“Everything comes in circles, even Professor Moriarty . . . . The old wheel turns and the same spoke comes up. It's all been done before and will be again.”

Ah, Sherlock Holmes’s version of “history repeats itself.” Like all truisms, we wait for that perfect moment to whip it out, that moment when history does actually repeat itself and we can jadedly announce with a sigh, “It’s all been done before.”

The thing about history, however, is that it’s such a large and detailed field that none of us can know enough of it to always be aware of just when it actually is repeating itself.  I’m sure it does just about every second of every day, somewhere in the world. And while I’m not exactly a historian or even a history buff, my long, and some might say unsavory, Sherlockian past  has armed me with just enough historical details to be dangerous . . . and to occasionally spot a repeat in history others might miss.

Take this evening,  for example,  when the good Carter’s desire to see Bill Maher’s Religulous  at the local theater  spurred us to a late-weekend movie outing.   As the number ten box office movie on a weekend full of new movies,  Religulous seems to have made some sort of dent on the weekend movie crowds,  which is pretty good for a documentary.  And why not? Our hero, Sherlock Holmes would have enjoyed it immensely.

How would I know that Sherlock Holmes would enjoy any modern movie,  as – unlike a certain other columnist on this site – I make no claims to being a direct descendent or otherwise an insider with the Great Detective Himself?  Simple. I not only read the tale in which Holmes said, “Let me recommend this book - one of the most remarkable ever penned. It is Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man,” I also read the book he recommended to Watson in that line.

I’m sure I’m not alone in that among Sherlockians. I mean, Holmes recommended the book, we have to be a little curious.  Of course that curiosity might be daunted a bit by the over five hundred pages that Winwood Reade wrote in his very Victorian style that seems to walk step by step through the whole of human history not once, but twice.  Reade wrote Martyrdom in 1872, and his final premise was simply this: man had evolved past the need for religion as we know it, and that said religion was doing more harm than good.

That was 1872, and one hundred and thirty-six years later,  we still haven’t evolved past our need for religion, as Reade had hoped. In fact, it is actually more prevalent today than in Reade’s time, if for no other reason than there’s just more of us. Enter Bill Maher, a comedian turned social commentator who either offends or delights, depending upon which side of his opinions  one falls. Were he around in Reade’s time, Maher would have been reaching audiences via the printed page as Reade did, but being a modern sort,  Maher decided to work out his own questions with religion in a modern medium.  He’s funny, he’s covering more Western religions than Reade did (Later saying he would have hit the Eastern ones,  too, but didn’t have the budget.), but in the end, Maher’s message is the same as Winwood Reade’s:  Religion  is too dangerous in the wrong hands for man to hold on to it.

As many an article has been written over the years, ascribing one religion of another to Sherlock Holmes,  there are surely Sherlockians out there who will disagree with me when I say that Holmes would have enjoyed Maher’s Religulous.  But even if Holmes was Jewish,  Anglican, or Buddhist,  he still enjoyed a spirit of intelligient inquiry. From the long discussions of our own religious beliefs that the good Carter and I shared as a result of watching the film,  I feel pretty certain that Holmes would  have been secure enough in his own beliefs to enjoy a similar result with his Watson.

After Watson finished reading The Martyrdom of Man,  he and Holmes probably had a lively evening of discussion just as Carter and I did, some one hundred and twenty years later. As I said at the start, history is always repeating itself . . . whether or not we notice it.

Your humble correspondent,
Brad Keefauver

P.S. For those of you wondering after last week's column, I did clean up the Holmes room this week. No time for pictures, so you'll just have to trust me!