Book Of Daniel Cancelled by NBC

As hard as it is to believe, NBC has dumped the Book of Daniel.

LOS ANGELES - The last chapter of the controversial religious drama "The Book of Daniel" has been written at NBC. Although the network stopped short of saying the low-rated show was canceled, a spokeswoman said Tuesday it has been dropped from the schedule.

The series, which starred Aidan Quinn as an Episcopalian priest with a pill habit who holds regular conversations with Jesus, has a promiscuous son and a daughter who deals marijuana, proved better at drawing criticism than viewers.

Conservative Christian groups condemned the depiction of Jesus as blasphemous, accusing the writers of portraying Christ as tolerant of sin in talks with the priest. Seven NBC affiliates refused to air it.

I never accused the show of being blasphemous. I said it portrayed the average Christian as being a nitwit and the average Christian family as being a group of sneaking hypocrites. The writers and producers of this show were writing about a culture that they know nothing about and writing instead about how they perceived Christians to be. This sort of self-indulgent judgmentalism is very heavy handed and almost universally false.

We all live in some ignorance. A physics professor may not know how to cook that perfect omelette, while the short order cook might not ponder the density of light. Most of us accept these small voids in our experience as a way of life. We catagorize them as things we either refuse to ponder farther, or things we will try and learn about. The Book of Daniel was a story written by a short order cook about the density of light.

Ignorance blared from a rooftop gets too much attention.

(h/t to Right Wing News.)