time is better spent telling of things that actually happened How do you know what actually happened outside of your direct experience? Anything that occurred

time is better spent telling of things that actually happened How do you know what actually happened outside of your direct experience? Anything that occurred outside the direct experience of a still-living human is known only through the stories people at the time told each other about it: incomplete, imperfectly remembered, biased towards the accounts of survivors who lived to tell their stories or those powerful enough to have their voices heard, even when all involved have the best of intentions of an accurate retelling. Unless the event made a sufficient impact on the physical world (which is itself going to be a very incomplete picture of events) then events older than ~80 years are accessible to us only through such stories. If you think deliberate fiction is damaging because the human mind doesn't fully distinguish it from truth, even when it knows it to be fiction, then you must hate accounts of "what actually happened" even more: They are often incorrect and yet label themselves as truth, so the human mind is even more likely to take as "truth" something that is incorrect. If the human mind does not always distinguish fiction clearly, then it is even less capable of discerning incorrect accounts of what actually happened from those that are more accurate. Let's take Inglorious Bastards as an example: What is more damaging, a dark comedy that presents itself as a fiction loosely inspired by actual events? Or a selective sampling of events that presents itself as the truth in denying events like the Holocaust-- something made ever more possible as time passes and those with direct experience die off? Butterflies in this case are an excellent example of the problems of non fiction as well: The dead butterflies accurately depict what a butterfly looks like by using a pose that shows its full detail a bit better. But in providing that detail it loses the nuance of how a butterfly would look in the wild. And yet a pose from the the wild would give less information about its full visual detail, and no single pose from the wild could fully encapsulate its natural state. This is for one small living thing that we can observe now, today. How much more incomplete of a picture must we have of older events? If you are disregarding fiction for the reasons you gave, you must also disregard nearly all aspects of prior accounts of human events as being similarly flawed and even more pernicious for their claims of being the truth.