When I was a kid my dad couldn’t stand for anyone to turn on the sitcom M*A*S*H if he was around. He served in the Korean War as a surgeon (stationed in Fairbanks, Alaska) and simply had no stomach for the way the show misrepresented and mocked the experience.

I have a similar reaction to Bill Moyers’ 16-year-old “Power of Myth” series that the PBS station here in Manhattan trots out nearly every single time it wants to earn money with a fund drive weekend. In the past month, in fact, the six-hour series has appeared twice!

(I only know this because, as someone who doesn’t subscribe to cable, I often only have PBS to switch on for tolerable programming when I want to watch a little TV. Of course, I switch it right back off when this series appears!)

Mythologist Joseph Campbell is the subject for the one-on-one interviews with journalist Moyers, who makes no attempt at even a semblance of balance and, instead, shamelessly indulges in unabashed reverence of Campbell.

For Campbell’s part, he makes no effort at hiding his outright contempt for the God of the Bible as he makes one outrageously blasphemous and inaccurate comment after another surrounding the Bible and biblical Christian tenets.

Here is just one example:

Campbell: “Iblis, that’s the Muslin name for Satan being God’s greatest lover. Why was Satan thrown into hell? Well, the standard story is that when God created the angels He told them to bow to none but Himself. Then He created man, whom He regarded as a higher form than the angel and He asked the angels then to serve man and Satan would not bow to man. Now this is interpreted in the Christian tradition, as I recall from my boyhood instruction, as being the egotism of Satan. He would not bow to man. But in this view he could not bow to man because of his love for God. He could bow only to God and then God says, ‘Get out of my sight!’ Now the worst of the pain of hell, as far as hell has been described, is the absence of the beloved, which is God. So how does Iblis sustain this situation in hell? By the memory of the echo of God’s voice when God said, ‘Go to hell.’ And I think that’s a great sign of love.”

Moyers: “Well that’s certainly true in life that the greatest hell one can know is to be separated from the one you love. That’s why I’ve liked the Persian myth for so long-- Satan is God’s lover.”

Campbell: “Yeah, he’s separated from God and that’s the real pain of Satan.”

Campbell ridicules the idea of the personal, one true God who acts as Father to his children and can barely contain his wholesale adoration of the devil.

He equates Satan’s appearance in the Garden of Eden, for example, with “immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again.”

Through Campbell’s endless twisting of Judeo-Christian concepts with all forms of paganism, pantheism and occultism, God becomes an “idea,” a “thought”--an impersonal entity with a “good and evil side.”

“In the beginning God was simply the most powerful god among many; he is just a local tribal god,” Campbell says, contradicting his own assessment of God as a transcendent energy that is “unknowable and unknown.”

When Moyers asks if Jesus Christ’s prayer could just as well have begun, “Our Mother which art in heaven,” Campbell reinforces that God is a “metaphorical image” and heaven is purely “a symbolic idea.”

“It is no place,” Campbell says of heaven. “All of the references of religious and mythological images are to planes of consciousness or fields of experience against the human experience. These are to evoke attitudes and experiences that are appropriate to a meditation on the mystery of the source of your on being, I would say.”

Moyers, of course, laps up all this New Age malarkey with open-mouthed awe.

Another intended myth all us Christians are too simple-minded to pick up on is the idea of a Savior.

The same goes for the virgin birth, which Campbell incorrectly states is only mentioned in Luke of the New Testament (Matthew 1:23 is another reference). His intended point that Luke, being the only Greek among the four Gospel writers, stole the “concept” from Greek mythology is also patently false. As J. Gresham Machen proves in his 1930 book “The Virgin Birth of Christ,” there is no known parallel in any other religious material for the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. Pagan stories, for example, have the god or gods fornicating with human beings.

Campbell and Moyers work in tandem to discount any literal interpretation of the Gospel story, especially the core salvation message that Jesus Christ died as payment for our sins in order that all who believe on Him as their personal Savior will avoid hell and gain eternal life.

Here’s an example:

Moyers: “So you would agree with Abelard in the 12^th century who said Jesus’ death on the Cross was not as a ransom paid--as a penalty applied—but it was an act of at-one-ment, atonement, at one with the race?”

Campbell: “That’s the most sophisticated interpretation of why Christ had to be crucified. Abelard’s idea that the coming of Christ to be crucified, and illustrating thus the suffering of life, removes man’s mind from commitment to the things of this world in compassion. It’s in compassion. It is the suffering that evokes the humanity of the human heart.

By contemplating the cross you’re contemplating the true mystery of life and that love.”

The overall intent of the series is to push the New Age belief, “I am God” and that all religions are “myths” leading to the same conclusion. Anyone narrow-minded and arrogant enough to believe in only one truth through a one true God has simply been brainwashed by the particular religious tradition they were raised in.

“You must go past the image of Jesus, your God is your ultimate barrier,” warns Campbell. “That’s why Clown Religions are good because they show the image is not a fact, but it’s a reflex some times.”

Campbell, in fact, refers to the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion as “a clown act, really.”

If there’s one great lie Satan has propagated throughout man’s history, it’s that men don’t need God—they are gods. This deification of the creature’s will is at the heart of all idolatry and stems from Satan’s original decision he was going to make God out of himself. His rebellion in the heavenly realm began before man was ever put on the scene and has nothing to do with a refusal to bow to men, as Campbell states.

Satan, originally known as Lucifer (meaning “light-bearer”), was created by God as second only to God Himself in wisdom and beauty. Placed above all other angels, Satan was given the exalted position of literally conducting the universe’s worship of God. Lifted up by narcissistic pride, though, Lucifer got it in his head that he could do things better than God and he set about gaining the allegiance of the other angels. “I will be like the Most High,” he determined.

“What he was saying was, ‘I saw this creation and I saw what He was doing and I saw the plan and I would be the better one to do it,’ ” explains my pastor in a sermon I have on tape. “ ‘And I’m going to be the possessor of heaven and earth and it’s going to be mine and I’m going to be the ruler and I’m going to be the one who controls. It’s going to be my philosophy and my purpose and my plan, not his, that’s going to be worked out.’ ”

This represented the beginning of the lie Jesus Christ speaks of in John 8:44 when he calls Satan “a liar and the father of it.” The battle today is one between God’s program of the truth and Satan’s program of the lie and whose will is going to function.

After the Rapture and in the ensuing Tribulation Period, this deception will reach such a level that Satan, as the man the Anti-Christ in his world reign from Jerusalem, will make people believe he is God in human flesh and Jesus Christ is the devil!

“These people out there in the ages to come are going to have a guy standing there saying he’s the Messiah,” explains my pastor about the Anti-Christ. “He’s going to come into Jerusalem, he’s going to have them build a temple and he’s going to re-institute the Mosaic religion.”

What we’re seeing today is the groundwork being laid for this ultimate deception and it has everything to do with replaying and replaying “Power of Myth” in hopes of gaining more and more converts.

“Satan, the god of this world (II Cor. 4:4, Eph. 2:2), manipulates nations, rulers and finances,” explains Bible scholar Hazel Brown in her booklet, “The Dispensations and Israel, Dispensationally Considered (An Enigma Solved, A Puzzle Unraveled)”.

“Through the news media, TV, schools, apostate churches, and the money situation, he is grooming and conditioning the world to welcome his masterpiece of deception, the Anti-Christ. Most of the world today is totally unsuspecting of this mind control and financial maneuvering.”