Did the movie The “Ten Commandments” have any factual or historical basis?   Certainly not in the triumphalistic and dramatic way that Cecil B De Mille envisioned.   The name “Passover” is derived from the Hebrew word ‘Pesach’ which is based on the root “pass over” and refers to the fact that God “passed over” the houses of the Jews when he was slaying the firstborn of Egypt <http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/arabs/egypttoc.html>  during the last of the ten plagues.  Did this anthropomorphic God really do a fly over, and were there really ten plagues?  Did the Red  Sea part?  Is there any historical or archaeological evidence for any of this?  Most scholars say no.  Neither  is the world a mere 5000 years old, some scientists suggest circa 250 million,  nor was it created in 7 days.    Did King Solomon really have 600 wives and 300 concubines,  and where did the idea that marriage is between one man and one woman originate or that it is indissoluble? Now that Obama has come out in favour of extending basic civil rights to the LGBT community, what will happen to all of our earlier mythologies?   Answer???????????

Galileo upset what was left of Christendom in the 16th century, and Darwin scarred the hell out what remained of Christian England in the 19th century.  Alas, somehow we all adjusted.  After what it went through about Galileo, the Catholic Church shut up and ignored Darwin, not so the Reformed Faiths, some of whom carry on about the theory of evolution to this very day.   Discovering that the earth revolved around the sun and that we did not all originate in Adam’s ribs did not convert many to an  agnostic or atheistic stance. The world did not fall apart, we just moved on to a different understanding.

God, we were taught, is totally other, a mystery.  Those of us who believe accept that He/She has chosen to reveal himself/herself  to us in a thousand different ways, and yes also in Jesus the Christ and through the Spirit.  We acknowledge the intrinsically spiritual nature of human kind along with the material, and we celebrate both.   Some of us find ‘religion’ confusing; what in it is truly of God, and what of man?  The answer is not at all clear.  So we struggle with the comfort of what we have known and found comfort in, with the soarings of our intellect and imagination.  There is no faith without doubt and wonder.  But one thing must surely be apparent, a God of love will not look askance at people who love one another no matter what genitals they possess and what they do with them.