Not your Auntie's Geo.(Scan: Short news and commentary)(National Geographic)(Periodical review)

The May 2006 issue of National Geographic was an especially tendentious installment of a magazine that has, alas, migrated from Middle American icon into increasingly politicized participant in the culture wars. The cover story was a badly skewed look at the ANWR oil-drilling debate, illustrated with romanticized nature shots. There are fuzzy birds in the grass up there! (For TAE's own eyewitness report from Alaska's North Slope, see our September 2001 issue.)

Then there was a gratuitous little editorial that quoted journalist Bill McKibben as if he was a scientific authority instead of an environmental radical, in the process of suggesting that only idiots could doubt that global warming requires clamping down on human activities. Next came a hagiography of Darwinist E. O. Wilson, including extended swipes at religion and "the Iron Age desert kingdom scribes who wrote the Bible."

Speaking of Iron Age scribes, there was a pathetically hyped story on the "Gospel of Judas," packaged for rubes as if there was something fresh and authoritative in finding a deviant manuscript written by Gnostics--who have long been known to have fed parasitically on Christianity (and other religions as well), distorting and mixing and rewriting at will, centuries after the original events described. What was found in this case was basically a very old New Age novel written by a fourth-century Egyptian equivalent of a cross between Marianne Williamson and Ward Churchill. Yet National Geo essentially announced on the basis of this single chunk of papyrus that moldy old Christianity is going to have to overturn much of what it believes to be true. This betrays either cluelessness on the complexities of religious scholarship, or shamelessness ...