The so-called explainer website Vox has published what is probably the worst possible characterization of Christian beliefs since the Romans accused the early martyrs of belonging to a secret society of incestuous cannibals.

It's not as bad as what the Romans thought, but it's certainly up there.

The website's co-founder, Ezra Klein, interviewed historian Yuval Noah Harari recently for his podcast, The Ezra Klein Show.

They talked about the sort of stuff thinkfluencers like to talk about, including robots, "the most cerebral humans," falling in love with robots, Artificial Intelligence and robot emotions.

Then came the part where Harari attempted to describe Christian theology. It was not enlightening:

This idea of humans finding meaning in virtual reality games is actually not a new idea. It's a very old idea. We have been finding meaning in virtual reality games for thousands of years. We've just called it religion until now.

You can think about religion simply as a virtual reality game. You invent rules that don't really exist, but you believe these rules, and for your entire life you try to follow the rules. If you're Christian, then if you do this, you get points. If you sin, you lose points. If by the time you finish the game when you're dead, you gained enough points, you get up to the next level. You go to heaven.

Oh my. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

He continued:

People have been playing this virtual reality game for thousands of years, and it made them relatively content and happy with their lives. In the 21st century, we'll just have the technology to create far more persuasive virtual reality games than the ones we've been playing for the past thousands of years. We'll have the technology to actually create heavens and hells, not in our minds but using bits and using direct brain-computer interfaces.

You know, for a historian and academic, one would think Harari would have cracked at least one book explaining the basic theology of a 2017-year-old religion practiced by an estimated 2.2 billion people.

There are literally thousands of easy-to-read explainers, many of which date back to the earliest days of Christianity. The source material, which says nothing of a supposed points system, is also readily available in libraries, online and in multiple languages.

Maybe one day the "most cerebral humans" will program the source material into robots so that it can be read back to us when we don't know what we're talking about. Dream big.