You seem to think this question is some sort of a “gotcha,” and I’m not sure why, since the answer is very self-evidently “yes.”
As with Linnaeus and taxonomy, Melvil Dewey’s Decimal System only informs us how libraries using his system sort their shelves. Outside of that, it does not inform us whether a given text is actually fiction or non-fiction.
As to the above question, of course the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Sutras, most of Plato and the ancient Greeks, the Norse Poetic Edda, and the Greek Myths (Heinrich Schliemann and Hissarlik was Troy notwithstanding) are fiction by the definition that has nothing to do with the Dewey fucking Decimal System.
The bible should be classified in the same way as those other examples (except Plato - what, the Atlantis legend?). That’s obvious to anybody who does not consider Christianity a special, unique truth.
But the classification is not fiction. Not in today’s English.
BTW, American humor books are classified in DD under 817, British humor under 827. Are they fiction, literature, or some other class entirely? The entire 800s are deemed Literature, whether it is high or low, poetry or drama, nonfiction and criticism about literature, or dictionaries. Technically, fiction is 8x3 for all x from 1 through 8. Literature therefore is a higher, encompassing, classification than the others.
Religious mythologies are classified in the 290s, under Religion; folklore and legends under 398, under Social Sciences.
I wouldn’t try to backfit Melvil Dewey’s 1890s victorian viewpoint into any modern discussion.
Because “literature” means “fiction the self proclaimed intellectual elite are pretentious about”. It’s still fiction.
Literature includes both fiction and nonfiction and can be written or spoken creative works.
https://www.thoughtco.com/difference-between-fiction-and-literature-739696
If that’s the definition we’re using, then everything in a library is “literature”, and the term therefore has no use in library classifications.
I did not advance this claim, I don’t even believe I mentioned, or even implied any particular religion, but may have on a contextual reply. - So with that clarified, I will ask of you still see a contradiction, and if so if you can explain it beyond the assumption you seem to be making about apparently what you thought I posted.
Well, i think literature is writing the CDs of music the library used to lend, and the DVDs of movies they still lend, along with the jigsaw puzzles and cake pans you can borrow from my town library, are not literature.
But yes, i think all the books in the library are “literature”. I would never have said that anything is “literature” instead of beinging fiction. I’d have said that Shakespeare is plays and poetry rather than fiction.
The Bible includes poetry and (factually bad) history, and myth, and law, and collections of letters, and memoirs, and probably other stuff. It’s a mishmash of different kinds of literature.
I don’t know how many intellectual elites use “literature” that way nowadays, but one does still hear about the divide between “literary fiction” and “genre fiction.”
Please clarify whether you think a future mythic Christianity is exactly equivalent in every reasonable way to the mythology of old or not, first.
Please define what you mean of ‘mythic Christianity’, and what is ‘mythology of old’. I have already compared and equated Dantes Inferno to the Legends of Hercules. Neither are religious works, but can be said to be ‘myths’ or perhaps works of religious fiction in a culture of a particular religion where the work was pulled from the religious framework. If that is what you mean, I would say they equate.