Telling fact from fiction

[Angrboda]

Fair enough.

This is meant to be a first pass, a smell test. A way to look for obvious fiction. It's not meant to validate the accounts any further than that. We're just comparing believable to non-believable.

You're comparing believable to non-believable, and your fist criterion is whether or not the events the narrative recounts are believable? That seems rather circular. It also begs the question when applied to religious texts. If you're an atheist, you might see this as a win. If you're a theist, you might see this as biased instead. So it is a politically loaded principle.

There are no general indicators that something is fact. Only negative indicators that something doesn't comport with reality as we know it, which may be very different for different people. Your principles are geared toward identifying something as fiction, only. They say very little about whether or not an account is fact. That requires a different approach. Looking up independent attestations. Comparing our acceptance of events to our acceptance of other similar events. And so on. So you're not really teaching how to tell fact from fiction, but rather fiction from bad fiction.