The book is better than “The Da Vinci Code” because, while the former is focused on the non-important theory that Mary Magdalene came to France and gave birth to Jesus’s child, “The Secret Supper” is focused on the discovery among Renaissance artists and intellectuals of the original spiritual path taught by Yeshua.

We’re working on it, though.

I made the Darwin story my lead story for a day on the news page for a reason – to show people why this news organization is more interesting and important to read by far than the Birmingham News and other local chain papers.

And forget local TV news, where you won’t hear word one about Darwin because you know what the uneducated Christian viewers think about him. To them, evolution and Natural Selection are “just a theory” right? In the same class of information as the creation story in Genesis.

To even mention it on the evening news in the same breath as the pope’s visit would generate angry calls from right wing Christian idiots and canceled advertising from Bush’s favorite corporate giants. It scares news directors half to death.

One of the things we try to do here is to inform a more educated audience to take back the airwaves and bring pressure to bear on news organizations to do a better job of covering these things. If liberals and libertarians were as adamant about pressuring the press as the Christian Right, we might get a more informed press – and a more enlightened populous.

Since the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls and the lost Gnostic Gospels, the truth about Christianity has been available for all who wish to understand.

That truth is that, in my opinion, Yeshua (the correct Hebrew name for Jesus) taught a very mystic spiritual path, a very different faith from the one later invented more or less by Paul of Tarsus and made the established religion of the Roman Empire after the Council of Nicea in 323 CE.

The Roman Church that came into being at that time kept most of the trappings of the previous pagan religion of ancient Rome, transforming the various gods and goddesses into saints, “Christianizing” many of the old pagan festivals, such as Saturnalia, even retaining the robes and headgear of the old priesthood for the new.

The personal spirituality taught by Yeshua was replaced with an institutionalized, legalistic, authoritarian religious “empire” modeled very much on the secular Roman Empire. This model endured challenged only infrequently, and without much success, until the success of the Protestant reformation in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Unfortunately, only a few Protestant movements grasped how fundamentally distorted the original teachings of Yeshua had become, leading eventually to Protestant fundamentalist movements nearly as intolerant as medieval Catholicism.

I join you in lamenting the near-absence of coverage of the Darwin diaries. But it’s no surprise.