Equivocate, from Dictionary.com
–verb (used without object), -cat⋅ed, -cat⋅ing.
to use ambiguous or unclear expressions, usually to avoid commitment or in order to mislead; prevaricate or hedge: When asked directly for his position on disarmament, the candidate only equivocated.
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In 1804 Thomas Jefferson, one of The United States "Founding Fathers" published
"The Life And Morals of Jesus of Nazareth" (online text). Today it is commonly known as the
"Jefferson Bible". It was his attempt to preserve the teachings and philosophy of Jesus without the supernatural aspects and the parts that he perceived as misunderstandings and mistakes of the Gospel authors. This is one example of Data Cleansing of scripture, and remarkably, it was carried out by one of the most esteemed men in History. It seems that Thomas Jefferson would agree that "once you get the God out of Wisdom Literature, it can be enjoyed by everyone".
Generally speaking,
Wisdom Literature (<- that Wikipedia entry needs revision) are texts written intended to accumulate knowledge used to teach. Unfortunately Wisdom Literature is usually associated with local deities. The fact that it has been associated with a local deity, isolates it to a culture and makes it generally inaccessible to anyone not open to information associated with another culture or deity. Some examples of Wisdom Literature are easily found in the Scripture of most religions. To my disappointment, I've heard and seen people whom I respect very much, whom I consider to be intelligent, and who consider themselves "free thinkers", categorically discredit and disregard ideas contained in religious scripture as "Woo Woo" and irrelevant. An example of a religious concept that is relevant and adds value to civilization even without the God is Yoga and Meditation. Once you get the God out of Wisdom Literature, Wisdom can be enjoyed by everyone.
[Revised 20091103] This is the first article in a series of Brief Introductions to
Hindu Scriptures. As with other ancient religious texts, these are generally considered to be divinely revealed. Divinely revealed information has all the problems identified by Information and Data Quality Dimensions, the most obvious are the Intrinsic dimensions of Accuracy, Believability, Objectivity and Reputation. Hinduism is the oldest religion and the Vedas are its foundation.
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If a believer says that
"it is not unreasonable to believe there is intelligence behind our natural laws"
then they should agree that there must be an intelligence behind the intelligence of our natural laws. But isn't that absurd? Its got to stop somewhere, so why don't we stop before we get to Gods. There is obviously no way to prove which God it is if they are not going to present themselves, so we might as well say, there is no God. If we ask a God to present itself unambiguously to us and it doesn't, isn't that exactly what we would expect if there really wasn't any God? What difference does a God that does not interact make anyway?
Recently in a rejoinder over at
Debunking Christianity one of the participants made the following comment challenging a non-believer to
"Account for the information design that every atheist scholar admits that exists but lives in denial explaining away."
The tragedy at the "Sweatbox" resort highlights several problems with Religion.
'Sweatbox' victims were attending 'Spiritual Warrior' program, CNN, October 10, 2009 -- Updated 2202 GMT (0602 HKT)
"The use of sweat lodges for spiritual and physical cleansing is a part of several Native American tribes' cultures."
Since terms such as "spirit" are not defined, they are ambiguous. They can mean anything. Since they can mean anything, then there is no definition. When there is no definition, there is nothing to compare it to. Since there is nothing to comapare it to, the definition can change as needed to suit whatever purpose its being used for. There is no way to measure it.
So in the case of "spirit cleansing" some simple common sense questions come to mind.
I am confident that ideas are transmitted through language and that ideas follow language. So it follows that as a language spreads across a population, then so will the ideas that are represented by that language. Semitic is of the afroasiatic family of languages, yet Hittite is of the Indo-Eurpopean family, yet it seems that Judaism was developed in Asia Minor/Anatollia/Modern Turkey or "Hittite Land". When did Persia and Greece (which share a common language family) dominate the Levant where Israel and Judah are located? When do we start seeing ideas that are typically contained in the indo-eurpoean language start creeping into Judaism? When did Egypt start to lose its dominance? To be continued...
Hindu is the oldest religion known to man so far. It has been argued that Christianity borrowed heavily from Hinduism. Lord Krishna was the physical manifestation of one of the Gods of the Hindu Trinity who is named Vishnu. Vishnu came to earth as a Human 5000 years ago to battle evil and show people the right way to live. This is an introduction to Lord Krishna, the human manifestation of the God Vishnu.
I was watching Animal Cops (a "reality" TV show) the other night and a Veterinarian was working on a potentially lifeless dog (bear with me, this story does have a happy ending).
On April 14, 1994, two American Air force pilots in F15 fighter planes misidentified two American Army helicopters operating in Iraq and shot them down killing all 26 people aboard. Because the lead pilot was not able to evaluate his personal belief using external evidence, 26 people are dead.
Or, "What is the difference between private personal experience and knowledge?". I know this may sound like a stupid question to some, but it seems that it is pivotal in the "Disregarding Established Knowledge..." discussion. In my view, considering inaccessible personal experience to be of the same value as established knowledge is untenable.
Its simple,
If your beliefs are not consitent with established human knowledge, then they probably are not justified. In that case, other people are not justified in believing what you say about them, and furthermore you have no reason to expect anyone to believe you.
My working hypothesis is that Game Theory and simple rules derived from self-interest are sufficient to generate self-organized behavior that is labeled as "Morality". Here's more evidence to back that up.
[20090617. Added References] This article explores the Social Impact of Poor Biblical Information and Data Quality focusing on two of the sixteen IDQ dimensions, Understandability and Interpretability and provides a method for scoring them relative to other fields.
Over in the
"In a world without God...why does evil exist?" article, Brad Haggard said
make that post into an article so we can discuss it", so I did. Enjoy.
The Fallacy Files, Wikipedia Watch has revealed ANOTHER case of Journalists using Wikipedia as an original source. This is a real life example of how people that should know better will reproduce poor quality information. I'm sure there was no malice involved, just people trying to get a message accross that they believed likely to be true, similar to the authors of scripture.
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I'd like to propose an analogy to represent the relationship between God, Us, the Bible and the World. God would be in charge, and the source and producer of information, and the majority of us would be his potential customer, subscriber or consumer. We would have a value to him and lets assign the value the number 1. So if one of us 'subscribes' to Gods information, then he correspondingly gets to add that to his return on investment.
-=A Human Sacrifice=-
and flaunt your little dead men on a stick, check your facts, most things that Easter depends on don't cross-check. [edited 4/15/2009. added links]
In my view debates about Morality derive from the tendency of people to attribute and misinterpret intent and intelligence in self-organizing phenomena. To me it is obvious that Morality fits in a category of phenomena that derive from self-organization.
Self-organization is commonly spoken about, even by scientists whether they mean to or not, as having some kind of intent or intelligence behind it.
I'm a big fan of argument analysis, and in
William Lobdells post he listed several common Christian heuristics for dealing with the problem of apostasy. In the comments section of his article you can see one of our christian guests using some other common heuristics which I've taken a moment to analyze. I welcome William, and I hope he'll consider joining DC as an author.
In a recent comment a Christian Guest said the following.
I do know why some of my friends can't see God;
- generally it comes down to either not wanting to,
- or insisting that if God doesn't follow their rules, he doesn't exist.
- All I can do is testify that for me, it's obvious...
"Feeding the Trolls" is a type of Social Engineering, aka manipulation of well meaning guests. Every now and then a "troll" comes along and makes comments that are in poor taste and meant to generate responses from other commenters. We will clean up the blog after one of these events, but I request that when a troll makes a comment that it be ignored because If a troll makes one comment and it gets 2 responses, then 66% percent of the mess is caused by well meaning guests. It takes less time to only have to clean up after the troll. This is simply something we'll have to live with as long as we permit real time free and open discussions.
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This is yet another Christian Heuristic that "blames the victim" in the same way as "if you don't understand it, its your fault". Some qualifiers are missing in that statement, mainly SCOPE and DEFINITION but also the ACTIONS of the AGENTS DOING THE SEARCH and AGENTS BEING SEARCHED FOR. What are the responsibilities of the Agents? What is the definition of "a comprehensive" search? And how will you know when you find it? There must be a description to go by or how will one know when they've found it?
RichD is one of our Christian commenters. No matter how much we disagree, we can always find a way to inject a little good humor into the dialog. He's smart, he expresses himself clearly, he doesn't seem to take it personally, he keeps his goal in view and he keeps a positive and humorous outlook which, in my view, exemplifies a "good Christian", adds tremendous value to the dialog, and to this blog in general. In my view RichD is one of the commenters that sets the standard.
In the comments section of my article
Jesus Appeared To Other People, Why Can't He Appear To Me? Darrin started by asking me "What would YOU do as God?". Goprairie mentioned what she would do if she were God. Then Russ contributed what he would do as God. I thought the interaction was brilliant so I'd like to feature it and request responses from everyone meaning all categories from Believers to Non-Believers, Buddhists to Zoroastrians.
God has appeared or unambiguously interacted with a wide range of types of persons in The Bible. But every time I mention that I think Jesus should just come down and visit with me, I get the old Christian rebuttals, such as
The Use Or Intent Of Information Does Not Determine Its Quality
Over at
Sophies Ladder, Jeff says
"Reliability, on the other hand, I take to mean “can be dependably used” and so, obviously, reliability relates to the purposes intended."
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Over at
Sophies Ladder Jeff agrees that accuracy and reliability are important but his view of accuracy and reliability all stem from some "inner knowing". This contradicts commonly held principles about accuracy and reliability which generally holds that the source of the information is known, can be verified, represents real world states and can be depended on to accurately reflect real world states when verification is not a viable option and when planning needs to be done. But for the moment, I'll stipulate the Spiritual Realm exists.
By now everyone has heard about the plane crash in the Hudson River. The "miraculous" landing was facilitated by a human being prepared for the split second decisions he had to make by a lifetime of EXPERIENCE, DATA GATHERING, DATA ANALYSIS and SOLUTION PROVIDING. PRAISE SULLY! HALLELUJAH FOR IDQ! Can I get A "HUMAN"?
Very little in the Bible can be understood as it is written. To be understood as relevant and applicable to today necessitates speculation, interpretation and pre-processing for general consumption. The Bible, as it is written, has become meaningless even though Church leaders try to speculate, interpret and derive meaning from it. Since Christian leaders don't agree, large portions of the data in the Bible is demonstrably meaningless which is a result of the Information and Data Quality flaw of "Meaningless Representation".
While acknowledging that Jesus' usage of the term "son of man" has no consensus, this article shows how the term "son of man" was historically used to refer to mankind or Humans as a category, was never generally considered by the Jewish community to be a descriptive phrase for the Messiah, and therefore seems to be used incorrectly either by Jesus, by the authors and/or translators of the gospels as something like a personal pronoun for Jesus. In any case, presuming the Bible is the Word of God, the term still maps to two real world states fulfilling the criteria for Ambiguous Representation which is an Information and Data Quality (IDQ) design flaw.
This article will show how the concept of the Trinity was derived from the Design Deficiency of incomplete representation in scripture leading to "Garbling" causing Scripture to map to a meaningless state. The Bible has many instances of incomplete representation but for the sake of brevity, this article will focus on "Jesus as God". It highlights some disconfirming evidence which refutes the proposition that "Jesus was God" can be rationally determined from the text.
The originators of scripture had a remarkable lack of insight when creating scripture considering it was revealed to them by God. Apparently God didn't reveal to them some fundamental principles in ensuring they were creating quality information and data that would stand the test of time and generations.
By applying principles of Information and Data Quality (IDQ) in research to the Bible, it can be shown that a high level of confidence in the accuracy and reliability of the information in the Bible is irrational, therefore arguments or claims using the bible as a premise are inherently weak.
In the coming weeks, I intend to show that if we posit a null hypothesis about the Bible and we evaluate the quality of data and information in the Bible, the hypothesis that humans alone were sufficient to create the Bible is supported very well by the Data which effectively refutes the hypothesis posited in 2 Timothy 3:16.
I think I've come up with a weighted ranking scale heuristic for scoring the plausibility of claims derived from government, business and theoretical criteria and I'd like to put it out here for critique. This weighted ranking scale could be used for the bible, literature, science, history, news articles etc... and we could compare them.
Worksheet
Here is a logic puzzle. You are walking down a road to a town. You come to a fork in the road. Standing there are two men. You already know that one of them always lies and one of them always tells the truth. What one question can you ask one of them that will give you the information you need to choose the right road?
When presented with a choice of outcomes the rational decision maker will choose the outcome with a positive payoff, but not God.
The best way to understand something is to build it.
In my recent articles I have been facilitating discussion on Adam and Eve and I have been collecting explanations about how Adam came to disobey god. This article identifies the parts of those arguments and diagrams one of them, and tries to tease out whether Adam could in any reasonable way be held accountable by his maker for his transgression and the resultant overall negative result that emerges from Gods Creation. However if we take Adam and God out of the equation, then the properties that emerge from nature are what we should expect once we understand them, and labeling them "good" or "bad" outside of any context becomes meaningless.
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Recurrent claim from Christians in comments:
"you seem to be questioning God. Why didn't God do this? why did God do that? The short answer is, because God does what he pleases and since he is infinite in knowledge, then God knows best, not us."
10:41 PM, August 23, 2008
QuIRP
- Just Say NO to Faith Based Thinking. Garbage in is Garbage out.
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