Higher Power
by Alex McRae

When Moses went up Mt. Sinai to check out a burning bush, he may have gone higher than we thought.

According to everyone from the authors of the Old Testament to Cecil B. DeMille, who directed The Ten Commandments, Moses went to the bush and spoke to God prior to receiving the Jewish law on a set of stone tablets.

But now a Hebrew psychology professor insists that wasn't the case at all.

Benny Shanon, who teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, recently alleged in the "Time and Mind" journal of philosophy that Moses wasn't just high on the mountain ... he was high on drugs.

So the burning bush was really just wrapped in a "Purple Haze"? Say it ain't so,Satan. Professor Shanon recently told Israeli media: "As far as Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don't believe, or a legend, which I don't believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effect of narcotics." Shanon bases his premise on the fact that he, too, has seen strange things when under the influence of hallucinogenic products.

Shanon says he was introduced to mind-altering drugs during a 1991 trip to a hotbed of spirituality ... the Amazon River basin. He says he gnawed a stuporinducing plant called ayahuasca during a "religious ceremony."

He didn't say if the ceremony was attended by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin or Elvis, but I wouldn't be surprised.

So where does this leave religious scholars? According to the movie, The Ten Commandments, while Moses was on the mountain, the Israelites got bored and started fooling around. They made some idols and sang some outlaw songs. But, according to the movie, they weren't smoking (or chewing) dope ... they were swilling home brew.

I'm buying the movie version, based on my personal experience. In the movie, when Moses came down with the Top Ten tucked under his arms, the Israelites were partying like it was 1999. To me, the Israeli party looked disturbingly like the scene I once witnessed in the infield of the Atlanta Motor Speedway the night before the big spring race.

But I digress.

The tale of the dope-smoking Moses isn't the only strange religious story to appear this week. The same week Moses was accused of being a junkie, the mayor of Centerton, Arkansas, resigned, saying he had been kidnapped and brainwashed by Satan worshippers almost 30 years ago.

Mayor Ken Williams says he has known of his problem "for years." He says he has been living under an assumed name and didn't realize the depth of his problems until he got a dose of truth serum recently.

That's when he also realized he had a wife and two kids in his former life. He says he now "remembers" he took on a new identity to protect them.

Bless his heart. Williams says he wants to find out about his past life. He says his forgotten family supports him. Let's hope the truth will set him free.

Speaking of free, or at least low-rent, if recent events have left Mayor Williams or Hebrew professor Shanon looking for a new church home, it may be easier to find than they think.

They might even want to hook up with Marc Perkel, founder of the Church of the Reality. The church's nineyear old (and somewhat shallow) roots were described this way by Perkel: "I was smoking a little weed, and I was thinking about religion. The name kind of popped in my head. But I had a hard time grasping the idea that no one had thought about it ... We're not a faith-based religion. We're doubt-based. The Church of Reality is a new kind of religion."

Hard to argue with that.