What would happen to your religious lives if, hypothetically, all history were voided or made inaccessible to you or somehow falsified beyond hope? In other words, imagine that due to some strange reasons, the details of which are irrelevant, you have to live your lives without having any knowledge passed down from God through any historical events whatsoever. What would you do? Would it be possible for you to lead religious lives, and if so, by what authority would you do so? In other words, can you discover the spiritual truth for yourselves without dependence on historical sources, or would you be lost if such historical sources were simply unavailable or unreliable? [Myth of Hindu Sameness]

That was a question Rajiv Malhotra asked a room full of attorneys in New Jersey and they were stumped. Does this mean that Abrahamic religions are dependent on historical episodes and would be meaningless without them?

On November 18, 2008, PBS is premiering a 2 hour program titled The Bible’s Buried Secrets which “vividly recounts the saga of the ancient Israelites and digs deeply into both the Bible and the history of the Israelites through the archeological artifacts they left behind.” The program tries to find out who wrote the Hebrew Bible and if there is any historical basis to Moses, Abraham, Exodus, and King David.

The findings of the program are not going to make a lot of people happy

But the film challenges long-held beliefs. Abraham, Sarah and their offspring probably didn’t exist, Meyers said.

“These stories are unlikely to represent real historical events, but rather there’s some kernel of ancient experience in there which has survived and which helps give identity to the people at the time the Bible finally took shape centuries and centuries later,” Meyers said.

There’s no archaeological evidence of the Exodus, either, Meyers said. “It doesn’t mean that there’s no kernel of truth to it,” she said.

Apsell said she found it “extremely shocking” to learn that monotheism was a process that took hundreds of years.[Orlando Sentinel – “Bible’s Buried Secrets” from PBS’ ]

Already online petitions are up calling for an end public funding for PBS.