Yeah ok mate . Star trek and star wars are two cornerstones of nerd culture and always have been . Just because scifi has taken off for Normie ' s now does not erase the fact that it started out as a nerd ie undesirable , low social status , male counterculture movement in the 60 s and 70 s . <| sep |> I am curious , yes . How can parts of the Torah be considered literally and fundementally true , but other parts be considered only metaphor ? How does anyone know which parts are literal ? They ' re all fundamentally true . As for how they can be metaphorical or how anyone can know , well we have a tradition , as someone else said , but deeper than that , it ' s more or less selfjustified by the text itself one just gets a feel for when it ' s seeming to be taking about something bigger and when it ' s seeming to be telling a literal narrative and the default is that it ' s literal unless there ' s a good reason to think it isn ' t . In addition and more importantly , some things are more fundamental to the system than others . Some details change things and some details don ' t really . For example , if you ' re telling your friends about your night out , and you say both that the waiter was 7 ' 5 and that you payed your check , no one would call you a liar if the waiter was actually just 7 ' 2 , or even 6 ' 2 , because clearly you ' re conveying something about your experience which need not match up to the facts and also has no effect on how things are or were . On the other hand , paying the check either did happen or didn ' t regardless of your experience , and consequently , you either still have that money or not and there could be police looking for you hypothetically . Similarly , we and people throughout time can get a sense of the majesty of Creation and the fact that it is entirely God ' s whether it took 6 days or 14 billion years , yet the Sinaitic Revelation either was or wasn ' t , and more importantly , either demands something of us or it doesn ' t . ie we can say that it was just someone ' s experience , but then it makes no difference to us , it teaches us nothing , nor do the details particularly matter so maybe someone felt God said be moral ! , but it ' s immaterial to us whether that person heard don ' t eat pork . While it would still be at odds with traditional theology , a belief that there was no literal mass revelation at Sinai but there was a perfect and definite revelation at some time around then would not challenge this logic though it seems to be an extreme minority view . As soon as you move into human recording of ineffable experience territory , you are inevitably somewhere on the slippery slope of ignoring commandments at will , and ultimately denying objective morality . As soon as the revelation is regarded as mere human experience , even truly sacred human experience , the authenticity or accuracy of any particular mitzvah comes into question , which means you ' re deciding which apply based on some other factor whether convenience , emotional resonance , or some other set of logical principles . And it ' s a much bigger discussion , but if you take away a fixed point for modality , it ' s an anthropological and logical fact that just as easily as what we eat , wear , or sleep with can be argued into unimportance , so can protection of life and property . tldr the bottom line here is that the reason the the literalness of the Sinaitic revelation is more important than that of Genesis or the battle of Jericho , for example , is that without it , it doesn ' t make sense to follow the Torah at all . Our 613 commandments or even if one chose just 150 that seemed relevant would be as valid a lifestyle choice as the moral code of the Aztecs , the 14 th century Catholic empire , or for that matter chimpanzees .