It is (or can be) serious kindling for the fire pit....

It is serious, it's a weapon of war. A very carefully constructed Pysops instrument to bend the will of people to be subordinate to the state. Plain and simple, that is the purpose. The effect of belief in these things is very well studed, but the governments who wrote them long ago and still enforced today. Part of the eveolutionary process of pyschological control of a majority by a minority. Big lies work the best. Life after Death, Part the Red Sea, Commit genocide on Sodem and Gormora and blame it one the. And on and on ad nauseam..

If you can’t take it as fact, then you can’t take it seriously!
It is a fictional book written by men at a time when they didn’t really have the knowledge and understanding of the world around them.

I put it up there a little above Homer's Odyssey. And way below Feynman's Lectures on Physics and the US Constitution.

Agree - it isn't fact, but there are things that can be learned from it if read with an open mind. It is not fiction. It is human written tradition.