Today on Friendly Fire, the 1981 pre-World War II movie Raiders of the Lost

Arc directed by Stephen Spielberg. Let's picture this scenario.

Hitler starts World War II having captured the actual arc of the covenant, which it turns out

is an actual mystical and magical artifact of biblical times that awards its possessors the power to melt faces,

shoe lightning bolts and unleash Lady Ghosts.

That would have been a bad outcome, yes, and a tremendous irony also, but I think most importantly

it would have proved the existence of the God of the Jews.

This would have been a very big deal at the time as it would now

Not only that but it would have proved that God gave the Jews the 10

Commandments that the box containing the crumbled up ten commandments had the power to melt

faces, and that the Jews actually misplaced or surrendered this amazing weapons to the

Philistine after losing to them in battle, which further suggests either that they did not use

the face melting functionality of the arc during this battle, or they forgot the password,

or the Philistines weren't troubled by it

all of which calls into question God's motives in delivering the arc in the first place.

Now God as we know is inscrutable but this seems like bad project management.

All of this would have been amazing to learn in 1936 and especially astounding to have received

this knowledge through the archaeologist Hitler.

But for Hitler to have pursued and succeeded in this plan,

he would have needed to have believed in the Jewish God.

We know from the historic record that Hitler was privately very anti-Christian and although he publicly

espoused a weird racist pagan hybrid Christianity it is fairly obvious that that was just

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