🚀 go-pugleaf

Helge Moulding <h...@slc.unisys.com> wrote in article
<3416AA...@slc.unisys.com>...
> Judson D. McClendon wrote:
> > [...]the Bible code discovered by Dr.
> > Rips exists, and I stand by my statement, as does Harold Gans below.
> > [quotes H.Gans}
> > the probability that they are mere coincidence is vanishingly small.
> 
> Gans says that what is called "Bible code" is a phenomenon he has
> observed, and that by some statistical analysis it appears to be
> quite a remarkable phenomenon. Whether or not they "exist" in the
> sense that they were put there on purpose is not a statement to 
> which Gans commits without qualification. 

Sorry, I didn't express that very well.  I simply intended to express that
I believe what Gans says, that the phenomena of the Bible codes is a real,
demonstrable phenomena.

> I have no idea what these people mean by "vanishingly small" 
> probabilities. By some measure, my individual existence has a 
> "vanishingly small" probability. Yet here I am.

Statistically significant to at least 100 times greater than would normally
be considered conclusive.

> I'm not inclined to worry too much about "vanishingly small" 
> probabilities. Aren't the names and dates and whatnot of these
> sages already in the OT in plain text? If so, then finding that
> some transformations turn up the names again, although "encoded"
> may be a forgone conclusion. Has that hypothesis been tested?

No, these are names and birth/death dates of prominent Jewish people who
lived LONG after the Bible was written.  The significant point, and the
actual point of the Statistical Science article, is not just that the names
and dates are there, but that there is an extremely significant statistical
correlation between the names and the dates historically associated with
that particular individual.  If the names and dates were in there
accidentally, there would be no significant correlation in placement
between a person's name and that person's birth/death dates.

> Also, to me finding that the Jews returning from Babylon decided to 
> make their first organized shot at holy writ more than just a 
> collection of stories isn't too unbelievable. It's just that if I
> were writing such a document I'd try a bit harder to impose a sense
> of order on the hidden names and dates - why else go to the trouble?
> So, while I can believe that it was done, I don't think that the 
> discovered "codes" are evidence of this, since they appear to be
> much too random.

But they are NOT random!  In fact, they are 'un-random' to an extreme
degree.  This is the whole thrust of the Statistical Science article.

> I'm thinking that if the codes are in fact there on purpose, then
> it is likely that Ezekiel didn't come up with this on his own. Does 
> anyone know if Babylonian religious writings had similar codes 
> embedded? Or were the post Babylonian Jews the first group from this
> part of the world to come up with this idea?

You are missing the main points of this particular code being there.  First
of all, how could *anyone* in Babylon, or anywhere else, (other than God)
know about people who would be born many hundreds of years later?  And even
if they did know, they would be unable to create a code of such
sophistication.  We are not capable of duplicating such a feat today, even
with our computer technology.
-- 
Judson McClendon          This is a faithful saying and worthy of all
Sun Valley Systems        acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the
ju...@mindspring.com      world to save sinners  (1 Timothy 1:15)