Yet fiction and religion do part ways in one crucial respect: I know, and my readers know, that my stories are made up. Indeed, the most destructive interpretations of sacred texts are literal. Fundamentalist readings of the Bible or the Koran insist that stories that could be illuminating as metaphors happened in exactly this way and represent the irrefutable, factual truth. Literalism leads to inflexibility and fanaticism. Certitude about the truth of stories that are scientifically impossible encourages an irrationality that spreads to everything, and that starts ominously to resemble
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