I got home from band practice last night and the Lovely Lady was about to watch a show called Gates Of Hell on these six locations on earth that were generally considered by those who lived in the area to be gateways to the underworld. We thought it might be fascinating, a look at the archeology of the areas, the myths of the various people who lived in the areas, and maybe even an exploration of some of these places. In some regards that was correct, but for the most part it was yet another shitty program featuring horrible reporting, ridiculous conjecture, and more stupid than one could shake a stick at.

One point in particular gives example of this. They were in Belize with an archeologist walking through this particular set of caves that the Mayans had believed were the houses of various torments in the underworld. Unlike most other cultures, this underworld was one that the Mayans entered in order to presumably preform blood sacrifices. As the archeologist went through the area, he found several bodies. The narrator implied that this proved that this was a literal gateway to Hell.

No, it doesn’t. For starters, they didn’t do a thorough evaluation of the bodies. For all we know, those were people who died in accidents or of any number of possible causes. And even if they had been murdered and all evidence pointed to sacrifice, what would we know for certain? Well, we would know that the Mayans conducted human sacrifices in the cave. This is conducive to what we know about the dark side of their culture and should come as no surprise, but to say that this means that the cave they are standing in is a literal portal to an Underworld where souls of the wicked are tormented for all eternity is what we call a bit of a stretch.

The entire crockumentary (a term I have just coined to imply a show that is performed in the style of a documentary and is not meant as a mockumentary, but is still a total crock of shit) was laced with this. They had interesting people on discussing the realistic side of these sites and the faithful who interpreted them as hellmouths, but those people were overshadowed by evangelicals with zany eyes saying that Hell is a real place.

They even went so far (though it has nothing to do with a gateway to Hell) as to get a guy on who was a plane crash survivor. He’s heavily scarred from a very harrowing experience, and while being doctored he had a near death experience with a tunnel of light that was lighter and more tunnely than anything on earth, and at the same time he turned his head and saw an evil darkness darker than the darkest darkness that wasn’t this particular darkness but was still plenty dark. The darkness tried to eat him. I know, right?

He attests that his experience was totally real and absolute proof that there is a Hell that is hungry for your soul and all the usual crap, and it didn’t even dispute this fact.

History Channel, you suck. You continuously take what could be interesting fodder for discussion and turn it into sound bytes that you think will sell. If your target audience is birthers, truthers, and other spoon-fed intellectuals, then you’re on the right path. But either way, please just stop.

Jim