Search ends, no Hoffa

Well, dang. The FBI has called off the latest search and Hoffa is still dead and buried … somewhere.

Just like the other hunts for the ex-Teamster boss, the latest one ended today with no evidence.

Jimmy Hoffa – surprise, surprise – is still missing

But one man is walking away with a profit. Anthony J. Zerilli, the son of a former Detroit mob boss, convinced the FBI and media that he was certain Hoffa would be found covered in a slab of concrete in an Oakland Township field, where he was buried alive after being hit over the head with a shovel.

It looked close there, for a while. Glad I didn’t buy the tipster’s gen-u-ine autographed photo.


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Forgery and Counterforgery

When Bart Ehrman’s Forged was published a few years ago, he characterized it as a popular work and promised that a textbook-level treatment of Biblical forgeries would be published soon afterward. That book is now to hand: massive, wide-ranging, heavily footnoted — and certain to be devastating to the inerrantist crowd.

It is bad enough that scholars don’t actually know who wrote most of the Bible’s ‘inerrant’ texts, or anything about the authors. Worse, scholars do know that a great many of those texts are forgeries, texts written by somebody who wasn’t Paul but claiming to be Paul, for example, with the purpose of influencing early Christian beliefs, doctrine, behavior. They probably weren’t written at midnight by some drunk who just wanted to see what he could get away with — but, then, you can’t be sure. Nobody knows who was the author of a majority of the Biblical texts, and scholars have known since the revival of historical criticism in the 1850s, following the suppression of Spinoza in the 1670s, that many of the texts are forgeries.

The Bible is not the progressive revelation of the Invisible Wizard’s plan, et cetera, et cetera; it is a collection of texts by different men who practiced related but different religions, and its hundreds of well-documented contradictions are there because they believed different things and sometimes made-up stuff for propaganda purposes.

The Bible is a political document, just like the United States Code.

On what grounds, then, do Holy Men claim that the Bible in inerrant? There are no grounds. It is done solely because the preposterous claim of inerrancy provides them a platform upon which to build their authority, and once they acknowledge the Bible is highly, endlessly, hopelessly errant — this is before we get to the hundreds of years of deliberate revisions by anonymities, scribal errors, and mistranslations — their schtick falls apart and they look like nothing so much as gaudy flim-flam men.

It gets better: Some forgeries were greeted by counterforgeries, forged texts written in response to a forgery.

In other words, the old boys made stuff up as baldly and cynically as the World Net Daily crowd does today.

Imagine this: I decide one day to open Uncle Bob’s Church of Eternal Sunshine, Kumaré-like. I rent an abandoned storefront, I hire a hyper-energetic kid to stand on the sidewalk waving a sign, in time I have a successful little church going, me and Wolf Blitzer are pals, my neighbors pay my tax bill, and I am driving around in a Bentley.

Why not? A nice gig, no?

My point is this: Anybody can be a preacher, from the graduates of bona fide seminaries to any loudmouth who needs a roll-your-own tax avoidance scheme.

I’m talking now about the graduates of real seminaries, the poor sincere fools who tortured their minds into pretzels in real schools trying to convince themselves that Christian theology makes sense and is true — those guys.

Every one of them already knows most of what is in this book; this book is intended to be an undergraduate textbook for their use. Every one of them knows he has no intellectual right to stand in a pulpit and howl and bellow and stamp his feet and get red-faced about the absolute trustworthiness of the Bible. Every one of them knows he does not know where the overwhelming majority of the texts in the Bible came from, or who wrote them, or even that they were written by the traditionally ascribed author.

Every one of them: L-I-A-R.


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Searching for Hoffa

According to news reports, the mobster who tipped the FBI to the latest search location said he was buried beneath a concrete slab in a now-demolished barn.

Well, what do you know? The searchers have found concrete:

The search of the 40- to 50-square-yard area would continue at least another 48 hours, said Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard. He said police and FBI officials remain optimistic but that nothing had been sent for lab analysis so far.

Bouchard said investigators had discovered concrete on the site, which could corroborate Zerilli’s claim that Hoffa was buried on the site under a concrete slab.

“Obviously that was part of the original information,” he said. “And it’s consistent with that” information.


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Kumaré

When American filmmaker Vikram Gandhi became curious about his parents’ religion, he traveled to India and spent time with different gurus. Dissatisfied, he found himself wondering something more fundamental: How do these guys get away with it?

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

So he decided to start a cult of his own and find out — and make a movie about it.

The result is Kumaré (available on Netflix) and, really, if you haven’t seen it you need to. He adopts an Indian accent, dresses strangely, emits an endless stream of deepities, insists over and over that he is not the guru, that “the guru is within you” — he makes it up as he goes. Even so, within months he has rooms full of devoted followers, and things are spinning out of control as they seek his advice on all sorts of complex personal problems, e.g., “Should I leave my husband?”

Even though you’re in on the ruse from the beginning — that Kumaré is a fraud, and means no harm — it’s difficult not to scowl and wonder what’s wrong with the helpless, parent-seeking nitwits who follow him around. Who are those people? What the hell is wrong with them? Why are they falling for this clown?

The truth is this: They’re the same people sitting in the more traditional church just around the corner from your house — the lost, the damaged, the tentative and hesitant, the ignorant and bewildered, all of them barely hanging-on in a world they are incompetent to understand.

The only real difference — Kumaré being a fake Holy Man rather than the real thing — is that he isn’t himself an idiot or a predatory cynic.


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VA Republicans bailing out

Embarrassed by the trio of nutcases nominated for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general, prominent Virginia Republicans are stampeding to Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe. Michael Hamar points to a story that surveys the wreckage:

Chichester and several other Republicans formally endorsed McAuliffe at a morning press conference in Richmond today.

They join other Republicans who are outspoken about their belief that Cuccinelli is too far to the right, and feel they’re becoming the GOP’s moderates as the party becomes more conservative.

The Republicans have become the political arm of a regional religious movement, only tenuously in touch with reality and hostile to the whole of modernity. They are no longer a national party that can win national elections in a pluralistic society — but they can wreak havoc locally, and will with zealous resolution.


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