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Originally Posted by Mightyboosh
The other (It's a work of fiction, no problem then.) was advice to the OP and one possible way to deal with his issue, as a way to just sidestep it. It wasn't an argument that the bible is in fact a work of fiction.
I took it as precisely that and find that, too, quite simplistic. If his GF was taking Antigone very seriously, to a degree so that OP feels their relationship might suffer if he does not make an attempt to learn more about her way of thinking, would it be acceptable advice to say "It's a work of fiction - don't worry about it?" And if OP found a passage in Antigone that starkly contradicts his moral intuitions, yet his GF seems to value that particular tagedy very highly, would it suffice to say "It's a work of fiction - don't worry about it?"
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I'm sure greater minds have argued this for centuries, but, the question I wonder about is that since there are many holy books, and we accept that they have contradictory views, so they can't all be right.
Depends on your definition of "right". If I say "I almost died today" and you say "I gave fret a little scare today" - is one of us wrong? In what sense? It would - there we go again - take study to figure out what claims (plural!!) to "rightness" are actually being made by scripture, the religious groups that use them and which of those hold up in contemporary religious practice and theorizing.
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So, which holy books contain, or are completely, works of fiction?
If by fiction you mean "did not happen in the real world/does not conform to reality" - probably all of them contain fiction. So do, then, autobiographies, history books of any detail, the physics textbooks my father used in school etc. Some of scripture is likely entirely fictious (according to that rather simple definition). None of that, the religious will argue, tells you anything about its claim to being right.
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Are there any Christians here who believe that the bible at least contains some fiction or that it might be completely fabricated?
Again - depends on what you associate with fiction. You will find comparably few central european christians claiming that the flood narrative is a historical account, if that's what you mean.
Last edited by fretelöo; 06-21-2013 at 04:55 AM.