The Bible, Creationism, and Prophecy (part 1)

Sam Vimes

man of faith wrote: »

Man, its pointless discussing any of this with you. You are only going to write off anything i put to you and carefully knitpick through my responses for some way to make me look like an idiot and just another religous nut. The prophecies are not vague at all, they are very accurate and specific. Where do you get vague out of 'whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land.'
Joel 3:2. If you look at history over the last 2000 years, you will see that the Jews have been scattered all across the world. Turn on CNN or google world news and madrid peace conference and you will see fighting and negotiations for land between Israel and Palestine over the past 18 years which has been orchestrated by America, or don't you watch the news. This is at the very heart of all the conflict in the Middle East.

Great, fantastic, the bible said some people would be scattered. Irish people are also scattered around the world and our land is also parted, it's happened all throughout history

man of faith wrote: »

Your response is a classic atheistic comeback to Bible prophecy. This is the best you can come up with in the face of such compelling evidence supporting God and The Bible and Christianity.

Seriously man, are you sure that you are not choosing to be an atheist because you desperately don't want the Bible to be true? Are you afraid that its just way too confronting and you don't want to change your thinking and adapt our disciplined way of life? If only you realised just how amazing life becomes when you choose to believe.

I'm saddened that you have allowed yourself to be so deceived. Why don't you make a hypothetical prayer to God, even if you don't believe in Him, just to enquire if what I have put to you is true. Nothing may happen, but you never know. I have heard of mind blowing occurances take place when people have done this. All the best.

In fact I think I live my life far better than many christians. I follow the rules from christianity that make sense and leave the ones that don't. So I don't kill or steal but nor do instruct women that they should not have authority over a man and should be silent (1 Timothy 2:12) and I don't feel the need to try to justify the horrendous acts apparently carried out by both god and his followers in the old testament or convince myself that slavery was somehow morally acceptable in the past. My disbelief has absolutely nothing to do with a desire to live a certain way and everything to do with the fact that the bible appears to be bronze age mythology and has no more evidence supporting its supernatural claims than any other religion.

As for prayer, to refer back to a thread here from a few weeks ago, I will believe in the power of prayer when an amputee prays for his limb to regrow and it happens or at the very least when god gets his priorities right and instead of helping me win a football match he does something about the starving millions in the world. Until then, "the power of prayer" is simply coincidence and confirmation bias, ie you remember the one time you prayed and got something but not the thousand times you didn't

Morbert

man of faith wrote: »

response to first quote: This was demonstrated in 'The Bible Code' - author Michael Drosnin. Check it out if you haven't already.

I know the book. What future events did Michael Drosnin, using the Bible, predict?

response to second quote: The answer John 3:16 - just google it.

You said we were afraid of the truth (which you presumably believe is John 3:16) Why would we be afraid of forgiveness and eternel pardise?

monosharp

man of faith wrote: »

Man, its pointless discussing any of this with you. You are only going to write off anything i put to you and carefully knitpick through my responses for some way to make me look like an idiot and just another religous nut.

Take away the carefully part ..actually minus the knitpick part too.

The prophecies are not vague at all, they are very accurate and specific.

Have you heard of these new things we have today ? They're called the past, present and future. They're fantastic ideas altogether and may help to explain what your talking about here if you look them up.

Where do you get vague out of 'whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land.'

Because whats not-vague about it ? Its a sentence from the Bible ? I could give you a similar sentence from 'The Silmarillion', does that make it the word of god ?

Joel 3:2. If you look at history over the last 2000 years, you will see that the Jews have been scattered all across the world.

I'm a little dodgy on my Middle Eastern history when it comes to Israelites but I'm pretty sure they were scattered a LOT longer then 2000 years ago.
i.e > They were scattered BEFORE the paragraph your talking about was written.

Turn on CNN or google world news and madrid peace conference and you will see fighting and negotiations for land between Israel and Palestine over the past 18 years which has been orchestrated by America, or don't you watch the news. This is at the very heart of all the conflict in the Middle East.

One could take any number of novels/fantasy books/myths and apply them to a current world situation specifically because they are so unspecific.

Your response is a classic atheistic comeback to Bible prophecy. This is the best you can come up with in the face of such compelling evidence supporting God and The Bible and Christianity.

You haven't given any evidence, you have given us quotes about unspecific situations out of a book which you think is true. I could give you as much evidence from the Koran or buddhist religious manuscripts or any number of other books quite easily.

Seriously man, are you sure that you are not choosing to be an atheist because you desperately don't want the Bible to be true? Are you afraid that its just way too confronting and you don't want to change your thinking and adapt our disciplined way of life? If only you realised just how amazing life becomes when you choose to believe.

The way fundamentalists believe it ? i.e > I don't have to live in reality anymore ? I could buy mushrooms for that if I wanted.

I'm saddened that you have allowed yourself to be so deceived. Why don't you make a hypothetical prayer to God,

Why don't you make a hypothetical prayer to Allah/Buddha/Horus/Thor/Apollo/Zeus/Poseidon/Krishna ? Even if you don't believe in them,just to inquire if they are real.

I have heard of mind blowing occurances take place when people have done this.

The way some peoples minds work I wouldn't be surprised. I've seen buddhist monks in a trance for days on end,not eating or sleeping, barely breathing. Much more impressive then christian/islamic praying to be honest.

Soul Winner

Sam Vimes wrote: »

I just remembered something about it having been dated back to the 14th century. Turns out it was verified by three independent organisations to the same time period. Of course that didn't stop the believers.

http://www.skepdic.com/shroud.html

And something that confuses me is: if it turns out it was actually used to cover the body of Jesus, so what? All it would prove is that he was crucified. I have no problem with believing a man was crucified, my problem starts when he gets back up again

You should read up on the study done by Ray Rogers who, when confronted with new evidence which claimed that the sample used to carbon date the shroud was added to the shroud during repairs made to the relic centuries later. These findings were confirmed by Rogers and submitted to a peer review journal and posthumously published after his death in 2005.

Good Discovery documentary made in 2008 about it here

Sure even if the shroud is a fake made by somebody in the 12th century, how on earth did they know how to generate a negative image when photography (which produces negative images) wasn't invented until centuries later? And how did they know that certain types of blood samples taken form the head area would only show up under ultraviolet light when that wasn't discovered until even later? Whoever faked it must have known that it was going to be subjected the most intense scientific scrutiny of any relic or artifact in the world ever. Every single scientific experiment performed on the shroud points to it being a genuine artifact from the middle east during the time of Jesus. Everything from pollen samples to the type of weave in the fabric, all microscopically detailed analysis. There is a really good book available which goes through all these tests in detail written by the Medical Examnier of Rockland County New York Dr. Frederick Zugibe

If it is genuine then the only question left to be answered is how the image was generated back in that day and if it was faked how did the fakers know about photography and ultraviolet light tests? I don't need the shroud to have a faith in Jesus but if Christ did raise to life whilst covered in this shroud then the power heat that entered His body at the moment of resurrection must have created the image on the cloth's fibrils which when looked at with the naked eye up close are practically invisible. Genuine or fake it is an amazing artifact considering the scientific scrutiny it has recieved to date.

robindch

Soul Winner wrote: »

Guys guys, it's a future debate. Please wait until you hear it before throwing your stones. Jeez??? [...] Give Ayala a bit of credit, at least he is willing to listen to the arguments and willing to debate Craig on this topic. The closed mindedness of some of you guys is really depressing at times. :mad:

I've listened to and read Craig quite a few times in the past, and his stuff is truly frightful -- mushy and unfocussed where it's not eyewateringly obviously true, or equally obviously false.

A bit like an restaurant that fails to impress on a third visit, I think he's had a fair chance to impress and he didn't manage it.

It would only be closed-minded if we'd refused to give him our time in the first place, and I think most A+A posters here have done that.

The balls in his court. Literally, I think.

Sam Vimes

Soul Winner wrote: »

You should read up on the study done by Ray Rogers who, when confronted with new evidence which claimed that the sample used to carbon date the shroud was added to the shroud during repairs made to the relic centuries later. These findings were confirmed by Rogers and submitted to a peer review journal and posthumously published after his death in 2005.

You should read the link I posted that deals with exactly that claim

Dr. Raymond Rogers, a retired chemist from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, claims that the part of the cloth tested and dated at around 1350 was not part of the original shroud. According to Rogers, the labs that dated the cloth to the 14th century tested a patch made to repair damage done by fire. How does he know this, since the patch was destroyed in the testing? According to shroud investigator Joe Nickell, Rogers "relied on two little threads allegedly left over from the sampling" and the word of "pro-authenticity researchers who guessed that the carbon-14 sample came from a 'rewoven area' of repair." According to Nickell, P.E. Damon's 1989 article published in Nature claims that "textile experts specifically made efforts to select a site for taking the radiocarbon sample that was away from patches and seams."

Says Nickell,

Rogers compared the threads with some small samples from elsewhere on the Shroud, claiming to find differences between the two sets of threads that “prove” the radiocarbon sample “was not part of the original cloth” of the Turin shroud.

The reported differences include the presence—allegedly only on the “radiocarbon sample”—of cotton fibers and a coating of madder root dye in a binding medium that his tests “suggest” is gum Arabic....However, Rogers’ assertions to the contrary, both the cotton and the madder have been found elsewhere on the shroud. Both were specifically reported by famed microanalyst Walter McCrone.

Dr. Rogers estimates the actual date of the shroud to be between about 1,000 BCE. and 1700 CE. Still, all the evidence points toward the medieval forgery hypothesis. As Nickell notes, "no examples of its complex herringbone weave are known from the time of Jesus when, in any case, burial cloths tended to be of plain weave" (1998: 35). "In addition, Jewish burial practice utilized—and the Gospel of John specifically describes for Jesus—multiple burial wrappings with a separate cloth over the face."*

Soul Winner wrote: »

Sure even if the shroud is a fake made by somebody in the 12th century, how on earth did they know how to generate a negative image when photography (which produces negative images) wasn't invented until centuries later? And how did they know that certain types of blood samples taken form the head area would only show up under ultraviolet light when that wasn't discovered until even later? Whoever faked it must have known that it was going to be subjected the most intense scientific scrutiny of any relic or artifact in the world ever. Every single scientific experiment performed on the shroud points to it being a genuine artifact from the middle east during the time of Jesus. Everything from pollen samples to the type of weave in the fabric, all microscopically detailed analysis. There is a really good book available which goes through all these tests in detail written by the Medical Examnier of Rockland County New York Dr. Frederick Zugibe

If it is genuine then the only question left to be answered is how the image was generated back in that day and if it was faked how did the fakers know about photography and ultraviolet light tests? I don't need the shroud to have a faith in Jesus but if Christ did raise to life whilst covered in this shroud then the power heat that entered His body at the moment of resurrection must have created the image on the cloth's fibrils which when looked at with the naked eye up close are practically invisible. Genuine or fake it is an amazing artifact considering the scientific scrutiny it has recieved to date.

Everything you've written here is covered by the article I linked to. Have a read of it.

Zombrex

Soul Winner wrote: »

Guys guys, it's a future debate. Please wait until you hear it before throwing your stones. Jeez??? The atheist who wrote the book is just the moderator of the debate, he is not partaking in the debate itself. Give Ayala a bit of credit, at least he is willing to listen to the arguments and willing to debate Craig on this topic. The closed mindedness of some of you guys is really depressing at times. :mad:

Exactly how many times do we have to listen to Craig before we can say he is talking nonsense with an open mind?

Craig is an terrible apologetic. If I were a Christian I would be embarrassed to wheel him out, there are far better Christian apologetic speakers.

darjeeling

MrPudding wrote: »

Ah, so "kinds" make as much sense as the rest of the rubbish they spout then...

MrP

Yup.

'Creation science' claims that there are distinct 'kinds' ('baramins') that were created separately, and that 'micro-evolution' acts within these kinds, resulting in intra-kind speciation. Creationists have made some efforts to identify these kinds. See this 2006 article by Todd Charles Wood* for a review of their methods, and a list of kinds they claim to have identified (see Table of baramins).

Before looking at the results, lets make a brief descent into creationist taxonomy. Creationists use the terms 'holobaramins', 'monobaramins', 'apobaramins' and 'basic types'. A 'holobaramin', they claim, is the complete set of creatures descended from the original created members of a kind. A 'monobaramin' is a subset of these - i.e monobaramins should ultimately get lumped together to make a holobaramin. Conversely, apobaramins contain members of multiple holobaramins and remain to be split up. The final category - 'Basic types' - are animals that can interbreed and are the equivalent of monobaramins, though with the added weight of evidence of interfertility.

Creationists lift most of their taxonomy from conventional science, so we see a whole load of familiar latin names cropping up. They then try to impose their own classification on the evolutionary tree of life. This basically involves lopping off branches, then declaring each offcut to be a separately created mini-tree. Where the axe falls is fairly arbitrary, but you'll probably see an attempt to justify it using some spurious interpretation of morphological / behavioural / ontogenic traits.

OK, enough background - what have creationists come up with? Well, picking a few rows from Wood's 2006 table:

Camelidae (camels, lamas etc) - 'monobaramin'
Felidae (cats large & small) - 'holobaramin'
Cercopithecidae (old world monkeys) - 'holobaramin'

OK, these are three highly diverse families of mammals. Divergence dates within each family vary between 10.8 million years ago (big cats vs e.g. house cats - ref) to 15 Mya (colobus monkeys vs the other monkeys - ref) and 25 Mya (lamas vs camels - REF).

What else?

Wood lists Ponginae (Orang utans and their extinct close kin) as sharing common ancestry. OK, what about the other apes? Gorillinae are listed as a possible basic type (i.e. interfertile), but what are they? Apparently an arbitrary grouping of gorillas and chimps - and no-one's actually checked if they can interbreed. The Australopithicinae (Lucy & her friends & relations) are also a 'basic type' (are creationists breeding australopithecines? Insert own joke here). And what about us? Wood gives Homininae as a basic type! Now, Homininae conventionally means gorillas, chimps and humans plus extinct species such as the australopithecines, so is Wood casually saying that we humans share a common ancestor with other apes? No: the reference on which this is based shows that - to Wood & his colleagues - Homininae 'comprises but one living species' (i.e. us). I can't see the point in using terms from conventional science yet giving them a quite different (and often unstated) definition; it just causes confusion.

Let's return to the real world now. We now have access to lots of DNA sequence which shows that for the cats, the camelids and the old world monkeys, there are members within each family that are genetically more divergent from each other than are humans and chimps. Moreover, Chimps are more different from gorillas than they are from humans. Wood recognises this fact in this essay on the human and chimp genomes, but can't explain why animals within a kind should be so much more different from each other than animals that he declares to be in different kinds. Of course, he isn't going to do the intellectually honest thing and let the evidence overturn his ideological belief.

So that is how creationists do taxonomy.

* Founding member of the Baraminology Study Group, and President of same after its more media-friendly rebranding as the (creation) Biology Study Group.

Postscript:

The disappointing thing is that Wood is one of the new breed of creationists who actually do make an effort to keep up with regular evolutionary science, and he has come so close to realising that it's the only thing that makes sense. I have hopes that he'll come round eventually, but even now, he has come to hold views that flat out contradict much of what JC and Wolfsbane claim to be the creationist position. Here are some unmined and honest quotes - check for yourselves!

Evolution works - read this, it's a good one!:

T C Wood wrote:

Evolution is not a theory in crisis. It is not teetering on the verge of collapse. It has not failed as a scientific explanation. There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it. It is not just speculation or a faith choice or an assumption or a religion. It is a productive framework for lots of biological research, and it has amazing explanatory power. There is no conspiracy to hide the truth about the failure of evolution. There has really been no failure of evolution as a scientific theory. It works, and it works well.

The myth that all mutations are deleterious:

T C Wood wrote:

There are still creationists out there who argue that all mutations are deleterious, that somehow God made one optimal, perfect genome for Adam (and Eve?), and it's all been downhill from there. [...] The actual number of deleterious mutations has not been experimentally verified, and it's not entirely clear how one would go about doing that anyway. In this paper, the authors compared three [human] genomes [...] to identify amino acid substitutions that are likely to be universally deleterious (i.e., not good in any circumstances). They found only about 800 such substitutions in each person, which is about 15% of the variations present (specifically of the nonsynonymous substitutions). This would seem to be more consistent with a robustly designed genome that is intended to be resilient and tolerant to random changes. This work does not refute the arguments that all mutations are deleterious (for valid technical reasons), but I've always found the all-mutations-are-bad arguments to be ad hoc and resistent to data anyway.

On human origins:

T C Wood wrote:

Trying to figure out what creationists think about human origins is kind of a nightmare, mostly because human origins is probably the single most important issue that gets creationists' goats. So everyone has an opinion, even though most have no real background from which to make any conclusions.

JC, Wolfsbane - time to do your homework! The creationists have moved on without you! :pac:

.

Soul Winner

Sam Vimes wrote: »

You should read the link I posted that deals with exactly that claim

Everything you've written here is covered by the article I linked to. Have a read of it.

Ok lets take a look at them so:

Sam's report wrote:

Dr. Raymond Rogers, a retired chemist from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, claims that the part of the cloth tested and dated at around 1350 was not part of the original shroud. According to Rogers, the labs that dated the cloth to the 14th century tested a patch made to repair damage done by fire. How does he know this, since the patch was destroyed in the testing?

They kept photographs of the samples. Hello???

Sam's report wrote:

According to shroud investigator Joe Nickell, Rogers "relied on two little threads allegedly left over from the sampling" and the word of "pro-authenticity researchers who guessed that the carbon-14 sample came from a 'rewoven area' of repair." According to Nickell, P.E. Damon's 1989 article published in Nature claims that "textile experts specifically made efforts to select a site for taking the radiocarbon sample that was away from patches and seams."

Says Nickell,

This is wrong. The area which was tested is widely known to have come from an area which was agreed to by the Vatican to be an area which would not deface the relice, hence the edge or hem or seem. All you need to do to check this is to simply Google it.

Sam's report wrote:

Rogers compared the threads with some small samples from elsewhere on the Shroud, claiming to find differences between the two sets of threads that “prove” the radiocarbon sample “was not part of the original cloth” of the Turin shroud.

The reported differences include the presence—allegedly only on the “radiocarbon sample”—of cotton fibers and a coating of madder root dye in a binding medium that his tests “suggest” is gum Arabic....However, Rogers’ assertions to the contrary, both the cotton and the madder have been found elsewhere on the shroud. Both were specifically reported by famed microanalyst Walter McCrone.

And that proves what exactly?

Sam's report wrote:

Dr. Rogers estimates the actual date of the shroud to be between about 1,000 BCE. and 1700 CE. Still, all the evidence points toward the medieval forgery hypothesis. As Nickell notes, "no examples of its complex herringbone weave are known from the time of Jesus when, in any case, burial cloths tended to be of plain weave" (1998: 35).

Mechthild Flury Lemberg, a former curator of the Abegg Foundation textile museum in Switzerland and a leading authority on historic textiles says different. She found a strong similarity between the Shroud's fabric and fragments of cloth produced in the Middle East about 2,000 years ago. Lemberg has likened stitching on both hems of the Shroud and on a lengthy seam down one side to that on cloth found in the ruins of Masada. Masada was a Jewish stronghold overlooking the Dead Sea and Jordan. The Masada fabrics have been dated at between 40 BCE and 73 CE.

I suppose she doesn't know what the hell she's talking about?

Sam's report wrote:

"In addition, Jewish burial practice utilized—and the Gospel of John specifically describes for Jesus—multiple burial wrappings with a separate cloth over the face."*

John's account of the burial reads as follows:

"Then took they the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury." John 19:40

"And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself." John 20:7

There is nohting about it being on his face in this verse. It was wrapped about His head to keep His jaw closed and tied atop of His head. You can even see evidence of this in the head portion of the shroud itself.

Sam Vimes

Soul winner, there has been controversy over the shroud for quite a long time and we're not going to settle in here. You'll come out with the claims of believers and I'll come up with sceptic responses to those claims but neither of us were there so we can't say for sure what happened. Anything you can google to support your case I can google to refute it. I would tend to think that three renowned universities would know how to date something properly and would be aware of possible pitfalls like a recent repaired patch and I'm also well aware of the human propensity to want to believe something and to dismiss evidence that doesn't fit with their theory.

The bottom line is that it makes very little difference to me if the shroud of Turin is genuine or not. I highly doubt it is but as I said earlier, even if it was completely genuine all it would prove is that Jesus was crucified which I am more than willing to accept as a possibility. My problem begins when he raises from the dead and when the tombs break open and a load of dead people wander around the town appearing to people.

Also, you shouldn't be so determined to try to find rational justifications for believing in the resurrection. As John 20:29 says, blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

Soul Winner

Sam Vimes wrote: »

Soul winner, there has been controversy over the shroud for quite a long time and we're not going to settle in here. You'll come out with the claims of believers and I'll come up with sceptic responses to those claims but neither of us were there so we can't say for sure what happened. Anything you can google to support your case I can google to refute it. I would tend to think that three renowned universities would know how to date something properly and would be aware of possible pitfalls like a recent repaired patch and I'm also well aware of the human propensity to want to believe something and to dismiss evidence that doesn't fit with their theory.

The bottom line is that it makes very little difference to me if the shroud of Turin is genuine or not. I highly doubt it is but as I said earlier, even if it was completely genuine all it would prove is that Jesus was crucified which I am more than willing to accept as a possibility. My problem begins when he raises from the dead and when the tombs break open and a load of dead people wander around the town appearing to people.

Also, you shouldn't be so determined to try to find rational justifications for believing in the ressurection. As John 20:29 says, blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

I have already said that I don't need the shroud to have faith in God, but as a Christian I find the possibility of tangible evidence to stories that I already believe in to be quite fascinating. When they prove that the shroud is a fake then I will be convinced, they haven't done this yet and even if that new study shows how one could fake such a thing that still doesn't prove that the shroud itself is an actual fake.

man of faith

monosharp wrote: »

Take away the carefully part ..actually minus the knitpick part too.



Have you heard of these new things we have today ? They're called the past, present and future. They're fantastic ideas altogether and may help to explain what your talking about here if you look them up.



Because whats not-vague about it ? Its a sentence from the Bible ? I could give you a similar sentence from 'The Silmarillion', does that make it the word of god ?



I'm a little dodgy on my Middle Eastern history when it comes to Israelites but I'm pretty sure they were scattered a LOT longer then 2000 years ago.
i.e > They were scattered BEFORE the paragraph your talking about was written.



One could take any number of novels/fantasy books/myths and apply them to a current world situation specifically because they are so unspecific.



You haven't given any evidence, you have given us quotes about unspecific situations out of a book which you think is true. I could give you as much evidence from the Koran or buddhist religious manuscripts or any number of other books quite easily.



The way fundamentalists believe it ? i.e > I don't have to live in reality anymore ? I could buy mushrooms for that if I wanted.



Why don't you make a hypothetical prayer to Allah/Buddha/Horus/Thor/Apollo/Zeus/Poseidon/Krishna ? Even if you don't believe in them,just to inquire if they are real.



The way some peoples minds work I wouldn't be surprised. I've seen buddhist monks in a trance for days on end,not eating or sleeping, barely breathing. Much more impressive then christian/islamic praying to be honest.

monosharp wrote: »

Take away the carefully part ..actually minus the knitpick part too.



Have you heard of these new things we have today ? They're called the past, present and future. They're fantastic ideas altogether and may help to explain what your talking about here if you look them up.



Because whats not-vague about it ? Its a sentence from the Bible ? I could give you a similar sentence from 'The Silmarillion', does that make it the word of god ?



I'm a little dodgy on my Middle Eastern history when it comes to Israelites but I'm pretty sure they were scattered a LOT longer then 2000 years ago.
i.e > They were scattered BEFORE the paragraph your talking about was written.



One could take any number of novels/fantasy books/myths and apply them to a current world situation specifically because they are so unspecific.



You haven't given any evidence, you have given us quotes about unspecific situations out of a book which you think is true. I could give you as much evidence from the Koran or buddhist religious manuscripts or any number of other books quite easily.



The way fundamentalists believe it ? i.e > I don't have to live in reality anymore ? I could buy mushrooms for that if I wanted.



Why don't you make a hypothetical prayer to Allah/Buddha/Horus/Thor/Apollo/Zeus/Poseidon/Krishna ? Even if you don't believe in them,just to inquire if they are real.



The way some peoples minds work I wouldn't be surprised. I've seen buddhist monks in a trance for days on end,not eating or sleeping, barely breathing. Much more impressive then christian/islamic praying to be honest.

Hey mate, here is something for you to consider:
Do you honestly think that major world leaders over the past 20 years such as both George Bush's, Bil Clinton, Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, Yassir Arafat would have just wasted their time consulting one on one with Michael Drosnin (author of 'The Bible Code') about the incredibly accurate encoded information shown in the Bible code?
Revealed in code is 9/11. This code was unlocked by Eli Rips, a man considered a near genius in the world of mathematical science. Rips passed three peer reviews at a respected US mathematics journal. Famous mathematicians from Israel and the US at Harvard and Yale and a Hebrew University confirmed the code is real. Isaac Newton (who discovered the law of gravity and figured out the mechanics of our solar system) and single handedly invented advanced mathematics insisted that the Bible would have a hidden code and searched for this code to reveal our future. Problem was that a computer was needed which would be invented 300 years later.
Harold gans, a senior code-breaker for the top secret NSA of the US government set about to debunk the Bible Code. Gans had spent his life making and breaking codes for US military intelligence and he was sure that this Bible code was "off the wall, ridiculous". He wrote his own computer program to prove it was a hoax and only found the complete opposite. He proved to himself that it was real. His results replicated the same results of Rips - the names of 66 sages who lived and died long after Biblical times with both their birth and death dates. Alongside this info, he also found names of the cities where the 66 rabbis lived and died also. He says it sent a chill up his spine and he was completely awe-struck.

This is just one of the numerous incredibly accurate discoveries found by this code. It even points out the rigged election of George W Bush, the assasination of Yitzhak Rabin (Israeli Prime Minister), the stock market crash in 2002 and the list goes on and on. Please tell me, what are the chances of this!!!??? - all occurring one after the other after the other.
Sure you could put all the letters together in one of the classic works of Shakespeare, apply a code to every fifth letter and somewhere you may find a random skip sequence such as "Twin Towers" -but not with "airplane". You might even find "Bin Laden" - but not with "the city and the tower". Time and time again the code has proven itself real.

Please don't tell me that you still believe that this is just some freakish chance of coincidence. I strongly suggest you read both 'Bible Code' 1 and 'Bible code 2 The Countdown' before you write off The Bible. And just remember, there is no Qu'ran or Buddhist manuscript code.

I challenge you to research and confirm what i have told you. I'm sure there will be plenty of skeptics out there claiming to have debunked the Bible Code, but just remember, they haven't debunked it to the most powerful leaders and governments of our modern world who are certainly not stupid and are responsible for making decisions far more important than ours.

Sam Vimes

Soul Winner wrote: »

I have already said that I don't need the shroud to have faith in God, but as a Christian I find the possibility of tangible evidence to stories that I already believe in to be quite fascinating. When they prove that the shroud is a fake then I will be convinced, they haven't done this yet and even if that new study shows how one could fake such a thing that still doesn't prove that the shroud itself is an actual fake.

Again we have the old "believe until unequivocally proven false" type reasoning. Can you imagine what your life would be like if you applied that reasoning across the board?

Sam Vimes

man of faith, has the code ever been used to predict a future event exactly as it would occur before the event happened? For example did Harold Gans sell all his stock the day before the code accurately predicted the 2002 crash or did they go back afterwards and find that it had been predicted?

man of faith

Yes. They found the part about Yitzhak Rabin's assasination around a year before It happened. On Sep 1, 1994 Drosnin flew to Israel to meet with Chaim Guri, a close friend of Rabin. He passed on a letter to warn Rabin of his assassination. The code said 'YITZHAK RABIN' 'ASSASSIN WILL ASSASSINATE'. A year later on November 4, 1995 he was shot in the back and killed by a man who believed he was on a mission from God (possibly Allah). Prepredicted in a part of the Bible which was written 3000 years ago.

Tell me Sam, have I now got yor attention?

Zombrex

man of faith wrote: »

Tell me Sam, have I now got yor attention?

Not particularly since if you do an ELS (equidistant letter sequences) analysis on Moby Dick you will also find reference to Yitzhak Rabin assassination along with the assassinations of Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, as well as the death of Princess Diana.

Perhaps God is trying to speak to us something through Moby Dick as well.

Or perhaps if you try hard enough you can find references to all sorts of things in any large text using ELS

And interesting fact is that if you do ELS on Genesis you find the words "code" and "bogus" in close pairings almost 60 times

Sam Vimes

man of faith wrote: »

Yes. They found the part about Yitzhak Rabin's assasination around a year before It happened. On Sep 1, 1994 Drosnin flew to Israel to meet with Chaim Guri, a close friend of Rabin. He passed on a letter to warn Rabin of his assassination. The code said 'YITZHAK RABIN' 'ASSASSIN WILL ASSASSINATE'. A year later on November 4, 1995 he was shot in the back and killed by a man who believed he was on a mission from God (possibly Allah). Prepredicted in a part of the Bible which was written 3000 years ago.

Tell me Sam, have I now got yor attention?

Well not really. When I asked that question I was pretty sure you would come back with something. Firstly I don't know if this actually happened. One thing that makes me very sceptical about it that the message is so vague as to be completely useless. the only purpose that could possibly be served by passing on that message would be to scare the man. Now if it said "YITZHAK RABIN 'ASSASSIN WILL ASSASSINATE on November 4, 1995 by being shot in the back by a man who believes he is on a mission from god" I might be more inclined to believe both that this event happened and that this code is anything more than people finding patterns in the patternless as our brains are heavily geared towards doing. It's an extremely useful function of our brains that unfortunately sometime misfires and results in us mistaking a pile of clothes for a burglar or mistaking an arbitrary arrangement of letters for a message when "decoded" with an arbitrarily chosen code

Turtwig

Dammit I just could not resists...

The Bible Code's predictions

So what does the code tell us??

Note : Above video only take swipes at the absurdity of the bible code.
My fav : The codes says

Bible Code Bad lie untrue fake

Hey, if it prophecises it's own falseness then it must be false.

monosharp

man of faith wrote: »

Hey mate, here is something for you to consider:
Do you honestly think that major world leaders over the past 20 years such as both George Bush's, Bil Clinton, Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, Yassir Arafat would have just wasted their time consulting one on one with Michael Drosnin (author of 'The Bible Code') about the incredibly accurate encoded information shown in the Bible code?

1. I have little to no respect for most world leaders now and in the past.

2. Major world leaders have also consulted with the Dali Lama, does that mean Buddhism is true ?

3. Please show me one single accurate prediction made using the Bible code.

Revealed in code is 9/11. This code was unlocked by Eli Rips, a man considered a near genius in the world of mathematical science.

After or before the event ? Actually there was a similar occurrence here in Korea where someone got a code for 9/11 from Korean creation mythology using maths. Does that mean the Korean creation myth is the correct one ?

Rips passed three peer reviews at a respected US mathematics journal. Famous mathematicians from Israel and the US at Harvard and Yale and a Hebrew University confirmed the code is real.

Confirmed what ? That the numbers 9 and 11 are in the Bible ? :pac:

Isaac Newton (who discovered the law of gravity and figured out the mechanics of our solar system) and single handedly invented advanced mathematics insisted that the Bible would have a hidden code and searched for this code to reveal our future.

Well first of all you need to go read a book about Newton, you also need to read about the theory of gravity/relativity and how Newton was wrong :P

You might also want to grab a basic book on mathematics because Mr Newton certainly did not invent advanced mathematics.

Harold gans, a senior code-breaker for the top secret NSA of the US government set about to debunk the Bible Code. Gans had spent his life making and breaking codes for US military intelligence and he was sure that this Bible code was "off the wall, ridiculous".
He wrote his own computer program to prove it was a hoax and only found the complete opposite. He proved to himself that it was real. His results replicated the same results of Rips - the names of 66 sages who lived and died long after Biblical times with both their birth and death dates. Alongside this info, he also found names of the cities where the 66 rabbis lived and died also. He says it sent a chill up his spine and he was completely awe-struck.

Proof ? Evidence ?

This is just one of the numerous incredibly accurate discoveries found by this code.

Name one and show me the 'code' and reference the bible passages.

It even points out the rigged election of George W Bush, the assasination of Yitzhak Rabin (Israeli Prime Minister), the stock market crash in 2002 and the list goes on and on.

He also predicted that there would be a nuclear holocaust in 2006. Bit late no ? :pac:

Please tell me, what are the chances of this!!!??? - all occurring one after the other after the other.
Sure you could put all the letters together in one of the classic works of Shakespeare, apply a code to every fifth letter and somewhere you may find a random skip sequence such as "Twin Towers" -but not with "airplane". You might even find "Bin Laden" - but not with "the city and the tower". Time and time again the code has proven itself real.

Yet no one has managed to make an accurate prediction BEFORE something happened yet.

Please don't tell me that you still believe that this is just some freakish chance of coincidence.

No I don't, I believe its pure plain lies, dishonesty and dillusion to read anything into this.

I strongly suggest you read both 'Bible Code' 1 and 'Bible code 2 The Countdown' before you write off The Bible. And just remember, there is no Qu'ran or Buddhist manuscript code.

Oh yes there is. I can absolutely guarantee you I can find similar predictions in other religious texts. Actually let me spend 20 seconds goggling right now.

Oh look a code for the Quran.

http://www.submission.org/quran/biblecode.html

Oh look, miracle maths of the Quran.

http://www.rashadkhalifa.org/mathematical-miracle.html

You can find similar 'miracles' for the Oxford dictionary, various buddhist and hindu documents and any random book plucked from a shelf.

I challenge you to research and confirm what i have told you. I'm sure there will be plenty of skeptics out there claiming to have debunked the Bible Code, but just remember, they haven't debunked it to the most powerful leaders and governments of our modern world who are certainly not stupid and are responsible for making decisions far more important than ours.

Our modern world leaders meet everyone from the Dali Lama, to the Pope to scientologists. They're also very capable of being idiots. Public office does not mean someone is intelligent.

Your arguments are flawed, have been debunked and are basically boring.

The author of the very book you reference says;

Author of said rubbish wrote:

Drosnin has refrained from making concrete predictions, saying, "I don't think the code makes predictions. I think it reveals probabilities." Drosnin also said "I think it might tell us all our possible futures.

man of faith

Sam Vimes wrote: »

man of faith, has the code ever been used to predict a future event exactly as it would occur before the event happened? For example did Harold Gans sell all his stock the day before the code accurately predicted the 2002 crash or did they go back afterwards and find that it had been predicted?

In some cases they did find the event after it had happenned. This is completely understandable, as you have to type in keywords in the computer program that relate to the event which is then applied to the continuous letter strand of the Bible by the program. Us humans can't predict the future unless ofcourse we are Nostre Damus, a prophet or God, so this is the reason some codes were found after the event. In particular - 9/11. The code was found only minutes after the event happened. The words 'TWIN' 'TOWERS' AND 'AIRPLANE' were found together and then 'TWIN' 'TOWERS' 'IT KNOCKED DOWN' 'TWICE' 'AIRPLANE'. What are the chances of finding them all bunched together like this. They have found everything from Watergate, assassination of JFK, the moon landing, the holocaust, Hiroshima, World War 2, The Gulf War. Sometimes found in advance, sometimes as they were happenning. Absolute proof that the Bible Code is real.
Sam, you have the opportunity to be saved right now. Please read John 3:16 and Romans 10:9-10. Do as it tells you to do and confess Jesus Christ is Lord. Ask God to forgive you from all unrighteousness and ask to be cleansed by the Blood of Jesus Christ, The Son of God. Tell God that you want to enter into an eternal relationship with Him, through your Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. And then say amen.

Morbert

man of faith wrote: »

In some cases they did find the event after it had happenned. This is completely understandable, as you have to type in keywords in the computer program that relate to the event which is then applied to the continuous letter strand of the Bible by the program. Us humans can't predict the future unless ofcourse we are Nostre Damus, a prophet or God, so this is the reason some codes were found after the event. In particular - 9/11. The code was found only minutes after the event happened. The words 'TWIN' 'TOWERS' AND 'AIRPLANE' were found together and then 'TWIN' 'TOWERS' 'IT KNOCKED DOWN' 'TWICE' 'AIRPLANE'. What are the chances of finding them all bunched together like this. They have found everything from Watergate, assassination of JFK, the moon landing, the holocaust, Hiroshima, World War 2, The Gulf War. Sometimes found in advance, sometimes as they were happenning. Absolute proof that the Bible Code is real.
Sam, you have the opportunity to be saved right now. Please read John 3:16 and Romans 10:9-10. Do as it tells you to do and confess Jesus Christ is Lord. Ask God to forgive you from all unrighteousness and ask to be cleansed by the Blood of Jesus Christ, The Son of God. Tell God that you want to enter into an eternal relationship with Him, through your Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. And then say amen.

This is nonsense. The proof is in the pudding, and in this case the pudding is efficacy. The code would need to make specific high information predictions before events happen in order to be affirmed. Until that happens, the Bible code will stand as a testament to nothing more than mathematical gymnastics.

Turtwig

Ooh forgot to mention that Isaac Newton was also a staunch follower of alchemy and the occult.

Sam Vimes

man of faith wrote: »

In some cases they did find the event after it had happenned. This is completely understandable, as you have to type in keywords in the computer program that relate to the event which is then applied to the continuous letter strand of the Bible by the program. Us humans can't predict the future unless ofcourse we are Nostre Damus, a prophet or God, so this is the reason some codes were found after the event. In particular - 9/11. The code was found only minutes after the event happened. The words 'TWIN' 'TOWERS' AND 'AIRPLANE' were found together and then 'TWIN' 'TOWERS' 'IT KNOCKED DOWN' 'TWICE' 'AIRPLANE'. What are the chances of finding them all bunched together like this. They have found everything from Watergate, assassination of JFK, the moon landing, the holocaust, Hiroshima, World War 2, The Gulf War. Sometimes found in advance, sometimes as they were happenning. Absolute proof that the Bible Code is real.
Sam, you have the opportunity to be saved right now. Please read John 3:16 and Romans 10:9-10. Do as it tells you to do and confess Jesus Christ is Lord. Ask God to forgive you from all unrighteousness and ask to be cleansed by the Blood of Jesus Christ, The Son of God. Tell God that you want to enter into an eternal relationship with Him, through your Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. And then say amen.

Sorry man of faith, as the video Malty T just linked to points out, the bible code also tells me "Darwin truth", "God does not exist" 8 times, "bible evil lie" 8 times and of course "bible code bad lie untrue fake". Who am I to argue with it?

pts

Good video Malty_T, went to the link in the video description:
http://www.biblecodewisdom.com
according to the Bible code God does not use code appears 2375 times!!
I'm glad that's settled!

Mark Hamill

EDIT: Should read other posts first to see if someone already posted the video, (damn you Malty_T )

Sam Vimes

http://www.biblecodewisdom.com/bibledefault.aspx?q=man+faith+wrong&num=1

Uh oh :P

robindch

man of faith wrote: »

And just remember, there is no Qu'ran or Buddhist manuscript code.

All together now, Oh Yes, There Is!

Indisputable proof, if you are open-minded enough to accept it, is presented here in these fine pages:

http://www.submission.org/miracle-history.html
http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/546

The latter's worth a read because -- hold onto your hats -- the bible proves that Buddhism is True! Even more shocking, the koran code is also present in the American Declaration of Independence.

Skinner's Pigeons spring to mind.

Mark Hamill

pts wrote: »

Good video Malty_T, went to the link in the video description:
http://www.biblecodewisdom.com
according to the Bible code God does not use code appears 2375 times!!
I'm glad that's settled!

According to that website: "mark best sex" appears 45 times

Turtwig

Mark Hamill wrote: »

According to that website: "mark best sex" appears 45 times

Yeah but

monosharp

man of faith wrote: »

The code was found only minutes after the event happened. The words 'TWIN' 'TOWERS' AND 'AIRPLANE' were found together and then 'TWIN' 'TOWERS' 'IT KNOCKED DOWN' 'TWICE' 'AIRPLANE'. What are the chances of finding them all bunched together like this.

Extremely high. You can find the same rubbish 'code' in any large book ever printed.