It may be that reading stories has, as a side-effect, an increased probability of believing something else which is false, even though it doesn’t involve any belief in the fiction itself. (People who read a lot of novels may be more inclined to believe in something false even though they don’t believe in the truth of the novels they read — say that life is going to tend to work out more like a novel than it really tends to.) If so, that’s sad. But saying that people who care about truth should never believe things they have no reason to believe is a rather different claim from saying that people who care about truth should never do things that could possibly expose them to an increased risk of error in other, not logically related beliefs. (Drinking whiskey will no doubt do that too, but if the argument had gone from abandoning religion to teatotaling this would quite rightly be seen as a really gross sort of bait-and-switch.)

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Now, some of your cells may bear the burden more than others, eg if you pay your taxes by maintaining your food consumption unchanged, but cutting back on your entertainment budget, the change might affect your brain cells more than your leg cells. But I don’t see how it avoids taxing your cells, in the sense of making some of your cells do without things they would otherwise have had. (Of course, if the government is efficient then what it spends the tax money on should more than make up for it).

As Glen says, the fallacy of division is an informal one, sometimes for something to be true of the whole it must be true of some of the parts.

That seems like a pretty simple and coherent narrative. And yet…it’s true.

I’m don’t agree with you on the difference in quality between contemporary and historic or religious stories, although I certainly agree that a lot of contemporary entertainment is mindless and silly. Seems that this may be a matter of taste.

Back to Robin’s question – I think it poses a false comparison. Giving up religion because of truth is an example of someone giving up a literal belief in the face of knowledge. But very few people hold literal belief in most stories, so there’s no reason that learning that the stories are fictional should affect them in any way. It shouldn’t be news to anyone that Gandalf doesn’t exist, but what does that matter?

Where the use of truth to undermine religion gets challenging is when you’re dealing with people who treat religion as a collection of inspiring allegory and useful rituals that help them improve their life in some way. That is, like you (and me), they hold no literal belief, and so arguments asserting the falseness of Christian beliefs should have no effect on them. There’s nothing intrinsically contradictory about being inspired by a fiction.

* I say “some” with intent – the Christian canon contains much that is inspiring and good, but it also contains some things I find repugnant, at least in their plain reading.

One of the reasons I am a Christian is because I find the stories so potent. As a multi-cultural library of oral histories, the Bible is littered with resonant stories. Deliciously, later writers reference what has come before, casting meaning through the lens of their own contemporary experience. We add an additional layer by reading these parables in the present tense. Conversely, today’s fiction and television generally disappoint. Contemporary narratives often lack the prismatic quality of religious texts, perhaps as a result of being worked over by fewer writers.

Being “faithful” does not require a suspension of disbelief. While I, as a devout, church-going, Christian do not believe in the literal truth of someone becoming un-dead, the metaphor of resurrection is in itself truthful and compelling. (E.g.: resurrection as a comment about how our ideas and actions can flourish beyond our own mortality; resurrection as a reminder that things sometimes change radically for the better just as we give up hope.) Similarly, the horn blows that sent the walls of Jericho tumbling down reveal the truth of the transcendent power of collective action- be it genocidal or philanthropic. Religiosity is not an abdication of reason, it is an embrace of the power of parable.