Does “society” believe in Judaism? There’s a difference between a religion being practiced, and it being the majority. Some other religion might someday come along and take the dominant-religion status away from Christianity in the Western Hemisphere, or Islam in the developing world. But even if not as dominant religions, they’ll still be practiced.
Jesus, according to scholars and Cecil himself was a real person. That doesnt mean legends didnt get written about Him after He did- same with Geo Washington.
The Greek religion also is categorized under 200- Religion- just like the Bible is. Neither is under Fiction.
I don’t understand how where something gets shelved in a library determines anything about whether its fictional.
Fiction is a modern literary category: a story created for entertainment or artistic purposes with no claim to being a cosmic truth.
Myth consists of “sacred narratives” that explain the world’s origins or a culture’s values. To a librarian, a myth is a “non-fiction” subject because it is a historical cultural artifact, not because the events in it literally happened.
Categorizing something as “Religion” or “Mythology” is a way of saying, “This book represents a belief system,” which is a factual statement about the book, not necessarily a factual statement about the events described within it.
We should not mistake archival categorization for ontological truth.
It would be like saying:
The grocer put the tomatoes in the vegetable aisle, therefore they cannot be fruits.
Classification is a matter of convenience. Libraries are like grocery stores—they organize by usage, not by essence. Storing a book on the “Religion” shelf to make it easy to find is a logistical choice, not a historical validation.
Teaching the Bible as literature should not be labeled fiction. It isn’t “fiction” in the literal sense. It is mythology as is the Greek/Roman pantheon, Norse, mythos, Hindu mythos, etc. They are legends mostly passed down by word of mouth until someone writes an interpretation of it. Beowulf is myth and legend, but not “fiction” in the same sense as “Lord of the Rings” or “The Blythedale Romance” or “Dracula”. These books were written by single authors with a story, and a theme in mind. The author invents the story and the characters with a particular lesson/intent. Myths and legends are stories slowly developed by a community of people to explain things they don’t understand, and maybe enforce a cultural norm. They take years and changes, both culturally and different interpretations to develop. It’s not real or factual, but it is not fiction either. I took the bible as lit in my Junior year in high school. It’s pretty much unavoidable if you want to understand western literature. I knew the difference and it probably helped me on my journey to Atheism.
Labeling it fiction is just factually wrong. Having said that I’m not talking about teaching Christianity and “bible study” in the religious sense. I’m only speaking to the teaching the different mythos that exist across cultures, and how they inform fiction.
Right. Dewey does not make distinctions among religions. /s
220 Bible
221 Old Testament
222 Historical books of Old Testament
223 Poetic books of Old Testament
224 Prophetic books of Old Testament
225 New Testament
226 Gospels & Acts
227 Epistles
228 Revelation (Apocalypse)
229 Apocrypha & pseudepigrapha
230 Christian theology
231 God
232 Jesus Christ & his family
233 Humankind
234 Salvation (Soteriology) & grace
235 Spiritual beings
236 Eschatology
237 [Unassigned]
238 Creeds & catechisms
239 Apologetics & polemics
240 Christian moral & devotional theology
241 Moral theology
242 Devotional literature
243 Evangelistic writings for individuals
244 [Unassigned]
245 [Unassigned]
246 Use of art in Christianity
247 Church furnishings & articles
248 Christian experience, practice, life
249 Christian observances in family life
250 Christian orders & local church
251 Preaching (Homiletics)
252 Texts of sermons
253 Pastoral office (Pastoral theology)
254 Parish government & administration
255 Religious congregations & orders
256 [Unassigned]
257 [Unassigned]
258 [Unassigned]
259 Activities of the local church
260 Christian social theology
261 Social theology
262 Ecclesiology
263 Times, places of religious observance
264 Public worship
265 Sacraments, other rites & acts
266 Missions
267 Associations for religious work
268 Religious education
269 Spiritual renewal
270 Christian church history
271 Religious orders in church history
272 Persecutions in church history
273 Heresies in church history
274 Christian church in Europe
275 Christian church in Asia
276 Christian church in Africa
277 Christian church in North America
278 Christian church in South America
279 Christian church in other areas
280 Christian denominations & sects
281 Early church & Eastern churches
282 Roman Catholic Church
283 Anglican churches
284 Protestants of Continental origin
285 Presbyterian, Reformed, Congregational
286 Baptist, Disciples of Christ, Adventist
287 Methodist & related churches
288 [Unassigned]
289 Other denominations & sects
290 Other & comparative religions
291 Comparative religion
292 Classical (Greek & Roman) religion
The records are lost and those religions dead because Christianity put an great deal of effort into destroying those religions and all information about them.
So, the equivalent situation would be if some other religions(s) gained control of civilization and spent over a thousand years destroying every trace of Christianity they came across. Those “extensive records” would have long since been destroyed, the churches all leveled, and so on and any knowledge of Christian doctrine and practice would have to be literally dug up out of overlooked ruins.
So at that point I expect the surviving knowledge of Christianity would basically be pop culture stories about it filtered through centuries of word-of-mouth, at best.
That pretty much explains why so little is known about Roman Mithraism. We have no literature, but we have lots of artwork and underground temples, called Mithraea. I favor David Ulansey’s theory that it was a wholly new religion, drawing upon imagery from older Mithraic worship but adding a new knowledge of cosmology on top. But we’ll likely never know for certain.
Well, the participants of Mithraism were not known for being open about the details of their practices. We don’t know how much they did write down, but whatever they did, they kept well hidden. That’s not a good recipe for enduring over time. Similar to the Anglo-Saxon pagan beliefs, because little was written down, it didn’t take much for it to get lost forever.
Compare that to other religions, like Christianity or Hinduism, whose participants wrote profusely about their beliefs. Even if a lot of it is lost, there’s so much of it, it’s nearly impossible to lose all of it. Or, Judaism, which despite being a small and scattered religion for a long time, maintained their practices over many generations in part due to their prolific writings.
We have much better technology available for locating and destroying records however to make up for it. Honestly, if there was a similar period of suppression but with modern or better technology to back it up, I could see the fact of Christianity even having existed being outright erased from history, much less the details about it.
That’s the way it is with Mystery Religions. But it didn’t help that the Christians actively campaigned against them.
I suspect a big reason Christianity and religion gets special treatment is that Dewey and other creators of library classification systems would get into a lot of trouble lumping the Bible in with fiction. More confusing is that theology is clearly non-fiction and goes in there also.
I have the Bible in my sf collection as fiction.
Now I know that libraries today separate current and recent fiction from literature as an aid to people finding stuff - the same way mysteries and sf are separated from fiction. The really interesting question is what is fiction and what is non-fiction. Even before Truman Capote S. J. Perelman wrote a travel book about going through the Pacific with his family. In his letters he noted that he didn’t find anything interesting to write about in Indonesia (still a Dutch colony then) and so he’d have to make it up. Fiction or non-fiction?
Absolutely. I wanted to contrast how the fate of persecuted religions is in part based on how widespread their use of writings is.
Not really. The Greek Myths and the Norse myths only survived due to Christian monks writing those legends down and saving them. Along with others.
No, what explains it is that Roman Mithraism. was a secret religion, they wrote almost nothing down (that was forbidden) and nothing was shared except with fellow members.
The “mystery” (literally meaning “unspoken”) element is key to why so little is known of the cult: it was a secret religion, to be practised only by initiates.
Writing anything down was forbidden. But good points.
The idea that we only have a fraction of Greek and Roman learning and literature because most of it was destroyed by Christians is a common assumed truism in much New Atheist discourse. But this is substantially a simplistic myth based on a number of misconceptions and errors of fact. If anything, we have a succession of Christian scholars to thank for all of the ancient learning that survives…This is almost entirely nonsense. As Holland later goes on to point out, there is actually no evidence of any such “systematic” or even sporadic but extensive attempt at extinguishing ancient learning.
Fiction is a subset of literature, not a separate thing.
Libraries separate out current function because that’s the most popular stuff. But they don’t say, “this isn’t literature”. They just have a table up front displaying some recent books they think will interest their readers.
I’ve never seen a library that has separate sections for SF or mysteries. They’re just shelved alphabetically with all the rest of the fiction. I have seen some that put little stickers on the bindings with pictures of rocket ships or magnifying glasses or whatnot, for the aid of patrons seeking a particular genre.
My library has separate sections for science fiction and for mysteries. As i read those more often than non-genre fiction, i find them helpful.
As I said above, humor gets a different Dewey number than fiction. Humorous fiction is shelved and treated differently than books marketed as humor, although the dividing line, as all dividing lines, is often blurry. As a collector of humor I’ve encountered books - in bookstores and libraries - sometimes in a separate section and sometimes merged in with fiction. Or memoirs. Or politics. Or nonfiction. Nobody knows what to do with it or what the boundaries are. My life is a misery.
Both DD and LoC put fiction into different codes than what we now consider to be literature. No public library I’ve been to that uses DD mixes the two. Literature is shelved in the 800s, fiction is not. LoC has subclass PS for American literature, with PS360-380 for prose and PS370-380 for prose fiction. (PS430-439 for Wit and Humor. Satire.) Very few public libraries use LoC, though. And older fiction, such as Moby Dick or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, does not get numbers in the 370-380 range. They both get 813.3 number from DD. Whether some individual libraries shelve them in the fiction section I can’t say; it’s possible but probably rare.
P.J. O’Rourke once grudgingly admitted in an essay that it’s fair to call him a “humorist,” seeing as whatever he writes inevitably ends up on the same shelf as Two Million Very Hilarious Things to Do with a Frog You Just Sat On.
Does it? I thought the 800 series was literature in general, 810 being American literature, and 813 being American fiction - and a similar structure for British literature and fiction (820 & 823, respectively) French, German, and so on.
Is this wikipedia entry incorrect?
As I detailed above, the entire 800s is labeled literature in DD. That include fiction, plays, poetry, humor, and much nonfiction.
Nevertheless, as I also said, the term “literature” is in modern usage is reserved for classic works. They include, but are not limited to works of prose fiction. Fiction, by contrast, is - almost exclusively in modern usage - prose. Publishers, libraries, and bookstores generally keep fiction and “literature” separate, just as humor is separated from both.