Thanks, I know what you mean. I must say my views are much to the chagrin of many who don't hold my views. But oh well... that's what makes the world spin (well, it's actually gravity but it's a metaphor
).
Srsly, I too am at a loss to understand why this is lost on so many people.
I'll try to be careful to not swerve too far off topic here but will briefly address this point. I should add the guy with the Ph.D in theology is not a biblical literalsist. Not at all. He's very progressive and even radical in his theology. But he, and like your biblical literalist, or really anyone who has never had a mystical experience will simply be unable to really understand what that is without directly entering into that experience themselves. They have no frame of reference. To read about it, to even hear a mystic tell of it, may either inspire something inside themselves that draws them to it, or they outright reject it because it cannot fit any referent in their experience of reality. They try to understand it using the mind, using reason to fit it into their symbol sets of reality, as they currently are.
The best way I've heard this expressed is what Emerson said, "What we are, that only can we see". I can tell you that I studied this stuff in detail and I could 'see' what was being described, but as soon as I actually entered within it, all of that, all those models and theories and teachings suddenly become a distant second. Whereas before they were elegant structures of reality, they now become understood as like 2-dimensional stick models, tree-like structures upon which we try to take transcendent experience, transcendent insights and try to hang them on various branches of that structure like ornaments of Spirit.
Those structures are then understood as temporary, and can be changed as the need arises. They are not reality itself at all. But to those whose only experience is those structures, those structures are their connection to the world itself. So how do you communicate something outside those? You only send reflections of light, sounds that rattle against those structures trying to get them to let go of the structures to see the world beyond them. My theologian friend argued "there is nothing beyond them". Emerson again, "What we are, that only can we see".
I think it's exposure or the lack thereof.
Exposure is good, but it takes something radically more. It's like those "seeds" that Jesus mentioned. It takes a confluence of existential questioning, seeing glimpses with the eye of spirit, and then emptying yourself into it. Reading about the ocean might inspire the imagination to one who has never seen the ocean, but to go to the edge of the Ocean itself and then set down the books and simply fall backward into Ocean, is the only way to really know what That is. And even then, it becomes a life's exploration of its depths, even though each and every wave is the exact same wetness everywhere. It is infinite Ocean, but "outside" our experience until we take that step into it.
This despite all our attempts to tell him he is being heavy-handed and insensitive in his remarks. I lol'ed when he said "I respect your right to your beliefs, as far off as they are". 
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