Holy Watermelon

Why are there no bear ghosts?  Nearly all the ghosts in the world seem to come from a specific period of time, long before any of us were born.  There is a universal obsession with death, so we're going to explore death from the perspective of those left behind. (Traditions about what lays beyond will be the subject of another episode.) We talk about the Shiva tradition in Judaism, and the ghastly...

Angels in most traditions are heavenly messengers, and modern pop culture has greatly exaggerated almost every feature. While it makes sense to assume that there are female or feminine angels, each one named in Abrahamic scriptural tradition is a man. The word Angel comes from the Greek Aggelos (lit: messenger), and the Hebrew word Malak has the same meaning.  In this episode we explore the groups...

Katherine Spallino is the author of The Bad Cadet , a memoir of her days as a child-slave to the secretive Scientologist "Sea Org." Before she joined the Sea Org officially, Katherine was raised away from her family in a boarding school for cursed and abandoned children, part of the last batch permitted by the Sea Org before they banned Sea Org members from having children (and naturally started e...

Bonnie Lu Nettles and Marshall Herff Applewhite, Jr. founded what is known today as Heaven's Gate , a fantastic group of UFO enthusiasts and religious believers. Though they both came from a Christian background in Texas, the mystery of Area 51 affected their daily lives to the very end.   Nettles was a nurse, and Applewhite was a pastor, but they shared a willingness to adjust their cosmology (an...

Apotheosis is the process of becoming a god, and that gift isn't always limited to the dead. Some classic examples include Asclepius, Ariadne, and Glaucus. Apotheosis also appears in the Abrahamic tradition, in a varity of manifestations, including the Alawite tradition, which elevates Ali ibn Abi Talib to godhood. We examine the diference between Apotheosis and Theosis in the Christian tradition....

Euhemerism is essentially the hypothesis that many of the gods who have been celebrated throughout history may not have been simple fabrications but real people around whom great myths developed and grew to legendary proportions.  Euhemerus was a fellow who entertained and educated with tales of how the old gods of Hellenic (Greek) tradition were originally humans, mortals who lived mundane or occ...

Ever wonder why we bother with the groundhog, or horseshoes, or four-leaf clovers? Have you noticed city employees relying on divining rods to find your water leak? Where do all these superstitions come from, and how do they manage to linger in our science-powered information age? All these questions have answers, and we've tracked them down for you. Crossing your fingers isn't just a simple thing...

Zarathustra is the mythical hero at the foundation of Mazdaism, and thus it is better known as Zoroastrianism. Because ancient sources disagree on when this camel herder lived, it's nearly impossible to prove that he ever did, though there must have been an original founder of this ancient Persian religious tradition, the man's true name is certainly lost to time. Some Christians (especially the J...

Frank McMahon served in the VATICAN . Now, he's joining us to talk about his experience with Playboy, puberty, alcohol abuse, Buddhism, and the things he loved about his service with the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, as well as why he left, and the things he hopes to see change in the church.  We talk about Frank's favorite and least favorite saints, and about some of the mechanisms that...

St. Nicholas' Day has passed, but we're not done with Christmas visitors yet. Santa has taken a few different forms over the centuries, and he's got an army of companions and alternates, too.  Santa Claus takes inspiration from a variety of European folk  traditions,  and many of these old traditions have survived with modifications in the Christian era. In this episode we talk about a lot of our...

There's no shortage of saints with questionable careers, even during their "faithful years." For others, we might be looking at people who never existed. Let's explore more saints who might not deserve such exalted status. We can say with almost rock solid certainty that Saint Vernoica never existed. She is famed for the veil that bears the imprinted face of Christ--in fact, that's how the name Ve...

Andrew Penner grew up in the Mennonite tradition of the Anabaptist movement. The Anabaptists have a colorful history of subversion from the Catholic Church, despite their commitment to pacifism.  There's an awful lot to learn on these subjects, including the connection with the Amish and Hutterite branches, as well as the variation within the Mennonite conferences. (Jakob Amman and Jakob Hutter we...

As we close out the spooky season, it's time to talk about Puritanism and the extremism that led to witch hunts and barbaric murders of innocents. The Puritan movement was born from the Church of England, with the idea that King Henry VIII and the new English national episcopalian congregation hadn't reformed nearly enough after breaking away from the Imperial Church of Rome. Like the Pharisees be...

Halloween is--despite what you might hear from your local evangelical group--a Christian holiday... kinda. There's a lot to it, and there are layers of syncretism to dig through, but just under the secular (not-technically-pagan) veneer of sugar and chocolate, is a thick layer of juicy Christian religious expression. All Saints' Day on the old calendar begins at sunset, giving us the EVE of so man...

We've really enjoyed doing this show together, and we've learned a lot. It's time to reflect on the foundation we've built. The natures of knowledge and belief are tricky philosophical concepts, and the motives any person might have for believing anything or claiming knowledge are as varied as anything else in human behaviour.  We answer audience questions, and we have questions for each other, to...

Canada's National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is right around the corner, and we've decided to interrupt our regular programming in favour of an interview with Cheryl Whiskeyjack from Bent Arrow Traditional Healing Society, and some important First Nations Stories. Canada's name is derived from an old word for village, making us the nation of villages. We discuss the role of storytelling, and...

If you think you know Mormonism, this one's for you. We examined the origins of the Latter Day Saints last month, and now we're taking a look at the men that led the Mormons in various divisions.  There was a nonet of splinter groups that left the early Mormon Church before the assassination of Joseph Smith, but some of them shouldn't really count, since they disavowed everything Joseph taught, an...

Brigham Young gets a lot of credit as the "American Moses," but it's nothing compared to the work Joseph Smith did to earn that title. Moses led the people for many years, from place to place, but he never entered the Promised Land--like Joseph Smith. Joshua was the one who led the final trek into their new home--THAT'S Brigham's parallel.  The Latter Day Saint movement (Utah Mormonism, et al) liv...

Lost books include apocryphal literature from heretics, grifters, and entrapment-dodging translators, but there's also genuine works that were abridged or edited later, allowing the originals to disappear in the fog of disuse. Some books are lost because their religious traditions and communities have died out or were pushed underground, and other books are the stuff of legend, and may never have...

Staring Down the Canon might be intimidating for some, but now that we've explored several holy texts, we're ready to talk about the nature of scriptural authority and how texts are measured against one another within religious traditions.  Books are a great way to preserve knowledge, testimony, and prophecy, but its imperative that readers remember that authors perform their work as imperfect peo...

The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is one of the best books of religious satire released this century, and maybe it will hold that status for a while--only time will tell. After a serious look at the most revered books on the planet, it's time to lighten things up with the Pastafarians and their book that contains approximately as many contradictions as the Christian Bible, but with a rock...

The Book of Mormon has a better story than you might think, though not quite what you might have heard in Stone & Parker's musical of the same name.   Rather than a tome of collected works, each the subject of contentious discussion in council, The Book of Mormon is an abridgement of a continuous historical record, with a couple appendices of original content and other summarized histories.   Of c...

What is the Granth Sahib? What is the Adi Granth? The Guru Granth Sahib is the last and eternal Guru, an authoritative collection of sacred verses from not only the greatest Sikh leaders, but also from faithful Muslims and Hindus. Like other sacred texts, this collection has an interesting history, including a contested editorial process. Who are them men who recorded their revelations in sacred s...

What is the Quran?  It is among the most published texts in the world, and among the most vilified in the global west. Who was really responsible for the book as we know it today, and how did imperial power play into its history? Why is it that so many interpretations of the text are considered authoritative, and what efforts were made to ensure the acceptance of such ambiguity? The recitations of...

The Christian New Testament is a tiny collection of letters, and a small handful of modestly interdependent testimonies of a personal Jesus from a small town in the unnamed northern province (now known as Galilee). The outliers are almost as valuable as the more orthodox materials. The Bible consists of four biographies, some of which show more interest in symbolic teaching than in historical accu...