If you take the historical issues that shaped modern society you will find that there were sincere, bible believing christians who spoke "literal truth" from the scripture on both sides of every issue. This includes slavery, women's rights, corporal punishment, the death penalty and intervention in warfare. If you take the the top political moral issues of our time you will find the same thing (stem cells, gay marriage, the Iraq war, abortion). This happens because the bible gives no clear answer on a single point of Theology. None. It never has and it never will. That's why the big monotheisms have survived so well. They're just vague enough to be unassailable by reason, just vicious enough to be seized by cunning and capricious rulers, and have just enough of an eschatological carrot to keep generation after generation plodding in circles of metaphysical nonsense.
History is littered with the bodies of those who died for lies against lies right back to the original writings wherein you find....no clear understanding by the disciples themselves of important Christian principles. What's going on with religion now is what's been going on with religion for thousands of years. And while certainty certainly isn't possible, if we could say one thing for certain it is that no god has watched homo-sapiens suffer and die for 100,000 years before finally ameliorating their condition with a poorly documented human sacrifice in a remote part of ancient palestine, a sacrifice about which the quorum of dedicated believers has never agreed and never will, a sacrifice which has produced no meaningful observable result what-so-ever. An invisible god with an invisible solution to an invisible problem of his own invisible making.
AND...you must love him.
But from a less rant-oriented standpoint that even most theistic scholars on this board can probably agree to (and this comes from my Phd philospher roomates involved in translation work, etc.)...Much as it appears that the old testament has at least two traditions, the new testament seems to have an inclusivist message and also an exclusivist message. The confusion of trying to reconcile these produces infinite variations between the extremes. Secular critics like myself simply conclude that these were two distinct ideas. Much in the same way that some books indicate different leanings on the divinity of Jesus, the nature of salvation, and on and on and on.
