Grump, grump

1) I was looking up some reviews for a book that Kathie Holly (the other bookmobile person and a retired school teacher) had recommended to me. The book won a number of regional awards, was nominated for national prizes and had been made into a Hallmark TV movie. The vast majority of the brief reviews I found were very positive. The handful that were negative all seem to have been written by high school kids who had been "forced" to read the book for class. Their complaints sounded so much alike that I suspect a group got together and wrote a template for them to follow. What was more interesting to me was that all of these comments included grammatical errors, misspelled words, sentence fragments and so on. That did not make their complaints sound well-grounded, I must admit.

2) Does anyone else notice how bad the so-called religious and biblical programs are on the History, History International, National Geographic and the Discovery Channels?

First off, they have about fifteen minutes of content that they stretch to an hour by constantly repeating the same text before and after every commercial break, and they use the same video clips again and again.

Second, no one seems to do even basic fact-checking for them. A recent program on the Ark of the Covenant several times used the example of the death of Uzzah (see II Samuel 6) to prove how dangerous the Ark was. Yet they always spoke of this in terms of things Moses did, including how Moses had the Ark placed in a tent afterward to protect the people from the Ark. I suppose no one noticed that the story is not about Moses but David, who lived about 400 years later.

Third, they take quotes from various scholars and experts out of context and make it sound like whatever they want it to sound like. They do not indicate whether or not the scholar or expert is actually recognized as such or simply claims to be such. And half the time they wind up expounding some crazy theory that the producers simply tell as if it were as good as any reputable theory -- and conclude with a statement that basically says, "No one can prove this ISN'T true or DIDN'T happen -- so maybe it did." If you pay close attention to most of the programs, there is usually one sane person who points out all the reasons why the absurd is absurd, but reason is overwhelmed by the vastly over-represented voices of those who are committed to the more entertaining (that is to say, more marketable) fantasy.

Fourth, they speak as though there is a single Christian perspective on all sorts of things. This was most obvious in a program I watched recently in which the Septuagint (an ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures) was spoken of as some esoteric collection containing many books that were not accepted in the Christian Bible. This is demonstrably false, since the Catholic and Orthodox churches still use translations that include those texts. It is true that the Jewish authorities after the fall of Jerusalem rejected the texts because they had been written after the time the rabbis believed prophecy had ceased. When Martin Luther and other reformers did their vernacular translations in the sixteenth century, they adopted the Jewish selection of texts (though NOT in the order found in Jewish books). Except for one passing reference, viewers would never guess that for almost 3/4 of the history of the Christian church, the vast majority of believers accepted books no longer found in Protestant Bibles but still found in Catholic and Orthodox and other ancient churches to this day.

Fifth, they seem to spend all sorts of money on programs about things like Nostradamus and Stonehenge and the pyramids but never a penny examining things like the pre-Colombian civilizations that existed in what is now the United States. You can watch them every day for a year and never learn anything about the mound builders in places like Louisiana, West Virginia and Illinois. These are fascinating things about people who actually existed here and who left impressive evidence of their level of sophistication. Instead they will endlessly repeat drivel about how the Kensington Stone (almost certainly a nineteenth-century fraud about Vikings in Minnesota) proves that the Knights Templar (about whom they have many historically absurd programs) brought the Holy Grail (about which even more absurd programs) to the New World. So instead of learning about real things that can be documented and analyzed, viewers learn totally speculative stories about people who may or may not have existed and for whom no concrete and irrefutable evidence exists. And they dare to call themselves the History Channel? And to broadcast this stuff under the (once) repsected and respectable name of National Geographic?

What can I say? I shouldn't drink coffee in the afternoon and then turn on the television. Or I should stick to Phineas and Ferb! They aren't real either, of course, but at least I know that.