Why does God allow TV Press Tour to happen?

What better way to spend a Sunday than at TV Press Tour, listening to PBS talent taking potshots at God, of all people. (Well, if anyone can take it, it would be God.)

(And so here's the thing: If anyone from the religious right is going to use this blog entry to decry PBS as in league with Satan, they're going to overlook this next sentence.) Of course, this being PBS, they did so with mountains of research and philosophical thought, the sort of thing that fundamentalists don't trouble their heads with.

First up was "The Bible's Buried Secrets," an upcoming "Nova" report that suggests that if you go to a church that teaches that the Bible is the inerrant and utterly true word of God, you consider should suing your pastor for malpractice.

"It challenges the Bible's stories if you want to read them literally, and that will disturb many people," said William Dever, a Biblical archaeologist. "But it explains how and why these stories ever came to be told in the first place and how and why they were written down and why they continue to resonate with us. So it's a very controversial film, but it ends on a positive note. It should bring to laypeople a new appreciation of the literature and the history of the Bible."

"This is the first documentary about archaeology in the Bible that has taken modern critical scholarship seriously, that has looked at the archaeological discoveries in the eyes of the excavators and has talked courageously about the archaeological revolution," Dever continued. "Most people simply misunderstand archaeology and the Bible. Some of them are not going to like this film, but nobody will see this film without changing their mind about the way the Bible ought to be read. And what it does is to take archaeology seriously as an independent witness to what it was really like in the ancient world. People will have to make up their own minds about what they will believe. This is not about faith. It's about history or the lack of history in the Bible. It's a shocking film in many ways, but it's truth, revolutionary and it's as fresh as yesterday."

"So to take," added Duke University religion professor Carol Meyers, "for example, some of the things that you'll see eventually the film deals with, it talks about the stories of the ancestors in the book of Genesis, Abraham and Sarah and their offspring, and it shows that these stories are unlikely to represent real historical events, but rather there's some kernel of ancient experience in there which has survived and which helps give identity to the people at the time the Bible finally took shape centuries and centuries later.

"The same thing with the Exodus," she continues. "Archaeologists have scoured the Sinai Peninsula and scoured Egyptian documents to see some kind of reference to this event which is portrayed as earth-moving, to say the least, literally, in the tales in the book of Exodus. And there's no evidence for it. It doesn't mean that there's no kernel of truth to it. But the elaboration that we read in scripture is really now understood to be a literary production that conveys certain extraordinarily profound ideas like liberation, and we are learning, as scholars, to read looking for the ideas rather than by trying to prove this fact or another fact."

Obviously, this isn't going to go over well with those who believe God tinkered with the carbon dating in dinosaur bones to confuse scientists.

"It's a waste of time to argue with fundamentalists," Dever said flatly. "And this film doesn't do it. It's designed for intelligent people who are willing to change their mind. And of course, one film is not going to change religious life in America, but it will give intelligent people who want to read the Bible in a modern way a chance. If we insist on reading the Bible literally, in 25 years nobody will read it any longer."

Later in the day came "God on Trial," a "Masterpiece Contemporary" (the show no longer goes by the moniker "Masterpiece Theatre") docudrama about a group of Jews imprisoned at Auschwitz who participate in a sort of intellectual/philosophical debate as to whether God has broken his covenant to protect them from their enemies.