If you start picking which parts apply to you and which don't, you can pretty much read anything you want out of the bible.


There is no way around "picking which parts apply to you"--it's called hermeneutics. Choosing to apply ALL parts to you or NO parts are simply extremes.

There is a big difference between an individual reading anything they want to (less likely) and the possibility of *anyone* reading anything (more likely). Like any system, a hermeneutic may be big-C Consistent and Complete and yet allow only a small subset of all possible expressions. For example, arithmetic *could* have expressions like a+/()2^ but it does not. Likewise, one's Biblical hermeneutic is generally rule-based (if informal): many (but not all) statements are possible, fewer of those are extant, fewer of those are useful, and even fewer of those are normative. So for any one person's hermeneutic, there are strong constraints on what can be "read out of" the bible. For a group of people, the *variance* between hermeneutics grows in proportion, but don't forget that we are then talking about many mutually interacting systems, which tend to find their own internal equilibria (or at least local attractors), and begin to be modeled more appropriately as a cohesive group.

I'll grant you the position that most people's Biblical hermeneutic is less than rigorous. But that does not deny that *everyone* must rely upon their "fallible human judgment" at some point in the process of interpretation.