It's Eastertime, so media leaps to publish bizarre claim that Moses was a stoner.

Every spring it’s the same thing – on or about Easter, the media publishes some bizarre garbage about a religious figure or something that (they think) discredits Christianity. This year’s attempt is Benny Shanon’s evidence-free speculation that the burning bush/ten commandments stories resulted from Moses being stoned out of his gourd.

Just in the last few years we’ve had the Da Vinci Code (fiction but winked at and treated as non-fiction); The Lost Tomb of Jesus including the ossuary for Mary Magdalene, Jesus, and their son; Jesus walking on ice, not water; the Gospel of Judas and several other Gnostic Easter heresies. (If they don’t release these things at Easter they’d get no press at all.) That’s just the handful of stories I can recall. I’m sure there are more. It’s fair to say that this nonsense is topical, but the kind of articles you see related to Christianity at Easter are markedly different from the kind of articles you see on Islam at Ramadan.

In this year’s heresy, we are presented with the theory that Moses experienced no actual miracles – just a good buzz.

Writing in the British journal Time and Mind, Benny Shanon of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University said two plants in the Sinai desert contain the same psychoactive molecules as those found in plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca is prepared.
Was Moses high on Mount Sinai? – Science- msnbc.com

In a surprising flash of honesty, the author admits the obvious -

“I have no direct proof of this interpretation,” and such proof cannot be expected, he says.

However, “it seems logical that something was altered in people’s consciousness. There are other stories in the Bible that mention the use of plants: for example, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden.”
Hebrew University researcher: Moses was tripping at Mount Sinai

The bible describes hemlock, gall and wormwood as poison. More than one person in the bible drank alcohol recreationally or to excess. Myrrh could be used to ease pain but I can’t find a single instance of recreational drug use in the bible.  Not one.

But who’s really the stoner here?

[Shanon] mentioned his own experience when he used ayahuasca, a powerful psychotropic plant, during a religious ceremony in Brazil’s Amazon forest in 1991. “I experienced visions that had spiritual-religious connotations,” Shanon said.

He said the psychedelic effects of ayahuasca were comparable to those produced by concoctions based on bark of the acacia tree, that is frequently mentioned in the Bible.
Moses was high on drugs: Israeli researcher

I guess next year we’ll be hearing that the smoke around the altar wasn’t incense. And that whole journey to the Promised Land? That was clearly the first Burning Man.