Finally, the last day of the second celebration of the end of the second millennium and the start of the third is upon us. 2001 is finally here--Hal's revenge--and our friend and skeptical mentor Arthur C. Clarke has his hands full with celebrations of his prescient book. (The Simpson's episode featuring Homer in space munching potato chips to the tune of the 2001 theme--Thus Sprach Zarathustra--aired the other night. What makes it so clever is that they had Homer rotating like the 2001 shuttle does when it has to synchronize with the rotating space station for docking. Homer was docking with chips! Funny stuff.)

Many of you pointed out that according to the Politically Incorrect transcr ipt I was quoted as saying "I celebrate Festivus, for the rest of us. Of course I celebrate Christmas with my God." The first part of the line is a reference to a Seinfeld episode where George's dad invents a new xmas holiday. In the second part, what I actually said was "Of course I celebrate Christmas with my daughter."

Now, it's true, I spoil that kid rotten sometimes, to the point where it might look like I'm treating her like a God, but I assure you that this was a transcription error on the part of the PI staff. My daughter, in fact, was on the set watching the taping and she commented afterward that I had mentioned her. In any case, I could not have said this since I do not believe in God, god, or gods of any sort, unless you count the skeptical trilogy--Isaac, Carl, and Steve (Asimov, Sagan, and Ally partner Pat Linse, the Art Director of Skeptic, pointed out that it is Luke that contains the feminist overtones that the biblical scholar Randel Helms speculates in his book WHO WROTE THE GOSPELS? might have been written by a woman or several women (I had said it was John). And several of you pointed out that my blanket statement that the gospels were not written by Jesus' disciples is under dispute with a wide range of possibilities. For example:

"The majority of scholars tend to agree that the writer of the book of John (or most of it) was one of the original "disciples." Matthew is more controversial, but the author may have been a disciple. The dates for the first three gospels are usually placed from about 65-80 AD, with the fourth book (John) dated to the last two decades of the first century. The date for Mark, probably 65-70 AD, is thought to place it before the death of Peter or some other presumed observers of the events."

As most of you know this is a huge field of scholarship that I could not possibly do justice in a one-line on a talk show. I was just trying to convey the point that it seems clear that these are not divinely-inspired works of God, they are filled with inconsistencies one would expect in an oral-tradition society, and they are obviously written by believers bent on portraying their leader as the messiah. If you want to read a good book on the subject go to www.skeptic.com and order Randel Helms' book WHO WROTE THE GOSPELS?

As for Bill Maher, yes he is clearly a skeptic and most off the time on most subjects he tends to say the sort of things one would find in the pages of Skeptic magazine. And, to my great relief, he was supportive of my book.

Interestingly, I thought I would track the effects of this show on amazon.com, which supplies the sales ranks for books. How We Believe shot up from a ranking of 2,850 to 58 within one day of the airing of PI! It stayed in the top 100 for three more days, then fell dramatically off and is back in the thousands. Equally interesting, even though my other book Why People Believe Weird Things was never mentioned, it too rose from something like 3,500 to 524 in the rankings. Since my third book, Denying History, did not budge in the standings, I deduced that the Weird Things boost was from the fact that when you call up How We Believe on amazon.com they supply a list of related books one can purchase. Weird Things was listed, Denying History was not. Clever marketing ploy on their part to sell more books. We also got a huge boost of subscriptions to Skeptic on our own web page, www.skeptic.com from the show.

Happy new year/century/millennium (again) everyone.

Michael Shermer