At the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the U.S. Government puts the Ark in a box and puts it in a warehouse with a rather enormous number of other boxes.

I can always remember this bringing up a couple of reactions:

  • What was in all of those other boxes? How many other religions, lost continents, alien races, or senators had important relics locked away in that warehouse, never to be utilized, discovered, or mucked about with?

  • How terrible for them to take this wonderful object of religious significance and lock it away where nobody could get to it...how terribly selfish of the Government to do such a thing.

Needless to say, my views on point two have changed rather a bit over the years, otherwise why would I be bothering with this node?

Having gotten to the point where not only can I watch the melty-faces bit without even cringing (and now must work on not critiquing the effects work), I now have to consider...if the Nazis were capable of utilizing it in the manner which they did, who knows what other folks would do with something with the Ark of the Covenant?

Some might say, hand it over to the Jews, it's their Atomic Cannon of Godliness, after all. Why deprive them of their racial heritage?

But with things as messy as they are in the Middle East, I don't think anybody in their right minds would turn something that possibly powerful over to people as vengeance prone as the inhabitants of the Middle East.

Especially since if they did it wrong, all of Israel might melt over-night. Icky.

So maybe the Earth just isn't the place for items of power anymore. We're certainly not very responsible with things like tactical nukes...items of power from the gods themselves are likely an even bigger opportunity for somebody to say "Oops...well, who needs New York anyway?".


beniya says: "in your wu...I take great offense to "people as vengeance pronte as the inhabitants of the Middle East" in a way which implies that israel would use it to obliterate the arabs given the chance..."

You'll note that the Arc, biblically, didn't always wind up with the Israelites. Not, mind you, that any of the powers ascribed to it by RotLA were ever present in the bible. But if such a thing could wind up in the hands of somebody who God did judge as holy, it could get just plain messy.

Alternatively, if you take this node seriously...well you get what you paid for.

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