Yesterday’s post was grimmer than I like doing so I’m not going to mock Rapture 2009 today like I’d intended. You can giggle at their salvation prayer page on your own time. I’ll just point out that Hebrew is read reverse of English and vowel sounds exist as dots that alter the look of a symbol that people may have started adding in later. To see a dot or three in a symbol means the symbol gets pronounced a different way. In Hewbrew spelling of YHWH, there are no vowel dots which is likely why the Greek/English spelling has none. Speaking G-d’s name (in vain or otherwise) was a no no anyway, driven by a fear they’d say it wrong and would therefore commit an unforgivable, grievous sin.
How can people who probably can’t read Hebrew and probably haven’t bothered finding out some history of the original books trust a computer construct that churns out twenty god related yet random words onto a page of Hebrew symbols and think they’ve gotten a message about the end times?
I remember being amused when those Bible code books came out. The Skeptic’s Dictionary has a nice article about this. I’ll just quote this bit about the author of one such tome from 1997, Michael Drosnin, and a critic named Brendan McKay.
Drosnin once said, “When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby-Dick, I’ll believe them.” McKay promptly produced an ELS analysis of Moby-Dick predicting not only Indira Ghandi’s assassination, but the assassinations of Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, and Yitzhak Rabin, as well as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Mathematician David Thomas did an ELS on Genesis and found the words “code” and “bogus” close together not once but 60 times. What are the odds of that happening? Thomas also did an ELS analysis on Drosnin’s Bible Code II: The Countdown (2002) and found the message “The Bible Code is a silly, dumb, fake, false, evil, nasty, dismal fraud and snake-oil hoax.”* Does this mean that God put in a code to reveal that there is no code?
Moral of the story, people like to find what they’re looking for. This isn’t real science. It’s hokum dressed up as a science. I’d bet a cookie that Drosnin’s method would find all kinds of word patterns that could be manipulated. They wouldn’t all be about death and politics. But whatever doesn’t support his supposed “hypothesis” gets ignored. Any book large enough to give you enough lines to work with could net similar results as Moby Dick. Stephen King’s books would have bundles. Does it really mean God put the pattern there, or do our eyes just look for patterns because human beings like patterns?
