"Bible Secrets Revealed" On The History Channel

Tonight a series entitled "Bible Secrets Revealed" will debut on the so-called History Channel.

First things first: in the title of a show on the so-called History Channel, "Secrets" generally means "out-of-date scholarship, superstition, mistranslation, mispronunciation and straight-up, mind-boggling, how-on-Earth-are--they-able-to-sell-this-crap bullshit," and that ain't no secret, Daddy-O. I don't see any reason to suspect that things will be different in this case. The "experts" consulted for this series include University of Iowa Assistant Professor Robert Cargill, already guilty of serial collaboration with the so-called History Channel, Reza Aslan, who may be an expert on finding a good literary agent and had the incredible good luck to be propelled into literary superstardom when he was insulted on-air by a Fox News "pundit," and David Wolpe, who is just a dingbat. Cargill and Aslan and some other talking heads may make some accurate statements which don't get cut from their interviews, but unless the so-called History Channel undergoes a massive transformation with this series, and there's absolutely no reason to suspect that it will, experts will be nicely balanced in the mix by people who think -- or at least, who say -- that they've found Noah's Arc and Adam and Eve's DNA. Also, par for the course on the so-called History Channel is for some actual expert to say something like, "Object X has been conclusively proven to be a 20th-century forgery," immediately followed by the voice-over narrator saying something like, "Is Object X actually a 3000-year-old artifact which was touched by Moses himself? We may never know for sure. But for believers, [...]" I see no reason to believe that the narrators and the people who write the narration on the so-called History Channel even listen to the talking heads -- If they did, the narrators wouldn't commit the spectacular, aforementioned mispronunciations nearly so often -- let alone being able to sort the actual experts out from the idiots and the hucksters.

It will be interesting to see whether this series addresses misconceptions about the Bible, such as the very widespread one about the Bible having been written and/or re-written and/or edited and/or altered in any other way at the Council of Nicea. It would be very impressive if the show addresses the way in which that particular misconception has been perpetuated by the so-called History Channel. ... ... ...

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Excuse me. I fell off of my chair laughing just then, at the thought of the so-called History Channel doing something impressive and/or consciously attempting to clean up a bit of the dreck and confusion it itself has spread.