Well, here's the really ironic thing about it: all we ever DID was read the Bible. Here is a quick breakdown of activities in the average Southern Baptist Convention approved Sunday morning Bible study:
1) Use the scripture to reinforce the danger of disobeying God (pick any Old Testament story for this, and you can't go wrong)
2) Use scriptures to assert the direct authority of Jesus over that of any human being (They love their St. Paul; this exercise is partly intended to undercut any kind of priesthood, and partly to assert personal interpretation as superior)
3) Use the scripture to disect every other religion or denomination, and dismiss it as some kind of cult (We had an annual, weeklong seminar devoted to this... a "con", if you will)
4) Use the scripture to single out proscribed behaviors and demonstrate how they incur the wrath of God (tolerating homosexuality = rain of fire from heaven; lying = consumed by worms; etc.)
5) Use the scripture to show how following Jesus leads to a euphoric kind of joy, which those poor sinners are missing out on
Your discussion brings up a good point of the best way to read sacred texts, or any text, for that matter. I'm a strong believer really knowing the details on whatever it is you're talking about. And reading enough to get the full sense of the text -- not just the occasional snippet which, as you point out, are prone to severe distortion. Among other things, I'm a Biblical storyteller and have learned some fair-sized chunks of the Old and New Testaments by heart. (Probably just enough to make the "dunce" category in a first-century classroom, where learning by heart was a much bigger deal than it is now.)
However, I also believe that a modern reader cannot run with "the plain sense of the text" because over thousands of years, we've lost so much of the cultural context in which it was written. "Slavery" for example, refers to many different institutions at different times and places -- and almost never the race-based servitude that springs to mind when 21st century Americans think about it. I like to think that slavery would have had a much shorter life in the West if more people had understood that those verses were dealing with a totally different institution that happened to get the same name.
Anyway, we have to rely on specialists to supply some of that lost context, and specialists, more often than not, have some strongly-held opinions that aren't derived entirely from data. And it's very difficult for a layperson to judge. I find myself throwing up my hands when one group of well-educated, apparently sincere scholars says that the internal evidence in the Pentatuch points to the Five Books of Moses being written by Moses himself, while another equally large, well-educated and apparently sincere group finds that laughable, on pretty much the same evidence.
[wrenching sound as we move this back somewhat on-topic]
So with religious-based SF, how appropriate is it to need some religious background to appreciate it? Do you have to be a Jew (or at least know quite a bit about Judiasm) to truly "get" a golem story? Do you miss a lot in Orson Scott Card's novels if you aren't Mormon? And does this enhance or detract from the piece as art?