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Be sure to stop by WORLDmag.com today and bookmark it—or make it your home page and your daily online source for news and views uniquely presented from a Biblical perspective.

Israeli archaeologist Yossi Garfinkel says a discovery in July — a curved pottery shard bearing five lines of writing — may be the oldest known Hebrew inscription. A teenage volunteer unearthed the 3000-year-old relic in July. Garfinkel, who leads excavations at Hirbet Qeiyafa, yesterday released his conclusions about the find, the International Herald Tribune reports:

He said the relic is strong evidence that the ancient Israelites were literate and could chronicle events centuries before the Bible was written. This could suggest that some of the Bible’s accounts were based on written records as well as oral traditions — adding credence to arguments that the Biblical account of history is more than myth.

The Israelites were not the only ones using the proto-Canaanite characters, and other scholars suggest it is difficult — perhaps impossible — to conclude the text is Hebrew. However, Garfinkel based his identification on a three-letter verb from the inscription meaning “to do,” a word he said existed only in Hebrew.

The Tribune article discusses how the pottery shard, which is now kept in a university safe, was found and dated — and also how some scholars have warned about jumping to conclusions, even the conclusion that the text is Hebrew.

But let’s play around a bit and grant for a moment that it is Hebrew text. If you are among those who count biblical history a mix of myth and suspect oral tradition, would knowing that the biblical texts may have been based on written contemporaneous accounts change your view?

AP’s Eric Gorski makes a sweeping, gloomy statement: “The loser in this election is religion.” His analysis lists the election’s religious hullabaloos: Romney’s Mormonism, Obama’s supposed Islam, Obama’s Wright, McCain’s Hagee, and Palin’s anti-witchcraft-praying pastor. “Not since Kennedy’s Catholicism was dissected has religion been so used as a weapon in an election,” Gorski says.

In some ways, I’m inclined to agree. Each side — if not the principals, then the supporters — used religion to gut the other. The media looped nutty soundbites instead of promoting serious dialogue and most of the religious discussion centered on YouTube clips.

Gorski forgets some good moments, though. Rick Warren’s Saddleback Forum elevated the dialogue, and the Evangelical Manifesto made some thoughtful statements. If we try, the growing political diversity among evangelicals could end up prompting some thoughtful dialogue instead of creating internecine evangelical wars.

But what do you think? Did religion win or lose?

It’s been confirmed that John McCain will come off the campaign trail to appear on “Saturday Night Live” tomorrow night.  Hosting will be Barack Obama-supporter Ben Affleck. McCain has been on the show twice, most recently in May. He also hosted “SNL” in 2002. Will McCain’s ratings top Sarah Palin’s record-setting appearance two weeks ago?

My wife and I know several families who have sons and brothers serving in Iraq, who we pray for specifically each and every night. This morning the mother of one of those soldiers forwarded to us the following poignant message from her son, and gave me permission to share it with all of you:

The war in Iraq has been unpopular not because of the massive expense or the loss of American lives. It has been unpopular not because of the constant criticism of a political left more interested in the advancement of their domestic agenda than in a favorable outcome to the War on Terror. It is unpopular instead because in the Western psyche a few million men in dishdashas and women in veils do not equate to a few million actual PEOPLE.

If Americans and Europeans truly believed that Iraqis deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and that, like so many of our ancestors, Iraqis are tired, poor, and yearning to breathe free, this war would become the calling of our time, not the tool of career politicians and political opportunists. The real tragedy is that their personal political gains will come at the cost of human lives. The lives of men I know, with whom I talk daily, with whom I laugh and drink chai. And we in the West will not care because Iraqis don’t look like us, worship our God, or speak our languages, and those dishdashas make the men look like they’re wearing dresses.

I have spent the last six months in Iraq. I have sat and talked with Iraqis daily, both Sunni and Shia. I have heard what they want for themselves and for their children. I have seen the look of fear in their eyes when I mention that American troops may leave. For countless hours I have worked with them side by side and heard their concerns and ideas for the future. I have found that they want to live without the terror of masked men coming to take their fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters to be tortured and beheaded on propaganda videos by Al Qaeda and other extremist groups. I have found that they wish to govern their own affairs without the constant fear of a despotic government imprisoning them because of their religious and political affiliations. I have found that they want freedom to build a better life for themselves and for their children. Are these not the same rights we demand for ourselves? We are no different. If these basic rights were denied us, would we not ask the nations of the world to aid us in our struggle to regain them?

Instead of seeing support and compassion from the people of America and Europe, the Iraqis see us angrily protesting “American Imperialism.” They hear a presidential candidate saying that our part in their fight for basic human rights was a waste of America’s time, that their lives were not worth sacrificing ours. In our probable choice of a president and in our opinion polls we are telling the peaceful majority of Iraqis that they are not worthy of our quality of life, our life expectancy, or the natural rights of man. We tell them every day that in our eyes they are not human beings. What does that make us?

Christians who hate the Harry Potter books (CWHHPB) have a new friend: Richard Dawkins.  Of course, CWHHPB hate them for one of three reasons: because the books are 1) full of evil and menace or 2) forgettable pop literature or 3) both.  Dawkins hates them because they promote “mythical thinking.”  Which actually sounds like a good thing to me, since the word mythos means story, and since the world is made of stories.  But to Dawkins, it means simply “unscientific.”  He says:

I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s something for research.

Isn’t it also insidious to limit children to empirical data, rather than logic and reason and mystery and logos, which transcend sensory experience?  Of course, this isn’t about Harry Potter at all.  It’s about Christianity and theism in general.

It’s a form of child abuse, even worse than physical child abuse. I wouldn’t want to teach a young child, a terrifyingly young child, about hell when he dies, as it’s as bad as many forms of physical abuse.

It will make Junior feel so much better to know the chasm of unfeeling blackness will envelope him upon death, and that he has no moral recourse to stop his father from abusing him with religion.

Happy Halloween, also known as the Day Before All Saints’ Day. As Mickey said, it was 491 years ago (has it been that long, Marty?) when Luther composed his list of 95 propositions about the Church and posted them to the medieval version of today’s blog (a church door) to see who’d bite. The world bit, and now most Christians in the world are something other than Catholic.

So close to the 500th anniversary of this historic moment, “the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) has declared a ‘Luther Decade,’ providing a sort of 10-year plan for German Protestantism.” Because that’s what European Christians need. A plan.

[...] 500 years after Luther, Protestants seem to be longing for the things he himself called into question — ceremony, ritual and all the religious trappings. Higher-ups in the EKD are no longer content to watch debates about religion revolve around Islam and the pope, and they’re not content to watch mosques erected in the Protestant heartland while there are still no places for Protestant pilgrimage. Their goal is to remake Wittenberg into a true Protestant Rome.

Read here how the EKD is going to turn Wittenberg into the Mecca of Protestantism and Germany into the rediscovered Promised Land of Christendom.

Maybe we all want to be someone else. Or maybe it’s just that we should. Halloween brings out a pale shadow of this longing. Boys take on the garb of someone heroic if they yearn to be heroes, or something frightening if they are afraid. Girls put on something lovely, even if they are going to be cowgirls or kittens. In sad cases, the older ones attempt to dress seductively, either egged on or ignored by their fools for parents. Halloween is a physical acting out of what most of us do every day, which is to put on what we long to be.

Once in a literature class, my professor asked us to rewrite the beginning of a fairy tale, telling it from the perspective of its monster. We had been reading Lolita, which is likewise the story of a monster, told from the monster’s point of view. What struck me was that five of the six women in the class chose Cinderella, while none of the men did. The sixth woman chose Sleeping Beauty.

It made me wonder if this dream is deeply engrained in a girl, that someone will see beauty inside her and forsake all others for her and rescue her from a darkened world. I wondered, too, if we males, each of us having chosen stories in which a hero uses an ax to slay the monster, didn’t in some hidden place desire to be rescuers.

What happens, do you think, to leave the world littered with boys who never became anyone’s hero, and girls who never got rescued? When we grow older we put away our costumes, and so maybe with them we box up the dreams of becoming what our hearts once whispered we should be. Growing up means snickering at fairy tales, after all. Who needs heroes? Selfish self-sufficiency is the realist’s calling. And besides, no modern woman wants to be rescued, Pal.

Tonight my sons will be an Army man, Batman, and Robin Hood. They still believe that boys ought to grow up brave, and that they ought to protect girls. Sometimes I wonder if they’ll leave us too old-fashioned to be suitable for the modern woman.

Then I think about that literature class, and the rightful outrage of those modern women at Lolita’s stolen childhood, and how their minds went to Cinderella. Maybe there’s still room for boys to be heroes after all.

Sure most of you are celebrating Halloween today, but for us Reformed-minded Christians, Oct. 31 marks the 491st anniversary of Martin Luther ushering in the Protestant Reformation by nailing his 95 Theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany.

If you’re looking for a great way to celebrate, head over to The Washington Post’s Viewpoint online discussion, hosted today at 1 p.m. ET by Michael Horton. The author of the new book Christless Christianity, Horton is one of the leading voices seeking a modern Reformation of the church in America.

Conventional wisdom says that John McCain has lost. Real Clear Politics (RCP) and Yahoo! both have Barack Obama ahead by more than 6 percentage points. Even Republican Mike Huckabee seems already to be campaigning for 2012. I got an email yesterday telling me that if I sent his HuckPAC $10 I would receive an oval “HUCK” sticker for my car. No mention where the money is going, but since McCain’s spending days are over, you can draw your own conclusions.

In fact, Huckabee was in my hometown of Charlotte, N.C., yesterday, but he wasn’t making any public appearances. Officially, he was bucking up the troops for the final push at the local GOP headquarters. Unofficially, he was sizing up party activists for his own 2012 campaign.

But don’t stick a fork in McCain yet. There’s definitely something going on here. Both the RCP and Yahoo! polls are averages of the most recent national polls. What almost no one has noted, though, is that both of these averages include a poll by Pew Research that shows Obama up by 15 points. No other poll has the Democratic candidate with anything like that kind of lead, and Fox, Rasmussen, Gallup, and McClatchy show him with a 5-point lead or less.

If your eyes are glazing over, pay attention to this: The Pew poll is almost surely a fluke, but there’s no doubt it’s skewing the numbers. What will happen over the next 24 to 48 hours is that the Pew result will “cycle out” of the polls being averaged, and because it was so different, we’ll see an immediate rise in McCain’s numbers on RCP’s and Yahoo!’s “survey of survey” figures. That means that McCain definitely will have some momentum going into the weekend—if for no other reason than because of this statistical anomaly.

The question is: How much momentum? Obama has to walk a bit of a tightrope over the next few days. After Wednesday night’s infomercial, we’re hearing grumblings that Obama is trying to “buy” the election. Yet he can’t afford to take things for granted. The worst thing that could happen to Obama would be for him to lose by fractions with $100 million in the bank. He won’t allow that to happen; he’ll keep spending and he’ll start experiencing some real backlash over the weekend.

The Republicans, on the other hand, always have had a strong final 48-hour ground game, and I expect that will be the case this time, too. If McCain is within the margin of error (3 percent, in most polls) on Monday, that will be a massive energy boost to the Republicans’ get-out-the-vote effort. And I predict, for the wonky reasons I cite above, that McCain will be within those 3 percentage points by Election Eve.

Will that be enough? I truly don’t know. As Yogi Berra said, “Predictions are tricky. Especially predictions about the future!” But Yogi Berra also said this: “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

So I will predict this: The next few days will be very exciting indeed.