The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

The remark encapsulates a position Dawkins has often taken in debates about religion and education: that biblical literacy can be culturally valuable while theological claims should not be presented as factual truth in secular instruction. By calling the Bible “fiction, myth, poetry,” he frames it as a human literary artifact—one that has profoundly shaped Western art, language, and moral imagination—rather than a reliable account of the natural world. The quote thus argues for teaching the Bible in the way one might teach Homer or Shakespeare: as influential literature to be analyzed, not as authoritative reality to be believed. It also reflects Dawkins’s broader critique of faith-based epistemology and his preference for evidential standards in public education.