The very phrase "up for interpretation" still contains this sort of nagging belief that somehow it's even possible that something could not be up for interpretation, but entirely settled, objective, and absolute. And only that which could not possibly be subject to interpretation is objective. But I think that's still wrong.
I mentioned the idea of an objective starting point focused on ascertaining the intent of the human author, and the likely reception of the text by contemporaneous readers, taking into account the culture and intellectual understanding of the time. Sometimes this approach is called "critical realism", borrowing the term from sociology. It's an objective method, and no less so just because it can't claim an absolute authority as far as the meaning of a text, any more than the fundamentalist view. I am certainly agreeing with you that it's a mistake for religions to project a claim to "absolute truth" in this way.
In a lot of ways, what I am suggesting to you is in fact what you might call a more "naturalistic" or even atheistic approach to hermeneutics. In the sense that it does not privilege a particular reading via some metaphysical justification. In other words, it's not a form of special pleading for the bible, as you seem to think it is. One of the mistakes of religious ideology has been in supposing that only a Supreme Being as the ground of all thinking can provide a fundamental basis for objective claims, whether it's about morality or about the authoritative reading of a text. In a sense, you are carrying that idea forward with you even having rejected the theism it springs from. That's why I'm suggesting that it may be fruitful to contemplate what "meaning" really means, and how it is determined, from a naturalistic point of view. That's why I suggested treating the text first as a human artifact. It might be easier if we dealt with a text other than the bible just to avoid all the past associations.
Part of the problem, from my perspective, is in the assumptions that already go into thinking about "it" as having "concrete objective evidence to support it". What is the it that we're referring to? Presumably it's what you perceive to be the historical claims of the text, stated as propositions. "Jesus rose from the dead" for example. Part of the point though is that this approach is already assuming a particular hermeneutical method, namely the attempt to interpret a text as history in a modern sense, and also assuming that the historical value of the text is its meaning. Certainly for Christians both ancient and modern, there are such historical claims in the text that matter, and as you say, many (certainly the resurrection is one) lack objective evidence. It is important to realize that. But the historical does not exhaust the possibility of meaning. Especially with religion where, I would suggest, how we live now, how we participate in life, and in so participating come to understand ourselves, others, the universe, the Divine, that this question about a way of life is more fundamental than an abstract set of beliefs.
So when I asked in another thread what value a deist might find in ancient religious texts, I didn't mean in particular the "value" of verifiable claims to historic facts. I meant something more like inspiration closer to the aesthetic than the historical. Beliefs and metaphysics matter in the sense that they condition how we experience and relate to life. You seem, to me, to be engaged in this journey that involves realizing the inadequacy of your prior background beliefs, about God, about the Bible, about Christianity, and etc. I think this is normal and healthy, and I would never encourage you to stay stuck. What I am suggesting is that pursuing these threads may require challenging some of the assumptions that you still retain about what "religion" is, or about what "truth" is.
What I hear you saying is that Truth in a capital-T transcendental sense is too important to maintain certain views against the overwhelming challenge of reasonable objections to them. I think I understand, I certainly don't object. What I am suggesting is that, if a certain cleansing and freeing step is necessary, to seek truth over easy emotional comfort or familiarity, yet it remains also to be discovered what the boundaries of "truth" might be, who you are for yourself rather than for the sake of fitting into a particular system of belief. But also beyond a mere labeling of historical propositions as true or false. What meaning can your life have for you? What I am suggesting is that I think it's possible to find a great deal of wisdom and meaning in the collective insights of thousands of years of human life, beyond just the determination of whether certain historical claims are true or false, and not just as a question of adopting or rejecting a particular label, whether "Christian", "Muslim", "theist", "deist" or "atheist".
