The Bible Code
6/26 - A good friend of mine who I have been having some deep philosophical discussions lately just told me about this Bible Code yesterday. She told me that she read this book that talked about these Isreali mathematicians who found this code in the Bible that describes in detail huge events of our times, and tells of the future too. I had never heard of it before and I was very skeptical, but I thought it was interesting. That very night my mom brought home some movies and one of them was called The Omega Code, and it was about the Bible Code! Coincidince, or is someone trying to tell me something? Here's the book if you want to order it online. Very strange.
a few hours later... Keeke brought this review to my attention. It's from this webpage. She found it from my own link! Check it out:
David Haggith (author of End-Time Prophecies of the Bible) -
"The authors of all these types of books try to make it look like an extraordinary phenomenon that a computer could scan a Hebrew book of the Bible and find sequences of letters in close proximity that spell out major historic events (and therefore presumeably major future events as well). Let's look at the real odds:
First, the decoders give the computer a list of key words for a specific historic event. They make the list as large as they can dream up, but the computer only has to find two or three words from the list for it to be considered a phenomenal find. Second, the computer starts it search by scanning the Hebrew text, skipping every other letter. If it doesn't find a few matches to the key words in close proximity, it scans every third letter, then every fourth, going as high as it needs to go, up to skipping more than a hundred letters. Third, if the computer still doesn't find matches to the key words, it starts all over, starting with the second letter in the Hebrew book and repeating all the same skips it tried from the first letter. Fourth, if the decoders still don't find what they're looking for, they simply move to another book of the Torah or they try a different event with a different list of words. Fifth, the Hebrew Torah is written in consonants only; so, B-R-D can mean BIRD or BOARD or BORED or BARED or BREAD or BRED or BREED or BARED or ABOARD or ABROAD, etc. All the vowels are wild cards; so every string of letters has a huge range of possibilities.
Given that each book of the Torah contains tens of thousands of consonants with an infinite number of wild cards to go between them and thousands of ways of trying to skip through this pile of letters, the truth is that it's inconceivable that the decoders couldn't find a hidden message for any event, no matter how small. The only thing that's truly amazing is that sometimes they DON'T find a match for their keywords!
Finally, consider this: if a single letter had ever been dropped near the beginning of any book of the Torah, the entire code would be scrambled for that book, since everything depends on the relative placement of letters. In spite of how precisely the books have been transcribed over the years, there are variances of a letter or two here or there."
I knew it seemed pretty suspicious. The Bible Code tries to persuade it's reader that this is reality and this proves there is a God. If you want to read a more practical book about the probability of it, then read Who Wrote the Bible Code? : A Physicist Probes the Current Controversy.