Monday 25 January 2010

Bible Code

Many conspiracy theorists seem very keen on the idea of hidden messages or codes secretly embedded within ancient writings. Believers claim hidden prophecies of significant world events and disasters can be uncovered and deciphered by analysing the Bible. By simply selecting a random paragraph and taking out the punctuation and merely inserting the passage into a matrix a skeptic, if suitably motivated, and with the benefit of hindsight is easily able to uncover whatever it is they fancy. Believers see predictions of the assassination of President Kennedy and the 9/11 twin towers terrorist attack uncovered in the bible as irrefutable evidence of divine revelation even though rational thinkers can locate predictions of the death of Leon Trotsky and Princess Diana secreted within “Moby Dick”.

6 comments:

Pedro Homero said...

wicked fun! i'm facebooking this right now, thanks!

Moetzi said...

It would be cool if someone could come up with a bible code stating that the white whale actually devoured Lady Di and Leo Trotzki.

freethy said...

It would be funny if there was a code in the bible claiming that there is no such thing as god.

SamGoody said...

Many, many theses have been written detailing the statistical odds of finding such codes, and comparing the "hidden" phraseology in Moby Dick, the KJ bible, and the Hebrew Torah.

The scientific approach concedes that there are proportionally more in the Torah, that the Torah has more codes than would be statistically probable, and that the "code words" are consistently embedded into sections of text that relate to the code.

One can argue the significance of these facts. But, to ignore them and give one (or two hundred) examples of embedded code where it is statistically expected, is not only lame and stupid, it's unscientific. More importantly, it gives a very bad rap to those of us that try to do things professionally.

Martin_z said...

@SamGoody - please reference an article which "concedes that there are proportionally more in the Torah, that the Torah has more codes than would be statistically probable, and that the "code words" are consistently embedded into sections of text that relate to the code".

Otherwise, what you've put is just an assertion.

Anonymous said...

So basically what you are saying is that you don't understand statistics.

You have proven nothing, obnoxiously.