no demarkation in Greek for a homosexual or heterosexual for example) so it requires significant analysis to determine what the author was referring to and within which contextual bracket. The example I used above is a relatively simple example, the term that is cause for the constant of violence is Sword...in the Septuagint this is written as Gladium(us), however in the Book of Kells and in some textual fragments of earlier codices such as those regarded as the Vetus Latina we see the word transliterated not as Gladium, but as Gaudium, which changes that word from Sword, to Joy...which changes the entire nature of the text particularly if you are going to simply judge the specific passage rather than the whole.
It is not about the abstract, it is about the correct interpretation and translation of the texts themselves. I leave the message to the churchmen.
However, there are some passages that I would argue simply cannot be read figuratively. What does Proverbs 13:24 mean?
