I hear what you are saying John, however I do not believe the bible to be "God's written word" and free from error. Neither do I believe it to be infallible. While I believe the bible can be a vehicle in which a person can be introduced to God, I do not believe that all parts of the bible are relevant for here and now... An interesting book that I am reading at the moment titled "How to Read the Bible" by Kugel is quite informative. As a friend of mine says, "In the beginning God created..." Everything else is commentary....
Stormy,
Have you ever read the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy?
It is a good place to begin the discussion, and it will show us what you agree with, and don't.
BTW If you read Kugel's cv, you will find that he is consistently on the liberal side of things,
Here is a quote from his home page,
http://www.jameskugel.com/critic.php that explains how and why he deconstructs the Bible:
In saying all this, I'm not looking for a back door out of what I take to
be Judaism's basic doctrine about the Torah, namely, "Torah min
ha-shamayim." There's nothing in my book (or in me) that denies that
belief. As I've written several times, words are words, and there is no
litmus test that modern biblical scholars could ever perform to determine
that this word was divinely inspired and that word was not. But in my book
I did try to put the whole doctrine of a divinely-given Torah in a
somewhat different perspective, which, since you say you havent yet read
the book, I might summarize here:
What I tried to show was that, at a certain point within the biblical
period, the religion of Israel suddenly changed (I would say "as if by
revelation," except that I don't mean the "as if"). Now, "avodat H'" was
no longer principally understood as the offering of korbanot in the
Temple, but the keeping of God's numerous laws. This is evident within the
Bible itself, and the trajectory of avodat H' as presented in the Torah
carries over into all the later stages of Judaism, even in such perfectly
human activities as writing piskei halakhah (or, for that matter,
formulating lists of required beliefs). Keeping the mitzvot is the way
that Jews seek to reach out to H', and I would make no exception in this
for people who define themselves as "Orthoprax." It can't just be a matter
of lifestyle.
So... The point of this rather long-winded answer is that people who
devote themselves fully to keeping the mitzvot are, at least by my
definition, Orthodox in the true sense of the word: they have grasped what
is essential in Judaism, avodat H', and they are living it. All those
mitzvot have a single trajectory, from the Torah itself through centuries
and centuries of human interpreters, the makers of midrash halakhah and
aggadah, takkanot and gezerot shavot and piskei halakhah, down to the
present day. I think someone who truly understands this will not be
troubled by the things you mention.