Yes, I can understand your feelings both on the literalists and the fundamenatlists. Most Christians are not literalists, at least according to the denominations they belong to. Part of the misunderstanding is our relatively new and Western cultural notion that the only important truths are verifiable facts. It is even implied by the two choices you mentioned: literally true vs parables.

The irony is that even in our Enlightenment culture, we still learn the most profound truths from non-factual sources. We just don't recognize it. It takes great works of art to convey real cosmic truth to us, not science or history books.

For example, suppose you wanted to truly understand all aspects of human love, such as love of child, love of country, love of God, love of lover, unrequited love, dying for the love of one's country, selfless love, etc. And suppose you had a choice of two doors to go through to find that truth. One door leads to a room full of scientists, sociologists, mathematicians, etc. The other door leads to the world's greatest novelists, poets, and artists. Which door would you go through to find out about all aspects of human love.

The roomful of scientists would tell you all kinds of useful verifiable facts about love and its affect on the human body, etc.

The artists, on the other hand, would not tell you any verifiable facts, but instead would tell you profound stories about relationships, play heartbreaking music, speak achingly beautiful poetry, paint beautiful pictures, all illuminating the depth, breadth, and experience of human love from all kinds of angles and aspects. From them you would experience everything from the heights of euphoria of love to the depths of pain and suffering love can bring in times of tragedy, etc. And they would do all this without uttering a word that is literally true. You would come out profoundly moved and transformed in such a way that knowledge and truth about love would be a part of your very being. You certainly would not stop and challenge the novelists, for example, to produce evidence regarding the actual events in their stories.

I choose the topic of love because the Bible is a book about relationships between man and man, and man and God, where God's faitthful love for his unfaithful creation is the most important part of the message. Its about how our acknowledgment of that love is profoundly transforming but also a terrifyingly burdensome when we look at the misery and suffering in the world.

In modern western culture, we seem to only trust the person wearing a white lab coat and clipboard to tell us truth. But in the times the Bible was written, when the wise man said, "Let me tell you a story", everyone knew that they were about to hear something very important and very profound. The literary forms used in the Bible are known to us through other non-biblical literature as wisdom writing, prophesy, oral tradition, etc. Other cultures have this, too. Native Americans would start their stories of truths by saying "I don't know if this happened or not, but I do know it is true."

Most of the mainstream denominations believe the Bible to be inspired by God, and to be authoritative as God's Word in matters of salvation and God's Grace. Those denominations would consider it heresy to reduce it to a factual history book about talking snakes and men swallowed by whales. In fact, most of the highest forms of wisdom in the Bible is contained in its contradictions. All through the Bible is great dynamic tension between warring notions of such things as justice vs forgiveness, religious law vs human compassion, God's judgement vs God's Grace, etc. To ask if any part of those elements in tension are true facts is an almost meaningless question.

Jesus himself sometimes strongly echoes the Old Testament in his teachings, sometimes he reinterprets it, and sometimes he downright repudiates things from the Old Testament (his repudiation for retributive justice (eye for an eye) in Mathew, for example). Even the four Gospels and Acts, which are meant to be true accounts, are more like docudramas than they are pieces of journalism.

This, after all, is a book that contradicts itself almost immediately in the first two chapters of Genesis, where there are two different accounts of creation, one following the other, with the order of the creation of things are different from one account to the other. On the other hand, Genesis, manages to convey some of the most profound notions of God's relationship with his creation, and the uniqueness of man as a rational, creative, thinking being and the implications of that in terms of man being aware of the notions of good and evil.

As for your anger towards fundamentalism, I have to agree. The God revealed to us through Jesus is not all about sexual repression, excessive moralizing, and burning babies for eternity in hell. That's not the Good News of the Gospel. That is just downright nastiness and cruelty to teach that to people.