It used to be that cynical folks in the entertainment biz knew they could cash in on religious sentiment by catering to church-going people with movies and TV shows hyping their beliefs during their holy seasons. But sometime in the past decade or so, a switch got flipped somewhere and now the execs in the entertainment-industrial complex think that the most profitable way of catering to the religious consumer is with material debunking his faith. Obviously, it works because the more outrageous the show or movie, the more people tune in to see the zaniness. Better ratings and better box office.
The latest attempt to cash in comes courtesy of James Cameron, who apparently has taken his belief that he is “King of the World”, so far that he’s trying to bump off the real King of the Universe. Cameron is behind a Discovery Channel show airing this week called “The Lost Tomb of Christ.” The premise is so flimsy that few people can believe it’s even going to air.
Phil Lawler is one among many astute observers who’s taken a whack at in the past few days and since this like shooting fish in a barrel, I’ll let him summarize the response to this tripe:
The Discovery Channel will encourage credulous viewers to believe that archeologists have discovered a tomb containing the physical remains of Jesus Christ and members of his family. If this claim is true—that Jesus did not rise from the dead—then Christianity is a false religion.
[...] In a burial vault in Jerusalem, archeologists discovered ossuaries containing the remains of several people who apparently lived at the time of Christ. The boxes were marked with names, including Mary, Judah, and Joseph. On one box the name was illegible, but it might have read: “Jesus.”When this burial vault was discovered in 1980—that’s right, 27 years ago—the discovery drew no particular attention. There was no reason to believe that this tomb contained the remains of the Lord’s family. Indeed there were several excellent reasons to believe that it did not.
The names on the ossuaries were extremely common ones; the tomb might have belonged to any affluent family living in Jerusalem. But Jesus was born into a poor family from Nazareth, not an affluent family from Jerusalem.
A thin web of “facts”
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