Bible code theory

[karmicserenade]

Please forgive me if this has already been discussed (I did do a search and failed to see anything quite like this...but then again I may not have looked closely enough!).

What do all of you think of the Bible code? I am watching a program on the History channel about this, there are various 'matrix's that supposedly predict future events and also have shown previous events (Sept 11 for example), they are also talking end of days ...it all seems really weird to me.

There is also a search engine to find various events within the bible, you would simply type in a key word in hebrew, and away you go. You could probably read any book and find a 'code' within its contents.

There are many people studying this phenomenon. So what do you think?

[LibraryLady]

I think you are a welcome addition to our forum.

Take a look at this (http://forums.randi.org/archive/index.php/t-9946.html).

[drkitten]

Please forgive me if this has already been discussed (I did do a search and failed to see anything quite like this...but then again I may not have looked closely enough!).

What do all of you think of the Bible code? I am watching a program on the History channel about this, there are various 'matrix's that supposedly predict future events and also have shown previous events (Sept 11 for example), they are also talking end of days ...it all seems really weird to me.

There is also a search engine to find various events within the bible, you would simply type in a key word in hebrew, and away you go. You could probably read any book and find a 'code' within its contents.

There are many people studying this phenomenon. So what do you think?

Total bollocks. It's diviniation by searching for random patterns; the ancient Romans used to do the same thing with the entrails of birds and the patterns the clouds made. Any apparently random sequence will display pattern-laden subsequences if you look hard enough.

As you expressed it, "you could probably read any book and find a 'code' within its contents." People have duplicated the Bible Code experiment using Moby Dick, War and Peace, and the collected lyrics of Vanilla Ice.

[LibraryLady]

I think you are a welcome addition to our forum.

Take a look at this (http://forums.randi.org/archive/index.php/t-9946.html).

[triadboy]

http://www.nmsr.org/biblecod.htm

I think I remember somebody initiating a 'bible code' sequence and discovering the creator of the bible code will be stabbed in the eye with a pencil the first time he sets foot in Australia. :D


We're all waiting.

[Beerina]

One of the primary proponents of the Bible code stuff once said something like, "Well, I'll believe it's not real when someone can extract predictions from Moby Dick."

This was done. That they're after the fact is another clue that sets off alarms in the baloney detection kit.

[Complexity]

Wouldn't you rather learn something real about the world that you live in rather than waste your life on bible-code nonsense?

[The Atheist]

There are many people studying this phenomenon. So what do you think?

They're idiots.

[slingblade]

What do all of you think of the Bible code? [...]
There are many people studying this phenomenon. So what do you think?

I think it's utter crap. Next question?

[Yiab]

You could probably read any book and find a 'code' within its contents.

As you expressed it, "you could probably read any book and find a 'code' within its contents." People have duplicated the Bible Code experiment using Moby Dick, War and Peace, and the collected lyrics of Vanilla Ice.

I recommend the bit that Jon Safran does on this in his TV series "Jon Safran vs. God". He looks at the Bible's "predictions" about Sept. 11 then finds "predictions" of the same kind in the collected lyrics of Vanilla Ice. After this, he finds "post-predictions" of the same kind in Congress' complete report on the Sept. 11 attacks about Vanilla Ice being a one-hit wonder.

Any topic, any sufficiently large body of text and any sufficiently vague method of determining similarity will give you this result.

[Dancing David]

The stupid thing about the bible code is there is already a code in the hebrew text. When they say that Methuselah was X years old it is a code. The hebrew letters are also used an numbers. Like 18 is 'life' ch+i and some marks that don't count.

So the bible code is stupid, there already is a code and then there is the allegorical code.

[karmicserenade]

Ahh thanks so much for the link Library Lady :) I also felt that the very thought of intelligence agencies using this 'code' was utter lunacy! Heheh, as if!

The very fact that the bible was rewritten throughout history, would cause some serious questioning on my part. Man wrote the bible, not 'God' (*that would be debated too!) As God can work through man! hehe.

I thought the program was rather funny, that is why I watched the last half of it :P The fanatics are always entertaining (if not somewhat scary)...or how about the guy who thought he would find the Arc of the Covenant! Ohh that was rich :)

[lolurigeller]

I recommend the bit that Jon Safran does on this in his TV series "Jon Safran vs. God". He looks at the Bible's "predictions" about Sept. 11 then finds "predictions" of the same kind in the collected lyrics of Vanilla Ice. After this, he finds "post-predictions" of the same kind in Congress' complete report on the Sept. 11 attacks about Vanilla Ice being a one-hit wonder.

Any topic, any sufficiently large body of text and any sufficiently vague method of determining similarity will give you this result.

John Safran's stuff is pretty funny, though I didn't come across that episode on youtube.

[Yiab]

John Safran's stuff is pretty funny, though I didn't come across that episode on youtube.

Well, it's not the whole episode, but the segment is here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4mG7MdAzOw).

[MINISTERofTRUTH]

One of the primary proponents of the Bible code stuff once said something like, "Well, I'll believe it's not real when someone can extract predictions from Moby Dick."

This was done. That they're after the fact is another clue that sets off alarms in the baloney detection kit.
Great team work guys.

I see your point about Moby Dick. If truth is everywhere, then truth itself must be baloney.

Makes sense, ....... to you that is.

CLICK HERE (http://www.outersecrets.com/real/bible_numbers.htm)

[The Atheist]

CLICK HERE (http://www.outersecrets.com/real/bible_numbers.htm)

Marvellous.

"Teh Numberology in the Bible!"

Starts to lose its value somewhat when you're using two horrendously flawed translations of the original language but not the original language.

Try again.

[MINISTERofTRUTH]

Marvellous. "Teh Numberology in the Bible!"
Starts to lose its value somewhat when you're using two horrendously flawed translations of the original language but not the original language.
Try again.

YOU'RE STILL IN THE BRICK AGE. Try again.

[The Atheist]

YOU'RE STILL IN THE BRICK AGE. Try again.


Ah, when having no argument, evidence or logic behind a ridiculous claim, use CAPS.

Well played!

[Myriad]

As a (churchlessly) Christian theist, I think Bible Code divination is rank idolatry.

Within the context of most Christian teachings, it makes about as much sense, theologically, as reading the patterns from tossing communion wafers onto the altar.

This is, of course, apart from its empirical invalidity as appreciated by skeptical critical thinkers.

Respectfully,
Myriad

[David Swidler]

I brought this up in a previous thread that discussed this: even the curators of the "original" Hebrew text back in the Talmudic age said, "We are not experts in the extra or missing." Hebrew words can most often be written many different ways yet sound the same, both because the vowels are not part of the written text and because of the "kri-ketiv" phenomenon (in which specific words are written one way but read otherwise). So if the bearers of what would become the Masoretic text were already saying a few centuries before that the spelling in the Tanakh is not what it once was, that should already raise some eyebrows even without duplicating the results with Moby Dick.

The modern "use" of the "codes" got started in the 1930s and 40s, when a Hungarian rabbi named Weissmandel found some. In that pre-computing age that's quite an interesting feat, but not an indication of legitimacy (he never said quite how he went about it, AFAIK, and since the Nazis and their collaborators murdered him, no one really knows).

[phildonnia]

Once the internet archive is back up, I'll see if I can find the old bible code predictions about y2k. Needless to say, much of it didn't happen. I remember the phrase "power grid" in there, as if God uses modern English idioms, calqued into ancient Hebrew.

[AgeGap]

It is as valid and relevant as the book it is taken from. :D

[phildonnia]

Ah, here it is:
http://tinyurl.com/2fqjjd

I see that in addition to modern English idioms, the bible also contains modern Hebrew slang.

[cnorman18]

I'm coming in a bit late here--i just joined the forum--but from what I've just read, no one here seems to understand the "Bible Code" phenomenon or what makes it interesting.

The History Channel presentations were, as one might expect from TV, rather sketchy and sensational. They seemed to be based largely on Michael Drosnin's books, which were both dreadful, sensationalized, and misrepresented the phenomenon and the research.

There has been, to date, only one worthwhile book published in English on the codes, and that is "Cracking the Bible Code" by Jeffrey Satinover.

Four things make it worth reading:

(1) the author says, up front and throughout, that the jury is still very much out on this phenomenon. Whether or not something significant is happening at all remains unproven, let alone its significance. He is no
True Believer and no enthusiast; his aim is to explain the nature of the research, though he does so from a sympathetic point of view, and let the reader judge for himself.

(2) The book is a fairly long and difficult read, because the codes are not the simple word-search crossword puzzles as presented on TV or in the thin and oversimplified bestsellers. The phenomenon is much more complex and subtle than anything presented in popular culture. Satinover goes into cryptography and its history, higher mathematics, obviously Jewish tradition and esoteric teachings, and even into quantum theory and astrophysics in order to explain the research, the theory behind it, and the nature of the phenomenon itself. The popular presentations have been about as accurate and trustworthy as trying to describe and understand an internal combustion engine from a five-year-old's drawing of it.

(3) Satinover proves, from the research itself, that the code phenomenon--if it exists, which is not certain--cannot be used to predict anything, ever, by its very nature. The researchers found that bit of sensationalistic "reporting" especially offensive.

(4) you will find that the "Moby Dick", etc., demonstrations did not and do not fairly duplicate the phenomenon and are in fact based on a misunderstanding of how it works. If that were not true--if the phenomenon were truly as simple and random as has been alleged--it's hard to see how the original experiments could have ever made it into a respected, well-established, and strictly peer-reviewed scientific journal.

I don't know; I'm as skeptical of allegations of supernatural phenomena as anyone here, believe me. But this isn't precisely that, or at least not yet. At this point, it's just--interesting.

I absolutely guarantee that reading this book will challenge you in several ways. It isn't easy to understand the plain meaning of it in many places, for starters; if you know nothing of higher math or modern physics, you will have learned much by the time you finish it. It may also challenge your definitions and understanding of certainty, truth, and the nature of reality itself--or you may just laugh at the presentation and dismiss every aspect of it a priori on principle, without ever taking it seriously, as many have already done.

In any case, I can also guarantee that you won't be bored.

[GodMark2]

<a lot of irrelevant stuff snipped>

(1) the author says, up front and throughout, that the jury is still very much out on this phenomenon. Whether or not something significant is happening at all remains unproven, let alone its significance. He is no
True Believer and no enthusiast; his aim is to explain the nature of the research, though he does so from a sympathetic point of view, and let the reader judge for himself.
Not to mention that whether anything at all, significant or otherwise, is happening has yet to be proven. But I bet the author glossed over that.

(2) The book is a fairly long and difficult read, because the codes are not the simple word-search crossword puzzles as presented on TV or in the thin and oversimplified bestsellers. The phenomenon is much more complex and subtle than anything presented in popular culture. Satinover goes into cryptography and its history, higher mathematics, obviously Jewish tradition and esoteric teachings, and even into quantum theory and astrophysics in order to explain the research, the theory behind it, and the nature of the phenomenon itself. The popular presentations have been about as accurate and trustworthy as trying to describe and understand an internal combustion engine from a five-year-old's drawing of it.

Quantum Theory? Great, I know that. So, where's the math? You mean there isn't any math in this book. That's odd, as all quantum theory work must be backed up by math. Or is he simply using the "Quantum theory is weird, and most people don't understand it well, so I can claim it means whatever I want it to" that most quacks using the term do?

(3) Satinover proves, from the research itself, that the code phenomenon--if it exists, which is not certain--cannot be used to predict anything, ever, by its very nature. The researchers found that bit of sensationalistic "reporting" especially offensive.

So, even if it exists, it doesn't exist? Cause if it existed; if, indeed, information was encoded in the bible relating to events yet to happen; then that information would be able to be decoded for us to know it was there. By pure chance, some of it would be decoded before the events being related happened, and that would be prediction. So if it can't predict, then either the information must not be able to be decoded (in which case we wouldn't know about the code), or isn't encoded there in the first place.

(4) you will find that the "Moby Dick", etc., demonstrations did not and do not fairly duplicate the phenomenon and are in fact based on a misunderstanding of how it works. If that were not true--if the phenomenon were truly as simple and random as has been alleged--it's hard to see how the original experiments could have ever made it into a respected, well-established, and strictly peer-reviewed scientific journal.

It's only hard to see for you, as you lack understanding of what a "respected, well-established, and strictly peer-reviewed scientific journal" is. No "bible code" has never been published in such a journal.

If the Moby Dick demonstrations were faulty, then, please, tell us exactly how they were so. Any faulty experiment can be exposed. It's been published how they ran the experiments, and no person has actually pointed out the flaws, though many people clinging to the false hope of the 'bible code' have claimed it was flawed.

"The Jury" is not out on this phenomenon. It has been shown to be indistinguishable from random chance.

[arthwollipot]

YOU'RE STILL IN THE BRICK AGE. Try again.

Did someone mention bricks (http://www.thebricktestament.com/)?
:D

[gtc]

The one thing that most Aussies notice about NZ is the relative lack of brick houses.

I guess New Zealanders (being stuck in the brick age) value bricks too highly to build mere houses with them.

[Taffer]

The one thing that most Aussies notice about NZ is the relative lack of brick houses.

I guess New Zealanders (being stuck in the brick age) value bricks too highly to build mere houses with them.

Come to Dunedin then. ;)

[Tez]

I agree with cnorman18 that most people here don't "get" the Bible code stuff - obviously it would not have been published in a statistics journal if it was as simple as reproducing the Rabbis experiment in Moby Dick! One certainly cannot find the exact Rabbis list in Moby Dick - where by "find" we mean counting as statistically significant those cases where the codes are close by the distance measure used in the original experiment (about which there are only very minor quibbles).


The key issue with the codes is that one has to show that there was enough leniency/ambiguity in the Rabbis' list that it could be manipulated so as to find the codes with statistical significance, despite the authors' claims to the contrary (they claimed the list was drawn up in advance of the search and was never manipulated). Then one has to show that there was enough flexibility that a similar list could have been found in Moby Dick, War and Peace etc.


Showing this took a lot of work (by some smart guys whose time would have been better spent on other things). You can read about it here: http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/torah.html


I read Satinover's book, and found it to be essentially empty verbal trash in the main. Much like paper's of his I've looked at.

[cnorman18]

"Not to mention that whether anything at all, significant or otherwise, is happening has yet to be proven. But I bet the author glossed over that."

I took out the book to check, and while the author writes from a sympathetic viewpoint--he clearly believes
that the phenomenon exists--he also writes at length on the many criticisms and objections to the research, and states over and over that the question remains open. Satinover is an advocate, of course--otherwise, why would he write the book--but he is also fair and accurate.

"Quantum Theory? Great, I know that. So, where's the math? You mean there isn't any math in this book. That's odd, as all quantum theory work must be backed up by math. Or is he simply using the "Quantum theory is weird, and most people don't understand it well, so I can claim it means whatever I want it to" that most quacks using the term do?"

I mentioned "higher mathematics" in my initial post.

"So, even if it exists, it doesn't exist? Cause if it existed; if, indeed, information was encoded in the bible relating to events yet to happen; then that information would be able to be decoded for us to know it was there. By pure chance, some of it would be decoded before the events being related happened, and that would be prediction. So if it can't predict, then either the information must not be able to be decoded (in which case we wouldn't know about the code), or isn't encoded there in the first place."

As I said, the nature of the phenomenon is more complex than has been presented in the popular press. I can't post an entire chapter here. If you really want to see why the codes prohibit predictions, you're just going to have to read the book. Sorry.

"It's only hard to see for you, as you lack understanding of what a "respected, well-established, and strictly peer-reviewed scientific journal" is. No "bible code" has never been published in such a journal."

Statistical Science, Volume 9, Number 3, August 1994.

"If the Moby Dick demonstrations were faulty, then, please, tell us exactly how they were so. Any faulty experiment can be exposed. It's been published how they ran the experiments, and no person has actually pointed out the flaws, though many people clinging to the false hope of the 'bible code' have claimed it was flawed."

Again, I'll decline to type in an entire chapter here. A number of critical studies and objections are addressed in the book, fairly and in detail.

"The Jury" is not out on this phenomenon. It has been shown to be indistinguishable from random chance."

If you wish to dismiss the research a priori, without examining the evidence, that is your privilege, of course. But don't tell yourself you're being "rational". The word that applies is "prejudiced", as in "pre-judged".

[JetLeg]

They're idiots.

They are highly educated people, working in prestigious universities. (Not Drosnin, but Ripps).

[Irony]

They are highly educated people, working in prestigious universities. (Not Drosnin, but Ripps).

...who are idiots.

[JetLeg]

...who are idiots.

Come on!


Wikipedia:



Eliyahu Rips

(born 1948) - is an Israeli-Latvian mathematician known for his research in geometric group theory. He achieved public notoriety as a result of coauthoring a paper on the Bible codes.

Rips grew up in Latvia (then part of Soviet Union). He was the first high school student from Latvia to participate in the International Mathematical Olympiad. On 13 April 1969, Rips (who was a 20-year old graduate student at the University of Latvia at that time) attempted self-immolation in a protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. After that, he was incarcerated by the Soviet government but, under pressure from Western mathematicians, was allowed to emigrate to Israel in 1972.

After recovering from his wounds and finishing his Ph.D., Rips joined the Department of Mathematics at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Rips received the Erdős prize from the Israel Mathematical Society in 1979 and was a sectional speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1994.

Rips' (mostly unpublished) work on group actions on -trees has been widely influential. The Rips machine, in the hands of Rips and his student Zlil Sela, has proven to be effective in obtaining classification results such as a solution to the isomorphism problem for hyperbolic groups.

In 1994, Rips, together with Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg, published an article in the journal Statistical Science which claimed that they have discovered encoded messages in the Hebrew text of the book of Genesis, a part of Bible. In 1997, their claim was then described in a popular book The Bible Code by journalist Michael Drosnin. Since then, Bible codes have been a subject of controversy and a refutation has been published by mathematician Brendan McKay and others



Bold added by me.

Do you have better achievements than that?

[Loss Leader]

What do all of you think of the Bible code?


Here's a blisteringly simple test: Just point to a sufficiently detailed prediction before it comes true.

Humans are pattern recognizers. We think we're engaged in logical thouht but much of the time, we're just matching patterns. Our brains like patterns so much that we tend to see then even when they're not there. This has been proven experimentally in all sorts of ways.

So, if the predictions are in there, it should be no problem to find one before it happens. If the predictions can only be found after the fact, though, you'll have to explain how that differs from the natural human desire to see order where none exists.

[Dancing David]

The code is obvious, but some people just have to look for a 'special one'.

[cnorman18]

"I agree with cnorman18 that most people here don't "get" the Bible code stuff - obviously it would not have been published in a statistics journal if it was as simple as reproducing the Rabbis experiment in Moby Dick! One certainly cannot find the exact Rabbis list in Moby Dick - where by "find" we mean counting as statistically significant those cases where the codes are close by the distance measure used in the original experiment (about which there are only very minor quibbles).


"The key issue with the codes is that one has to show that there was enough leniency/ambiguity in the Rabbis' list that it could be manipulated so as to find the codes with statistical significance, despite the authors' claims to the contrary (they claimed the list was drawn up in advance of the search and was never manipulated). Then one has to show that there was enough flexibility that a similar list could have been found in Moby Dick, War and Peace etc.

"Showing this took a lot of work (by some smart guys whose time would have been better spent on other things). You can read about it here:

[website deleted; I do not yet have 15 posts and the editor won't allow me to repost it.]

"I read Satinover's book, and found it to be essentially empty verbal trash in the main. Much like paper's of his I've looked at."

Statistical Science required the authors to repeat their experiment using a data set specified by THEM. Hard to see how that could be manipulated. McKay's criticisms have been answered at length by Rips, Witztum and their associates, but those answers were not to be found on the link you presented. I haven't been posting long enough to post a link myself (as noted above), but a little judicious Googling will make both sides of this debate easy to find.

Do you have any more detailed criticisms of Satinover's book? "Mostly verbal trash" isn't a particularly cogent analysis. I thought it was rather well written and informative.

Really, I always thought that skeptics prided themselves on examining evidence objectively and rationally before coming to conclusions. I have seen reports of alien abductions considered with less hostility and outright prejudice than is being directed at this debate. I find that remarkable.

I think we can all agree that determining one's conclusions beforehand and then setting out to prove them by manipulating data and methods is not authentic science. The original experiments of the researchers was not conducted in this manner; though that accusation is repeatedly made, evidence for it is absent (other than the fact that the research has produced results that critics reject a priori). Efforts to "debunk" the codes has, however, used those precise methods, and admittedly so.

As I said in my initial post, as far as I am concerned, the debate is still ongoing. Those who insist that there is no further debate necessary rather remind me of "Global Warming" advocates who say the same thing. That assertion rests more on an ideological wish to cut off discussions rather than any genuine interest in finding out the truth.

[Loss Leader]

I absolutely guarantee that reading this book will challenge you in several ways.


Can you absolutely guarantee that the book will reveal detailed and specific prophecies before they happen?

Chemists can reveal specific and detailed prophecies about my mixture of sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid. Astronomers can predict exactly where Juperter will be two hundred and nineteen days from now. Heck, I'm a lawyer and I can give you a pretty accurate prediction about how a judge will view your lawsuit.

Without predictive ability, everything else is just handwaiving.

[karmicserenade]

The whole thing just seems contrived to me, and I am not a blind skeptic, at all. I felt that the searching for key words, was a flawed thing at best, you can essentially find dooming words in any text if you look hard enough, and the fact that the bible is a translation made by a person from a text which again was written by a person, well that seems like an obvious clue....

If there is truth in the whole thing, then we are all saved!! Haha. No offense to those that believe in this sort of thing, truthfully if you guys knew half of the things I think are true you would probably laugh me out of this forum ;) but I will never speak of those things here! I am entitled to my secrets mwhahahaaa

[cnorman18]

Loss Leader: With all due respect, you aren't listening. The Codes, if they exist, cannot be used for prediction. That is not their significance, if they have any.

KarmicSerenade: the mere presence of encoded words is insignificant. Such can be found in any text whatever. The peculiarity of the Torah Codes (properly so called--I know of no claims for the rest of the Bible) is that they appear to show the presence of RELATED encoded words, at their SHORTEST intervals, appearing in the same PLACE; and that rather long lists of such words, chosen in advance--in the initial experiment, the names of various rabbis and their birth and death dates (IIRC)--seem to repeat this phenomenon at a rate exceeding that predicted by chance, and by a very wide margin. Whether or not the thing is, in fact, a matter of chance is the subject of the scientific debate. Since it's easier to simply accuse the researchers of deliberately rigging the results, that is the tack taken by most of their critics to date.

Don't worry--I believe some goofy things, too. The Torah Codes just aren't among them--at least, not yet.

[Glen.Nogami]

Cnorman-
I won't add my voice to the chorus of people pointing out why the bible code is crap, period, in all its incarnations, but I will point this out: You can place the tags and [ /quote] (without the space) before and after some text
[quote]to offset it like this
It makes posts much more readable.

[Skeptic Guy]

"Not to mention that whether anything at all, significant or otherwise, is happening has yet to be proven. But I bet the author glossed over that."

I took out the book to check, and while the author writes from a sympathetic viewpoint--he clearly believes
that the phenomenon exists--he also writes at length on the many criticisms and objections to the research, and states over and over that the question remains open. Satinover is an advocate, of course--otherwise, why would he write the book--but he is also fair and accurate.

"Quantum Theory? Great, I know that. So, where's the math? You mean there isn't any math in this book. That's odd, as all quantum theory work must be backed up by math. Or is he simply using the "Quantum theory is weird, and most people don't understand it well, so I can claim it means whatever I want it to" that most quacks using the term do?"

I mentioned "higher mathematics" in my initial post.

"So, even if it exists, it doesn't exist? Cause if it existed; if, indeed, information was encoded in the bible relating to events yet to happen; then that information would be able to be decoded for us to know it was there. By pure chance, some of it would be decoded before the events being related happened, and that would be prediction. So if it can't predict, then either the information must not be able to be decoded (in which case we wouldn't know about the code), or isn't encoded there in the first place."

As I said, the nature of the phenomenon is more complex than has been presented in the popular press. I can't post an entire chapter here. If you really want to see why the codes prohibit predictions, you're just going to have to read the book. Sorry.

"It's only hard to see for you, as you lack understanding of what a "respected, well-established, and strictly peer-reviewed scientific journal" is. No "bible code" has never been published in such a journal."

Statistical Science, Volume 9, Number 3, August 1994.

"If the Moby Dick demonstrations were faulty, then, please, tell us exactly how they were so. Any faulty experiment can be exposed. It's been published how they ran the experiments, and no person has actually pointed out the flaws, though many people clinging to the false hope of the 'bible code' have claimed it was flawed."

Again, I'll decline to type in an entire chapter here. A number of critical studies and objections are addressed in the book, fairly and in detail.

"The Jury" is not out on this phenomenon. It has been shown to be indistinguishable from random chance."

If you wish to dismiss the research a priori, without examining the evidence, that is your privilege, of course. But don't tell yourself you're being "rational". The word that applies is "prejudiced", as in "pre-judged".

Quantum Theory cannot, in any shape or form, be applied to a "bible code". It applies to really, really, tiny things. That's it. And if you hang out here long enough, you will find that when anyone starts referring to "Quantum Theory" when discussing anything larger than a Quark, they're pretty much full of BS.

And you don't have to quote the entire chapter. Paraphrase. Summarize the author's "theories".

Here's a blisteringly simple test: Just point to a sufficiently detailed prediction before it comes true.

Humans are pattern recognizers. We think we're engaged in logical thouht but much of the time, we're just matching patterns. Our brains like patterns so much that we tend to see then even when they're not there. This has been proven experimentally in all sorts of ways.

So, if the predictions are in there, it should be no problem to find one before it happens. If the predictions can only be found after the fact, though, you'll have to explain how that differs from the natural human desire to see order where none exists.

And Loss Leader beat me to it. The fact is that no bible code has ever predicted anything. Period. It's pattern hunting, plain and simple.

Loss Leader: With all due respect, you aren't listening. The Codes, if they exist, cannot be used for prediction. That is not their significance, if they have any.

KarmicSerenade: the mere presence of encoded words is insignificant. Such can be found in any text whatever. The peculiarity of the Torah Codes (properly so called--I know of no claims for the rest of the Bible) is that they appear to show the presence of RELATED encoded words, at their SHORTEST intervals, appearing in the same PLACE; and that rather long lists of such words, chosen in advance--in the initial experiment, the names of various rabbis and their birth and death dates (IIRC)--seem to repeat this phenomenon at a rate exceeding that predicted by chance, and by a very wide margin. Whether or not the thing is, in fact, a matter of chance is the subject of the scientific debate. Since it's easier to simply accuse the researchers of deliberately rigging the results, that is the tack taken by most of their critics to date.

Don't worry--I believe some goofy things, too. The Torah Codes just aren't among them--at least, not yet.

Highlights, mine.

1) Codes exist, if they exist? They have some unknow significance, if they have significance? This is hardly a scientific hypothesis.

2) They found a list of Rabbis in the OT? I believe they did and you could do so in any written work if you were given the names before hand.

3) I don't think anyone is accusing anyone of "rigging results". I think we are saying that there are NO results.

4) Yup.

[Loss Leader]

Loss Leader: With all due respect, you aren't listening. The Codes, if they exist, cannot be used for prediction. That is not their significance, if they have any.


So the codes are not predictive but:

and that rather long lists of such words, chosen in advance--in the initial experiment, the names of various rabbis and their birth and death dates (IIRC)--seem to repeat this phenomenon at a rate exceeding that predicted by chance, and by a very wide margin.


Which is it? Are the codes making predictions or not? It sounds like part of your professed proof that the codes are real is that they predicted the names and birthdates of later-born rabbis. And yet, these names and dates came true before the codes were deciphered.

Sounds like utter nonsense to me.

[Malachi151]

Wouldn't you rather learn something real about the world that you live in rather than waste your life on bible-code nonsense?

Exactly, which is why I'm pissed off the the "History Channel" wasted so much time on this nonsense and Nostradamus, etc.

BTW, all of this stupid "Bible Code" nonsense started by in the earliest days of the Roman adoption of Christianity. The Romans were already obsessed with prophecy business, and they believed that the "Old Testament" texts were literally prophetic because they believed that they predicted the events of the life of Jesus (Of course based on stories of the life of Jesus that were based on the Old Testament texts).

I talk about this a little in my article on Jesus:

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/articles/jesus_myth_history.htm#3

Towards the end of this section "Virtually every detail of the life of Jesus comes from "Old Testament" scriptures", it talks about this issue.

[Gregoire]

Exactly, which is why I'm pissed off the the "History Channel" wasted so much time on this nonsense and Nostradamus, etc.

BTW, all of this stupid "Bible Code" nonsense started by in the earliest days of the Roman adoption of Christianity. The Romans were already obsessed with prophecy business, and they believed that the "Old Testament" texts were literally prophetic because they believed that they predicted the events of the life of Jesus (Of course based on stories of the life of Jesus that were based on the Old Testament texts).

I talk about this a little in my article on Jesus:

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/articles/jesus_myth_history.htm#3

Towards the end of this section "Virtually every detail of the life of Jesus comes from "Old Testament" scriptures", it talks about this issue.

Thanks for the link. I have been reading a lot about the myth hypothesis lately and have found the whole subject very interesting.

Regarding the "Bible Code", even if someone thinks there is a Bible code in the original writings, or even if they think the original writings are "the inspired word of God", the point is no one actually knows what the originals actually said. All we have are copies of copies of copies.....etc. And as Bart Ehrman has shown with regard to the New Testament in his book Misquoting Jesus, it is very clear to scholars that over time there have been a multitude of errors.

Some copies had errors in them because the person copying the text simply lost his place. Some of them have to do with the wrong word being entered. And some have been shown to be blatant changes to suit the particular theology of the one who was doing the copying. Every time an independent early copy is found, it has differences from all the others. And the earliest copies we have now were still copied long after the original texts had disappeared.

Since the Old Testament is so much older, one can only wonder what how far away from the original are the texts we have now? And how could a code work, if you don't have the originals?

[triadboy]

Some copies had errors in them because the person copying the text simply lost his place. Some of them have to do with the wrong word being entered. And some have been shown to be blatant changes to suit the particular theology of the one who was doing the copying. Every time an independent early copy is found, it has differences from all the others. And the earliest copies we have now were still copied long after the original texts had disappeared.


<talking off the top of my head>

I believe Ehrman also said in Misquoting Jesus - the copyists for the first ~100 years were not trained copyists. They were literate people in the congregations pushed into service.

[Malachi151]

The whole business about it not being copied or translated correctly is a total red herring. To be honest, I've never been very impressed by Ehrman. He's a scholar, but I totally don't think he gets it at all.

Talking about copying or translating problems totally misses the point first of all, and second of all, in fact these works are actually very well preserved.

Talking about errors in copying is making an argument that the "word of God" has been lost, but this is a stupid thing to talk about, because the more important issue us that it was never the word of God in the first place, which can easily be shown by the content of what we do have.

What is remarkable are the still very clear parallels between the Epic of Gilgamesh flood scene and the Genesis flood with Noah, for example.

There are word-for-word phrases that are almost exactly the same between these two stories, and instead of talking about how we can't be sure about "the word of God" because its been lost in translation, he should be talking about how we are able to determine that these are stories which are based on other earlier stories from other religions, and that the Jewish scripture are really commentaries on earlier stories, and how the characters in the Jewish stories are based on "pagan" heroes, "pagan" gods, etc.

We have plenty of good information in the scriptures to go on, and all of that information shows that the earliest scriptures are based on pagan myths, that the early Jews didn't believe in a soul, life after death, or the devil, that the Hebrews (as well as others) commonly wrote "prophetic" stories long after the events had taken place, that the Hebrews commonly wrote new stories that were based on old stories where they explicitly framed the new stories as prophetic fulfillment of the old stories, etc.

The reason that this whole "Bible Code" thing even came up is explained in my article. The reason is that the writers of the Gospels were using literary allusion. They would base scenes in the Gospels on scenes in the Hebrew scritpures, but the scenes in the Hebrew scritpures that they were basing their scenes on were not prophecies, they were things like, for example, Psalm 22, passages in Kings about Elisha, or some seemingly random passage in Hosea, etc.

What the early Christians noticed was that all or most of the scenes in the Gospels related back to "OT" passages, but the passages that they related back to weren't anything that could clearly be picked out as a prophecy on its own merits.

Thus they came up with the idea that the Hebrew scritpures were "secretly encoded".

They had to be secretly encoded because there was no way that anyone could read through them and be able to pick out the "prophecies" for Jesus before hand.

So, in the eyes of these people, all of the events in the life of Jesus were predicted before hand by the scriptures, but there wasn't any clear way to pick out those predictions before hand.

Thus they launched into a centuries long effort to try and figure out the "secret code" to be able to predict the future using the scriptures.

Meanwhile, all along this "phenomenon" existed because the writer of the Gospel of Mark completely "fabricated" his story based on scritpures that had nothing to do with Jesus (because there was no Jesus) The scritpures that this author used were scriptures that talked about the destruction of Judea.

The reason that he used those scriptures is because he wrote this story AFTER the destruction of Judea, and he was writing an allegorical story ABOUT the destruction of Judea.

This is why the scriptures used in the Gospels don't necessarily seem to have anything to do with being prophecies for the coming of Jesus, because they aren't, they are scriptures about the destruction of Israel.

But that's something that would have been hard to figure out by Greeks and Romans 2,000 years ago, and with no cultural understanding of the Jews.

The whole thing is ridiculous and absurd, but it has nothing to do with the scriptures being poorly translated or preserved, in fact the good quality of the preservation is what has made it possible to figure all this out.

The fact that the Roman founders of Christianity were so stupid as to actually preserve all four Gospels, each of which was intentionally written because the writers disagreed with the one that they COPIED from, is the only thing that makes it possible to figure out the total lack of historical value in the Gospels.

The quality of preservation is what makes it possible to figure out that these stories have zero historical basis.

[cnorman18]

A couple of responses, and then I think I'm done.

In Satinover's book, quantum theory is said to be analogous to the codes phenomenon, not an explanation for it.

Complex and unusual ideas can be difficult to summarize. My own posts tend to be rather long, because I prefer to be precise and to make my meaning clear. If an idea can be explained clearly in just a few words, it would hardly be necessary to write an entire chapter, not to mention a book, in order to explain it. If you're interested enough in the codes to consider the nature of the phenomenon as presented by the researchers, which is essential to explaining why some, at least, of the "debunking" experiments were flawed, then hie thee to a library and check out the book. If you're not, then don't. I decline to conduct a detailed seminar for a clearly hostile audience that is apparently, occasionally inclined to twist my remarks to suit their own purposes.

For a convenient example, the idea of "prediction". I thought my remarks were clear enough, but perhaps not; if I am wrong on that point, I apologize.

A "prediction", as I am using the term, would be finding a matrix in the codes that indicates an event's occurrence before it happens. That is to say, FINDING the matrix before the event. If one finds such a matrix after the fact of the event, that would not constitute "using the codes to predict events", because it's not. Is it finding evidence of a "prediction" that occurred in the past? IMO, no, it isn't, because no one knew of it till after it happened.

If your crystal ball doesn't tell you about anything till after it happens, it isn't predicting anything; even if you could prove that it "knew" about the event in advance, no prediction has occurred.

In a sense, though, you are quite right, and the question you ask remains perhaps the most questionable aspect of the phenomenon and calls it most into doubt, even if one accepts (as I do) the good faith and integrity of the researchers: a genuine, detailed PREDICTION of an event, in present time, before its occurrence--or better, a whole string of such predictions--MIGHT constitute a kind of proof of its authenticity. Absent that, the truth of the phenomenon will remain in doubt.

The fact that the researchers say that such predictions are impossible leads me to suspect that the codes phenomenon will remain, or become, merely another matter of faith; that is to say, some will accept it as real, and some will reject it as false, and both sides will accept or reject evidence more on the basis of their previous inclinations than upon any real weighing of the facts--and unavoidably so, because the facts will remain obstinately equivocal.

I have no great emotional investment in the codes myself; since I have a variety of high-functioning autism, I have no great emotional investment in anything or anyone. If the codes were conclusively proven or disproven tomorrow, it would neither trouble nor inspire me at all. I entered this thread because I felt the code phenomenon was being misrepresented in a simplistic manner and unfairly dismissed as just another Jesus-appeared-in-my-French-toast bit of tabloid nonsense, and I felt--and still feel--that there is much more to it than that.

I don't appear to have convinced anyone to even consider for an instant that there might be anything here even worth trying to understand, so I'm done. This horse may not actually be dead, but I've been beating it for a while, and it's not moving.

Call it a parting shot if you like, but the conversation here has reminded me of talking to a group of "Creationists" who had read an outdated and oversimplified pamphlet about Darwin and were unwilling to even consider reading anything about current biological science. Their minds were made up, and no evidence could shake their convictions--and just to make sure none ever would, they refused to look at any. I've heard it said that atheists, in spite of their claims of supreme rationality, have their own unquestioned dogmas and unexamined axioms of faith. I have seen nothing here to disprove that.

Whatever. Peace to all, and for the record, you're probably right anyway. I just thought the research interesting, but then it doesn't challenge my convictions as directly as it apparently does those of others.

[Glen.Nogami]

Okay, makes sense. I do hope you stop back by at some point.

I'm sorry if this was in your earlier posts and I missed it, but if they aren't predictive, what, precisely was it about them that there was "something to"? I mean, what do they do if not predict?

Anyway, I can't find myself terribly interested in the bible code, but I would appreciate a clarification.

[cnorman18]

Okay, makes sense. I do hope you stop back by at some point.

I'm sorry if this was in your earlier posts and I missed it, but if they aren't predictive, what, precisely was it about them that there was "something to"? I mean, what do they do if not predict?

Anyway, I can't find myself terribly interested in the bible code, but I would appreciate a clarification.

A sincere, intelligent question without a trace of condescension or hostility. I thank you, and I'll try to answer.

The original researchers, unlike the tabloid-minded Michael Drosnin, never hoped to find a method of divination or fortunetelling in the Torah. Such things are forbidden to observant Jews anyway (for the record, the term "prophet", in Jewish tradition, has nothing to do with foretelling the future; it denotes one who speaks for God. Some Biblical prophets predicted future events as proof that they actually did speak for God, but that was of minor importance in the context of their larger messages, which usually boiled down to "Knock it off, people!").

Finding information encoded in the Torah about events that occurred hundreds or thousands of years after it was written, or, if you like, after it reached its present form, is, first, an obvious anomaly; such information shouldn't be there. It's rather like those Fortean reports one sees about machined metal parts found embedded in lumps of coal. Such things simply shouldn't be.

In my opinion, before considering the significance or implications of such a discovery, it should first be determined that it actually exists; but because of the nature of this phenomenon, the possible implications have already become part of the debate and have confused the issue enormously.

Some Jews have already seized on the most obvious possible implication of the codes, and have taken them as conclusive proof that the Torah actually was, as stated in the oldest Jewish traditions, literally written by God. This is the apparent position, or more properly, the hope, of both Satinover and at least some of the researchers. That is not a good thing.

Some Christians have used an enormously simplified (and thus inauthentic) version of the phenomenon and claimed the codes prove the truth of their beliefs about Jesus. "End times" believers have used similar methods to find references to apocalyptic wars and disasters in the near future. I have even seen at least one article by a UFO fanatic that claims that the codes prove that God is or was a space alien; a similar speculation surfaced on the History Channel, though it was a bit less manic in its tone. And, of course, some nonbelievers have set about trying to prove that the phenomenon is either a matter of chance, a misunderstanding, a simple error, or a deliberate falsehood, since they too have jumped to the conclusion that the existence of the codes would somehow prove the existence of God--and since that idea is (to them) clearly false, the codes must necessarily be false as well.

All of this begs the question; does the phenomenon exist, or not?

Assumptions are being made in both directions that are clearly affecting the way the research is being conducted and judged, and that is not good. Agendas have a way of distorting science, and that's why I think this whole endeavor will, in the end, lead nowhere.

The implications, if the phenomenon is finally proven out, would be staggering--but I don't think anyone has considered just what those implications might be beyond a mere "proof" of the existence of God. They might be much more, or much less, depending on how you look at it.

For my money--since we don't yet know just how this thing works, even assuming it's real--it's as likely that the codes might prove that we don't yet understand the nature of time; or that reality itself, as many have speculated, is a good deal more flexible and subjectively determined than we generally think. Maybe there is something about the human mind, some capability of finding patterns and imposing meaning upon them, that's never occurred to anyone before. Maybe this sort of thing occurs in other ways; maybe, if we really knew how to do it, patterns in tea leaves or animal guts really CAN foretell the future, because reality sends echoes of itself through the dimension of time in ways we've never understood or noticed.

Or maybe God wrote the Torah.

My point is, it's too soon to tell. We've heard a rustle in the bushes; is it a burglar, a bear, or just the wind?

Before we either fire a shotgun at it or go back to sleep, maybe we ought to find out what it is.

Let's look. That's all I'm saying.

[Dancing David]

The bible code exists it is called the Kabbalah, it is the oral tradition that goes along side the written tradition. Some of it is 600 years old, like the Lilith story (although there are some similarities to Lillitu), some is much older.

the old testament as it stands is a redacted text, the rabbinical tradition removed all the polytheistic text. Some of the dead sea scrolls are sort of not talked about, because they were Saducee and they had some extra gods and things like that.

[cnorman18]

The bible code exists it is called the Kabbalah, it is the oral tradition that goes along side the written tradition. Some of it is 600 years old, like the Lilith story (although there are some similarities to Lillitu), some is much older.

the old testament as it stands is a redacted text, the rabbinical tradition removed all the polytheistic text. Some of the dead sea scrolls are sort of not talked about, because they were Saducee and they had some extra gods and things like that.

Uh, dude, I'm pretty well read, and ALL of that is new to me. You have a source?

The Torah codes are not related to Kabbalah, at least not directly. The Oral Torah traditionally goes back to Sinai, which was about 3,500 years ago, not 600. Best guess I've seen on the origin of Kabbalah is that it was the esoteric teaching of the Temple priests, who continued to pass it on orally after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, but no one really knows. The "rabbinical" (sic) tradition didn't remove anything from Tanakh, because "rabbis" did not exist until after that date. Since Abraham's initial innovation was that there was only One God, I doubt very much that there were ever any "polytheistic texts" in the Bible. The Lilith story is a midrashic legend and was never in the Bible.

(I thought the Weekly World News had gone belly up...)

[Malachi151]

Uh, dude, I'm pretty well read, and ALL of that is new to me. You have a source?

The Torah codes are not related to Kabbalah, at least not directly. The Oral Torah traditionally goes back to Sinai, which was about 3,500 years ago, not 600. Best guess I've seen on the origin of Kabbalah is that it was the esoteric teaching of the Temple priests, who continued to pass it on orally after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, but no one really knows. The "rabbinical" (sic) tradition didn't remove anything from Tanakh, because "rabbis" did not exist until after that date. Since Abraham's initial innovation was that there was only One God, I doubt very much that there were ever any "polytheistic texts" in the Bible. The Lilith story is a midrashic legend and was never in the Bible.

(I thought the Weekly World News had gone belly up...)

Dude, "Abraham" is a mythical character, who never existed, and certainly didn't "innovate" anything. That's like saying that Hercules innovation was that gods and men could have children together.

Secondly, there is a lot of scholarship which shows that the Torah any many other texts of the "Old Testament" are no where near as old as they are claimed to be. Genesis 1, for example, was probably written around 600-400 BCE, not the 2,000+ BCE that it is traditionally beliefs to have been written, and of course the Torah was certainly not written by "Moses", who also almost certainly never existed and is also a mythical character.

[MRC_Hans]

For a convenient example, the idea of "prediction". I thought my remarks were clear enough, but perhaps not; if I am wrong on that point, I apologize.

A "prediction", as I am using the term, would be finding a matrix in the codes that indicates an event's occurrence before it happens. That is to say, FINDING the matrix before the event. If one finds such a matrix after the fact of the event, that would not constitute "using the codes to predict events", because it's not. Is it finding evidence of a "prediction" that occurred in the past? IMO, no, it isn't, because no one knew of it till after it happened.

Ahh, but no. If the code, and thus the prediction was written before the events it predicts, then it IS a prediction, no matter when (if ever) we find out.

And if the bible code can predict past events (but events happening after the code was created), then why shouldn't it be able to predict future events?

The trouble with finding predictions of past events is that the interpretation and ways to find the patterns is flexible. Therefore, if you have a sufficiently large body of essentially random data, you can always dig up a predetermined pattern.[/quote]

If your crystal ball doesn't tell you about anything till after it happens, it isn't predicting anything; even if you could prove that it "knew" about the event in advance, no prediction has occurred.

Wrong. If I could actually prove that the information existed before the event, then it would be a bona-fide prediction. For example, if I find a sealed container, provably sealed in 1930, and untouched since then, and a piece of paper inside predicts, say, Sept 11 2001, then it is a bona-fide prediction, even if I don't open the container till 2007. The crucial point is whether the information was available before the event, not whether it was found.

Hans

[Bri]

Finding information encoded in the Torah about events that occurred hundreds or thousands of years after it was written, or, if you like, after it reached its present form, is, first, an obvious anomaly; such information shouldn't be there. It's rather like those Fortean reports one sees about machined metal parts found embedded in lumps of coal. Such things simply shouldn't be.

Can you tell us why such things shouldn't be? The same kind of information is also embedded in Moby Dick, and any other large body of text. They are expected to occur by random chance, and it would be an anomaly if you couldn't find such things embedded in any text.

In my opinion, before considering the significance or implications of such a discovery, it should first be determined that it actually exists; but because of the nature of this phenomenon, the possible implications have already become part of the debate and have confused the issue enormously.

Of course the phenomenon exists. Even the skeptics who refute that it is anything interesting admit that it exists, but also point out that it would be expected to exist by chance in any large body of text.

Imagine creating a "word find" puzzle by creating a random 10 x 10 grid of letters. If words are defined as vertical or horizontal consecutive letters, you will more than likely find some words in there. If we change the "rules" to allow diagonals, you will find even more. Either way, you would expect there to be fewer longer words than shorter words. Finding a word that is 7 or 8 letters long would be improbable in any such puzzle. But what if you generated lots of these puzzles? Eventually you will hit on one that contains a 10-letter word! Would you then claim that this puzzle contains some sort of strange anomaly that shouldn't be there? Would you then calculate the odds of that particular word existing in a random set of letters and claim that something strange is going on? No, you would expect this sort of result to occur by chance if you generate enough puzzles.

It seems that the original authors are doing something similar with their lists of words. They try one list and find that it would normally occur in that configuration by chance. Nothing particularly interesting. So they modify the list and see if the results are any better. If nothing works, all hope is not lost. They just modify the procedure (the "rules") a bit and try again. Eventually, they hit on a particular combination of words that seems to have a one in a million chance of occurring in that text. Then for fun they start to add new words to the list to see if they can lower the odds even more, being careful only to add words that lower the odds rather than raise it.

It's quite obvious that's what's going on. Just look at the list of rabbis you mentioned earlier. Why did they only use the month and day of their births rather than the year, which would have made a lot more sense? The answer is obvious: when you do the same procedure using the year, you get nothing "unusual."

So, yes, the phenomenon exists such as it is. Nobody disputes that. It is expected to exist in any large body of text.

All of this begs the question; does the phenomenon exist, or not?

As far as I can tell, you are the only one who is begging the question. Even the skeptics who disproved the claim admit that the "phenomenon" exists -- they just showed that it's nothing unusual.

The implications, if the phenomenon is finally proven out, would be staggering--but I don't think anyone has considered just what those implications might be beyond a mere "proof" of the existence of God.

Is the fact that the same codes are found in Moby Dick proof of the existence of whales?

They might be much more, or much less, depending on how you look at it.

It appears that the implications (beyond a mere "proof" of the existence of God) are "much less" any way you look at it.

For my money--since we don't yet know just how this thing works, even assuming it's real--it's as likely that the codes might prove that we don't yet understand the nature of time; or that reality itself, as many have speculated, is a good deal more flexible and subjectively determined than we generally think. Maybe there is something about the human mind, some capability of finding patterns and imposing meaning upon them, that's never occurred to anyone before. Maybe this sort of thing occurs in other ways; maybe, if we really knew how to do it, patterns in tea leaves or animal guts really CAN foretell the future, because reality sends echoes of itself through the dimension of time in ways we've never understood or noticed.

Or maybe God wrote the Torah.

Or...maybe it just means that lists of words are expected to appear in large bodies of text by chance.

My point is, it's too soon to tell. We've heard a rustle in the bushes; is it a burglar, a bear, or just the wind?

Before we either fire a shotgun at it or go back to sleep, maybe we ought to find out what it is.

Let's look. That's all I'm saying.

Good luck with your search. That's all I'm saying.

-Bri

[Bri]

Ahh, but no. If the code, and thus the prediction was written before the events it predicts, then it IS a prediction, no matter when (if ever) we find out.

And if the bible code can predict past events (but events happening after the code was created), then why shouldn't it be able to predict future events?


Yes, but the hunting expedition used to find the "codes" can only occur after the event has occurred. You have to start with a list of words, then calculate the probability of those words appearing exactly as they do in the text. If the probability isn't high enough, you modify your list of words and try again until you get a result you like. Hardly useful for predicting anything since you have to have the list of words to start with.

Wrong. If I could actually prove that the information existed before the event, then it would be a bona-fide prediction. For example, if I find a sealed container, provably sealed in 1930, and untouched since then, and a piece of paper inside predicts, say, Sept 11 2001, then it is a bona-fide prediction, even if I don't open the container till 2007. The crucial point is whether the information was available before the event, not whether it was found.

Oh, the information exists before the event occurs, of course. But only because the list of words you chose happens to pertain to an event that occurred after the text was written. You can get the results you want using words associated with any event (or anything else you want) if you're willing to spend the time to modify the list and/or the procedure until you get the results you want.

-Bri

[cnorman18]

Ahh, but no. If the code, and thus the prediction was written before the events it predicts, then it IS a prediction, no matter when (if ever) we find out.

And if the bible code can predict past events (but events happening after the code was created), then why shouldn't it be able to predict future events?

The trouble with finding predictions of past events is that the interpretation and ways to find the patterns is flexible. Therefore, if you have a sufficiently large body of essentially random data, you can always dig up a predetermined pattern.



Wrong. If I could actually prove that the information existed before the event, then it would be a bona-fide prediction. For example, if I find a sealed container, provably sealed in 1930, and untouched since then, and a piece of paper inside predicts, say, Sept 11 2001, then it is a bona-fide prediction, even if I don't open the container till 2007. The crucial point is whether the information was available before the event, not whether it was found.

Hans[/QUOTE]

OK, that's reasonable; perhaps I should have said "PRACTICAL prediction," or some such.

In any case, you're saying pretty much what I did; the best proof of the codes would be a detailed prediction of an event that is found before it happens, and even that might not make the cut. For some, there will NEVER be sufficient proof, and some have even said as much in print. That strikes me as just as much of a "faith-based" position as that of someone who maintains that nothing could DISPROVE their beliefs; neither is rational.

[Bri]

Torah codes -- or even Moby Dick codes -- can predict the future. Simply make two different predictions (say "an earthquake larger than 6.5 will occur in California in 2008" and "an earthquake larger than 6.5 will not occur in California in 2008"), find both of them in the text, document both of them, then after the event occurs "forget" about one of them.

-Bri

[cnorman18]

Dude, "Abraham" is a mythical character, who never existed, and certainly didn't "innovate" anything. That's like saying that Hercules innovation was that gods and men could have children together.

Secondly, there is a lot of scholarship which shows that the Torah any many other texts of the "Old Testament" are no where near as old as they are claimed to be. Genesis 1, for example, was probably written around 600-400 BCE, not the 2,000+ BCE that it is traditionally beliefs to have been written, and of course the Torah was certainly not written by "Moses", who also almost certainly never existed and is also a mythical character.

Your conviction that Abraham and Moses were mythical characters is just as much a statement of faith as my own belief that they probably weren't. In fact, since it's exceedingly hard to logically prove a negative, perhaps even more so.

At one time it was confidently asserted that the Iliad was entirely fictional, that the Trojan war never happened, and that Troy itself never existed. Later finds have proven that that assertion was false. In any case, who cares? It's still a cracking good story and a classic of world literature, either way.

Which is more to the point. In Jewish teaching, it doesn't matter. My own rabbi often says, "The Torah is true, and some of it may even have happened." Jews have never maintained that the Bible is a history book, nor (as some fundamentalist Christians do) that it is a book of biological or geological
science. It is about moral and spiritual lessons, not about literal events--or at least not necessarily. We draw perfectly valid lessons from Orwell's "Animal Farm", but no one finds it necessary to claim that Snowball the pig was an actual historical person.

If you attend a Torah study at your local Reform or Conservative synagogue and ask, "Do you think Abraham actually existed?" many, if not most, will respond, "Who cares?"

Jews are not, by and large, fundamentalists. When studying Torah, the origins and provenance of the documents aren't often a subject for discussion--but when they are, you will find that we acknowledge the probable (at least) truth of what you are saying. Most current commentaries say that the origins of the Torah are much later than the tradition says, that it was compiled and edited from other documents by a late redactor, and so on. None of that matters very much in Torah study, any more than wondering if William Shakespeare actually wrote "King Lear" ought to interfere with one's enjoyment of the play.

[lightcreatedlife@hom]

Loss Leader: With all due respect, you aren't listening. The Codes, if they exist, cannot be used for prediction. That is not their significance, if they have any.
They are being used to keep that subject alive. The bible is a book of riddles used by the "organization of religion," to keep the religion alive.

[cnorman18]

Torah codes -- or even Moby Dick codes -- can predict the future. Simply make two different predictions (say "an earthquake larger than 6.5 will occur in California in 2008" and "an earthquake larger than 6.5 will not occur in California in 2008"), find both of them in the text, document both of them, then after the event occurs "forget" about one of them.

-Bri

That method has actually been used for decades by fake "psychics". The on-staff "seer" at a tabloid will write down a few thousand random predictions--"Michael Jackson will become a Mormon", "George Clooney will be killed by a mugger", and "Britney Spears will lose custody of her children"--have the list notarized, lock it in a safety deposit box, and open it at the end of the year. Throw away the 9,993 that went nowhere, keep the 7 that did, and voila! Seven genuine, notarized, and proven predictions!

Funny and interesting, but of course irrelevant to the actual research on the Torah codes.

This is getting boring again. There are actual problems with this research, but this kind of blatant deception isn't one of them.

If you have proof that actual, deliberate deception was involved in the research by Rips, Witztum et. al., please post it. To my knowledge, even their most vehement critics have not made THAT claim, and it surely hasn't been proven.

The fact that one doesn't LIKE an allegation is not proof that it is false, let alone fraudulent.

[Bri]

Funny and interesting, but of course irrelevant to the actual research on the Torah codes.

This is getting boring again. There are actual problems with this research, but this kind of blatant deception isn't one of them.


It was a joke! Of course nobody has made any predictions using Torah codes or Moby Dick codes. I already agreed with you on that point, so I thought it would be obvious that I was joking.

I'm still waiting for you to respond to my serious post here (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?postid=3089614#post3089614) which contains some much more legitimate criticism of the "actual research on the Torah codes."

-Bri

[Belz...]

(4) you will find that the "Moby Dick", etc., demonstrations did not and do not fairly duplicate the phenomenon and are in fact based on a misunderstanding of how it works.

And yet it works with any and every piece of litterature you can imagine.

It's seeing patterns where there are none, plain and simple.

Loss Leader: With all due respect, you aren't listening. The Codes, if they exist, cannot be used for prediction. That is not their significance, if they have any.

That's a weird admission.

[Belz...]

They are highly educated people, working in prestigious universities. (Not Drosnin, but Ripps).

Which is not mutually exclusive with the fact that they're idiots.

[cnorman18]

Sorry about that. By way of excuse, I'm still very new here, and I haven't gotten to know anybody.

You've probably noticed, as I have, that there are a lot of posts here that OUGHT to be jokes, but aren't...

I really wanted to go look at some other threads, but I'll try to address your criticisms by trying, at least, to explain what this phenomenon IS. That might help in the discussion, since no one has yet done so.

This may take a while.

First, then: words may be found "encoded" in the Torah--or, as you say, in ANY book--by programming a computer to search for the letters in the words that appear in sequence at equidistant intervals. The word "Joshua", for instance, might appear at a 7-letter interval: "J", then six letters, then "O", then six letters, then "S", and so on (I know, Hebrew has no vowels; this is an example). Now, clearly, this means nothing. Since the computer can easily find words at intervals of thousands of letters, one can obviously find literally any word in any book; the shorter the word, or the longer the book, the more instances of the word's appearance can and will be found. Big deal. If this were all there was to the phenomenon, it would not rate a filler paragraph on the back pages, but some apparently believe that this is the case.

The phenomenon of the codes, and its statistical improbability, is in this: Say we find a word--in the initial experiment, the name of a medieval rabbi--encoded in the text in this manner. Not difficult; Jewish names tend to repeat, just as English names do (how many "Roberts" do you know?). The name has to appear SOMEWHERE, and is in fact quite certain to appear in MANY places. But now we focus on the place where the name appears at its SHORTEST interval, obviously a much smaller portion of the text. Again, that means nothing--it has to happen somewhere.

But now we search for a related word or phrase--again, in the initial experiment, the date of that rabbi's birth or death, whichever is known; and we find that that information appears, again at its SHORTEST interval, IN THE SAME PLACE. To make the improbability of that clear, imagine the whole Torah spread out on a football field, and the place where both words appear at their shortest intervals is the size of a paperback book. That should strike anyone as rather unlikely; still, though, it might be a mere coincidence, and one such example still proves nothing.

The problem, for those who wish to dismiss the codes as meaningless or trivial, is that this strange coincidence appeared over and over with a rather long list of rabbis and their dates which were chosen by an arbitrary standard before the searches began.

These results were so shocking that the journal, Statistical Science, insisted that the experiment be repeated, this time with an entirely different list using another arbitrary standard--one chosen by reviewers at the journal and not by the scientists involved. The results were the same.

[Edited to add: I do not claim that these extreme outcomes occurred with every rabbi on either list; they did not. But the degree of correlation was extremely high, with a probability calculated at p < 0.000016. When precisely similar experiments were conducted with exactly the same data sets on the book of Isaiah and a Hebrew translation of "War and Peace", no such correlations were found.]

The standard was, for the record, the amount of space devoted to the rabbis' biographies in the Encyclopedia of Great Men in Israel, a standard work [for clarity, "Israel" here refers to the Jewish people and not to the nation-state]. The first sample included rabbis with at least three columns of text; the second, those with between 1.5 columns and three. There is, therefore, no question of the researchers using carefully selected data to ensure positive results; the standard was totally arbitrary and determined beforehand.

Similar experiments with other texts--significantly, including other books of the Bible--have yielded no such consistency of results.

Perhaps, in the Moby Dick experiment, a similar encoded pair or two were found, after searching dozens of possibilities; that would not, as we have seen, be particularly surprising. But I know of no experiment with any other text that either used these arbitrary standards or that has produced such a long list of positive results or with an equally low predicted probability..

I hope this has clarified things a bit.

[Belz...]

Whatever. Peace to all, and for the record, you're probably right anyway. I just thought the research interesting, but then it doesn't challenge my convictions as directly as it apparently does those of others.

Just because somebody claims something is BS doesn't mean that person is challenged by the idea. Maybe it IS just BS.

But then, you'd have to do research in order to find that out.

[Belz...]

Your conviction that Abraham and Moses were mythical characters is just as much a statement of faith as my own belief that they probably weren't. In fact, since it's exceedingly hard to logically prove a negative, perhaps even more so.

Yeah, that doesn't help you, because then it puts the burden of proof on YOU to prove that they DID exist. Because, so far, zilch.

At one time it was confidently asserted that the Iliad was entirely fictional, that the Trojan war never happened, and that Troy itself never existed. Later finds have proven that that assertion was false.

Actually, people weren't sure if Troy existed or not, but that's beside the point, because it's pretty much the only known example that people EVER come up with.

Jews are not, by and large, fundamentalists.

That's also true of most non-Jews, so I don't see why you care to make the distinction.

[cnorman18]

"Yeah, that doesn't help you, because then it puts the burden of proof on YOU to prove that they DID exist. Because, so far, zilch."

Did you miss the part where I said it didn't matter?

It's a non-question. For those who believe they DID exist, the Torah IS the historical reference and the proof. For those who don't, or don't care--what's the problem again?

"Actually, people weren't sure if Troy existed or not, but that's beside the point, because it's pretty much the only known example that people EVER come up with."

Oh, I wouldn't say that. Until recently, some said that neither King David nor tha ancient nation of Israel itself ever existed--until contemporary inscriptions referring to his dynasty were found. Scientists long dismissed both pandas and gorillas as creatures of folklore, until living specimens were captured. The coelacanth was pronounced extinct, until specimens were caught. And so on. Both historical study and biological science are trustworthy enterprises, but neither has closed its canon quite yet.

"That's also true of most non-Jews, so I don't see why you care to make the distinction."

Um--because we were discussing a Jewish book, its place in Jewish tradition, and the attitudes of Jews toward it?

[Bri]

Sorry about that. By way of excuse, I'm still very new here, and I haven't gotten to know anybody.

You've probably noticed, as I have, that there are a lot of posts here that OUGHT to be jokes, but aren't...

Understood, and not a problem.

I really wanted to go look at some other threads, but I'll try to address your criticisms by trying, at least, to explain what this phenomenon IS. That might help in the discussion, since no one has yet done so.

I read through your explanation, and believe that I did understand the phenomenon when I made my comments.

The problem, for those who wish to dismiss the codes as meaningless or trivial, is that this strange coincidence appeared over and over with a rather long list of rabbis and their dates which were chosen by an arbitrary standard before the searches began.

No, the lists were not chosen by an arbitrary standard beforehand. If they had chosen a list of rabbis and birth dates beforehand and never changed it, the birth dates would at the very least include the year that each rabbi was born. I could even see if the list only included the year and not the day and month. However, the authors chose to use only the day and month of the rabbis birth dates. The reason is obvious: because none of the other formats turn up anything even remotely close to each other, and the results are no better than chance. To get the 1 in a million odds that are claimed, the authors had to tweak the list, and possibly even the procedure (the "rules") used to find them. In some examples by the same researchers, they don't use the minimal interval rule. Again, the reason is fairly clear.

Using the same procedures used by the researchers to find the rabbis in the Torah, these sorts of "coincidences" still appear in every text, including Moby Dick. There are many examples from Moby Dick where lists of multiple related words are found in the same "area" of the text at their minimal intervals using the same procedure used to find the rabbis.

These results were so shocking that the journal, Statistical Science, insisted that the experiment be repeated, this time with an entirely different list using another arbitrary standard--one chosen by reviewers at the journal and not by the scientists involved. The results were the same.

I assume you are aware but forgot to mention that the same journal later published an article thoroughly discrediting the article you mentioned.

There is, therefore, no question of the researchers using carefully selected data to ensure positive results; the standard was totally arbitrary and determined beforehand.

But of course it wasn't totally arbitrary nor determined beforehand. In fact, there is evidence that the researchers had performed the famous rabbis experiment beforehand and knew that the dates would be in close proximity to the names. Why do you suppose they chose only the month and day of the rabbi's birth dates? And why do you suppose they chose particular names and spellings of the months over other more common names and spellings?

They also didn't use the same dates as those provided in the book that they took the names from. They omitted several dates on the grounds that those listed were in dispute, yet they kept several other disputed dates. They also used dates from other sources on the grounds that those other sources were more authoritative, but they kept at least two dates that were probably wrong.

And of course whenever any of their arbitrary decisions are changed, the results are rather telling.

Similar experiments with other texts--significantly, including other books of the Bible--have yielded no such consistency of results.

That seems to be false. In fact, there are many examples, both in English and in Hebrew, for many texts including both English and Hebrew versions of the Bible, Moby Dick, and War and Peace.

Perhaps, in the Moby Dick experiment, a similar encoded pair or two were found, after searching dozens of possibilities; that would not, as we have seen, be particularly surprising. But I know of no experiment with any other text that either used these arbitrary standards or that has produced such a long list of positive results.

If you know of no experiment with any other text that either used these arbitrary standards or that has produced such a long list of positive results, then your knowledge on the subject seems to be lacking.

I hope this has clarified things a bit.

It does, yes.

-Bri

[Bri]

[Edited to add: I do not claim that these extreme outcomes occurred with every rabbi on either list; they did not. But the degree of correlation was extremely high, with a probability calculated at p < 0.000016. When precisely similar experiments were conducted with exactly the same data sets on the book of Isaiah and a Hebrew translation of "War and Peace", no such correlations were found.]

Of course no such correlations would be found using the list of rabbis on a different text. But other lists have similar correlations with other texts such as Isaiah and War and Peace. Likewise, those other lists don't correlate to Genesis.

If you found the word "rhinoceros" in one random 10x10 grid of letters, you're not likely to find it in another one are you?

The whole point was that the researchers quite obviously went on a fishing expedition, and threw back the little ones. The same can be done with any text.

-Bri

[cnorman18]

I would have to agree that the criticisms that you raise here would pretty much blow the codes out of the water. Can you post a source--website, book, whatever--where I can find this material? I'd like to know more about it.

If you were expecting an argument, I have none. Facts are facts. I may be religious, but I am neither irrational nor an ideologue.

One of the principles I have learned in my religious studies is this: "If you see something in the Torah that conflicts with what you know to be true or right, then you must reject the teaching of the Torah in that instance. It may be that your understanding of the Torah is flawed--or the Torah may simply be wrong." Most common example; the condemnation of homosexuality as an "abomination."
Liberal Jews today, for the most part, simply ignore those passages; they're wrong. Writing off the
Torah codes will be much less difficult.

In my belief, God gave us the Torah, but He also gave us brains. Thanks for giving me something to put in mine.

Learning the truth is more important than winning any argument. Thank you.

[Bri]

I would have to agree that the criticisms that you raise here would pretty much blow the codes out of the water. Can you post a source--website, book, whatever--where I can find this material? I'd like to know more about it.

Absolutely. Most of the information (and a lot more) can be found in the paper "Solving the Bible Code Puzzle" which was published by Statistical Science in 1999 in response to the paper "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis" which was published in the same journal in 1994 by Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg.

A copy of the paper can be found online in PDF format here (http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/StatSci/StatSci.pdf).

If you were expecting an argument, I have none. Facts are facts. I may be religious, but I am neither irrational nor an ideologue.

I appreciate your honesty, and your principles. By the way, when I first heard about the Torah codes, I too was fascinated and determined to look deeper. So, I've certainly been where you are.

One of the principles I have learned in my religious studies is this: "If you see something in the Torah that conflicts with what you know to be true or right, then you must reject the teaching of the Torah in that instance. It may be that your understanding of the Torah is flawed--or the Torah may simply be wrong." Most common example; the condemnation of homosexuality as an "abomination."
Liberal Jews today, for the most part, simply ignore those passages; they're wrong. Writing off the
Torah codes will be much less difficult.

In my belief, God gave us the Torah, but He also gave us brains. Thanks for giving me something to put in mine.

Learning the truth is more important than winning any argument. Thank you.

Thank you for looking at it so objectively and for being more interested in the truth than in winning the argument. Others (myself included) can learn a lot from your example, so I hope you'll stick around on the forum.

-Bri

[cnorman18]

Well... Feces.

Wouldn't you just know it. I don't have a computer (well, I do, but it's in storage). I do this on a BlackBerry, and I can't download PDF files. Excrement.

Well, it's all good. I'll google around and see if I can find a summary or something. I know where to find it, anyway. Thanks.

Thanks for the kind words, too. I'm having a great time here. Pretty cool place, even if I am in the, um, minority.

BTW (and this not directed at you, Bri), I don't mind being called an idiot. I'm used to it. I've been married.

[Bri]

Here (http://wopr.com/biblecodes/) is some additional reading on Torah codes until you can view the paper. It is a site by Professor Barry Simon, the IBM Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Caltech and an Orthodox Jew. In particular, take a look at The Case Against The Codes (http://wopr.com/biblecodes/TheCase.htm) on that site.

Here (http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/opinions/) is a list of other sites containing various expert opinions on the Torah codes.

-Bri

[Gregoire]

The whole business about it not being copied or translated correctly is a total red herring. To be honest, I've never been very impressed by Ehrman. He's a scholar, but I totally don't think he gets it at all.

Talking about copying or translating problems totally misses the point first of all, and second of all, in fact these works are actually very well preserved.

Talking about errors in copying is making an argument that the "word of God" has been lost, but this is a stupid thing to talk about, because the more important issue us that it was never the word of God in the first place, which can easily be shown by the content of what we do have.

......The reason that this whole "Bible Code" thing even came up is explained in my article. The reason is that the writers of the Gospels were using literary allusion. They would base scenes in the Gospels on scenes in the Hebrew scritpures, but the scenes in the Hebrew scritpures that they were basing their scenes on were not prophecies, they were things like, for example, Psalm 22, passages in Kings about Elisha, or some seemingly random passage in Hosea, etc.

What the early Christians noticed was that all or most of the scenes in the Gospels related back to "OT" passages, but the passages that they related back to weren't anything that could clearly be picked out as a prophecy on its own merits.

Thus they came up with the idea that the Hebrew scritpures were "secretly encoded"......



I don't think that is what was being discussed in the OP with regard to the terms "Bible Code"

I thought they were referring to an idea that had to do with actual letters and actual words forming patterns. Anyone feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

I would refer to Wiki's discussion:

(go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_code)

"Overview

The primary method by which purportedly meaningful messages have been extracted is the Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS). To obtain an ELS from a text, choose a starting point (in principle, any letter) and a skip number, also freely and possibly negative. Then, beginning at the starting point, select letters from the text at equal spacing as given by the skip number. For example, the bold letters in this sentence form an ELS. With a skip of -4, and ignoring the spaces and punctuation, the word SAFEST is spelled out."


My question is that if we know there are numerous mistakes in letters and words....regardless about whether or not the general story is the same... how can anyone believe in these patterns in the first place?

With regard to Ehrman (who does not believe the Bible is "God's word"), I have no idea about his personal scholarship. His states in Misquoting Jesus he is writing to the general public of what the overall findings in his field, textual criticism, are. He never talks about his particular contributions. I found his book fascinating in that regard.:)

[Malachi151]

I don't think that is what was being discussed in the OP with regard to the terms "Bible Code"

That is correct, but what I'm talking about is how all of this originated. Starting in the 2nd century there was a view among Romans that the Hebrew scriptures contained all of the prophecies for all future events, based on the relationships between the "NT" texts and the "OT" texts, but they couldn't figure out how to actually predict the future with the "OT" texts because there are no clear patterns between the OT and the NT. The NT texts are based on the OT, but they are based on OT "prophecies", they are just based on seemingly random passages, and this is what started the whole business of thinking that the OT contained prophecies of the future, but not being able to figure out how to discover the prophecies before hand, and this is what launched the whole industry of trying to "decode" the OT, and of course it has evolved from there down many different roads.

There are 3rd, 4th, 5th, centuries writings talking about the power that could be gained by the emperor and the military if they could figure out how to decode the OT, etc., since they believed that the NT proved that it had the power to predict the future, etc.

They were to stupid to realize that the NT Gospel writers simply based their stories on the OT.

[MRC_Hans]

Yes, but the hunting expedition used to find the "codes" can only occur after the event has occurred. You have to start with a list of words, then calculate the probability of those words appearing exactly as they do in the text. If the probability isn't high enough, you modify your list of words and try again until you get a result you like. Hardly useful for predicting anything since you have to have the list of words to start with.



Oh, the information exists before the event occurs, of course. But only because the list of words you chose happens to pertain to an event that occurred after the text was written. You can get the results you want using words associated with any event (or anything else you want) if you're willing to spend the time to modify the list and/or the procedure until you get the results you want.

-BriEhrm, that is the same as saying that the codes are bunk. They are just the kind of random patterns you can extract from any sufficiently large amount of data.

Was that your point?

Hans

[MRC_Hans]

In any case, you're saying pretty much what I did; the best proof of the codes would be a detailed prediction of an event that is found before it happens, and even that might not make the cut. For some, there will NEVER be sufficient proof, and some have even said as much in print. That strikes me as just as much of a "faith-based" position as that of someone who maintains that nothing could DISPROVE their beliefs; neither is rational.
(My emphasis)

Now since you are a reasonable and polite guy, I'll be also polite about this: Excrement.

There may be people out there to whom there will never be sufficient proof, and to whom it is a matter of irrational faith. Till some such people enter this debate, however, that is utterly irrelevant. In fact even if some do it will be irrelevant till such time as somebody does present some solid evidence for them to irrationally reject.

Nothing personal, but I have seen that line so many times from believers: "Hey, even if I did produce some irrefutable evidence you would reject it anyway, so you are just as irrational as me."

.... All I can say is: Try me. Produce some irrefutable evidence. Heck, just produce some good evidence.

Hans

[CFLarsen]

Nothing personal, but I have seen that line so many times from believers: "Hey, even if I did produce some irrefutable evidence you would reject it anyway, so you are just as irrational as me."


The funny part is that they can't see that they aren't as much criticizing skeptics as shooting down their own argument.

"Gee, you are just as irrational as me!"

And that is supposed to be convincing?

[MRC_Hans]

Well, I suppose it is, if you live in an irrational world.

Hans

[Dancing David]

Uh, dude, I'm pretty well read, and ALL of that is new to me. You have a source?

The Torah codes are not related to Kabbalah, at least not directly.

The use of letter as numbers is part of the kabbalah, and then the transliteration of the words to numbers a versa visa.

The Oral Torah traditionally goes back to Sinai, which was about 3,500 years ago, not 600.

Read much? The Lilillith story is commonly believed to be dated to the 1500s.

Best guess I've seen on the origin of Kabbalah is that it was the esoteric teaching of the Temple priests, who continued to pass it on orally after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, but no one really knows.

Duh, I said it was the oral tradition.

Some claim Moses stole it from the Egyptians.

The "rabbinical" (sic) tradition didn't remove anything from Tanakh, because "rabbis" did not exist until after that date.

I realize that, I could have said the monotheistic tradition that led to rabbis, I didn't. So when were the requirements of matrimony added into the texts?

Since Abraham's initial innovation was that there was only One God, I doubt very much that there were ever any "polytheistic texts" in the Bible.

Then you need to read more, there are dead sea scrolls that would indicate that there was a polytheistic tradition along side the one in the torah.

The Lilith story is a midrashic legend and was never in the Bible.

You need to read more carefully, i said that Lillith was part of the kabbalah.

Read much kabbalah?



(I thought the Weekly World News had gone belly up...)


Ah, sarcasm, the resort of those who could learn more. And have low reading skills.

[Dancing David]

Sorry about that. By way of excuse, I'm still very new here, and I haven't gotten to know anybody.

You've probably noticed, as I have, that there are a lot of posts here that OUGHT to be jokes, but aren't...

I really wanted to go look at some other threads, but I'll try to address your criticisms by trying, at least, to explain what this phenomenon IS. That might help in the discussion, since no one has yet done so.

This may take a while.

First, then: words may be found "encoded" in the Torah--or, as you say, in ANY book--by programming a computer to search for the letters in the words that appear in sequence at equidistant intervals. The word "Joshua", for instance, might appear at a 7-letter interval: "J", then six letters, then "O", then six letters, then "S", and so on (I know, Hebrew has no vowels; this is an example). Now, clearly, this means nothing. Since the computer can easily find words at intervals of thousands of letters, one can obviously find literally any word in any book; the shorter the word, or the longer the book, the more instances of the word's appearance can and will be found. Big deal. If this were all there was to the phenomenon, it would not rate a filler paragraph on the back pages, but some apparently believe that this is the case.

The phenomenon of the codes, and its statistical improbability, is in this: Say we find a word--in the initial experiment, the name of a medieval rabbi--encoded in the text in this manner. Not difficult; Jewish names tend to repeat, just as English names do (how many "Roberts" do you know?). The name has to appear SOMEWHERE, and is in fact quite certain to appear in MANY places. But now we focus on the place where the name appears at its SHORTEST interval, obviously a much smaller portion of the text. Again, that means nothing--it has to happen somewhere.

But now we search for a related word or phrase--again, in the initial experiment, the date of that rabbi's birth or death, whichever is known; and we find that that information appears, again at its SHORTEST interval, IN THE SAME PLACE. To make the improbability of that clear, imagine the whole Torah spread out on a football field, and the place where both words appear at their shortest intervals is the size of a paperback book. That should strike anyone as rather unlikely; still, though, it might be a mere coincidence, and one such example still proves nothing.

The problem, for those who wish to dismiss the codes as meaningless or trivial, is that this strange coincidence appeared over and over with a rather long list of rabbis and their dates which were chosen by an arbitrary standard before the searches began.


is this in the paper you linked to, where can we see the data and how it was dervided. It the interval constant? How are the dates derived?

These results were so shocking that the journal, Statistical Science, insisted that the experiment be repeated, this time with an entirely different list using another arbitrary standard--one chosen by reviewers at the journal and not by the scientists involved. The results were the same.

is the data in the papre or where is it?


[Edited to add: I do not claim that these extreme outcomes occurred with every rabbi on either list; they did not. But the degree of correlation was extremely high, with a probability calculated at p < 0.000016.

we need to see the data before that means anything.

is that in the paper you linked to?

Did they search for assumed null sets of names that were not in the book as a control.

take the name and date of someone with a similar name, culturally speaking from the same place and time and then run the data on their names. that would be a good control. and then the level of names that are not chosen is also significan, if the cose only picks ceratin names that would make wonder , why?

[Bri]

Was that your point?

Yup!

-Bri

[JetLeg]

Which is not mutually exclusive with the fact that they're idiots.

Hm... I think that it is. You need intelligence in order to earn a Ph.D.

[Belz...]

Did you miss the part where I said it didn't matter?

Nope. But you DID mention it, so I assume that it matters more than you admit.

It's a non-question. For those who believe they DID exist, the Torah IS the historical reference and the proof. For those who don't, or don't care--what's the problem again?

Historical accuracy.

Oh, I wouldn't say that. Until recently, some said that neither King David nor tha ancient nation of Israel itself ever existed--until contemporary inscriptions referring to his dynasty were found. Scientists long dismissed both pandas and gorillas as creatures of folklore, until living specimens were captured.

Those are all good examples. Thanks for the correction, and I didn't know about David.

However, it changes nothing about what I said. Until you have proof of something, it's safe to assume it doesn't or at least not bother to think about it, otherwise you'll be chasing all possible theories around and you won't have time to focus on those you know are true, or at least probably true.

So saying that they found Troy means nothing about the subject at hand.

The coelacanth was pronounced extinct, until specimens were caught.

That's not a good example. They knew it HAD existed at some point.

Um--because we were discussing a Jewish book, its place in Jewish tradition, and the attitudes of Jews toward it?

"Jews are people" would've been just as helpful.

[Belz...]

I may be religious, but I am neither irrational nor an ideologue.

Wouldn't that be a contradiction ?

I kid, I kid. :D

[Belz...]

Hm... I think that it is. You need intelligence in order to earn a Ph.D.

No, you need to be good at memorising things.

It doesn't mean you don't believe in Roswell-type stuff or whatever other woo.

[JetLeg]

No, you need to be good at memorising things.

It doesn't mean you don't believe in Roswell-type stuff or whatever other woo.

The second part is true, but while a Ph.D. is researching ;not memorising.

[cnorman18]

Wouldn't that be a contradiction ?

I kid, I kid. :D

Not to worry. For very many religious folk, you wouldn't be kidding.

On our local cable, there are four categories of channels that I don't watch; I call them "Spanish", "Snoozers", "We Want Your Money", and "Jesus".

There seems to be a considerable amount of overlap between the last two.

[cnorman18]

Nope. But you DID mention it, so I assume that it matters more than you admit.
.

I suppose I should have mentioned it earlier; I would LOVE to use the quote function, but I do this on a BlackBerry and many of the functions don't work for me. The quote function is one of them. I can quote the whole post and edit, as above, or not at all. I can't put more than one highlighted quote in a post. I also can't watch videos, download audio or PDF files, or see special fonts like italics. It's a PITA, but it's better than not being here at all.

Anyway, about Abraham et. al.: I'm interested in the Bible, and in history, so I suppose one could say that it "matters"; but not much, and certainly not in terms of my religion. I can't speak for all Jews, but by and large we follow the teachings that the characters of the OT are said to have imparted to us; the individuals themselves are of very little importance in comparison to the principles they are SAID to have taught.
I think it would be really cool is King Arthur really lived, too, and I personally think that there's probably some grain of truth behind the legends; but the question hardly matters to my core beliefs or how I live my life. Abraham and Moses hold a similar place in my heart.

So does Frodo Baggins, but I'm a little more certain of his authenticity. Why let a little thing like 'historical accuracy" interfere with the enjoyment of a good story and the appreciation of the lessons it has to teach? The issues really are separate.

[Ichneumonwasp]

I suppose I should have mentioned it earlier; I would LOVE to use the quote function, but I do this on a BlackBerry and many of the functions don't work for me. The quote function is one of them. I can quote the whole post and edit, as above, or not at all. I can't put more than one highlighted quote in a post. I also can't watch videos, download audio or PDF files, or see special fonts like italics. It's a PITA, but it's better than not being here at all.

Anyway, about Abraham et. al.: I'm interested in the Bible, and in history, so I suppose one could say that it "matters"; but not much, and certainly not in terms of my religion. I can't speak for all Jews, but by and large we follow the teachings that the characters of the OT are said to have imparted to us; the individuals themselves are of very little importance in comparison to the principles they are SAID to have taught.
I think it would be really cool is King Arthur really lived, too, and I personally think that there's probably some grain of truth behind the legends; but the question hardly matters to my core beliefs or how I live my life. Abraham and Moses hold a similar place in my heart.

So does Frodo Baggins, but I'm a little more certain of his authenticity. Why let a little thing like 'historical accuracy" interfere with the enjoyment of a good story and the appreciation of the lessons it has to teach? The issues really are separate.

You know, I think I'm getting to like you more and more. Keep posting.

[cnorman18]

You know, I think I'm getting to like you more and more. Keep posting.

Mutual.

I shall.

Later--

C.

[lightcreatedlife@hom]

Here's a blisteringly simple test: Just point to a sufficiently detailed prediction before it comes true.

Humans are pattern recognizers. We think we're engaged in logical thouht but much of the time, we're just matching patterns. Our brains like patterns so much that we tend to see then even when they're not there. This has been proven experimentally in all sorts of ways.

So, if the predictions are in there, it should be no problem to find one before it happens. If the predictions can only be found after the fact, though, you'll have to explain how that differs from the natural human desire to see order where none exists.

A lot of times the order that they see is there, it just probably doesn't mean anything. Wouldn't they still be obligated to mention what they see? And how would a "real" message/pattern get recognized? I mean, it would be easy to see coming from the void of space, but how in our pattern rich earthly world?

[zizzybaluba]

And how would a "real" message/pattern get recognized?

Simple. The pattern would have to be used to make reliable predictions of future events.

[qayak]

ISo does Frodo Baggins, but I'm a little more certain of his authenticity.

News Flash: Frodo Baggins found to be figment of JRR Tolkein's imagination. Story at 6:00 pm!

Why let a little thing like 'historical accuracy" interfere with the enjoyment of a good story and the appreciation of the lessons it has to teach? The issues really are separate.

Stories and lessons are perfectly fine. The belief that the story is true and that all people should be obligated to live THEIR lives with the lessons YOU think exist in YOUR make believe stories, is what is wrong with religions.

In your post you are quick to point out why your religion is better than some others. This is a fallacy. All religions are equally bad for exactly the same reasons. They are all dictatorships with a megalomaniac at their head and equally pompous humans, believing they are infallable, as the link between the unworthy follower and the megalomaniac in the sky. All have, and do, commit atrocities based on this structure.

So, your religion is as much a lie as any other. You would be better to go back and gather your life lessons from some good, and recent, children's books. A child today understands the world better than the most sophisticated thinker of the bible era.

[cnorman18]

"News Flash: Frodo Baggins found to be figment of JRR Tolkein's imagination. Story at 6:00 pm!"

No kidding? Gee, my hopes of taking a Grey Ship to Valinor when I die are dashed! I shall now fall upon my sword...

BTW, it's "Tolkien," not "Tolkein."

"Stories and lessons are perfectly fine."

Glad we agree on that, anyway.

"The belief that the story is true and that all people should be obligated to live THEIR lives with the lessons YOU think exist in YOUR make believe stories, is what is wrong with religions."

I didn't say that. In fact, I pretty much stated the opposite.

"In your post you are quick to point out why your religion is better than some others."

No, I didn't. I said that I find the practices found in some religions to be "contemptible," as do most atheists, and that they are not found in Judaism. For the record, I don't think such practices necessarily reflect the actual beliefs of most followers of those religions. Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jim Bakker, for instance, are as despised by most Christians as by atheists, and quite probably more so, since they bring shame upon their faith.

"...All religions are equally bad for exactly the same reasons. They are all dictatorships with a megalomaniac at their head and equally pompous humans, believing they are infallable, as the link between the unworthy follower and the megalomaniac in the sky. All have, and do, commit atrocities based on this structure."

You paint with a very broad brush. That's about as reasonable as the proposition that all atheists are Communists or homosexuals, which is, I hasten to add, ludicrous.

"So, your religion is as much a lie as any other."

You are entitled to your opinion. I do not share it.

"You would be better to go back and gather your life lessons from some good, and recent, children's books."

Thanks for the advice. As a matter of fact, I just finished the last Harry Potter and found it very good indeed.

"A child today understands the world better than the most sophisticated thinker of the bible era."

If you say so. Personally, I've never found the mere fact of belief in God to be enough to declare someone a complete moron. But to each his own.

Peace.

[qayak]

"[B]BTW, it's "Tolkien," not "Tolkein."

You know your opponent is desperate when they resort to pointing out typos.

I said that I find the practices found in some religions to be "contemptible," as do most atheists, and that they are not found in Judaism.

Judaism is just as contemptible as christianity, islam, hinduism, etc. Religions are not based on love, charity and harmony, they are based on hatred, seperation and conflict. You demonstrate this by placing judaism above christianity. In fact, they are all equally contemptible.

You paint with a very broad brush. That's about as reasonable as the proposition that all atheists are Communists or homosexuals, which is, I hasten to add, ludicrous.

I didn't say anything about the people who practice religions. I stated that religions are set up in such a way that they are always abusive. Dictatorships like Stalinist Russia, North Korea, and Hitler's Germany have more in common with religion than they do with anything else. Dictatorships are almost always cohorts with religion.

You are entitled to your opinion. I do not share it.

So, your religion wasn't created by men? Your god really does exist? Little boy's penises really do need to be mutilated to satisfy god?

Thanks for the advice. As a matter of fact, I just finished the last Harry Potter and found it very good indeed.

Yes, a much better series of books than all the ancient, or modern for that matter, religious texts combined.

If you say so. Personally, I've never found the mere fact of belief in God to be enough to declare someone a complete moron. But to each his own.

I didn't say a belief in the bible made anyone a moron, although it does contribute greatly. What I said was that a child of today has a better understanding of the world than the best biblical era scholars. Elementary school children learn about evolution, the planets and stars, the germ model of disease, etc., which is more than those scholars could ever hope for.

The life lessons religions push are those based on ignorance and superstition. Unfortunately, even today, some people choose the ignorant and superstitious life lessons from the past.

Any book geared toward a child of today has far more valuable lessons than those ancient texts.

[cnorman18]

"You know your opponent is desperate when they resort to pointing out typos."

Oh, please. I resonded to your ribbing with a little of my own.

"Judaism is just as contemptible as christianity, islam, hinduism, etc. Religions are not based on love, charity and harmony, they are based on hatred, seperation and conflict. You demonstrate this by placing judaism above christianity. In fact, they are all equally contemptible."

Where did I place Judaism "above" Christianity? If I gave that impression, I apologize. I have addressed that topic elsewhere on this forum, and at considerable length. We Jews differ with some Christians on the matter of Biblical interpretation. That certainly does not imply a negative judgment on their religion as a whole.

"I didn't say anything about the people who practice religions."

How can one discuss a religion without considering those who follow it?

"I stated that religions are set up in such a way that they are always abusive. Dictatorships like Stalinist Russia, North Korea, and Hitler's Germany have more in common with religion than they do with anything else."

There's that broad brush again. Dictatorships are hierarchical, and so are many religions (Judaism is not; neither is the Southern Baptist Convention, and many others). Beyond that, it's really hard to see many similarities. Their aims and methods are hardly the same. Your assertions here smell more of vitriol than of logic.

"Dictatorships are almost always cohorts with religion."

As someone once said, the plural of "anecdote" is not "evidence".

"So, your religion wasn't created by men?"

Created by men, no; shaped by men, most definitely yes. God no longer has the right to determine what we believe or do. He delegated that work to us--as a community. We have no Pope and no Prophet. Sorry if that doesn't fit your stereotype, but that's the way it is.

"Your god really does exist?"

We believe so, yes.

"Little boy's penises really do need to be mutilated to satisfy god?"

Mere provocation and insult. I shall ignore it.

"Yes, a much better series of books than all the ancient, or modern for that matter, religious texts combined."

Well, I didn't think it was THAT good. One is tempted to ask just how many modern religious books you have actually read.

"I didn't say a belief in the bible made anyone a moron, although it does contribute greatly."

I didn't mention a belief in the Bible, either. What I mentioned was a belief in God. I wonder what, exactly, you mean by 'belief in the bible". Whatever it is, I suspect that most Jews do not so believe.

"What I said was that a child of today has a better understanding of the world than the best biblical era scholars. Elementary school children learn about evolution, the planets and stars, the germ model of disease, etc., which is more than those scholars could ever hope for."

I concede the point; you are absolutely right. On matters of morality and justice, though, I doubt that we have any significant advantage over the ancients.

"The life lessons religions push are those based on ignorance and superstition. Unfortunately, even today, some people choose the ignorant and superstitious life lessons from the past."

Of what "life lessons" are you speaking, and why are they objectionable? In the case of Judaism, the "life lessons" that we think most important have to do with treating one's fellow humans with justice, dignity, respect and even love. Us there something else I should be learning?

"Any book geared toward a child of today has far more valuable lessons than those ancient texts."

That's an astonishing statement. Is there nothing of value to be found in the Bible at all?

I really think your hostility and obvious hatred of ALL religion is a bit over the top. I don't happen to care for apples, but I've noticed that some are tastier than others.

Peace.

[qayak]

Where did I place Judaism "above" Christianity? If I gave that impression, I apologize.

Two issues here. First, you placed your religion above others right about here, "I said that I find the practices found in some religions to be "contemptible. . . " You then go on to say that judaism doesn't practice these things.

Second, don't aplologize. I expect that anyone who chooses one system over another does so because they believe that system is better. No one would choose judaism if they thought christianity was better. You did choose your religion didn't you? You weren't just born into it? What were you before you decided judaism was best?

How can one discuss a religion without considering those who follow it?

How can you discuss abortion without discussing the people who perform them? Well, it is quite simple, you discuss what the tenets of the religion are and not the individuals who practice it just as you discuss the issues of abortion without discussing the personality of the doctors performing them.

Sometimes there can be an overlap where the discussion includes the people involved but a meaningful discussion doesn't require it.

There's that broad brush again. Dictatorships are hierarchical, and so are many religions (Judaism is not; neither is the Southern Baptist Convention, and many others). Beyond that, it's really hard to see many similarities. Their aims and methods are hardly the same. Your assertions here smell more of vitriol than of logic.

Really? Funny but when there is an issue judaism feels it has a say in, I hear jewish leaders speaking out about the position of the jewish faith. I never see them take a poll to decide where each individual jew sits on the position.

As someone once said, the plural of "anecdote" is not "evidence".

Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong-il, Hirohito, etc., etc.

I didn't mention a belief in the Bible, either. What I mentioned was a belief in God. I wonder what, exactly, you mean by 'belief in the bible". Whatever it is, I suspect that most Jews do not so believe.

Yes, my mistake. I meant to say "the belief in god," not "belief in the bible."

On matters of morality and justice, though, I doubt that we have any significant advantage over the ancients.

We and our children have the advantage over ancient biblical scholars. Let's face it, even young children realize that it is as bad to kill an atheist as it is to kill a christian or a jew.

You are mistaking reasoning power with morality. An ancient biblical scholar obviously had better reasoning ability than today's child but was hamstrung by their religious indoctrination.

Of what "life lessons" are you speaking, and why are they objectionable? In the case of Judaism, the "life lessons" that we think most important have to do with treating one's fellow humans with justice, dignity, respect and even love. Us there something else I should be learning?

Well, you aren't getting that from ancient religious texts. In the case of moral guidance your religion is no better than any other and far less effective than one based on modern reasoning and an all inclusive world view. Religions are not all inclusive. In fact, they are exclusive.

That's an astonishing statement. Is there nothing of value to be found in the Bible at all?

Yes, the bible is a snapshot of early civilization and as such it is an important historical document. Not a very accurate one but it illustrates well the things people of that time and culture found important.

I really think your hostility and obvious hatred of ALL religion is a bit over the top. I don't happen to care for apples, but I've noticed that some are tastier than others.

I don't hate religions. I strongly dislike the fact that believers try to gloss over the damage done by religions and go to such extremes to claim their version of the myth is beyond reproach. I don't think it is hateful of me to point out the faults with religions in general or your religion in particular.

[cnorman18]

"Two issues here. First, you placed your religion above others right about here, "I said that I find the practices found in some religions to be "contemptible. . . " You then go on to say that judaism doesn't practice these things."

I thought I made that clear in my last post. I don't regard those practices to be representative of those religions. IMO, most "faith healers" and other religious con men have no more commitment to their professed faiths than a pornographer has to women's liberation.

"Second, don't aplologize. I expect that anyone who chooses one system over another does so because they believe that system is better. No one would choose judaism if they thought christianity was better. You did choose your religion didn't you? You weren't just born into it? What were you before you decided judaism was best?"

I was a Methodist; in fact, 30+ years ago, I was a Methodist minister. I abandoned that faith specifically on skeptical grounds; I could not buy into the God-become-man thing, and had a very hard time with various Christian teachings, e.g., that what one BELIEVES is more important than what one DOES, that those who do not believe in Jesus are condemned to Hell, and much more. I think now that I entered seminary and the ministry in an effort to quell those doubts, but they only got worse. I left the ministry, and for many years I maintained a kind of eclectic faith that was quasi-Christian but rejected most Christian dogmas. Like most Christians, I really knew very little about modern Judaism; but when I began to read about Judaism in my late 40s, I realized that these were the beliefs that I had always held. The parts of Christianity that were precious to me all turned out to be Jewish, and the things that were different I embraced like long-lost friends. The freedom, even the expectation, of arguing with authority and even with God Himself; the disinterest in emotional display and manipulation; the conviction that the life and dignity of the individual human were more precious than any dogma or teaching; and so much more. I loved it, and I still do.

The funny part is that almost all converts fall in love with the culture, the ritual and music and holidays and all that--the emotional connections--first, and only accept the teachings to get that. I have no feeling for any of that at all. My attraction was entirely intellectual and theological, and still is. I HATE going to services; it's mostly in Hebrew and they're four hours long on a good day.

It's also pretty cool that I'm not expected to try to get others to join up. I'm not doing that now; you did ask, and you'd strike me as pretty unlikely to ask me to introduce you to a rabbi anyway.

"How can you discuss abortion without discussing the people who perform them? Well, it is quite simple, you discuss what the tenets of the religion are and not the individuals who practice it just as you discuss the issues of abortion without discussing the personality of the doctors performing them. Sometimes there can be an overlap where the discussion includes the people involved but a meaningful discussion doesn't require it."

Point taken. You're right.

"Really? Funny but when there is an issue judaism feels it has a say in, I hear jewish leaders speaking out about the position of the jewish faith. I never see them take a poll to decide where each individual jew sits on the position."

Some examples would help, but I suspect that those issues are things that most Jews would agree on and that everybody involved knows that. I can't imagine anyone daring to speak for the Jewish community on a matter that's still in dispute.

"Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong-il, Hirohito, etc., etc."

Like I said; anecdotes are not evidence. I can't imagine how either Stalin or Kim were involved with religion, anyway (Hitler's religious attitudes are problematic and are currently being argued to death on another thread. Hirohito I'll accept--he used Shinto to ensure people's devotion--but I don't think he was either the real dictator or the force behind Japanese imperialism. Not worth arguing about here, either way).

"Yes, my mistake. I meant to say "the belief in god," not "belief in the bible."

No harm, no foul. I thought it an odd lapse.

"We and our children have the advantage over ancient biblical scholars. Let's face it, even young children realize that it is as bad to kill an atheist as it is to kill a christian or a jew."

Again, I have to disagree there. Jews were never in the business of murdering those who didn't believe as we do (well, not since Joshua's day, anyway). For most of our history, that wouldn't have been a very good idea, since we were surrounded by and dependent on them. I can't recall anything in the Bible that says atheists ought to be killed, but I could be wrong.

"You are mistaking reasoning power with morality. An ancient biblical scholar obviously had better reasoning ability than today's child but was hamstrung by their religious indoctrination."

Since those scholars were concerned mainly with discussions of morality and justice, I can't see how they were "hamstrung". They also discussed religious matters, but since those were of no interest to anyone but coreligionists, what's the problem?

"Well, you aren't getting that from ancient religious texts."

That's pretty hard to credit, since those texts are cited as the justification for every moral pronouncement the sages ever made, and still are. In fact, it's pretty much the opposite of what you say; if you can't find some indication of the rightness of your position ANYWHERE in the Torah, you're going to have a hard time getting it accepted. That was true 3,000 years ago and still is.

"In the case of moral guidance your religion is no better than any other..."

Never claimed that it was. Virtually every modern faith recognizes some variant of the Golden Rule, and that's been the heart of the Jewish ethic from the beginning.

"...and far less effective than one based on modern reasoning and an all inclusive world view."

I can't help wondering how that would be different.

"Religions are not all inclusive. In fact, they are exclusive."

On that point, you are indubitably correct. The idea of being a "separate people" is integral with early Judaism, and remains to some degree even today. There are reasons for it, but they don't negate your point.

That argument does not, however, apply to the ethic. Jews are admonished over and over, throughout the Torah, to have "the same law for yourselves and for the stranger (i.e., the non-Jew) in your midst." The analogous concept in Islam is "infidel", and the admonitions are not quite the same.

"Yes, the bible is a snapshot of early civilization and as such it is an important historical document. Not a very accurate one but it illustrates well the things people of that time and culture found important."

The fact that the moral principles found there are still valid and dominant today, not to mention the literary value of the books--which has influenced artists, writers and poets throughout history--argues that there is a bit more to be found there than mere history. It's a bit ironic, really--history is one area (as well as science) where Jews say that the books are NOT to be trusted, at least in the early sections.

"I don't hate religions. I strongly dislike the fact that believers try to gloss over the damage done by religions and go to such extremes to claim their version of the myth is beyond reproach. I don't think it is hateful of me to point out the faults with religions in general or your religion in particular."

I have no problem with anyone pointing out the faults of my religion (and certainly not those of any others); Judaism is certainly not perfect, and there are no people more obsessive--and argumentative--about pointing out its faults than Jews themselves. My difficulty is your lumping in Judaism with all other beliefs, and then holding it equally responsible for the kind of horrors that it has never participated in, and in fact has most often suffered from.

Wherever you find a religion that dominates a society and uses that dominance to repress and oppress others, guess who is first on the list for sanctions, segregation and forced conversion? Whenever a dominant religion looks around for an "other" who can be blamed and persecuted, who do they focus on first? When there are religious wars, who invariably gets it from both sides? If you want examples, I can give them to you geographically or by century.

Oppression? Please. Our religion was born with our being freed from slavery, and whether that was historical or not is irrelevant. It remains the centerpiece of our identity, and we celebrate and remember it every year at Passover. Whenever and wherever there is a struggle for freedom, we have been there; whether it was for the abolition of slavery, the Civil Rights movement, the plight of Soviet dissidents, or gay liberation, you will find Jews on the front lines in far greater numbers than our percentage of the population would make likely.

If you want to condemn Christianity through most of its history--from the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, through the Russian Orthodox in the 18th and 19th centuries, to Southern Baptists in the 60s--or medieval (and modern) Islam, or the ancient Pagans, for that matter, for their brutality, repression, intolerance, and murderousness, for their cooperation with and support of tyrants, despots, demagogues, kings, czars and dictators of all kinds, you'll get no disagreement from us, because we have usually, throughout Western history, been their first and most frequent victims.

It's pretty hard, though, to watch as we are derided and condemned along with them.

When you talk about "the damage done by religion," try for a moment to remember how much of that damage was done to us. We really haven't had much time to oppress or persecute others--we've been pretty busy being oppressed and persecuted ourselves.

The most remarkable thing of all, in my mind, is that even after all the above, Judaism still refuses to condemn other faiths. We maintain that those who have persecuted us were never typical of those religions, but betrayers of them. A dear friend of mine, one of the only Jews I knew in my youth, once said, "We don't want Christians to become Jews; we just wish they'd be good Christians."

(not directed at you, but at others; spare me any nonsense about Palestinians. Their persecution, if that's what it is, is being carried out by the Israeli government, not by the Rabbinate--and Jews are in the front lines of their struggle too, in organizations like Gush Shalom and Peace Now. Jews defend and demand justice for even their enemies.)

Thanks. I needed a good rant.

Thanks, qayak. Whatever else may be true, I'm enjoying the conversation.

[Glen.Nogami]

I'm not sure that you should've conceded that bit about discussing the people so quickly, cnorman.
How can you discuss abortion without discussing the people who perform them? Well, it is quite simple, you discuss what the tenets of the religion are and not the individuals who practice it just as you discuss the issues of abortion without discussing the personality of the doctors performing them.

Sometimes there can be an overlap where the discussion includes the people involved but a meaningful discussion doesn't require it.

is not convincing to me. Religions necessarily make their presence felt in the world by the actions of their believers. Therefore, even though Islam and Christianity have similarly barbaric commandments about what ought to be done about various types of crime/abominations/etc, the fact that they are practiced in the Islamic world (Saudi Arabia, cutting off hands of thieves, the near-universal discrimination against women, etc), makes Islam the more barbaric religion of the two, independent of the fact that there may or may not be more barbarity in the Qur'an than in the Bible.

Now, if we're talking about the religions on a purely literary sense, and basing our judgments independent of religious impact on the real world, you'd also have to withdraw your somewhat distasteful "Dictators" argument. Take your pick.

[JetLeg]

Religions are not all inclusive. In fact, they are exclusive

I think it is true with regards to fundamental religions.

Liberal religions are not exclusive. They are all cherry-picking from their holy texts according to more or less modern ethical criteria. There is nothing exclusive about that.

[cnorman18]

I'm not sure that you should've conceded that bit about discussing the people so quickly, cnorman.


is not convincing to me. Religions necessarily make their presence felt in the world by the actions of their believers. Therefore, even though Islam and Christianity have similarly barbaric commandments about what ought to be done about various types of crime/abominations/etc, the fact that they are practiced in the Islamic world (Saudi Arabia, cutting off hands of thieves, the near-universal discrimination against women, etc), makes Islam the more barbaric religion of the two, independent of the fact that there may or may not be more barbarity in the Qur'an than in the Bible.

Now, if we're talking about the religions on a purely literary sense, and basing our judgments independent of religious impact on the real world, you'd also have to withdraw your somewhat distasteful "Dictators" argument. Take your pick.

Point taken. I just didn't think it worth pursuing at the time, having other fish to fry. Thanks, though; you're probably right.

[qayak]

I think it is true with regards to fundamental religions.

Liberal religions are not exclusive. They are all cherry-picking from their holy texts according to more or less modern ethical criteria. There is nothing exclusive about that.

Sorry, not what I meant. They all clearly identify the members of their group as being distinctly different from everyone else. That's why you have so many different sects and denominations.

They are exclusive in that their members are "the chosen ones" andf everyone else is wrong to some degree or other.

[qayak]

I'm not sure that you should've conceded that bit about discussing the people so quickly, cnorman.


is not convincing to me. Religions necessarily make their presence felt in the world by the actions of their believers. Therefore, even though Islam and Christianity have similarly barbaric commandments about what ought to be done about various types of crime/abominations/etc, the fact that they are practiced in the Islamic world (Saudi Arabia, cutting off hands of thieves, the near-universal discrimination against women, etc), makes Islam the more barbaric religion of the two, independent of the fact that there may or may not be more barbarity in the Qur'an than in the Bible.

You cherry pick. You ignore things that have gone on in Rwanda and other places where it is christians doing the killing and maiming. You are making a false comparison. Take two countries with economic and education levels close to each other and compare how their respective religions behave. Rwanda, for instance.

Now, if we're talking about the religions on a purely literary sense, and basing our judgments independent of religious impact on the real world, you'd also have to withdraw your somewhat distasteful "Dictators" argument. Take your pick.

Why would I have to withdraw the dictators argument? Hitler used religion, Stalin was trained by and used religion, Kim Il-sung is the president of North Korea and yet he is dead, he has been declared a god and his son is said to be one with the father which is where he gets his authority from, Saddam used religion . . .

And religions all embraced their dictatorial benefactors.

[MINISTERofTRUTH]

BIBLE CODE INTODUCTION.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pcZQQNwKbM

[arthwollipot]

*yawn*

[MINISTERofTRUTH]

*yawn*


Hey, if A dedicated man of DOOOOOOM finds it boring, it is a must that it is of importance !

BIBLE CODE INTRODUCTION.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pcZQQNwKbM

[arthwollipot]

Hey, if A dedicated man of DOOOOOOM finds it boring, it is a must that it is of importance !Or it could be just boring.

[MINISTERofTRUTH]

Truth is boring most of the time.

[MINISTERofTRUTH]

http://www.outersecrets.com/real/image/greenmanspeaks.gif

:jaw-dropp What are the odds ? :jaw-dropp

[slingblade]

That you've violated copyright and Rule 4? I'd say pretty high, actually.

[Bri]

<ignore this>

-Bri

[MINISTERofTRUTH]

I have spoken.

[Brainache]

I have spoken.

So now all we need to do is find this Sean Proudler bloke and nail him to a tree?

[dafydd]

They are highly educated people, working in prestigious universities. (Not Drosnin, but Ripps).

Then they should be sacked.

[dafydd]

Come on!


Wikipedia:



Bold added by me.

Do you have better achievements than that?

Anyone can go insane.

[dafydd]

So the codes are not predictive but:




Which is it? Are the codes making predictions or not? It sounds like part of your professed proof that the codes are real is that they predicted the names and birthdates of later-born rabbis. And yet, these names and dates came true before the codes were deciphered.

Sounds like utter nonsense to me.

It is.