Hitch is dead

Yes it does. Width has to be wide for everybody, dogs have to be canine for everybody, evidence has to be evident for everybody. By definition.You can reject the evidence but you can't pretend it isn't evidence. You can believe something that isn't evident but you can't claim to have "your own evidence". But the scripture is fantasy-based.

Then The Lord of the Rings would be evidence for elves. And Grimm's fairy tales would be evidence for talking bears.

You're thinking of a prison bus.On regular buses, you can get off whenever you want. Or the driver can throw you off. There's no guarantee of getting to your destination.Edited by ringo, : No reason given.

It is on no way "obvious" that the Bible was intended as non-fiction.

That's what apologetics is all about. The broad road is an easy sell - all you have to do is profess belief and you get out of hell free. You could ask the same question about creationism. People who reject the evidence don't have "different evidence". They just choose easy answers. Fiction is made up. It doesn't conform directly to reality. There are real prodigal sons but the details in that story might be an amalgamation of several different stories. Fiction is reality altered to make a point. The imaginings of an imaginary being are not somehow " more real" than our own imaginings. Acknowledging that we are responsible for all of the answers is humbling ourselves. Bragging that your Sky Daddy has all the answers is anything but humble.

That isn't obvious. Unthinking people prefer the easy answers of fiction but you can't blame the media for that.

And yet you refuse to even discuss what the apologists claim. It's your position that's laughable. I see the same emptiness in your beliefs. You have nothing but the word salad that the apologists have fed you. You reject the only Book that even mentions your "saviour" (which I have never done). That's the point. You don't need to replace it. It's nothing. You don't even have to " throw it away". There's nothing there to throw away.

As others have pointed out, that's clearly false. Maybe you could say that the Bible authors didn't make a clear distinction between "truth" and fiction but you can not deny that the Bible contains fiction. The parables, by definition, are fiction. Metaphors are the stuff of fiction. "The Lord is my shepherd" is fiction, not news.

If you tighten your definition enough, you can claim that almost anything is non-fiction. You're comparing apples to orange groves. With a vast number of different authors writing in different styles and with differemt intentions, there may well be parts of the Bible that are comparable with Harry Potter. There may also be parts with a germ of truth and parts that are mostly true. But it's ridiculous to pretend that it was all "intended" to be taken as fact.

So we can put to rest your claim that "The Bible is evidence for Christianity." And your claim that it is somehow different from The Lord of the Rings.

So not "obviously" intended as non- fiction.

All parables are fiction. The events are "real" - i.e they have happened in real life - but the story is clearly intended to teach a lesson, not to convey facts. That's what I said. Many parts of the Bible were't even intended to be taken as truth, so it isn't "obvious" that they were.

I didn't say it was all fiction. You said basically that none of it is - i.e. that it's easily distinguishable from The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.

So does Holden Caulfield. When a fictional character makes a claim, that doesn't count as non-fiction.

We're not talking about the author. We're talking about the narrator.Did he even exist? Like Ishmael in Moby Dick, we can not take the word of a fictional character as a given.