Brad Pitt spent a year hunting for imaginary medieval treasure beneath his French estate. A grifter selling some kind of ground-penetrating radar convinced Pitt that crusaders buried looted Levantine gold on Pitt's property.
Quote:Perhaps the most renowned of Pitt’s creative sidelines is the wine that he’s been producing at his estate in Provence, Château Miraval. In 2008, he and Jolie bought the thousand--acre property, which produces a world-class rosé that has become a multimillion--dollar business; in 2014 the two were married there. More recently, the estate popped up in the press when Jolie sold her stake in the business. Before the legal wrangling that has since ensued, Pitt received an interesting bit of information about the property.
He tells me that he was approached a few years ago by a man who explained to him that the château was supposedly home to another fortune: millions of dollars’ worth of gold that one of the estate’s medieval owners had taken from the Levant during the Crusades and buried on the grounds. “I got obsessed,” Pitt says. “Like for a year, this was all I could think about, just the excitement of it all.” He bought radar equipment and scoured his property. “Maybe it has something to do with where I grew up, because in the Ozark Mountains there were always stories of hidden caches of gold.”
Of course, no treasure was unearthed. Pitt says the man who’d approached him was ultimately seeking money for some kind of radar company; an investment opportunity, he was told. The whole thing went nowhere and Pitt was left feeling a little surprised that he’d let himself believe in the idea. The entire experience was, he says, “pretty foolish in the end. It was just the hunt that was exciting.”
https://www.gq.com/story/brad-pitt-august-cover-profile
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
