A peach / looks good / with lots of fuzz / but man's no peach / and never was

[nameandnature]

robhu linked to a post on convert_me in which pooperman realises he's an atheist after reading Dawkins, Dennett and Harris. There's some interesting reflection on the origins of scriptural literalism, which is related to the stuff about science and truth in my last post. pooperman writes:

Basically, Harris' has ceded--on behalf of religion, apparently--the hermeneutic of scripture to the fundamentalists. What Harris fails to understand is the scriptural basis for a more-moderate and more-metaphorical (as well as through the changing lens of historical contexts) interpretation of much of scripture. Also, Harris presumes that the literal approach to scripture is more-primitive, more-fundamental--that the "first" believers in these ancient religions understood and interpreted the texts in a straightforward and unquestioningly literal way. ... There is a good chance, IMO, that Harris has this completely backwards. It is entirely possible that religious moderation is more primitive, and that literalism is a more modern corruption of religion--a corruption from the outside, not from within. What is the source of this corruption? It is reasonable to suggest that the rise of science and the increasing rhetorical value of the "objectively true" that science (and, more to the point, engineering) has infected the religious mindset and caused some of the religious to prematurely devalue the indirect truths and insights of a beautifully-complex metaphorical image and to seek to replace these images as images with a direct, parsimonious, and straightforward representation of Truth, without sacrificing the images themselves. The literalists have, I think, slit their spiritual wrists with Ockham's razor.

I've often heard that evangelicalism is a modern heresy, but I've never seen the historical evidence for it. Does anyone have any references for that idea?