outlaw:
I don't consider them any more worth of respect than other works of fiction. If you find my lack of respect offensive, we can stop here.
Religion teaches that if you pray hard enough and have faith, a shark CAN appear in the middle of the desert and bite your head off.

Read your own post xiao, you gave me three possible meanings for the verse. It's stupid to assume that a metaphorical meaning is more probable than the literal one. Does the verse contain a footnote saying "Gods tryna be all metaphorical here n shxt. Read between the lines."? How do you decide which verse is literal and which metaphorical? Again seems to be a matter of convenience.
Come on, it's hardly "plain as day" if you have to go through the entire Quran first and see how many times that exact word was used and in what context. Then once you count the number of instances to see which meaning was used the maximum number of times, you still can't be sure if THAT's the meaning which applies here. Because there's no rule that says that just because the arabic word for "cut" is used X number of times to mean "cut off relationship with", that it cannot possibly be used to mean "literally cut off", especially when it precedes the words "hands". The literal meaning is what's plain as day here, and the metaphorical one is arrived at through a lot of hard work and wishful thinking. I welcome the intention here though. It's definitely good. But eventually i hope people will acknowledge that these old texts will have to be bypassed altogether when forming laws in the 21st century.
P.S. The joseph example is a good argument, but I'm not sure if there's any rule that for a quranic law to be applied a certain way, there has to be a precedent. Plus I'm not sure of the specifics. There are other conditions that have to be fulfilled so I don't know why joseph was allowed to keep his hands. Maybe he got a good lawyer. Someone like you who managed to convince/confuse the judges.