
Could an atheist accept a usage in which religious literature or
tradition is viewed in a metaphorical way?  Of course: this is
essentially what we do with Homer, or with other concepts such as
fate, luck, free will ;-)...  However, there remains the question of
whether the religious literature of -- say -- Christianity is a
particularly *good* set of metaphors for the world today.  It's also
entirely unclear, and to me quite unlikely, that one could take a
contemporary religion like that and divorce the metaphoric potential
from the literalism and absolutism it carries now in many cases.