Richard Dawkins - The Great Bus Mystery

Educated and moderate Christians know better than to interpret the Bible literally. To do so, they rightly understand, would entail the rejection of virtually all good science. It would take lots of twisted logic (and an unabashed sense of denial) to reject the massive amounts of empirical evidence produced by independent branches of science over the past four centuries, all of which seem to suggest that the claims about the universe found in the Holy Book are just false.

Now, if you claim the book is to be understood metaphorically instead of literally, you get to avoid this hugely embarrassing problem... until you consider the doctrine upon which Christianity is founded: Jesus came to sacrifice himself to redeem humanity from the original sin committed by Adam and Eve. Of course, since everything we know from science tells us this couple never really existed, Jesus' real torture and death would have been made for the sake of a metaphorical story that never actually took place... and that will be difficult to explain without having to resort to the same kind of twisted logic for which we all tend to mock fundamentalists.

Channeling the spirit of PG Wodehouse (metaphorically, of course), Richard Dawkins explains this logical problem in the following short piece of humorous literature:

For more on the intersection between literature and religion, you might enjoy Jorge Luis Borges' macabre short story The Gospel According to Mark.
.