brainrow

I saw Jon Stewart performing live earlier today. He’s a funny guy. The audience laughed and applauded throughout the show.

Ohio was a “swing state” in last year’s election. Jon asked whether we’d enjoyed having presidential candidates visit every few days to tell us how much they loved us. He asked whether we’d seen any of them since the election. They used us, he said, then threw us away “after they’d done their dirty, dirty business.”

It wasn’t all politics. He talked about buying a new computer that the salesman assured him was “more powerful than the computers NASA uses to launch the space shuttle.” Jon said his shuttle was just sitting in the driveway at home because his old Tandy computer wasn’t powerful enough to launch it.

Mostly, though, there was a political edge. Paraphrasing very loosely, he said this:

The divide in America today is not between religion and science. It’s not between conservative and liberal, or Republican and Democrat, or red states and blue states. The divide in America today is between moderates and extremists.

We’re all moderates here. We’re not shouting slogans. Nobody here has their mouth taped over with the word “Life.” Nobody here is carrying around a can of red paint just to throw on somebody.

You don’t see moderates standing in front of a building chanting, “Let’s be reasonable!” You know why? Because moderates have stuff to do. They’re too busy to travel around the country staging vigils for the TV cameras. That’s why the extremists seem to be winning. Moderates have stuff to do.

We’ve had a lot of presidents — some really good ones, and some really bad ones — and our government has survived through all of them. It will survive through these guys, too. They may try to bring it down, but they’ll fail, and here’s why: when things get bad enough, all those busy moderates — the ones with stuff to do — are going to say, “You know, this stuff can wait ’til tomorrow.” And they’ll rescue the country from the extremists.

But he said it better than I did.

One of the tough things about being absolutely certain you have the one literal, immutable truth must be learning something like this:

Satanists, apocalypse watchers and heavy metal guitarists may have to adjust their demonic numerology after a recently deciphered ancient biblical text revealed that 666 is not the fabled Number of the Beast after all.

A fragment from the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, dating to the Third century, gives the more mundane 616 as the mark of the Antichrist.

That would be embarrassing, I should think, especially if you were accustomed to making fiery denunciations of your enemies based on the Book of Revelation.

Dr. Aitken said, however, that scholars now believe the number in question has very little to do the devil. It was actually a complicated numerical riddle in Greek, meant to represent someone’s name, she said.

“It’s a number puzzle — the majority opinion seems to be that it refers to [the Roman emperor] Nero.”

Revelation was actually a thinly disguised political tract, with the names of those being criticized changed to numbers to protect the authors and early Christians from reprisals. “It’s a very political document,” Dr. Aitken said. “It’s a critique of the politics and society of the Roman empire, but it’s written in coded language and riddles.”

Oh, so using God’s name to justify your own agenda isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s a time-honored tradition. I guess I owe an apology to all those currently taking the Lord’s name in vain.