Why can't you? The bible is nothing more than a bunch of short stories in a compendium. Some of them are factual, some of them are fictional, some of them are op-ed, some of them are straight historical documents.

The short answer is that the bible serves little purpose if you pick and choose what you want out of it. If we seek to understand God and how he relates to humans through the bible, and yet reject the things we don't like or can't understand, this leaves us back at the same place we started. We've enfourced our ideas onto the bible; why then read the bible at all if we're simply going to come away with our own ideas? It might be read for the purposes of understanding the people who wrote it or the historical context in which it was written, but if not taken as a whole, the bible can tell us little about God.