Church leaders do not believe in a literal understanding of the Bible

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

So does that mean that women can be popes but not priests?

Or is it just another story to pick and choose at like the rest of the Bible?

If "the Bible" were any other document you would have no problem with the practice of sifting it and trying to place a value on it's constituant parts. Demanding an all-or-nothing approach from Christians when you're an atheist is asking them to build your strawman for you.

One might as well. The Bible itself is picking and choosing - viewed by many as a document whose content has withstood the test of time, remaining inviolate over the years... Even though there are so many different versions and translations. To try and get a logical approach to this would hardly fit with belief in any case.

This is not a particularly accurate representation of the Biblical text. The Bible has been translated into most languages, but it has not been translated "through" them, all modern stranslation are based on Greek and Hebrew prototypes, it has got to the point that they are all based on the same protoypes. Further, as Greek and Hebrew are languages designed for accurate scribal reproduction erros are (relatively) easy to pick up. This is no way eliminates scribal error, but it goes a very long way to mitigating it.

As to a "logical" approach, philology and textual criticism were developed for the Bible.

I never said he did, I was responding to the article.

The problem with that point of view (and I don't doubt that it is relatively popular) is that then how do we know what constitutes a good life without interpreting the poetry? "Good" is such a relative term that in order to objectivise it, as religious groups seek to do, it must be based on something and that something is the interpretation of the bible. Whilst most people would be able to point out things like charity and such as a good deed, moral grey areas are what this philosophy of the bible would struggle to deal with.

Moral "grey areas" are where you have a decision you don't want to make. You will never be in a situation where two decisions are actually morally equivilent.