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Vladimir comments on Tsuyoku Naritai! (I Want To Become Stronger) - Less Wrong
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Some minor comments regarding Eliezer's remark. The emphasis on non-contradiction of opinions in the Talmud and elsewhere is fairly recent. Maimonides for example was more than willing to say that statements in the Talmud were wrong when it came to factual issues. Also note that much of the Talmud was written before the medieval period (the Mishna dates to around 200 and the Gemara was completed around 600 or so only very early in to the medieval period).
The notion of the infallibility of the Talmud is fairly recent gaining real force with the writings of the Maharal in the late 1500s. In fact, many Orthodox Jews don't realize how recent that aspect of belief is. The belief in the infallible and non-contradictiory nature of the Talmud has also been growing stronger in some respects. Among the ultra-Orthodox, they are starting to apply similar beliefs to their living or recently deceased leaders and the chassidim have been doing something similar with their rebbes for about 200 years. Currently, there are major charedi leaders who have stated that mice can spontaneously generate because the classical sources say so. I have trouble thinking of a better example of how religion can result in serious misunderstandings about easily testable facts.
Everyone claims these days that canonical "literalism" is a recent phenomenon. It's said about Islam especially and now this comment claims it about Judaism. I've also heard this about the Greek religions (there's a book called 'Did the Ancients believe in their myths'). Is this really true? Or is this some kind of post-modern thing where everyone is trying to prove how much "wiser" our ancestors were as if they weren't literal idiots.
I think the common sense intuition is that literalism&fundamentalism must have been more prevalent in the past, but I'm willing to update if anyone can demonstrate some kind of trend in any of these religions.
The case of Maimonides is well-discussed in Persecution and the Art of Writing by Leo Strauss. Maimonides considers it bad to teach the secrets of the Talmud to people who aren't worthy and thinks that the Talmud contains wrong statements to mislead naive readers.
Issues of secret knowledge and mechanisms to keep knowledge from getting picked up by people are found in many spiritual traditions.
There a key distinction between esoteric and exoteric works. Reading esoteric works literally usually means to treat them as being exoteric.
If you look at someone like Richard Bandler who founded NLP, Bandler often tries to teach esoterically whereby he's not explicit about what he wants to teach. If you understand how he teaches than you won't take a story about a personal experience that Bandler recounts as literal but as a vehicle for the transmission of esoteric knowledge.
When Maimonides wanted to teach esoterically he also argues that the esoteric knowledge is more important than the literal truth. Maimonides is likely making a lot of decisions that are different when he teaches that are different from those that Bandler makes, but both consider esoteric knowledge to be important.
People who value exoteric knowledge like Greek philosophers or modern scientists tend to be a lot more literal than people who value esoteric knowledge. Especially at the level of teachers. That doesn't necessarily mean that the average lay-person understands that certain claims about knowledge aren't to be taken literally.