But that one is definitely in the top ten, maybe top five. Sorkin is one BRILLIANT scriptwriter, but it was perfectly cast and acted, too.

But the put-down of a sanctimonious "Dr Laura" lookalike was AWESOME!!!!

books/portions they threw out. ... like today, propaganda meant to inspire certain behaviors. I love it when someone tells me they read the entire bible. In my world it's like DUH! One guy told me he read it three times. DUH!

The bible isn't a single book (actually... the name makes that clear), and different pieces have different proportions of readers believing that they are metaphor/inspired.

Some of the books are clearly historical, others are poetry. Some pieces of other books are considered by some to be allegorical, but that's entirely different from saying that they are "fiction". Comparisons to Tolkien/Rowling books are laughable of course - particularly in the case of Tolkien (as is an implication that metaphor and "God's own truth" are the only options on that spectrum).

Of course... Guinness ranks it as the #1 selling nonfiction book of all time. So there that.

"And his days were 900 years..."

So...

Inquiring minds want to know.

Where are the records of the "plagues" of Egypt?

... is that a historian getting facts wrong does not move his published history text from non-fiction to fiction.

OK, then. Real good, then...

History, by my reckoning, is an attempt to chronicle antecedent events to provide understanding for those who were not there, particularly future generations. There isn't a single book of the bible I've read that even remotely appears to serve this end. The ultimate goal is not historical understanding, but promulgation of religious belief. These are not historical chronicles. They are myths with real historical figures as characters. If we are to consider Exodus historical because Pharaoh was a real guy, we may as well move "Cold Mountain", "Dances With Wolves", and "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" over to the non-fiction section posthaste.

is actually historical or factual. Show your evidence. Babel? Jonah? Patriarchs living hundreds of years? It is to laugh.

The burning bush and the talking snake HAVE TO BE REAL, amiright??!?!?!

But it was a "serpent" so it might have been, you know, a dragon. They're real, too. See Harry Potter.

so surely there was a white whale. Sherlock Holmes as well as Harry Potter must have existed as the streets of London are known to many.

Right after he metaphorically filled the bellies of a 5 thousand with a couple of fish and a dozen bagels.

Wouldn't be kosher otherwise.

A little lox couldn't hurt either.

Of course, Guinness can call it what it wants. But they might as well also call the Harry Potter series "nonfiction," as far as I'm concerned. It won't change my perception of either.

...than offending the privileged majority by calling it fiction.

in the sense we can believe is accurate?

by Power. The power lies in people believing that work of fiction and taking it as gospel. I see so many Egyptian, Greek and even older myths used as the foundation of the story. Without the "stolen" stories of others, there would be no bible.

The difference being that we have exact replicas of precisely what Swift, Tolkien, and Rowling put down on paper, while those other works began as oral stories only written down after many centuries (in ancient languages) and come to us only after multiple translations.

But fiction? Indubitably.

with excellent marketing...

Harry Potter.

Nobody would have read it.

So we can pronounce it.

No, simply leftovers.

Waste not; want not.