GAH! I should have known. I wonder if his hands and eyes are intact. 

I don't think it's fair to expect us to produce ONE RULE that you can apply to every single verse, or even a set list of rules. The Bible is an artifact from a foreign culture, which has been translated into English from an ancient (idiomatic) language. You really have to take a lot into account to say "Q is the proper way to  interpret this verse," so you shouldn't be surprised to occasionally meet objections.

To be sure that you're interpreting a verse well enough that no objection can be made, you would have to take *everything we know* about the relevant section of the Bible into account. It's sort of like the scientific method: a theory must incorporate all the data, and make good on its predictions.

I don't think so.

A person cannot 'cherry pick' through an instruction manual and successfully learn how to do whatever it is they were trying to instruct themselves on, and the bible is largely touted as the instruction manual (in fact, the term 'Bible' is now regularly used to refer to terrific instruction manuals).

If I want to learn how to power-up my Viper in Falcon 4.0, I can't cherry pick whatever I do want to do or don't want to do, or arbitrarily decide that some parts of the sequence are metaphors for my existence from the teaching material. If I don't do exactly what the material says, word for word, my jet never leaves the fucking ground.

The same is true for all other forms of instruction manuals.

Why this massive exception for 'the' instruction manual?

I agree that it's bullshit. However, the Bible is regularly seen among Christians as 'the teachings of Christ', and otherwise reflect back on it to guide their decisions and personal values. It's their instruction manual for life.

What you and I feel about it is irrelevent - we're not the ones using the material.

I wholeheartedly disagree.

For starters, any information in a book is completely without worth if it is never read or understood - and that's pretty diminishing. Second, a lot information in a book often relies on the reader to have completed reading and undestanding other parts of the same book in order to have value. To use my previous example, if I decide that I'm uninterested in starting my jet and more interested in shooting my missiles, so skip right to that chapter, the information I read will have no worth at all because it doesn't matter whether or not I know how to fire-off an AIM-9 when I can't even power-up my bird. To use an example I can illustrate better:

Excerpt from Improvised Weapons (pg. 162, Mutants & Masterminds Second Edition)

Superheroes and villains often use the most unlikely objects as weapons. Use the following guidelines for improvised weapons:

 - Weight: the object should be no more than a light load for the wielder to use it as a weapon

 - Damage Bonus: The damage bonus of an improvised weapon is equal to the wielder's strength bonus. If the weapon's Toughness exceeds your Strength, you get a damage bonus equal to the difference, up to +2 (like a club).

So, having cherry picked this for you, because I happen to like improvised weapons in my superhero games: how useful is this information to you, standing on it's own (assuming you were interesting in Mutants and Masterminds at all)? Does if fulfill it's teaching purpose of letting you have a lamp-post fight between superheroes without the reading understanding much more information?

The index is used so a reader can easily find things in a book that they're already familiar with, in my experience and opinion. And dare I say that my hobby of choice lends me a bit of expertise in this area.

...And what 'prior learning material' or experience to you mean? Now you've introduced whole new elements to the discussion. Having someone else teach you the stuff that you skipped in the manual is effectively the same thing as reading the material yourself (just lazier). And simply referring to the book in a piecemeal fashion isn't the same thing as 'cherry picking', because you aren't treating some of the information as chaff or misunderstanding it - you're just not reading the book in order.

Again, irrelevant. My room isn't trying to teach my anything.

So, how about this instead: A live instructional course. Who are the students more likely to gain the most from said course: the ones who decide to only pay attention to the interesting parts, or the parts that they like; or the ones who pay attention to the entire session?

And while that's fantastic, it's not useful for gleaning knowledge from said instructions.

I'm describing cherry picking almost precisely how Christians continuously do it, and with such dishonest intentions, for their Bible. One thing is literal, another thing is metaphorical, all without consistency or reason. Some quotes are shoved down our throats, others go entirely ignored because of their ludicrous content. What other body of knowledge is permitted such flexibility? Physics? Chemistry? Mathematics? Engineering? By all means, I challenge you to name even one rational field of study where one can be so arbitrary about what they regard as correct or incorrect.