Starting to smoke is a choice. Continuing to smoke...with a substance proven as addictive as heroine for some people...is often not a choice all the way to the last rasping breath.  

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Some Christians believe that in order to obtain salvation it is required to accept the Bible in its literal form. The loss of meaning through translation is part of my resistance to this idea. The loss of context, however, is the larger hurdle for me. More meaning for me is derived if I take as allegory the narrative that describes Original Sin.  The literal acceptance otherwise forces me to conclude that God is simply cruel. I don't look down my nose on Christians who do take the Bible literally. On the contrary, some of the best minds I know, some of the best friends I have, are insightful Christians that take the Bible literally. For them this is the only way it can be understood. For me, however, it's just not so. I cannot accept their arguments to the contrary and they challenge me to define where the allegory ends and the literal begins. What's odd to me is that such a distinction matters to a proper life with God.

It seems quite clear to me that "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is allegory.  A literal acceptance of this unambiguous command tells me that America should not put "under God" in its Pledge of Allegiance.We have a military and covert ops and a number of murderous, government sanctioned campaigns at work on a given day. Such is the life of the empire. How many times a second do individuals who are Christians fighting in a war violate this command under the literal view of it?

What gets lost to me with the literal view is context. There is a lot of killing in the Bible, and a lot of it is done at the command of God. Without the whole picture I lose context, and without context the Word loses its meaning for me. God has reasons for commanding humans to kill each other. I have to take into account the scope of the situation...get the full picture...so that I can then put his command to kill in context. If I am still unable to build context from what I'm reading, then I switch my assumption from literal to allegorical.

When there is insufficient information to build a consistent picture from which to derive context using a literal approach, I switch to a allegorical interpretation of what I'm reading in the Bible. This is why I feel that taken literally the Book of Genesis (and Revelation) is one of the greatest works of Science Fiction ever conceived. It is also why I feel that, taken as allegory, it is one of the most thought-provoking, spiritually moving communiques to come down to us from God.

I will use Genesis 1:3 - 5 as an example, of which I take to be allegory :
³ Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. ⁴ And God saw that the light was good. Then he separated the light from the darkness. ⁵ God called the light "day" and the darkness "night."

We know that darkness is simply the absence of light (photons hitting your eyeball), so why the need to separate anything? It's a weird thing to be so specific about and throws a wrench into my literal train of thought. So what's the point of this bizarre act of separating that which needs no separating?  When I switch to viewing this as allegory I get a more consistent understanding of what's going on here, and therefor the context becomes clear. Those who wrote this did not know the world was round, and apparently God did not think they needed to know about it in order to get the point across:  God created the earth, the solar system, and in fact the very physical laws responsible for fusion, why time slows down at the bottom of a gravity well, and the fact that the earth rotates (thus the day and night cycle).

So there it is.