Do you get the impression that the people that work at the “science lite” channels like Discovery and National Geographic have decided that pestering Christians is some kind of contest? Last year, National Geographic re-packaged a gnostic text that the Church had tossed in the wastebasket centuries ago, offering up the “Judas Gospel” as if it had any meaning at all. And now James Cameron, who should by rights still be counting the money he made by making “Titanic”, has a show on Discovery tonight in which he purports to have found the tomb of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and their son.

But how could they have found the tomb of Jesus if … Save it. Cameron wants none of your hidebound dogma. He’s off being all scientific and important and stuff, and thank goodness he was able to find a cable channel brave enough to broadcast more of the types of errant trash that are bound to get them ink and air in the Legacy Media.

So am I just getting paranoid to notice that these great “discoveries” are broadcast during Lent? I wish I was. In this case, it doesn’t sound like there’s a scrap of real, disinterested science in this. Even the Washington Post is starting to lend an ear to the scholars — non-Christian, so apparently they might know something — who are saying the film is a lot of nonsense. It would have been lovely if anyone had practiced that honest skepticism before the damage was done, but oh well.

Well, on the whole, I’m with Fr. John on this:

One does get tired of the media going into a tizzy every time some idiot comes along with such manifestly baseless claims, and making pronouncements about how this could “rock the Christian faith.” It would probably help if more people in the media had a real education of their own — in some field other than how to look good on camera.

As if to prove the point that there’s an alarming lack of basic Christian intelligence out there, we have this gem of a quote, (via Get Religion) from the film’s director:

Simcha Jacobovici, the Toronto filmmaker who directed the documentary, said the implications “are huge.”

“But they’re not necessarily the implications people think they are. For example, some believers are going to say, well this challenges the resurrection. I don’t know why, if Jesus rose from one tomb, he couldn’t have risen from the other tomb,” Jacobovici told “Today.”

What? Honest to goodness, y’all — what?

You really don’t know where to start. I’m reminded of a quote of Mark Twain’s: “I stopped believing in science the time I went to a museum and saw a small skull and a large skull labelled ‘Skull of Christopher Columbus in youth and adulthood.’”

I don’t feel like disbelieving in science quite yet. But I sure have my doubts about the combination of science, filmmaking and propaganda.