Do You Really Think Moses Was Stoned?
My favourite headline for this news story was The Guardian‘s: “Moses Was Stoned When He Set the Ten Commandments.” But the story itself is both amusing and appalling. Whatever happened to the scientific method? To proof?
Because this Benny Shanon doesn’t want to believe in supernatural events, he wants, instead, to speculate that more than one million people had the same hallucination thanks to a concoction of herbal extracts?
Which one takes more faith to believe?
One million people having exactly the same hallucination would be a supernatural event. Even the highly refined and strictly controlled drugs in today’s pharmacopoeia don’t give the same reactions to any two people. Valium makes most people sleepy; it makes my mother hyperactive. Codeine knocks me out cold; it gives my best friend insomnia. So it is risible even to suggest that a million people could have been affected in exactly the same way at exactly the same time by a hallucinogen prepared in the desert under less-than-lab conditions. Such an outcome would require an act of God.
Which, I think, is precisely what Mr. Shanon was trying to avoid.
2 Comments
The title is an eye catcher
The wonder of the mind in the big picture and what it conjures up in some folks is funny, yes quite risible. I am with you, he was avoiding the presence of the Lord! sam