Tunesmith, how young are you? You sound a bit like me when I was sixteen, discovered the writings of Philip Wylie, and learned that not everything I was being taught in school was necessarily true. I was a real pain in the butt for quite a while.

Churches (not all, grant you, but a fair number of the more liberal ones) have been batting this subject around for years. The adult forums in some of the neighborhood churches I mentioned above have been having discussions along these lines for at least twenty-five years that I know of. Undoubtledly the reason you don't know this is that you wouldn't be caught dead within ten blocks of a church, and this, of course, makes you an authority on religion.

As to the media, there have been several television shows on the historical bases and the evolution of religion within recent years (last five or ten) and they keep coming back. One was a series entitled "The Search for the Historical Jesus" (Discovery Channel, if I remember right). I believe this was where I learned (mentioned above) about the historical records of a Joshua bar Joseph who was crucified (standard Roman method of execution at the time) as a disruptive influence. The Romans kept very good records. There is no "hard evidence" in these records that say unequivocally that this person was the Jesus of the Bible, but the fact that "Jesus" is the Greek equivalent of "Joshua," and that this Joshua had a group of followers is enough for the faithful to latch onto as sufficient evidence. Not really enough to call absolute proof, but it does blow a bit of a hole in the arguments of those who insist that he didn't exist. So it breaks down to a matter of faith, n'est-ce pas?

There was another more general telecast recently, featuring a group of anthropologists and archeologists searching for archeological evidence for some of the various stories in the Bible. The book of Exodus didn't come off too well as an accurate historical record. It seems that, contrary to popular belief, the Egyptians never kept slaves. The assumption was made by archeologists sometime in the nineteenth century that the pyramids would have been impossible to build without slave labor. More recent research (not based on mere assumption) shows that the ancient Egyptians were remarkably enlightened for the times and had learned early on that keeping slaves is not economically feasible over the long run, so they didn't. The crossing of the Red Sea has drawn all sorts of speculation, assuming that the Israelites were ever in Egypt in the first place. Another fact that cast serious doubt on the story is that evidence has been found on the Sinai Peninsula of the remains of shepherds' campfires that can be dated as far back as 6,000 years ago, but no signs of any group of any size wandering the area for forty years. Any group of the size indicated in the Bible would have left plenty of evidence, and archeologists have not been able to find it (maybe it's like WMDs in Iraq?). The conclusion that some of them drew was that the story told in Exodus is allegorical. Like much of the Bible (fundamentalists hate that!).

In addition to a substantial number of television shows (granted, shown on channels watched by the more serious-minded, like Discovery, or the History Channel, or PBS, not the Big Three commercial channels, or MTV, or the Cartoon Channel, or Comedy Central, or Nickelodeon), there is a whole library of books. If you are seriously pursuing knowledge and not just messing around, I would recommend that you start with something solid and scholarly, like A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam by Karen Armstrong. Karen Armstrong was once a nun, but she left the Church. Now, she is a historian, and in her books she deals with various aspects of religion and religious belief. She doesn't mince words. And she's not particularly friendly toward fundamentalism, orthodoxy, and organized religion. She is not trying to sell anything, she's just laying it out for you to look at. This is where religion came from, this is how it evolved over time, and this is what it's all about.

If I wanted to learn about the real nature of the Cosmos, I wouldn't start by watching "The X-Files" and reading books like Flying Saucers are Real. I would start with the writings of people like Timothy Ferris or Stephen W. Hawking. And I would take the same approach if I were seriously interested in learning about religion and its history.

Don Firth