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Watch for it—or rather watch out for it.  Jesus and Mary Magdalene get the soap-opera treatment on ABC on Monday, November 3, at 8:00 PM (ET). Like Peter Jenning's ABC special, The Search for Jesus, before it (June 2000), this new piece of theological journalism, "Jesus, Mary and Da Vinci," goes straight for the speculative. This investigative theology has Jesus married to Mary, who flees with their child after his crucifixion and is supported and protected by a secret society. The plot comes straight from Dan Brown's popular novel, The Da Vinci Code, in which he follows the Priory of Scion, a secret society dating from 1099 and having as members such luminaries as Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci, who includes code in his masterpieces. [See Religion News Blog, October 31, 2003]

I supposed next we'll see more weird theology when one of the networks gets around to picking up the option for Umberto Ecco's Foucault's Pendulum (1989). But then who could screw history up better than NBC's 1999 TV movie Noah's Ark, starring Jon Voight and Mary Steenburgen. I still can't figure out how they could mess up the time-line so much that Noah and Lot end up as buddies and Noah heads out on his Ark after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. They should all get the decoder ring—it's called Scripture.

The human soldier. Staff Sgt. Georg-Andreas Pogany, 32, a US Army Special Forces interrogator, faces court-martial in a rarely used charge of cowardice. According to the October 30 wire-service report, the Green Beret was overcome by shaking, nausea, and terror when he came upon the mangled body of an Iraqi while with his team in an area north of Baghdad. He told his team sergeant that he was headed for a "nervous breakdown" and asked for help. In response, the Army denied the man's humanity.

When Christians attack. This past Monday, D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries joined with Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council in a friend of the court brief to the US Supreme Court in support of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's appeal of the order that removed his Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama Judicial Building.

While Judge Moore marches onward to keep his 2.6-ton granite monument in front of the public, the city leaders of Casper, Wyoming, have voted to move their Ten Commandments monument out of a public park in order to thwart the Rev. Fred Phelps from displaying his own 5.5-foot-tall granite monument with a bronze placard bearing Matthew Shepard's portrait and an inscription reading: "MATTHEW SHEPARD, Entered Hell October 12, 1998, at age 21, in defiance of God's Warning: 'Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination.' Leviticus 18:22." Costing an estimated $15,000, the monument would be the latest of several stunts used by Phelps, the anti-homosexual propagandist from the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, to protest gay tolerance. The pastor achieved nationwide notice when he protested at the funeral of Matthew Shepard, the University of Wyoming student who was murdered in 1998 for being gay.

In addition to its "picketing ministry," the Westboro Baptist Church maintains a really graphic website called God Hates Fags. Phelps and members of the Westboro Baptist Church also plan to be in Durham, New Hampshire, on November 2 to picket the Rev. Gene Robinson's Episcopal consecration ceremony at the University of New Hampshire.

So what's up, really, with these venom-tongued people? Admittedly we are to "Hate evil, love good" [Amos 5:15] and, like David, should avoid the deceitful and wicked, and abhor evildoers [Psalms 26:4,5; 97:10; Prov 8:13]. But it does not follow from this that as Christians we are called to judge any evil person, to harm them, or to heap abuse upon them. Our proper response to all forms of evil is to flee it [Psalms 37:27; 101:4; Prov 4:27], not to fear it [Psalms 23:4], and to approach the evildoer with a unique Christian love. As Peter says: "Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing" [1 Peter 3:9].

As for all this idolatrous business about Ten Commandments monuments, these people all get lumped into the same club with the psychopathic Ugandan Joseph Kony and his brutal Lord's Resistance Army.

A Chinese blessing: "May you live in interesting times." I have lived during the cultural revolution of Mao Tse-tung, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon's disgrace, the Clinton scandals, the deceitful election of George W. Bush—now, ahead of me, is the implosion of the Episcopal Church as the homosexual Rev. V. Gene Robinson is consecrated bishop in the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire this approaching weekend. More than the violent splintering of a church body, it will mean the beginning of a modern Christian heresy.

What is most troubling about Robinson's refusal to stand down is how he continues to support his leadership as a homosexual Christian. He does not appeal to Scripture, because he knows that he cannot win the debate on those grounds when God's words resound with a denunciation of the gay lifestyle. He appeals instead to a "Spirit-led" decision that God has called him to this leadership role, saying also that only a call from God will turn him from his mission. But in appealing solely to supernatural guidance he places himself in the same camp as any other hocus-pocus poseur. The world is strewn with the litter of cults begun by guys with visions. Spirit-led Christians have tools for discernment when important decisions must be reached and we desire to know God's will for us. We approach Scripture, because we want to know that our decision is not inconsistent with the body of Biblical truth; we counsel with other Christians so that we may better discover whether we are being guided by the Spirit or our own will. There is no limit to the wickedness in the hearts of men. James knew this well:

When tempted, no one should say, "God is tempting me." For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. [James 1:13-15]

This weekend will bring much regret, not so much because we will witness the creation of a gay Christian church in the Episcopal body (for the apostate church is quick to sanction designer-Christian start-ups); our regret will come instead as the gate is closed on a path toward redemption for those who live that lifestyle and find that there is now available to them an approving, heretical Christian cult. On the other side of the gate the grass is greener .

All Cretans are liars.  While in France recently for a series of conferences, the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, advised against converting to Buddhism, saying "I think it is best, if one is a believer, to keep the religion with which one was brought up, which one is used to, which is familiar." His point is a practical one: "In the 1960s I met people who had changed religion and then, later in their lives, experienced many problems because of that," he said. [Reuters-UK, October 15, 2003]  Of course, this would also follow from what the Dalai Lama said in Prague in his Address at the "Forum 2000" Conference:

"We accept the need for pluralism in politics and democracy, yet we often seem more hesitant about the plurality of faiths and religions. It is important to remember that wherever they came from, all the world's major religious traditions are similar in having the potential to help human beings live at peace with themselves, with each other and with the environment."

And he also came very close to saying the same thing in a published conversation with Robert Thurman in Mother Jones in 1997:

"I always say that people should not rush to change religions. There is real value in finding the spiritual resources you need in your home religion. Even secular humanism has great spiritual resources; it is almost like a religion to me. All religions try to benefit people, with the same basic message of the need for love and compassion, for justice and honesty, for contentment. So merely changing formal religious affiliations will often not help much."

In the same interview he explained why this is so—there is no "absolute truth." From one angle all religions are good and useful because through them a universal peace is possible; from the critical angle, because reality for the Buddhist is ineffable and all propositions express only relative truths, the only definitive truth for the Buddhist is "the absolute negation of any one truth as the Definitive Truth." [Mother Jones, November/December 1997]

So the Dalai Lama's advice is impeccable: one shouldn't convert to Buddhism. As a doctrine, Buddhism is logically incoherent—and therefore it must be false. And we should expect this. Neither the Buddha nor his disciple, the Dalai Lama, has ever claimed to be divine. The claims of the Buddha are empirical, phenomenological, and subject to the same metaphysical constraints as Science.

Jesus, who spoke from an entirely different vantage point, said to his disciple Thomas: "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." [John 14:6]  The truth of his words have an unassailable authority.