I remember we had to do illustrations in Religious Studies. Nice simple way to see what we were getting. The one I remember most clearly is the temptations of Siddartha under the bo tree. Possibly because I really wanted to draw girls in not much clothes.

When I was in college I took a kind of "Foundations of Literature" class and we had to read the King James. Around the same time I started working as a copy editor at the newspaper. I used my downtime to do my reading for that class. For a semester (this was a very liberal liberal arts college) they all though I was some fundamentalist who relaxed with the Bible.

I just got a ridiculously exciting reprieve -- I have something that needs to be emailed by 3, but I just realized it needs to be emailed to Wisconsin by three! I have a whole extra hour!!

My college required one religion course (it was a Quaker college, afterall.) They had some really interesting and varied courses, in addition to the basic comparative type ones. I wanted to take a fairly broad one. Of course, what happened was that my majors, as usual, locked up my schedule so all I could take was a course on the New Testement. I resented the hell out of it largely because it wasn't what I wanted to take, and transfered this resentment to the work itself. It was sort of literary/historical and now? I'd find it interesting.

At the time, well... there was lots of cursing.

At the time, well... there was lots of cursing.

I can just picture you... "Now what the fuck is Jesus doing?"

The sysadmins need to really not ask my permission to reboot a machine I have no authority over. I told them I didn't, but they seem to have taken it as a yes. Um.

We read a couple of excerpts from Genesis in English, I don't remember which year of high school. Most of what I learned about religion, I learned in history classes.

Nah, Jesus didn't bug me . I mostly snarled at other stuff. Some of it incredibly stupid on my part.

My 9th grade English class involved at least excerpts of the first five books. I remember because we got to the end of Book 5, i.e. the last book Moses was supposed to have written himself, and he died before the end! Stupid ghostwriters.

I will say, now that I've got a lot of the foundational western culture Greatest Hits under my belt, I find it really thrilling to do process detective work over centuries. Like the transformation of the story of Adam and Eve -- who first called the fruit of the tree of knowledge an apple? Who first decided that Eve was an idiotic slut, and not just the unlucky one who happened to stumble over the snake first? How did the competing versions of "man and woman he made them" and "Adam is the real deal and Eve was just, like, an appendix writ large" -- how did people explain adhering to one and not the other, when they're side by side in the original text?

In sum: Milton is to blame. Blame Milton. Or blame Milton's shitty attitude after his divorce.

Years ago i bought a recording of the Philip Glass opera Akhnaten. I had never heard of Akhnaten before and what I read just fascinated me. Akhnaten (aka Amenhotep IV) was a Pharaoh who instituted the first monotheistic religion.

Supposedly Judaism borrows a lot from Atenism (the religion of the sun god Aten, the monotheistic god promoted by Akhnaten) - I was really interested in this but I've never read more about that.

From the Wikipedia article [link] :

The idea of Akhenaten as the pioneer of a monotheistic religion that later became Judaism was promoted by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in his book Moses and Monotheism and thereby entered popular consciousness. Freud argued that Moses had been an Atenist priest forced to leave Egypt with his followers after Akhenaten's death.

...

More recently, Ahmed Osman has claimed that Moses and Akhenaten were the same individual. While these speculative views have gained acceptance in some quarters (e.g. Laurence Gardner, Bloodline of the Holy Grail, Lost Secrets of the Sacred Ark; Gary Greenberg, The Moses Mystery: The African Origins of the Jewish People), most mainstream Egyptologists do not take them seriously, pointing out that there are direct connections between early Judaism and other Semitic religious traditions, and that two of the three principal Judaic terms for God, Yahweh and Elohim, have no connection to Aten.

Hmmm...