I'm not sure who you're addressing this to. It appeared to me that "squeezing out the cultural juices" was precisely what Eliezer was doing when he talked about the Old Testament, the kind of society it originated in, the way people have always tried to irrationally defend religious beliefs, and the process by which science has repeatedly devastated those defenses. Freeing ourselves from beliefs doesn't mean ridding the world of all of the related literature and artifacts. I've never heard anybody advocate the complete elimination of all knowledge that was ever believed in religiously (any more than not practicing folk medicine means eradicating those species of plants, along with whatever information there may be about how many people lived/died because/despite of their application). And what's wrong with being consigned to history? That's where scientific knowledge tends to end up, after all.

Can you justify that tradition ought to contain knowledge? Folk medicine has a very crude optimizing drift - do it wrong and the patient dies, and some cures can be obvious. I don't see even that in religion. For what reason ought it to produce better results than noise?