Well said. I was just reading an article last night about why the ancient Greeks didn't get upset about how much of their religious mythology was contradictory. All you have to do is read different versions of the same stories about Greek gods to know what I'm talking about. The details can be wildly divergent.

This seems odd to people living today, because most of us are conditioned to believe that religious texts say something about history. That we should either consider them to be divinely inspired and error-free, OR if we are more liberal, consider that they at least contain underlying factual truth we can and should discern.

But this is newfangled thinking. The ancient Greeks didn't trouble themselves with textual contradictions, because they thought about their myths in entirely different ways than we do. They knew they weren't literally true, and they didn't want them to be literally true. They were meant to provide glimpses of the Divine and to shed light on moral thinking.

People alive today have no problem thinking that way about mythology in general, but many of us are conditioned to exclude religious writing from the ranks of myth.

Which, as you observe so clearly, can cause a hell of a lot of problems.