Butterfly, I don't think you're necessarily a bad Catholic. :-) Christianity has a 200-year-old tradition of historical criticism, which does not take the text of the Bible at face value but rather investigates passages' authorship, genre, intent, and above all historical context before coming to a conclusion about what the text might mean to us. This is a standard way of approaching the Bible, taught at all mainline seminaries. To take the Adam and Eve story as an example, modern interpreters ask questions like: was the intent of this story to teach literal history or to make a statement about the relationshp between God and humanity? How can our understanding of this story be improved by comparing it to Canaanite and Babylonian creation myths, so that the key differences between the Israelite worldview and neighboring worldviews can be teased out? Obviously there are a lot of conservative Protestants who don't engage in this kind of critical analysis of the Bible, but the Catholic tradition, and my liberal Protestant tradition, accept it as a matter of course.
Historical criticism of the Qur'an is only just now beginning, and mostly in the West. Reza Aslan's No god but God is a fantastic book to read to get some insight into what a "progressive Islam" might look like. But for the most part, it seems to me, Muslims approach the Qur'an more like fundamentalists approach the Bible, not like Catholics do. (This is, of course, a misleading statement, since the truism in religious studies is that the Qur'an's role in Islam is much more like Christ's in Christianity than like the Bible's.)
Butterfly, I don't think you're necessarily a bad Catholic. :-) Christianity has a 200-year-old tradition of historical criticism, which does not take the text of the Bible at face value but rather investigates passages' authorship, genre, intent, and above all historical context before coming to a conclusion about what the text might mean to us. This is a standard way of approaching the Bible, taught at all mainline seminaries. To take the Adam and Eve story as an example, modern interpreters ask questions like: was the intent of this story to teach literal history or to make a statement about the relationshp between God and humanity? How can our understanding of this story be improved by comparing it to Canaanite and Babylonian creation myths, so that the key differences between the Israelite worldview and neighboring worldviews can be teased out? Obviously there are a lot of conservative Protestants who don't engage in this kind of critical analysis of the Bible, but the Catholic tradition, and my liberal Protestant tradition, accept it as a matter of course.
Historical criticism of the Qur'an is only just now beginning, and mostly in the West. Reza Aslan's No god but God is a fantastic book to read to get some insight into what a "progressive Islam" might look like. But for the most part, it seems to me, Muslims approach the Qur'an more like fundamentalists approach the Bible, not like Catholics do. (This is, of course, a misleading statement, since the truism in religious studies is that the Qur'an's role in Islam is much more like Christ's in Christianity than like the Bible's.)