Religious tale-spinners and the Ark of the Covenant; the jive and the tap dance

Dear Steven Spielberg...

Organized religion is frozen poetry.

The predator priests—who between them couldn’t write a nursery rhyme—take a work of great imagination, an epic poem, for instance, and edit it, cut it to shreds, insert some extra pumping and thumping, and come up with DOCTRINE.

—This is what God did, this is what He wants, this is how we, your Church, will administer it, these are the rules, this is where you drop your money in the till, this is how we control your lives.

There is a specialized form of this op, in which certain purported physical objects (usually missing) are promoted as holy holies.

Like the Ark of the Covenant.

“The inner room, or Holy of Holies [underground, in Jerusalem, below the Muslim Dome of the Rock], was thought to be the actual dwelling place of the God of Israel, who sat invisibly enthroned above a solid slab of gold that rested on the Ark of the Covenant and had a cherub at each end. This Ark was a gold-covered wooden box containing the tablets of the Ten Commandments.” (Jerusalem Post)

Wikipedia: “The Ark of the Covenant, also known as the Ark of the Testimony or the Ark of God, is an artifact believed to be the most sacred relic of the Israelites, which is described as a wooden chest, covered in pure gold, with an elaborately designed lid called the mercy seat. According to the Book of Exodus, the Ark contained the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. According to the New Testament Book of Hebrews, it also contained Aaron’s rod and a pot of manna.”

“The biblical account relates that approximately one year after the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, the Ark was created according to the pattern given to Moses by God when the Israelites were encamped at the foot of Mount Sinai. Thereafter, the gold-plated acacia chest was carried by its staves by the Levites approximately 2,000 cubits (approximately 800 meters or 2,600 feet) in advance of the people when on the march. God spoke with Moses ‘from between the two cherubim’ on the Ark’s cover.”

Uh-huh. Right.

So where is the Ark now?