I take some measure of consolation from a book I just read. It's called The Battle for God by former-nun-turned-religion-scholar Karen Armstrong.

Armstrong makes the intriguing argument that people in biblical times did not believe the miracles happened. Or not in the same way that fundamentalists today do, anyway. Armstrong says that the ancients viewed the world simultaneously in two different ways. One was logos, the other mythos. Logos was the ancients' rational and practical side, the factual knowledge they used in farming or building houses. Mythos was the stories that gave their lives meaning. For instance, the story of the Exodus was not to be taken as factual but as a tale filled with significance about freedom from oppression. The ancients didn't necessarily believe that it happened exactly as told - with six hundred thousand people trudging through the desert for forty years. But it was true in the larger sense, in the sense that it gave context to their lives.

Fundamentalism, Armstrong says, is a modern phenomenon. It's the attempt to apply logos to mythos, to turn legend into scientific truth. I don't wholly buy Armstrong's thesis. It smacks of wishful thinking to me. I don't think the distinctions in the biblical minds were that black and white. But given the choice between her theory and fundamentalism, I'll take hers.