I've fallen prey to the TikTok invasion of Facebook, and I finally know what doomscrolling is. I was enjoying short videos, or "reels," of cute old Mexican men dancing, but lately the algorithm has decided that I should see the work of many religious nuts, especially but not only Christians. It's partly my own fault, of course: I don't have to click into the reels. And it doesn't help that I've been commenting on many of them, and receiving comments in return.
So, one clever fellow informed me today that the Bronze Age Bible is best classified as fiction. He posted the same statement under other comments, so it wasn't just me. It's the same sort of simple-minded snappy comeback that all of us like at some time in our lives. Christians have them too, such as "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist!" Which, when I think about it, isn't as clever as they think it is. Bragging about their shortage of faith? Really? I understand the point they're trying to make, but it really doesn't work. This is a matter I hope to return to.
But back to Mr. Bronze Age Fiction. While it's true, there's a lot of fiction in the Christian Bible, there's a lot of non-fiction as well: proverbs, sermons, and so on. In this respect much of the Bible is like Plato's dialogues, which use a fictional framework for philosophical discussion. What got my goat, though, was "Bronze Age." The Christian Bible, both Testaments, is a collection of Iron Age writings. The odd thing is that I can't recall ever seeing a fellow scoffer dismiss the Bible as Iron Age fiction. Doesn't it have the same pizzazz? "Bronze Age" seems to have caught on among village atheists like a radioactive virus.
Naturally, I spend more time correcting factual errors from Christians under these videos. Many of them like to invoke what they call "Biblical facts," which also isn't the win they think it is. Biblical facts are like, say, Tolkien facts, or Harry Potter facts. If someone were to say that Frodo Baggins is an elf, or that Harry Potter was assigned by the Sorting Hat to Ravensclaw house, it would not be factual within those imaginary worlds, but it would still not be factual outside of the books. Recently I got into a little scrap on Twitter with someone who jeered at fundamentalist for thinking that the Bible is real -- but they announced in their profile that they were in Hufflepuff. No, they aren't, and claiming that they are isn't a Potter-universe fact.
