NYT: Jesus Is A Fairy Tale

NYTimes ethicist Randy Cohen let his -- and his newspaper's -- anti-inclusive slip show in a column today. Writing on the not at all complicated issue of when to tell your kid about the tooth fairy, he concludes:

If it's any help, when my own daughter asked about her tooth money, I looked her in the eye, thought about her cognitive development and told her that I won it in a poker game with Spider-Man, a unicorn and Jesus. And I'm sure that with a few more years of therapy, she'll be just fine.

Capt. Ed points out:

Heaven forbid that a mere blogger should point out what the Paper of Record's many levels of professional fact-checking seems to have missed, but Jesus of Nazareth is no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy. Whether or not one believes Jesus to be divine, His existence as a person is in no doubt. Josephus, who hardly could be considered a source friendly to either Christians or Jews, wrote contemporaneously of Jesus in a short portion of his writings on the Roman Empire considered to be reliable and accurate.

Equating Jesus with unicorns and Santa Claus not only shows remarkable insensitivity to the paper's Christian readers, but also betrays the NYT's multicultural posings as a sham.

This was not a sloppy quote by Cohen; it was well thought out. He positions Jesus against two other things. The first is a creation of modern man's creative mind; specifically Stan Lee's creative mind. Cohen picked a contemporary fictional character to remind his readers that there are still people today who believe the "fiction" of Christ.

Then, with the unicorn, he picked a mythological figure out of the mist of time. In so doing, he anchored the modern fiction with the ancient myth; both easily dismissed, just as he has dismissed Jesus.

But whether you believe Jesus was the son of God or not, you had better believe he existed. To not do so shows a prejudice so deep that it keeps you from even informing yourself. Apparently the editors at the NYT have joined their ethicist in this.

I pity Cohen's kids. What a poor role model their father is being.