Monthly Archives: March 2013

Magic vs. Technology

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In the New Testament, Jesus does lots of impressive miracles.
More precisely, they were impressive for the time. Today we surpass them with technology so regularly that we often don’t notice. Let’s compare the miracles of Jesus with what modern technology can do.
Jesus walked on the water. We can’t walk on the water, but we can travel on the water in a vast array of boats, both large and small, powered and wind driven. For example, an aircraft carrier can carry 5000 people, sail at 30+ knots, and operate for 20 years without refueling. We can travel under the water with submarines. We can fly above the water with airplanes. We have even gone to the moon.
Feeding of the 5000. We can’t feed people with magic, but we can still feed lots of people. Norman Borlaug has saved perhaps one billion lives because of improved strains of wheat, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize. The Haber process, which turns nitrogen into ammonia, produces fertilizer that is estimated “to be responsible for sustaining one-third of the Earth’s population.”
Cursing the fig tree. Jesus was hungry, but it wasn’t the season for figs. Nevertheless, Jesus cursed a fig tree, and it withered. While we can’t destroy trees with magic, we’ve got the destruction thing figured out. We have herbicide that kills plants. We have chain saws and bulldozers. We have dynamite and hydrogen bombs.
Miraculous catch of fish. We can’t catch fish with magic, but modern fishing trawlers do a good job at catching lots of fish. They do perhaps too good a job, and aquaculture now produces as much tonnage as wild capture to reduce humanity’s footprint.
Calming the storm. We can’t stop storms, but we have gotten pretty good at prediction. We’re able to minimize the loss of life from disasters like the 1900 Galveston hurricane. Technology can warn of tornadoes and tsunamis.
Prophecies. Jesus predicted his death and his second coming, but pause for a moment to consider this quote from Shakespeare:

Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

Jesus made prophecies, and so can any man, but do they actually come true? His predictions of a second coming within the lifetimes of some witnesses didn’t come to pass. His prediction of his death is part of a story that we have little reason to see as history.
Healing miracles. Jesus did many of these (I recently explored the healing miracles here). For example, he healed lepers. We don’t heal lepers with magic but with antibiotics. Leprosy is no longer much of a problem, as is the case for smallpox, bubonic plague, and polio.
Jesus cast out demons. We don’t, because we know they don’t cause disease. We can’t cure all illnesses, but we do a better job now that we’re focused on the actual causes.
Jesus restored sight and hearing. Here again, we can’t prevent all such cases or cure all that occur, but medicine has made remarkable improvements in health.
Jesus raised the dead. We don’t use magic, but modern medicine has returned thousands from conditions that just a century ago would be considered “dead.”
What Jesus didn’t do. Jesus didn’t do any miracles against which we can parallel clean water and sanitation. Or civil engineering—roads, bridges, and buildings. Or communication—telephones and the internet. Or the energy industry or the chemical industry or the transportation industry.
What Jesus did was basically just party stunts. From helping God create the universe, he was reduced to doing magic for small audiences and today just appears in toast.
Some Christians will agree and say that Jesus didn’t come to improve the lot of people on earth but simply to spread his message.

Do not believe me unless I do the works of my Father. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father. (John 10:37–8)

Okay, we can’t duplicate what Jesus did by magic. But everything that has been improved for humanity has been improved by humanity. Technology puts the claimed miracles of Jesus in perspective.

Religion may not be dying just yet,
but it’s sure getting feeble in this age of reason.
— comment at WWJTD blog

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Religion is to Science as Homeopathy is to Medicine

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How reliable are the medicine or cures in the Bible Jesus New TestamentReligion in the West is mostly unregulated, like alternative medicine. Both make bold claims without evidence of efficacy. For both, it’s buyer beware. I cringe at the thought of gullible people throwing their money at stuff with bogus claims—homeopathy, magnetic bracelets, detox foot pads, aromatherapy, chelation therapy, colloidal minerals, iridology, … and religion.
Christians are on the same page when they shake their heads at Scientology, whose story amounts to little more than a $100,000 sci-fi novel metered out in installments, or Heaven’s Gate, the cult whose members killed themselves to get to an alien spacecraft.
Traditional Christians are skeptical of the historical claims of the LDS church. Joseph Smith translated “golden plates” by using a magic rock, you say? Show us the plates.
Ditto for Sathya Sai Baba, who had millions of followers and died in 2011. He was an avatar (deity on earth) and performed many miracles, including curing himself of paralysis from a stroke and raising people from the dead. Christians wonder, have scientists corroborated these claims?
They’ll shake their heads at Steve Jobs, who attempted to cure his (very treatable) cancer with alternative medicine. He realized his mistake only when it was too late.
They’ll laugh with skeptics at the end-of-the-world claims of Harold Camping or fans of the Mayan calendar that ended in December
But they stop laughing when the topic turns to Jesus.
The healing miracles of Jesus
The gospels record several outdated ideas about disease.
1. Evil spirits cause disease. In the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac, Jesus expelled many demons from a man into 2000 pigs, which ran into a lake and drowned. Demons cause crippling as well (Luke 13:10–13). We learn that knowing precisely how to expel the various kinds of demons is an art (Mark 9:25). And getting rid of an “impure spirit” doesn’t help because it’ll just find a bunch of its friends and turn the newly cleansed person into a drunken fraternity party (Luke 11:24–6).
2. Sickness can come from sin. Jesus healed a disabled man but warned him,

You are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you. (John 5:14)

3. Magical healings. Jesus healed a deaf mute by putting his fingers in the man’s ears and touched his own saliva to the man’s tongue (Mark 7:32–5). He healed a blind man by making mud with his spit and putting that on the man’s eyes. After he washed them, the man could see. (John 9:6–7).
4. Healings by Jesus touching. Jesus used touch to cure a leper, a person with a fever, and two blind men. He also raised the dead.
5. Healings by touching Jesus. A woman touched Jesus and was healed without Jesus doing anything, as if he was a medicine battery.

At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him (Mark 5:30).

6. Healing at a distance. Jesus doesn’t even have to be there. He healed the centurion’s servant remotely.
So what have we learned? According to the gospel story, some illnesses are caused by sin, and others are caused by demons. Expelling demons is a waste of time, because they’ll just return with more demons. Jesus can cure with special techniques, he can cure just by a touch, he can cure by being touched, and he can cure at a distance without touching at all.
I don’t know what to make of this hodge-podge of techniques except to wonder why Jesus didn’t just put up his feet and heal thousands of worthy people remotely or eliminate diseases like cancer and smallpox.
Apologists may argue that Jesus didn’t cure much because he had no interest in doing so, and yet the gospels disagree. A crowd followed Jesus, and

he had compassion on them and healed their sick (Matt. 14:14).

Seeing a widow at the funeral of her only son, Luke says:

his heart went out to her and he said, “Don’t cry” (Luke 7:13)

and then he raised her son. He heals people, at least in part, for the same reason a modern doctor does, because of compassion.
Alternative medicine vs. religion
Alternative therapies give hope where science offers none, and Americans spent $27 billion on them in 1997. The same is true for religion, and Americans give $96 billion to religious organizations annually.
Some of the nutty claims can be put to the test. In a TED video (scroll to 2:20), magician James Randi swallows an entire bottle of sleeping pills. Not to worry—it’s homeopathic medicine, guaranteed to have no active ingredients.
Does Christianity have any more? The gospel stories of the healings of Jesus sound like a nutty infomercial rather than historical fact.

He’s the best physician
who knows the worthlessness of the most medicines.
— Benjamin Franklin

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Gay Marriage, Abortion, and Open Mindedness

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Abortion and gay marriageSenator Rob Portman (R-OH) now supports same-sex marriage, a reversal he recently made public. What caused the turnaround was his son coming out as gay two years ago.
Portman’s record against homosexual issues was pretty consistent. He voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, he supported the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and he voted to prohibit gay couples in Washington, DC from adopting.
He said about his change of heart:

What happened to me is really personal. I mean, I hadn’t thought a lot about this issue. Again, my focus has been on other issues over my public policy career.

Dick Cheney had been a closet supporter of gay marriage for years because of his lesbian daughter but in 2009 he also came out on the issue.
Why the delay? Republicans are hesitant to do the right thing on gay marriage because it’s politically inconvenient? Since when do you put what’s best for the party in front of what’s best? Still, they have company. I’m sure that was behind the Catholic Church pedophilia cover up—doing what’s right for individuals took a back seat to what was best for the Church. But that’s a side issue. It’s a step forward, and let’s celebrate politicians who take a potentially unpopular stand.
Imagining it vs. living it.
Here’s my question. I see that having a relative makes the issue one you can’t just push away, but why does it take that? Isn’t one of humanity’s super powers the ability to imagine themselves in new situations? Why couldn’t Portman or Cheney speculate, “Gee, what if this issue hit me directly? What if my own child was homosexual? Would I still not budge on ‘traditional marriage’?”
The tide has turned, and many conservative legislators who are now against same-sex marriage will change their minds in the next decade, but why must it take so long? Why can’t they mentally put themselves in Portman’s position and change their minds next week? (And when they finally do change, will they think back on Portman’s example and wonder why it took them so long?)
I guess it’s harder than it looks. Speculating about something must be a poor substitute for it actually happening, and Portman and Cheney would probably still hold their old positions if not for the push from their children.
How does this apply to abortion?
Let’s broaden this observation. One of my recent posts on abortion received nearly 1000 comments, and I argued there with several pro-life advocates. I’m guessing they were older men (related post: Why is it always men advancing the pro-life position?). Their positions were pretty simple: a fetus is a human life, and it’s just wrong to kill a human. That’s it—no nuance, no exceptions, no consideration for the harm of not having an abortion. And why should there be? It’s murder—end of story.
It seems to me that these antagonists are like the pre-enlightenment Portman or Cheney. They’re smart, and they can marshal arguments to support their position. And their position isn’t insane—abortion does kill a fetus.
It’s the tunnel vision that’s the problem. Let’s broaden the view, Senator Portman, and imagine that your own son were gay. Let’s broaden the view, Mr. Pro-Life, and imagine that your own 15-year-old daughter had an unwanted pregnancy. All the plans that you and your wife have for your daughter—graduating from high school, then college, and then a satisfying career and a family—are in jeopardy. How much school will she miss? What teams or clubs must she withdraw from? What commitments will she have to cancel for decorum or out of embarrassment?
It will be an enormous bump in the road if she places the child for adoption. But girls in that situation almost never do—just two percent of premarital births in the U.S. are placed for adoption. Now we’re talking about, not a bump in the road, but a fork to a completely different life, a life with her as a 16-year-old single mom living at home trying to make a life from the constrained options available.
Problem one is that Mr. Pro-Life can’t put himself in this situation, or at least can’t do it successfully. Imagining it is a poor substitute for actually hearing his daughter sobbing in her room and finding out what the problem is.
Problem two is where the lesson from Sen. Portman fails. Portman understands that he can’t make his son un-gay, but Mr. Pro-Life can encourage his daughter to become un-pregnant. He could cite extenuating circumstances in his situation, take care of the problem, and then return to his pro-life dogmatism.
We see this situation in the stories of women picketers of abortion clinics who, being human, have their own unwanted pregnancies. Or their daughters do. They’ll slip in the back door, have the abortion, and then be back on the picket lines days later. When asked about the hypocrisy, they say that other women are sluts. They, by contrast, had a good excuse.
For this reason, pro-lifers may never be able to understand the difficulty facing the nearly one million American women who choose abortion each year. And perhaps we will never have a reasoned conversation on this divisive issue.

I was always looking outside myself
for strength and confidence,
but it comes from within.
It is there all the time.
— Anna Freud

Photo credit: Cafepress

A Debt to Christianity?

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Does Christianity give us much? Do atheists or secularists owe it a debt?I recently came across a 2010 article by John Steinrucken titled, “Secularism’s Ongoing Debt to Christianity” in the conservative online magazine American Thinker.
I didn’t think much of it.
Steinrucken says that he’s an atheist, but he has an odd accommodationist point of view. I don’t see him making many new atheist friends, and his view of Christianity as a false but useful fiction to keep the Proletariat in line can’t endear him to Christians either. Still, dozens of sites reference his article, many of them Christian.
First, let’s understand his thesis.

Religious faith has made possible the advancement of Western civilization. That is, the glue that has held Western civilization together over the centuries is the Judeo-Christian tradition. … Western civilization’s survival, including the survival of open secular thought, depends on the continuance within our society of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

As an atheist, he doesn’t believe that there is anything behind Christian faith. And though the somewhat-Christian West is at the top of the pyramid at the moment, other societies have advanced quite well without Christianity—consider the Islamic Golden Age, China’s many dynasties, the Aztecs and Olmecs in Central America, the Incas and Aymara in the Andes, Mali and Egypt in Africa, Greece and Babylon in the Eastern Mediterranean, Angkor and Sukhothai in Southeast Asia, and India. He has a long way to go to show that Christianity does something that other religions don’t.
Next, it’s Christianity as a “moral compass.”

Can anyone seriously argue that crime and debauchery are not held in check by religion?

I say to any Christian who would be a rampaging maniac without religion: please remain a Christian! Since prisons aren’t overflowing with atheists, they tend to avoid crime simply because it’s the right thing to do.
If you wondered if this guy is really an atheist, he really looks like a clumsy Poe when he says:

Has there ever been a more perfect and concise moral code than the one Moses brought down from the mountain?

Wow—how many ways would this be wrong in American society? No, the law that Moses brought down from the mountain would be worse than useless. The Ten Commandments demand allegiance to God; the First Amendment allows religion but says that government must stay out of it. The Ten Commandments say nothing against slavery, genocide, and rape; today, we have a very different view of what’s right and wrong. The Ten Commandments presuppose a theocracy; the Constitution outlines a representative democracy.
He blunders into the question of morality and says that the secularist

can cite no overriding authority other than that of fashion.

Wrong again. Atheists point to a shared moral instinct. We’re all the same species, so we have pretty much the same moral programming. If Steinrucken is pointing to objective morality, I want evidence of such a thing. I’ve seen none.
For some reason, he has a chip on his shoulder about “secularists.” He pauses to paint a bizarre picture of how they fill their God-shaped hole. If it’s not nutty New Age nonsense,

they surrender themselves to secular ideologies or do-good causes, especially those in which they can mass with others in solidarity, shouting in unison mindless, ritualistic simplicities and waving placards of hackneyed and inane slogans.

My local atheist group organizes an event at the local blood center every eight weeks. At Christmas, we wrap presents at book stores, with donations going to a children’s hospital. We answer phones for the local public radio station pledge drive. We don’t shout mindless simplicities or wave signs with inane slogans—should we?
Next, we’re told that

secularism has never offered the people a practical substitute for religion.

Do you substitute something for malaria or cancer? Or do you simply make victims healthy?
But if you want to see it that way, the substitute for religion is reality.

We secularists should recognize that we owe much to the religionists, that we are not threatened by them, that we should grant to them their world.

They already have their world—read the First Amendment. I strongly support the demand that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
As for our not being threatened, guess again. Some Christians are eager to see prayer in public schools. To see Creationism taught in science class. To see prayers in government buildings from City Hall to Congress. To see “In God We Trust” continue as our official motto and the phrase “under God” remain in the Pledge. To see a de facto Christian requirement for public office.

Why should we be exercised over a Christmas Crèche in front of the county court house?

Because it spits on our governing document, that’s why. (Unlike what you may have heard, there actually are stupid questions.) Do we care about the First Amendment or not? If so, respect it and protect it.

And what harm will come to a child who hears prayer in the schoolroom?

You tell me. Should we deliver morning prayers by cycling through the religions represented in America, giving turns to Muslims, Mormons, Satanists, Wiccans, Hindus, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Catholics, and so on? No conceivable harm to the schoolchildren, right?
Or—crazy idea—maybe we should leave the religious indoctrination at home and just focus on education at school.
Steinrucken doesn’t think much of “elitists,” which pop up occasionally as scoundrels in his essay. They stand on the shoulders of the Christian masses to practice “their conceits and dilettantes.” But it would be wise of them to

publicly hold in high esteem the institutions of Christianity and Judaism, and to respect those who do believe and to encourage and to give leeway to those who, in truth, will be foremost in the trenches defending us against those who would have us all bow down to a different and unaccommodating faith.

So fight fire with fire? When the Muslim believers attack, we must respond with Christian believers for some reason.
No, you don’t fight fire with fire; you fight it with water. A civilization that is immune to the siren call of Christianity won’t care much for Islam either.
But from Steinrucken’s standpoint, what’s the problem? If Christianity is the special sauce that makes a civilization run, what’s the problem with replacing it with Islam? Wouldn’t it provide the same thing? He’s asserted that Christianity is the best but provided no evidence.
This flabby apology for American Christianity never gets off the ground. It’s not that Christianity is the foundation on which is built American democracy; it’s the other way around. The Constitution is what we should defend and hold in high esteem. It’s the Constitution that gives religion its freedom.

A religious war
is like children fighting over
who has the strongest imaginary friend.

Photo credit: Jonathan

Lee Strobel’s Fragile Argument

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Lee Strobel likes to introduce himself as a former atheist—quite an unpleasant atheist, in fact. As a tough-minded and award-winning journalist, he wanted to get to the bottom of the nonsense about Christianity when his wife became a Christian.
He was the legal editor at the Chicago Tribune where they had a sign reading, “If your mother says she loves you, get a second opinion.” Sounds like they take their fact finding seriously!
Journalists are great; it’s hypocrisy that I don’t care for. Strobel’s The Case for Christ starts off with this tough-minded search, and yet everyone interviewed in his book is a committed Christian. If this is journalism, where is the other side of the story? Looks like the conclusion was drawn before he started.
I have no problem with a Christian writing a Christian book; just don’t try to pass off this project as unbiased journalism.
Strobel wrote a summary of this search. I’d like to respond to his arguments.
He first picks up elements from the gospels—that Jesus was executed, that the tomb was empty, and that the opponents had to claim that the body was stolen—and uses them to argue for the truth of the overall story. That’s like saying that in The Godfather, the motivations of the movie studio executive made complete sense because he’d found a horse head in his bed.
The gospel story is a story. There really wasn’t a horse head, Indiana Jones didn’t really find the lost Ark of the Covenant, and Dorothy didn’t really land in Oz. Why imagine that there was a resurrection? Don’t show internal consistency between elements of the gospel story without first showing that it’s history.
Who Would Die for a Lie?
Strobel next says:

[The disciples] wouldn’t have been willing to die brutal martyrs’ deaths if they knew this was all a lie.

How do we know that this is accurate? Christianity Today reports that “The tradition of apostles’ martyrdom goes back at least to the beginning of the third century.” So we know this because it was written down 150 years after the events? Quite flimsy evidence.
And what does he mean by “if they knew this was all a lie”? In the first place, I don’t think that the gospel story was a deliberate invention, like a hoax, so this doesn’t attack a point I’d make. In the second place, Strobel apparently imagines that the disciples were charged with crimes that could be dismissed simply by saying, “Just kidding! Jesus wasn’t really raised from the dead.”
What crimes are we talking about? Sedition? Disturbing the peace? General rabble rousing? Denying Jesus doesn’t get you off from these. This “Why would they die for a lie?” argument collapses. (I’ve written more here.)
Straw Man Arguments Are Easier
He next “investigates” whether the reported post-resurrection appearances were hallucinations or visions. This is another argument I would never make just like I would never investigate whether the Cowardly Lion was a hallucination or vision.
This reminds me of the joke about the guy looking for something at night under a street light. Guy 2 comes over and asks what’s up.
“Lost my keys,” Guy 1 says.
So Guy 2 looks around to help. After a few minutes, he says, “I sure don’t see them. Where did you lose them, exactly?”
“Over there.” Guy 1 points to a dark part of a parking lot.
“Then why are we looking here??”
“The light’s better here.”
And that’s why Strobel brings up the hallucination argument and similar straw men. They aren’t serious arguments. Nobody raises them. But these he can knock over. The light’s better here.
Other Dying and Rising Gods
Strobel says:

Was the resurrection simply the recasting of ancient mythology, akin to the fanciful tales of Osiris or Mithras? If you want to see a historian laugh out loud, bring up that kind of pop-culture nonsense.

Unfortunately, all we have of Strobel’s juggernaut of an argument is this vague reference, so we’ll just have to do our best as we risk historians’ mocking laughter.
So the dying-and-rising aspect of the Jesus story couldn’t have come from the dying-and-rising aspect of gods that preceded Jesus like Tammuz, Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, Attis, and Baal? These were gods from nearby cultures, which would likely have been familiar to literate first-century Greeks, and these gods all died and rose again. No chance of resurrection envy influencing the gospel story?
The typical response is that these other gods’ stories are different from the Jesus story. Of course they’re different—otherwise, they’d be the same story. But they sure sound similar. For example, in a story originating centuries before Jesus, Dionysus was the product of one of Zeus’s many affairs. His jealous wife Hera had the infant Dionysus eaten by Titans, but Zeus brought him back to life through the mortal woman Semele.
Dead, and then born by a mortal. Brought back to life by the ruler of all gods. Is something of that present—nay, central—to the gospel story? You decide if there’s any chance of cross-pollination.
Second-century Christian apologist Justin Martyr even used the similarities to his advantage. He said:

When we say [that Jesus] was produced without sexual union, and that He … was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter.1

Not only did damning similarities exist, Justin argued, but they were deliberately planted in Greek myths by the devil:

For when [the Greeks] tell that [Dionysus] was begotten by [Semele], and when they relate, that being torn in pieces, and having died, he rose again, and ascended to heaven … do I not perceive that [the devil] has imitated the prophecy announced by the patriarch Jacob, and recorded by Moses?2

Justin not only acknowledged the similarities, he embraced them!
Strobel ends his essay:

After I had thoroughly investigated the matter, I reached an unexpected conclusion: it would actually take more faith to maintain my atheism than to become a follower of Jesus.

Yeah, whatever. Do some objective research and maybe you’ll reach a different conclusion.
I can imagine that Strobel used to be an atheist. But not that he was an atheist just like me.

And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant,
the words of the Bible were used
to beat plowshares into swords
— Alan Wilson Watts

1Justin Martyr, “Analogies to the History of Christ,” chapter 21 of First Apology.
2Justin Martyr, “The Devil, since he emulates the truth, has invented fables about Bacchus, Hercules, and Sculapius,” chapter 69 of Dialogue with Trypho.

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 10/12/11.)

Photo credit: Illuminating Distractions

Separating Fact From Fiction: How Does Christianity Fare?

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when you throw your net into a sea of truth, what do you get? do you get Christianity?How do you separate fact from fiction? What procedure do you go through when confronted with a truth claim? This procedure should be practical rather than cumbersome, and it must be objective and fair rather than being biased toward a particular worldview. The goal should be finding the truth, not supporting a predefined conclusion.
I’ll go first. I only have two principles.

  • Accept the scientific and historical consensus, where there is one. In fields where there’s a high barrier to entry (becoming a physicist, for example), a layman is unqualified to evaluate evidence in that field and must rely on experts. That doesn’t mean that the experts are right, but the consensus is the best provisional approximation of the truth that we have at the moment.
  • Use the Principle of Analogy. This is the common-sense observation that we have much experience already with things that really exist (rocks, planets) and things that don’t (unicorns, legends). Let’s use this experience to find the best fit for any new claims. (I discussed the Principle of Analogy in detail here.)

Let’s take this procedure for a test drive with 15 categories of claims. (As we go through these, see what your procedure would make of them.)
Mythical animals such as unicorns, fairies, and leprechauns: fiction. Science tells us that these don’t exist and that there is no precedent for the magical powers attributed to some of these animals.
Animal surprises like the coelacanth, gorilla, Komodo dragon, and okapi: fact. Conclusive evidence for these animals was discovered only in the twentieth century.
Cryptozoological claims such as the Loch Ness Monster, Yeti, and Bigfoot: fiction. Science says that the arguments for these animals are insufficient. However, since these are (typically) claimed to have no special powers, there is a chance that evidence simply hasn’t been found. Science has been surprised before by new animals.
Curious life forms like the giraffe, blue whale, bacteria, volcanic vent life, and carnivorous plants: fact. Science tells us that they exist, even if we haven’t seen any personally.
Mythology like the Iliad, Gilgamesh, and Beowulf: fiction. Myths are sacred narratives that explain some aspect of reality (for example, the myth of Prometheus explains why we have fire and the Genesis creation myth explains where everything came from). History notes many examples of supernatural tales like these for which there is no evidence.
Legends like Merlin, Lady Godiva, and the Choking Doberman urban legend: fiction. Though they can include miracles, legends are otherwise plausible events that (unlike myths) are grounded in history. History tells us that there is insufficient evidence.
History like Alexander the Great, Hannibal, and Julius Caesar: fact. These generals won some remarkable battles. Though supernatural stories arose around these men (not surprising in a pre-scientific culture), history rejects the supernatural elements.
Fiction like The Wizard of Oz and Harry Potter: fiction (obviously). Most are clearly labeled as fiction, though the label is occasional lost or ignored—Orson Welles’ Halloween, 1938 War of the Worlds radiocast is a famous example.
Individual claims of supernatural events like miracles, ghosts, and demonic possession: fiction. Though these are widespread and customized to each culture, history and science reject these for lack of evidence.
Individual claims of extraterrestrials like seeing a UFO or an alien encounters: fiction. Like claims for cryptids, these don’t rely on the supernatural, but science has insufficient evidence to conclude that they exist, particularly when other explanations (hoaxes, misidentification, etc.) are available. “But no one has debunked case X!” may be true but is hardly proof of an alien claim.
Pseudoscience like ESP; telepathy; Ouija boards; Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, and other predictors of the future; and speaking to the dead: fiction. Insufficient evidence.
Fringe medicine like homeopathy, crystals, and Kinoki foot pads: fiction. With the stakes so high, fringe medical claims are common, whether by charlatans or people who honestly think they’ve found a new cure. But when alternative medicine provides the evidence that it works, it’s simply called “medicine.”
Science like black holes, undersea volcanoes, planets around distant stars, quantum physics, and the Big Bang: fact. Science has a remarkable track record, though, as stated above, its claims are provisional.
Conspiracy theories like the moon hoax or 9/11 as an inside job: fiction. Some conspiracies are accurate history, but many, like these examples, do not have the evidence.
Books from the other guy’s religion like Hinduism, Buddhism, Scientology, Christian Science, and Mormonism: fiction. Historians discard the supernatural. That supernatural claims were made is often history, of course, but not that the claims are accurate.
That’s 15 categories, some of which are fact and some fiction. What are your criteria for separating fact from fiction, and what do they make of these examples?
The challenge for the Christian is to have an objective list with no “except for my religion” caveats. When Christians throw their net of truth into the water, a winnowing procedure that’s fine-meshed will pull up Christianity but also a lot of other religions. A procedure that’s coarser (like mine) will reject all religions.
What objective procedure can Christians have that will show Christianity as the only valid religion? I can imagine none.

Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions …
are ever destroyed by their enemies
until they have been corrupted and weakened
by their friends.
— Walter Lippman

Photo credit: Hasin Hayder