Marxist Hacker 42's Journal: Random religion stories this weekend: Noah, Jesus, God

Ok, I missed my posting time this weekend, and three big media bombshells hit, so this is the JE to post in if you don't want your post lost among the 1500 in the "Religious Gene" stories.

1. Noah. Discovery Channel, right before that debacle I'll refer to in my next point, ran a very interesting 1-hour documentary that finally made sense of the Noah story to me. In addition to relating it to the Gilgamesh Epic (which everybody has done) it also related it to an earlier Summerian flood legend- and this time got the flows of the river right. The new theory is that the yearly flood of the Euphrates was augmented by a *very* rare freak storm (a once in a millenium occurance) sweeping Noah/Gilgamesh's ark out into the Persian gulf. Following the Summerian Legend, Noah was a shipmaster, not a man of God, with a cargo of animals and beer. The beer allowed them to survive until they landed in "Dilamon", a near paradise, and never returned to Ur, where the contract laws would have sold the entire family into slavery. This is an explaination I can believe.

2. Jesus Tomb. Sorry, I just don't entirely buy this one. First, Jose/Joseph (Yose, Iosef) is just too obvious of a nickname for a young kid named Joseph with a father/uncle of the same name; despite this being the only ossuary found with this, let's face it, the ossuary period was short and few ossuaries have been found with readable names at all. Second, wouldn't a family from Nazareth be buried in Galilee, not in Jerusalem? Which argues for the Yeshua/Yosef/Maria connection being a far more common name combination than was previously thought. Finally, that bit where they misquoted the geneticist's result from the DNA test just blew most of the lid off of their case. Good causal chain, but far too many weak links and if statements. It would certainly be nice to look further into this, but drop the idea of this being Jesus of Nazareth and his brothers/mother/cousins/wife/son in this tomb. Far too much film making, far too little science.

3. A human genetic need to believe. This is one I've long believed, and the research was obviously well done. I'm glad to see SOMEBODY doing this research, and I look forward to reading more than just the synopsis on it. I hope from here the (to me obvious) leap will be made to the effect of evolution on religion and culture; religions and cultures are as much shaped by climate as by priestly guessing, just as human beings are shaped by environment as well as genetics. I would not be surprised to find new scientific enlightenment in such a study of religion; it's entirely possible that technologies that have not yet been examined by western science have been used in religion; it could show new directions for our science to go in.