A) Does reading scripture as allegorical rather than literal truth damage religion?
B) Does reading scripture as literal rather than allegorical truth damage religion?
Tashi Delek
The answer to both questions is yes.
The Bible is neither literal nor allegorical, the Bible is a collection of many different books, comprising a lot of different literary genres. Good reading of the Bible is about reading what is literal as literal, and reading what is not literal as not literal.
But there is no universal consensus among Christians over what is and isn't literal/non-literal in all cases.
Some Christians read the creation stories in Genesis literally.
Some Christians read the creation stories in Genesis non-literally.
Both ways of reading the text have bee, broadly speaking, acceptable in Christianity.
On the other hand, Jesus' life, death, and resurrection is read literally; to read those things non-literally is to deny the very fundamental teachings of the Christian faith.
And that's why not all things are equal here. Some parts of the Bible, in this sense, just matter more. Jesus' death and resurrection is more important to Christianity than whether or not the week of creation was a literal week or simply a literary device. That doesn't mean some Christians take the Bible more seriously than others; it just means that certain things do in fact matter more in Christianity than other things.
The doctrine of the Trinity is a lot more important than, say, how many archangels there are.
-CryptoLutheran