Well, as I said, the general tone of the 60 Minutes piece sort of gave the fellow the benefit of the doubt, but seemed to imply that the relic might be, or probably was, fake. They were "tut tut skeptical." You know, the way they are about everything. Big yawn.

Well, just a short time later I was channel surfing and came across a far more extensive program investigating the validity of the Ossuary and the Solomon Tablet, and it turns out there was no "probably" about it. The scientists in Israel not only conducted exstensive research on the "patina" which demonstrated that it could not have been genuine, but they also determined through mass spectrometer analysis the probable process that had been employed to produce a relic that had all-but fooled the "experts." And that's not the half of it, because when the authorities went to the apartment of this Oded Golan it turned out that he had a small factory devoted to producing fake relics and even had an inventory in various stages of production.

I don't think any of this was mentioned on the 60 Minutes piece, although I may have missed it while avoiding the commercials. So, I guess the issue here is that there's so much sensitivity about religious feeling, a sensitivity that lacks understanding of religious sentiment itself, that these folks on CBS just didn't want to go out on a limb and declare something an outright fake even though the scientific community had made that determination to a virtual certainty.

It's sort of hard to express this, but if you have a community of people who take for granted that all religion is a kind of "opiate," then eventually they'll start regarding religious sentiment as kind of "magical." It has properties that allow it to see through walls or something, so even though they're willing to scoff at religion itself... they're not inclined to do it too openly for fear of offending someone with the "handicap." Well, I'm a bit mystified really. Perhaps it's just that CBS News have become a bunch of hacks, and they really didn't invest very much in this "expose'." It was like a class project that didn't quite get completed. Or something??

There's just no doubt that the Jesus Ossuary was a fake. None at all. Zero. Zip. Nada. And it seems to me that if there's so much mystique and misunderstanding around religious sentiment that even 60 Minutes can't simply call a spade a freakin' shovel then religious frauds of various stripes might very well perceive an opening. I mean, why else do you get people like Jon Edwards on national TV talking to your great grandma, and your dead uncle Milt?

Now, the scientists who made the determination about the ossuary did not appear to be part of an anti-religion "religion"... so they simply weren't squeamish about stating the obvious. Indeed, why would they be? They gave the thing a genuine chance to be legit, but when it wasn't they didn't celebrate. Just another day's work.

I'm still scratching my head over just how this 60 Minutes piece was even news, given that the issue had already been extensively and exhaustively researched and documented by National Geographic (which CBS didn't even bother to cite, for heaven sake).

So did anyone else get the impression from the CBS treatment that there was still some controversy about the validity of the relic, or did I just imagine that? Very odd. No wonder the Schiavo thing is such a mess. Mainstream Media to the rescue.

The bottom line is that you oughtn't to be surprised that EV is producing some sort of quasi-docementary to legitimate itself. Apparently snake oil is all in the eye of the beholder after all.