c. 1996 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ Charles Panati can tell you why Muslims are teetotalers, Jews don’t eat pork and some Christians experience a run of meatless Fridays.
“Food taboos _ of the kind that abound in Leviticus, chapter 11, and Deuteronomy, chapter 14 _ are the means by which ancient societies maintained their separateness from others, their cohesiveness as a clan and the exclusivity of their religious beliefs,” Panati says.
“God knew what he was doing; strict dietary laws kept Jews from easily socializing with people of other faiths. Less socializing meant less intermarriage.”
Likewise, the Koran forbids all intoxicating drink, which sharply distinguishes Muslims from the wine and beer enthusiasts in other faiths.
As for the now largely abandoned practice by Catholics and some other Christians of abstaining from meat on Friday, its origins were purely economic, Panati says.
Four hundred years ago, King Edward VI of England faced a meat shortage combined with a struggling fish industry. Parliament, with the backing of the church, ordered fish be substituted for meat on Fridays. The custom flourished until eating meat, especially on Good Friday, was considered a grave sin.
Panati adores digging up little-known stories like this. He reads himself quasi-blind each time he researches one of the scholarly browsing books on which he built his reputation. His tomes have sold more than 5 million copies in 12 languages, with “Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things” tallying a half-million copies in print.
His latest effort, timed for Christmas, is “Sacred Origins of Profound Things” (Penguin). He sifted through the major world religions for grist on evil, heaven, hell, limbo and purgatory, with stops to ponder virginity, stigmata and papal infallibility. He borrowed liberally from mythologist Joseph Campbell. And he dedicated the finished product to his mother, Mary Panati, an 80-year-old Catholic living in Atlantic City, N.J.
Trained as a physicist at Columbia University, Panati takes a different slant on religion than his mother. The author brings a scientist’s skepticism to his work.
He writes that Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was “a hot-blooded teen-ager, a self-styled ladies’ man,” who wound up preaching polygamy as the answer to the evils of adultery and prostitution.
“Polygamy is a chapter in Mormon history that the religion’s devout followers would like to close and forget _ much the way the Roman Catholic Church feels about the era in which indulgences were sold for cash, cattle and crops,” Panati says.
He cocks an eyebrow over the phenomena of stigmata, raising the possibility that wounds in the hands and feet that emulate Jesus’ might be self-inflicted chicanery. He notes that the physics of crucifixion require nails be driven through the wrists (to support the victim’s weight), but that almost all people with stigmata report bleeding through their palms _ the common way Jesus’ injuries are depicted in religious art.
Panati admits his book will do little to soothe the pious. He takes a wry tone reporting that Catholics have patron saints of hairdressers and coin collectors.
David Letterman is apt to like it _ having already invited Panati onto his show eight times. Oprah Winfrey has featured the author on three programs. But Panati says he dislikes the marketing end of his gig. What he really prefers is solitude, and the company of 100 wild birds who live with him on Long Island.
“I don’t want to offend anybody with this book,” Panati says.
“I’ve been as factual as I can be, I’ve used the major encyclopedias of the world’s religions and I can give a reference for everything I’ve put in,” he says. “Nothing is made up. Where I found factual conflicts, I tried to trace them to their sources and turned to interviewing scholars in the more specialized fields.”
Panati, 53, says he wrote this book partly because he felt he had never learned the best stories about religion, despite being steeped in a Roman Catholic education and graduating from Villanova University in Pennsylvania.
“Religion and science are two entirely different things,” says Panati, who worked as Newsweek’s science editor for five years. “The existence of God simply cannot be proved. This was driven home to me as a physics major at Villanova. My physics professors were exhorting us to use our God-given thought processes to think, deduce and infer. Then I’d go to a class on the theology of Aquinas and be told to treat it as revelation. Theological arguments are not proofs, just a slightly suggestive line of reasoning.
“If you want to believe, you do believe,” he says. “I definitely have a foot in both camps.”
MJP END LONG
