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Secret Codes Protect Ancient Torahs
An anonymous reader writes "A story on Wired News reports the problems Jewish synagogues have protecting their Torahs from theft. The Torah scrolls, containing the five books of Moses, are hand lettered over the course of a year, are often hundreds of years old, and can sell for $50,000 or more. But Judaic law "dictates that not one character can be added to the 304,805 letters of the Torah's text", which makes them untraceable and easily sold on the black market. Rabbinic authorities have recently approved two computer-based systems to make the scrolls traceable: one takes a digital fingerprint of a Torah, a second makes microperforations in the parchment that yield a unique identifier."
Oy!
So much for looking for a signed copy...
I bet you think you're the first person to question God.
Grouping all religions into one blanket statement is useless, as well. The evolve, just like organisms. And as we know, not all of anything "suck".
Even vacuums break at some point.
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
It doesn't solve the problem of theft. If one is stolen, it might take years to recover it, if at all. Once it is recoevered, it isn't in pristine condition anymore. More attention should be focused on solving the problem itself than making it easier to apprehend the criminals.
Oy, these Rebbes today, so unimaginitive. Whatever happened to REAL anti-theft devices for holy artifacts, like the one on the Ark of the Covenant that melted your face off?
Anyone have an idea how the Torahprints will look like?
Braille MD5 sums. No doubt this idea was the Holy Grail of cryptography.
But, a character is a character, whether it is holes punched in paper or pen and ink. I think this is cheating.
Or perhaps this is just religious dogma getting in the way of the greatest idea in secruity codes since Leonidas scrapped off the wax.
This is the first example that was found by Googling for microcalligraphy. I wonder if this technique could also be used on those works of art, which are extremely rare and expensive but also quite beautiful.
I'm surprised that's all their worth.
I mean, aren't these old manuscripts we're talking about here? Or are these modern rewritings?
Seems they could solve the problem by simply keeping them in a safe and using the buddy system, etc.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
If you consider the text of the Torah to be the body of a message being transmitted, then would not an included digital fingerprint or series of microperforations be additional data included in a header (in this case, for authentication purposes)? I know that a digital fingerprint or a series of microperforations are not precisely the same thing as adding more Hebrew characters to the body text of the Torah; but is it not conceptually possible to represent the pattern of data included in the fingerprint or the perforations within the same Unicode scheme as Hebrew characters are represented? Thus in effect would these unique authentication identifiers actually transgress the rule against adding more characters?
Max Cohen would be ashamed.
But can't the identification be before the holy part so while on the same physical object are different things. The law is against the alteration of the law and not a name. The Christian Bible has the same warning, as does the Koran, and they both have ID in the beginnings that does not detract from the laws.
not one character can be added to the 304,805 letters of the Torah's text", which makes them untraceable and easily sold on the black market
Just a few quick questions:
Is putting some kind of ownership label on the inside cover really 'adding to the text'? I don't think anyone would mistake "From the Library of Hiram Goldstein" as part of the actual text. Can you buy a Torah at the bookstore? If so, does it have publisher's information? Further, 'character' is pretty specific to alphabetic writing. I wonder if a Chinese idiograph or Egyptian hieroglyph count as a 'character'?
Yeah well, it's known as the first compression method...
Get your Unix fortune now!
My head just asplode
Statesmen serve to better the country and help the people.
Politicians serve to better themselves and help friends.
I suppose that you could add a chemical signature to the ink.
When I bought a diamond for an engagement ring, it came with a gemprint; a card showing the stones unique identifer when light is passed through it. No two diamonds are exactly the same, so light will not pass through two diamonds the same way. Very similar to what they're doing with the torah scrolls.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Contemplating stealing a holy text should lower the prospective thief's Karma enough that all you'd have to do would be to filter the entrance to the synagogue, yes? Easy enough to do on the forums!
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
First of all Svadt isn't so tiny and second of all I highly doubt microcalligraphy is done only there - I have several prints that are made up of microcalligraphy and this has been done for quite a few years now - somehow I doubt the idea and skill only stayed there.
15000 years from now, after the current civilization has been forgotten, some archeologist is going to dig up one of these, and discover the 'secret codes,' and see them as evidence of God or even aliens.
Now I've seen Everything
See!
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
"Hey... at least now they'll have a Safer Torah!"
/>
/>
<bah-dum-ching!
"... and if they got away with it, they'd be getting Loot of the Frum!"
<boo hissss
$ touch
How does this have anything to do with the topic at hand? Personally I'm offened, as a Jew, and a reader of slashdot that you would use this topic to start on your own agenda. Additionally, your arguement is totally faulty. If you weren't such an ignorant bigot, you might learn that the ONLY person who has ever been put to death in Israel was a Nazi war criminal. Other than him, there is no death penalty for any crime in Israel. Also, who all looks alike? Go find a soapbox somewhere else.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Wouldn't it be easier to, I don't know, use a modern book version that would be too cheap for anyone to bother stealing? Sheesh, dogmatists . . . . .
I had the same thought. Micro-perforations are still a form of characters.
Why not make some of the required Torah characters look slightly different in their appearance as a form of encoding? Seems like this would be easy to do and not violate the mandate of adding any characters.
Unless that sounds like characters encoded into characters. Hmm. Somehow this is reminding me of The Nine Billion Names of God.
> What makes Jews so special?
Well... there's this I guess...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03gene.
The very act of putting holes (however small) that are not used for binding pieces of parchment to the other ones, might render a Torah unfit for use! As an observant Jew, I'd be a little bit skeptical about reading from one...
Keep the faith, share the code
Any alteration of the writing on the document would, in theory constitute a "new" message.
I was thinking more along the lines of them contacting the US Treasury department. They are pretty much experts at making paper "unique and identifiable". Something as simple as black fibers embedded in the paper making a barcode. In this case, "not one character" is added as it is already there.
Who would pay $50,000 for a stolen Torah? Surely somebody that would place that much value on a book would actually have read the book and be attempting to follow the laws therein, especially the one about "Thou shalt not steal" -- or encourage others to steal! I can't beleive people could buy this without the provence of them documented, and then claim they just didn't know it was stolen.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Why didn't they put 'thou shalt not steal' on it originally - like they did - helpfully - on some other texts?
Parent comment is a slap in the face of human culture, Jewish or no, religious or no, and it has no place on Slashdot.
--An 'If I Were a Rich Man'-singing " non-Jew.
Don't feed this troll, just mod them down, please.
That is about as real as somebody complaining about OSS being used In Syria, China, Cuba, and North Korea, while ignoring the fact that each of these countries are currently based on MS Windows XP. And to make matters interesting, these were sold by MS directly to the countries.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
And if I can help only one ignorant slashdotter spell "flamebait" then it's worth it.
We'll work on spelling "troll" next article...
its not paper, its the skin from a kosher animal.
WHich really, though, opens up a better alternative - take a microscopic sample from the parchement, and then do a DNA-fingerprint of it. Put fingerprint in a database. Viola.
You are a troll. You know nothing about which you are talking about, and sound like an idiot.
Who said anything about Torah desecration in this article? It has to do with tracing stolen Torah scrolls. This is not a Bible, or a Quran, or whatever. The Torah scroll must be kosher in order for it to be used in all Jewish rituals. Again, nobody is claiming it was desecrated or flushed or anything... Is it, or isn't it according to the word of G-d? Simple as that...
Who is expecting you to fall over, not me, not the Jewish community, who is? And you must think alot of yourself to call other peoples beliefs 'fairy tales'. You must be one SMART DUDE!!!
Check your facts before you open your dumb mouth...
Michael A. Uman
Sr Software Engineer
softwaremagic.net
It's not very PC to call religious folk "loony" -- after all, if the Jews had fallen in with every popular idea, where would they be today, and where would the Bible be -- but you make a good point. We can transcribe every document onto multiple formats today. Still, some last better than others. My family has black and white photos from the 1940s and 1950s that still look good today; we have color photos from the 1960s that are fading and VCR home movies from the 1980s that none of us can look at because our VCR is busted, and we've moved to DVD.I've seen TV programs about all the trouble it takes to keep the original Declaration of Independence from crumbling. What remains? It's hard to beat the Rosetta Stone for one of the most useful and enduring documents ever written/carved.
Handmade documents deserve a certain aura of respect. Have you ever seen the Book of Kells in Dublin? Think of what it took to make an illuminated manuscript. I have worked on
Web sites and several newspapers, and they are ephemeral. What remains?
The only written communication Jesus is recorded as making was something he wrote with a stick in sand. Wouldn't you like to know what he wrote?
Well, the code may be the same, but only because they destroyed all the copies but one.
:)
And it STILL hasn't stolved the problem of a rift among the developers. Several of them got into fights over who really owned the source code and they've been having bitter IP disputes over it ever since as to who the true heir to it should be.
Besides, they still haven't worked out some of those jihad problems. So it's always best to stay one release or so behind and keep with something more stable. Granted, that doesn't mean problem free, but most (but not all) of the really violently horrible errors are gone from it by now and it's considerably more peaceful. Whereas this new version completely takes over your system and violently refuses to uninstall, no matter whether you've changed your mind or not. And changing your mind afterwards can be *really* painful with all those fatal exception errors and such.
Just a friendly warning
But barcodes are a new message as well.
I guess they'd have to go with the digital fingerprints. No alteration, period. It sounds like a very promising method...
Except that the skin is from multiple animals. (not multiple KINDS, but more than one animal). Have you ever seen a torah scroll? They're HUGE (and I don't think I'll volunteer to be the holder - it's always the brawny guy who has to do that at my shul).
Although, your idea has merit - just collect samples from pages X, Y, and Z, and make that into a database..
. Define sqrt(x) as something really evil like (x / rand()), and bury it deep. Watch your coworkers go nuts.
This is the most sensible comment that has been posted thus far.
When "the world" realizes that we're all just human beings, and can get over all of this religious sillyness, perhaps then we can evolve into a more mature and understanding society.
Until then we settle for "I'm going to blow you up because (this is what you believe) and (this is what I believe)."
It's interesting that so many religions think it is okay to kill people, well, just because they don't agree with some rules that are posted in some book...
As an Orthodox Jew I have to agree that the State of Israel does have two forms of justice and unfortunately while the media portrays (getting it wrong of course) Israel as a reflection Judaism - in reality it's the farthest thing from basic Jewish beliefs. A not so well known fact on this subject (unless you happen to know a little history, which unfortunately most people don't) - up until the founding of the State of Israel the nearly unanimous position of Orthodox Rabbinical community is that the whole concept of nationalism (Zionism) prior to the arrival of the Messiah was and is completely wrong. Unfortunately now, while a large proportion of Orthodox Jewry believe Zionism is wrong, they don't speak out - meanwhile Israel gets a free bite at the apple to kill as many Palestinians as desired and the US protects them politically, financially and militarily. Bottom line, the State of Israel should have never been created, it has nothing to do with Jewish beliefs that Jews have been following for the last 2000 years and innocent people - men, women and children, both Jews and Palestinians are being killed as a result - on top of all of this it makes all Jews look bad.
Someone should call RMS. The Ancient Torahs aren't compatible with the FDL
C-x C-s C-x k
Well.. a Nazi war criminal and, well, Rachel Corrie....
l nice bulldozer...
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/invest.htm
At least people feel good about themselves when they go to bed, I guess.
>Religion sucks.
Religion begins as a set of prescribed and proscribed behaviors which, overall, would have been observed as increasing the size of the tribe.
What better way to get people not to shit where they eat, or to understand that fucking leads to babies, or to instill a basic system of law and order, than to make the people believe it dogmatically. It does not necessarily even require a God -- an oral system with medicine people and storytellers can work just as well.
But once you have your peasant class believing in a divine mandate from a supreme deity, then your behaviors that are codified into law will start to enforce themselves, over many generations, without a need for a managed political heirarchy.
Unfortunately, a system that begins innocently enough (wash your hands before delivering babies, don't eat raw pork), can be amended to enforce a corrupt political ideal.
I'm not saying that happened in any particular religion, but I'm satisfied with the basic premise that it could have happened.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
"And the educated have always had more sex, money, power and influence."
I'm quite certain the uneducated have more sex. Those in the ruling classes always have more societal structures in place, that are aimed at *preventing* sex.
The money, power and influence parts, I won't argue with. But peasants definitely have more sex.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Where was Da Vinci when they really needed him?!
Did anyone else read this as "Secret Codes Protect Ancient Torrents"?
"The Bible Code" ... "The Torah Code"...
Could you just take a really high resolution photograph of it? Doesn't everyone have different handwriting? Or are all of them meant to look the same?
You couldn't add an RFID to the scroll itself, although it might be possible to add it to the Atzei Hayyim (wood staves) on which the scroll is wound.
-David Barak
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
You do realize that said refugees were first expelled from Israel? The jews of Israel, for the most part, came there in the last 100 years.
+1 insightful/underrated. Why is it such a taboo to criticize bullshit cultural relics?
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Those masses of people do not contradict the claim that they are a minority. They are just well organized.
If everyone in New York would suddenly agree (as if they could agree) to protest it would be a crowd a couple orders of magnitude the size of those protests you are talking about. Yet it would still be a tiny minority of the US, much less the world.
Though I have no idea if they really are a minority. From the news I hear though
Yes, all you have to do to produce a cheap copy to leave lying around to be stolen is spend a year hand lettering it on parchment hundreds of years old.
.they don't have the reference? And what has that got to do with OSS anyway?
Then of course there is the issue that Torahs aren't "left lying around." You don't just stick one on the shelf like a King James Bible. If you find one in the authentic location, it's authentic. It's not just a good idea, it's God's law.
The remaining question is, how do you suppose anyone is going to use software to authenticate the scroll if. .
This basically boils down to comparing jpegs. If you give me a peice of paper with a signature on it and I take a picture of it, I can't tell you if the signature is genuine, but at a later date I can tell you if it is the same piece of paper, and I don't even need software at all to do this. Software just makes it easier.
KFG
It says "Be sure to drink more Ovaltine."
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Sure, they are teh 3vil!!
For fuck's sake. To a palestinian, you are a foreign bastard who took his territory and gave it to the Jewish people, the same Jewish people he's in war and kills your people since you can remember. Of course they're shouting death.
And you know what's wrong with them, besides war crimes and unbelievable suffering and pain? Lack of perspective. Peace can't be achieved because most can't see any further than this.
So do you, as far as I can tell. Please, this people are not lunatics, no one is. They have been raised by a different culture, but it's not a bad one. Fanatics are just as bad there as in the US, except they don't have the FBI to kick their asses whenever they feel like it. They live in a society mandated by inertial hate they got from previous generations.
To a palestinian, you are much more of a son of a bitch than he is to you. It's just that they gather on the streets to shout it instead of reelecting their badass president to "kick some ass" and having the senate give him unlimited military budget.
Think about it. Pretty much everything happens for a reason.
My english is sow-sow. Sowhat?
As a Jew, I am offended by such a statement as well. And how any self-respecting moderator could have modded it "Funny" or "Insightful" is beyond me.
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
$50,000 or more is for a Torah that is used every day. A truly ancient e.g. more than 5 or 6 hundred years old scroll or a Torah from eastern Europe before 1800 would literally be priceless. Pick a large number, double it, add 4 zeros, double it again.
Theft is not a huge problem but it is a problem because scrolls are so expensive and some shuls simply can't afford them. So they look for one of questionable provenance. Also scrolls do wear out and have to be buried and replaced eventually.
What you mean the big D9's? Yeah it's usually a very bad idea to get infront of several ton's of moving equipment especially if you have a chance of falling and being crushed to death when an op can't see you.
Surprise. There's a reason why you don't go wandering around on construction and work sites either. On top of that perhaps you need to question who she was staying with...they were 'questionable' at best.
Om, nomnomnom...
Religion is not silly, and eliminating it will not solve the world's problems. The majority of the world practices some sort of religion. The majority of the world believes their religion can coexist with others. There are few extremists who misread religious texts. All religions I know of are based on some sort of morals and generally want their followers to be good people. Without religion the world would not be better. Since we are all "just human beings" there will always be extremists, whether they are religious extremists or not. To remove these people we would need to destroy beliefs completely. Obviously that is impossible as long as humans have brains. So the only way to get real peace would be to kill everyone.
what about those chemical barcode flakes? years ago i saw something about them being used to mark explosives for tracking, microscopic flakes which contain different patterns of colors when inspected under a microscope, just spray them on with an adhesive? I'm not Jewish so would that be acceptable for a Torah scroll?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
What could be more extensible than the original five books of Moses? They've been extended to dozens or hundreds of fully realized religious texts, and their internal objects are in reuse through metaphore in nearly every spoken language and nearly all literature.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Then why didn't the IDF reveal the full text and findings of its investigation? Sorry, but construction equipment is usually designed so that the operator can see where he or she is going and what he or she is doing. Your apologetic excuse makes zero sense.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
That confused me too. If you want to see the parent article, click the child's article number so you're just viewing that, and hit the "parent" link.
I would agree with you in theory, if the terrorist groups were not the ones winning the 'elections' and promising to soak the ground in Jewish and American blood.
Om, nomnomnom...
Except that DNA analysis requires a sample of the parchment to be destroyed. When you have a several-hundred-year-old document you cannot afford to remove a little bit off it each time you want to test its authenticity. And given that the sample could easily be contaminated by anyone who might have handled it you may need quite a large sample.
Thanks! It's been corrected.
;)
This reminds of a Saturday Night Live skit where a TV anchor was interviewing Stephen King who was typing away while talking. He stopped typing for a long moment and then started typing again. The anchor guy asked what happened and King replied that he forgot the rule about whether i should come before e or after.
when Christ went to eat with the publicans and sinners
If you feel a need to make a distinction between sinners and publicans, you obviously don't know many publlicans.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The $50K value is for a new one. People pay less for older or damaged ones, and for the same reason that people will try to pay $300 for a "brand new iMac G5" you'll get people who will pay $20K for a Sefer of unknown provenance... :(
-David Barak
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
hell was having to spend all eternity with his nagging mother. Of course, I think everybody thinks their ethnic peoples have the most nagging busy-body mothers!
I bet they believe the words are from God too.
Can you prove otherwise?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
A Black Market for Torahs? That has to be one of the strangest things I've ever heard of...
Of course it would play nicely into my Cops parody skit Rabbis
Yitzak 511, we have a non-kosher bagel in progress on the corner of Sherbrooke & St. Denis, please send backup for a minyan.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
304,805 letters? That's only 1.15e-15 libraries of congress!
Ok, so I made that number up. What's the real number?
The Torah, and other religious works, should be saved in some form.
However, with that said, if we are ever to advance beyond our current barbarisms, we must realize these works of religion for what they are...myths. Religion has inspired many people to do good. Within most of the worlds "great" religions, and most of the lesser ones, lie messages of peace, hope, and goodwill for our fellow man. However, some of the darkest periods in history were results of, or were instituted by, so-called "religious" people, acting upon supposedly "higher" orders, or so they thought.
Mod me down as "flamebait" if you wish, it doesn't change the facts of the matter...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
"Unfortunately there are still some (...) Jews around who have problems with the idea of Jews being armed"
Certainly not these jews.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
You can base countries on MS Windows XP? What was sold by MS directly to the countries? Who is complaining about OSS in Syria, China, Cuba, and North Korea? How does any of this make matters interesting, or relate to "matters" at all?
You're so sure of your insane lies portraying Jews as atheists that you post as Anonymous Coward. It's obvious that it is you who does not believe in god, or at least not in a righteous one. You speak in god's name, but don't even have the courage to use a flimsy Slashdot user ID. Anyone else reading your racist lies should immediately be able to tell what you are. And that the "future purpose" to which you allude, the popular racist fantasy of the gory sacrifice of Jews in an apocalypse, is the hallmark of the rest of you deranged Christian Taliban buying up such godporn as the sick "Left Behind" series. Which goes right along with your giveaway line slandering Catholics. Every generation has its excuse for people hating Jews, rather than themselves, for "betraying god". Yours are not new, but they're still disgusting. When you admit the truth, that you're covering up your fear of burning in hell by finding a surrogate in the Jews, you'll have at least a chance at salvation. Without that, you're just a sick fool lying about things you can't understand.
--
make install -not war
Sure, its on a single page alright.... its a scroll!
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
If I understand the tradition correctly, an individual can buy and use an inexpensive printed, mass-produced copy of the Torah, even a bi-lingual one that puts a page of Hebrew next to an English translation. No problem.
But a synagogue or temple has to own a hand-written exact copy of the Torah on parchment rolls, for use in worship services. The rabbi is to read to the congregation from a perfect hand-made copy of the Torah. If he wants to elaborate on it, or translate it into English or whatever is the local language, fine, but he always needs to quote the real thing in the original language from an authoritative copy.
In contrast, in Christian churches, the pastor or priest can read to the congregation from whatever translation or paraphrase of the original Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic that the congregation wants to use. The congregation will never hear the original Hebrew and Greek, and it's not considered important that they learn those languages. The exception is the Greek Orthodox Church, in which the Old and New Testaments are read aloud in a Greek translation (old testament) and in the original Greek (new testament).
In the Catholic Church, worldwide, for hundreds of years they only used a translation of the old and new testaments into Latin. Only forty years ago they decided to use translations in whatever the local language of the congregation is.
In the Hebrew tradition, there are a small number of scribes whose careers consist of making new perfect hand-written copies of the Torah for new synagogues and to replace worn-out ones, which are solemnly destroyed once it is confirmed that they are replaced by a proper hand-written replacement.
In this fashion the Jews have made sure that the original text of the Torah has not changed at all for several millenia. The very oldest fragments of written Torahs only differ from the ones made in this generation by a few alternate spellings of place names.
It doesn't make much sense to us in the information age, but it's worked for thousands of years, and there is no similar body of literature or group of documents from antiquity which has survived intact, without editorial changes or typos, like the Torah has.
All of the works of philosophy and theater written from 3,000 to 2,00 years ago in ancient Greece or the Roman Empire which we have today are known only from copies that date to the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. And these copies have obviously suffered some alteration and editing by the scribes that copied them thousands of years after they were composed. We have no way of knowing or proving if the words of Socrates that we find printed today bear any actual resemblance to what Socrates wrote 2,500 years ago (or however long it was). Not so the Torah!
This is quite an achievement. That's why the tradition of hand-copying the Torah and only accepting perfect copies for corporate worship and study will continue.
You gotta respect those Jews. They got it right and they kept it right, across millenia and unbelievable historical, political and cultural changes, and a diaspora that took them out of Palestine and all over the globe.
You really should come out here to NYC to explain that bit to me. Let me know when you'll be dropping by with your "real god", and we'll see how well it works for you. Because I can see all kinds of bugs in your install of "christianity" - especially that "tolerance" vaporware.
--
make install -not war
a slap in the face of human culture? That would be daytime television. Fight the real enemy--Dr. Phil.
From the article:
/. article there will be a huge underground movement to break The Code -- (the "Da Vinci" part semi-assumed ;-) )
The 3.5- by 8-inch template resembles an IBM punch card, with eight holes arranged so their position relative to one another describes a unique identification number in a proprietary code.
Though maybe after this
Paul B.
You actually need Windows CE (Country Edition) with Nuclear Power Plus! Plugin.
um it's like 5am here... I did'nt read the post I replied to very well... ... the fact I dont agrea with many things to do with Israel has nothing to do with the general plight of the jewish people, and also nothing to do with the thread in general.
Personaly I dont know what got the jews through their terrable ordeals, maybe it was religion, maybe it was the fact that they are a people with strong famaly ties
I'm going to bed now.
Fair enough. Mind you, I think she was acting quite inappropriately, at best. Claiming that the Israelis have never killed anyone is ridiculous, and that was the point I was trying to make. Not only have they completely persecuted Palestinians for years and years and years, they're dumb enough to get caught running over some girl with a bulldozer.
kinda off subject, but why is moses always affiliated with the jewish? I mean, christians believe in the old testament too.
http://illhostit.com/ - Webhosting
I never for once said to remove religion from the world. But I do indeed think that it is silly that people of one religion will kill people of another religion just because of religion. And I think that the Israelis, no matter how badly they have been mistreated in the past, use the fact that they were persecuted as an excuse to murder Palestinians over and over and over again. But whatever. "Believe" what you want.
Minor issue: it wasn't the land of Palestine. That's a British name. It was the land of Israel in the Torah, and since nobody has been able to prove something that is older, that is the name that should be accepted. The Romans scattered the Jewish people (IIRC), thus starting the diaspora. Around 5,000 years later the British came up with the name Palestine and it has stuck in our modern minds...
Well-poisoning Christ-killers
And what has that got to do with OSS anyway?
;)
If you mention "OSS" early on a new posting, it'll get all kinds of replies and mod points. So far I got a few intelligent responses, got crap flooded, my "Fat Albert" fan club responded, and someone asked what's going on. Mod points for being insightful and overrated. So far this has been a good experiment.
not one character can be added to the 304,805 letters of the Torah's text
So just add two or more characters. One character wouldn't be that helpful in uniquely identifying the scroll anyway.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Funny, I thought people with blind faith sounded like idiots. Especially those who claim to be such wonderful, generous, helpful-to-all folks like I was expected to be when I was raised. That person may "sound like an idiot" and not be "one SMART DUDE" and have a "dumb mouth" but at least maybe he'll make it into the Kingdom of Heaven.
I just love Anonymous Cowards... they make the best fans! :P
From what I've read, the scrolls are made from animal skins. Couldn't you just start a DNA bank of the skins? That would eliminate the adding character issue.
"...dictates that not one character can be added to the 304,805 letters of the Torah's text..."
:)
how about two?
Actually the Talmud dictates exactly how the characters are written, to the extent that even in a few places a letter is written larger or smaller.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
since these aren't the originals anyway, why not just put them in pdf or make some kind of high-quality prints? is the text not the most imporant part? it's like paying thousands for picaso painted by someone else. perhaps it's a system to make sure the haves are always truly "holier than thou". many religions have a lot of built-in things to ensure power for the religious elite. i guess these guys never heard of guttenburg.
Actually,Xmas is wiccan.Look up yule.The catholics stole it when they were converting pagans and added a christ element.I had to write this as my sister is a wiccan and hates when people think it's a christian holiday. I think all religion is for scaring peasants,Personally. And thanks for getting rid of the craptcha.As someone who has trouble seeing those things,I thank You.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This is one of the most tired and twisted criticisms I've heard of Judiasm. You're not the first to put it forward.
Do you understand the difference between law and case law? It exists even in the modern American legal system. When you have a law, different judges will end up interpreting that law slightly differently.
Because one of the purposes of law is to establish uniformity of judgements, each ruling sets up a precedent, which can be cited for future cases. In American law, if there are enough divergent precedents the Supreme Court will agree to hear a case in order to set a ruling which will prevent further diverse rulings by the lower courts. Jewish law worked similarly.
The talmud ( or so called 'oral law') which was being written down at the time of Jesus is case law. Jesus was not protesting the Talmud, per se. He was protesting those rulings in the talmud which 'annulled the written law.'
In other words, Jesus was a 'strict constitutionalist' who railed against judges that 'legislated from the bench' and wrote legal interpretations which violated the mosaic laws.
For example, lending at interest was prohibited under mosaic law, but Hillel effectivly allowed it. Mitigation of severe punishments was also common in the Talmud. For example, "an eye for an eye" was interpreted as demanding commesurate monetary compensation. You couldn't actually poke someone's eye out, it was ruled, because that could kill them and their blood would be on the hands of the court. There are also some very out there metaphoric interpretations of the old testament in the Talmud (like arguments that the ancient Egyptians suffered 50 or more plagues pursuing the hebrew peoples towards the red sea.)
But the Talmud is ultimatly the work of learned men and it shouldn't be taken for more than that.
Destroying case law doesn't solve anything. You'll still have a diverse range of legal judgements, or else you'll have no law at all.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Good post, and very interesting info about Darwin. Thanks. B)
...context.
Thought I'd point out something interesting in return. Actually, only consonants are written in Hebrew, something dustily remembered from my years in Hebrew school (which of course, like most typical NY Jews, ended the day I turned 13.) There are two ways of describing vowels in written Hebrew: the use of sub and superscript dots, dashes and "Ts" (kinda Tetris symbols) (a system which Torah scrolls do not use) and
There's a great web page that describes it better than I could:
http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~hr/bible/hebvow.html
But yes, how Torahs are made is amazing, from the preparation of the skin, to the ink, to the sewng together of the sections. And, it's a true master/apprentice skill, one of the few left. To combine that with modern high tech is way cool, no?
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
This should make for some great arguing. :)
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Actually, I remember from my Bar-Mitzvah that I had to sing my parshah. Although I know how to read Hebrew I didn't know how to read the musical notes which most Torahs carry.
For those unfamiliar with semitic languages such as Hebrew, the vowels are somewhat optional and are not part of the normal string of consonants. Instead, they are little marks made in various locations around the consonants. For example, a dot to the left of a character in the middle is an "ewwww" sound. Move the dot to the top of the letter and its an "oh" sound.
In addition to these vowels are various musical notes which tell you how to sing that particular passage (as a canter would). If I understand the history correctly the vowels and musical notes are not part of the "characters" (consontnats) of the Torah.
Perhaps minor variations in the musical notes could be used to signify the Torah -- or would that invalidate it. I guess one other important thing to mention is that there is some built-in redundancy in the vowels and (if I remember correctly, it was almost 20 years ago) in the musical notes. For example, a bar under a letter is an "ah" sound but so is a T-shape under a letter (althoug there may be a subtle difference in pronounciation that I'm not aware of).
A bit like a stream of data can be encoded in the less-significant bits of an image.
And for anybody interested in the non-Roman alphabets, http://www.ancientscripts.com/ is a good place to start.
What about the right to make derived works?
although you're part right, Yule (and Modresnacht, Thorrablot, Widvinterblot, and the other's around that time) are Pagan, but they aren't wiccan.
Paganism and Wicca aren't interchangible terms, Hel, Wicca doesn't even fall under the Pagan umbrella. (neopaganism != paganism).
Though Xmas IS a christian holliday, it just assimilated some of the old traditions (like decorating a pine tree on Modresnacht, for example, or the relative timing over the other festivals at that time of year, and yeah, that's where the bunnies and eggs come in on easter, etc). That's how the old ways survived, and that's not rally something to get pissed off about, imo.
Yeah, how about taking a digital copy of the Mona Lisa and storing it on your computer? There are tons of digital copies. But the original is still precious to us all. Here too we're dealing with objects that represent value beyond the intellectual content alone, where the intellectual content has been digitized and backed up a million ways. Each physical vehicle is unique, kind of - not kind of, exactly - like antiques. And where tradition means a lot, jumping on the latest and greatest storage medium such as a dual layer blue laser DVD that emits a hologram may not be regarded so highly, especially if you find out that the ink in the DVD degrades after 10 years, but too late when you threw away your parchment 10 years ago thinking you got something better.
Some info. Yes, there are sects of ultra-Orthodox Jews who are anti-Zionist, but most are either non-Zionist, living in Israel and studying there, and in a lot of cases even voting and taking welfare money, or actually quite like having a state for the Jews, which they realise is not quite the same as the one they believe the Messiah will grant them, and so don't complain.
As for regular Orthodox Jews, to claim that "a large proportion of Orthodox Jewry believe Zionism is wrong" is disingenuous in the extreme. You know all those settlers that think the occupied territories should be annexed by Israel? Most are religious. Was there a U-turn in opinion in 1948? I don't think so.
Oh, one last thing. Next time you make inflammatory, false remarks about history, politics, or indeed anything at all, why don't you post in a non-anonymous way? That way I might not completely lack any respect for you. Just a thought.
These secret codes are preventing me from making a backup copy of these Ancient Torahs! The torahs are no doubt very fragile and may be unreadable in any second. Yeah, I'm sure the original manufacturer promised they would last for a few thousand years but after that? I demand these ancients reveal their data encryption schemes to the general public! There's probably DRM evilness of some sort lurking there also. This is Slashdot after all and my rights as a athei^D^D^D^D^D religious believer of whatever are being violated.
Theres a reson the us used pens instead of pencils. Its because when you write with pencils, small shards of (conductive) grafite fall off. These then go around and around and around the space craft, until they find some rather nice control to short out..... (Pencils in space == Bad karma)
kinda off subject, but why is moses always affiliated with the jewish? I mean, christians believe in the old testament too.
Yes. But the jews don't believe in the Old Testament. They believe in the Hebrew Bible (as well as the oral law, of course). Now, there is a not so subtle difference between the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible. The name "Old Testament" implies it has been replaced by the new shiny "New Testament" and is no longer valid. Jews don't believe that. God's convenant with Abraham has no exit clause!
Having said that it is quite confusing to see a large cathedral in Amsterdam named after the lawgiver of Israel and his brother the high priest (Moses en Aaron kerk (sp?)).
6) It turns out that the Bible is right, and that human ancestry can be traced back to a biological bottleneck about 6,000 years ago, known as mitochondrial Eve.
This is not true.
Defining older copies as more holy seems a lot like idol worship to me, and that is (IIRC) kinda forbidden
If you don't ID your scrolls you will have to either sell them to a shop, or just read them at random to find out what they are. In either case you risk wasting a valuable scroll!
I only hope the Jewish community bears this in mind before it's too late.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Precisely. Science is based on the presumption that every observable phenomenon can be understood and explained. This runs very deeply and so tends to be disregarded, as we tend to disregard the very foundations of mathematics: because if the most basic presumptions did not hold, too many other things would also fail. Organised religions -- especially the dogmatic, monotheist ones -- tend to be based on the presumption that some observable phenomena cannot be understood {"it's all part of God's Great Inexorable Plan"}.
Of course a scientist is exhibiting faith; but the difference is that faith in science is corroborated over and over again by reproducible experiments {and scientists are only too ready to modify their theories when they are contradicted by new observations}, whereas faith in religion is largely uncorroborated except by "holy texts" specific to the religion in question.
This is why science and religion in their purest forms can never be truly reconciled: all hinges on the question "Can everything be understood?".
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Almost all of this is wrong.
The Origin of Species hardly mentioned humans at all. The word "races" was used at the time to mean a sub-species of animals. That is the sense in which Darwin used it. The first edition of the book barely mentioned humans at all - later additions contained perhaps half a dozen passing references.
Darwin was undoubtedly a "racist" by modern standards - but by the standards of the time he was fairly enlightened. He was, for example, vehemently opposed to slavery.
The idea that the Scopes trial was about a law opposing racism is hilarious. In case it has escaped your notice, racism and segregation were entrenched in Tennessee at the time and for forty years after (at least). The legislators who passed the Scopes law were the same people who enforced segregation for another forty years. Do you want to guess how many were Christians, and how many "evolutionists"? You may want to look up the "Hamitic hypothesis".
The idea that the roots of racism lie in the theory of evolution is completely ahistorical. But in any case, your logic is faulty. Even if Darwin was an appalling racist and his ideas were supported by racists, this would have no bearing on the evidence for/against evolution. Newton was a nasty piece of work - should I disbelieve gravity?
But I'm sure you're not deliberately lying - presumably you've never read the original sources or studied the period and are just regurgitating what you've read on creationist websites. If you are open-minded, I'd urge you to read these more critically in future.
Seems like the sensible solution to me.
Deleted
Why is this needed? How hard can it be to find a stolen Torah? It isn't like 17 year olds are going to be carrying them around like iPods. The only people who would want them would be Rabbis who have the intelligence to detect and the morality to not take advantage of a theft.
"The idea that the Scopes trial was about a law opposing racism is hilarious."
Why do you think Clarence Darrow was interested? Racial and sexual equality were his main fights.
"In case it has escaped your notice, racism and segregation were entrenched in Tennessee at the time and for forty years after (at least)."
You don't think perhaps the legislators were trying to slowly remove racism, perhaps by first removing it from the biology textbooks? Remember, the only part of evolution it forbid teaching was the evolution of man.
"The idea that the roots of racism lie in the theory of evolution is completely ahistorical."
I did not say that. What I did say is that evolution firmed up the idea of biological roots of racism. It made it part of biology rather than ideology, which made it very difficult to remove from the public mind.
"Even if Darwin was an appalling racist and his ideas were supported by racists, this would have no bearing on the evidence for/against evolution."
My point was not on the general theory of evolution, but specifically on Darwin's idea of evolution. It's amusing that the "completely sure" arguments used in the scopes trial are now almost all completely discreditted, but it still remains for many as a show of why the Bible is wrong and evolution is right. My point was that the Bible was correct against Darwin's ideas and it will also eventually prove out to be correct against this generation's ideas. It's when man believes that his ideas are better than God's that we tend to have problems. In fact, this is one of Jesus's main points.
"If you are open-minded, I'd urge you to read these more critically in future."
I have read them critically, investigated their claims, and debated with others to thoroughly make sure that I'm on good ground, and I think I am, though I am open to correction. So far, your argument has simply been "I don't think so, racism was already there", which doesn't answer the argument at all.
Engineering and the Ultimate
The wikipedia article does nothing against what I said except to give a different date for the genetic bottleneck.
Note that the Wikipedia entry assumes the existence of precursors to Mitochondrial eve, but that is only resting on the assumption of evolution. Mitochondrial Eve would look the same whether or not Eve herself had ancestors or not, or whether or not she was the only person alive when she was born/made. The existence of her ancestors and contemporaries flows from the theory of evolution only, and not from data.
As for the date, we've found that human mitochondria mutates faster than previously thought, throwing previous molecular clocks off, and putting mitochondrial even at about 6,000 to 6,500 years.
While the existence of mitochondrial eve was predicted by both theories, the existence of a recent mitochondrial Eve was predicted by the Bible and came as a surprise to evolutionary theory.
Engineering and the Ultimate
It's true that there are mistakes in every hand-written Torah, when it is first written. However, it is written without the vowels and cantillation marks of the Masoretes. Consequently, whenever anyone reads from it, they have first to learn the text. If anyone reads aloud from a scroll and makes a mistake they are corrected, and they have to say the correct text before continuing. This means that mistakes will eventually be corrected - once a mistake is found, the scroll cannot be used until it has been fixed.
The consequence of this is that an old regularly used Torah is very error-free. A subsequent copy will have errors, but will also detect errors in the original, because the scribe will be intimately familiar with the text. Consequently the contents mutate at every rewrite - but are corrected throughout the lifetime of the scroll, and the mutations *do not necessarily propogate*.
Except you're missing the whole bit about that people don't generally do well in not being evil, at least in some small ways, and hence need something further (Jesus Christ) to be OK with God rather than just trying to be good.
And it's reasonably generalising to treat the Bible as one thing. It's a collection of books with a very varying style and purpose. There's everything from Jewish law (important for historical reference, nevermind other issues) to a Music book (most Christian hymns are derived from Psalms, nevermind that some of the closest scriptural links with the New Testament are with the Psalms) to prophecy, history (the whole careful detailing of Israel's relationship with God is/should be very instructive to Christians) and theology.
I think "don't be evil" is fairly indistinct even as a "gist" of the Bible. Perhaps you could have a subtitle of "Man and God" to guess some of the subject matter, that'd be at least someways more accurate.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
I wonder whether they could do a DNA analysis of the animal skin... I would imagine that for any given scroll, it's probably composed of a number of different individual animals and the mix is probably not the same for any given scroll. The catches would be a) DNA testing is not horribly cheap still, and b) DNA testing AFAIK, is still a mildly destructive process with dead materials.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
The earliest form of the Torah was the Mosaic oral traditions from 1200 B.C.E. It was not final form until the sixth century B.C. during the prophets and captivity. Hamarabi has the oldest written law from 2200 B.C.E. including punishments for theft.
Those 'publican meals are like $1000 a plate. Jesus must have been fucking loaded! Maybe he just saved up so he could meet the majority whip and Laura Bush.
The next question would be whether the jury would buy this. One of the consequences of a jury-based legal system is that it doesn't matter how right you are if you can't convince the jury to accept what you're proposing. Now admittedly, probably all that needs to happen to get that to occur is to get one of these CSI or Law/Order shows to introduce the technique.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Wish we had that law for christianity!
The bible is re-wrtitten every time one ass of a leader (pope) decides it doesnt fit his thinking!
Torah, first edition. Some wear and tear to tablets. Shipping not included. Call 555-1234, ask for Indy.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
You are mistaken. When the Romans dispersed the Jews from what was then known in Latin as Syria Judea, they renamed their newly-annexed province Syria Palestina.
The term, IIRC, is a reference to the ancient Philistine people, and the region had been described by the name in a few Greek sources. The Romans deliberately chose a name with no direct connection to the Jews to reflect their conquest of the same.
When the British acquired the territory from the Ottomans after WWI, they called it by the long-standing Latin name.
And whilst you're at it don't forget Easter which, in Europe, was originally the time for worship of the goddess Oestre.
Which also explains why there's an "easter bunny" as Oestres sacred symbols were the moon and the hare. The moon was revered for its influence on females (also explaining why Oestrogen is so named) and the hare was revered as a symbol of fertility (because it's one of the few animals that can get pregnant again before giving birth to the currently gestating foetus(es))
And thence also comes the idea of Easter being the time of the Earths rebirth which is why, when the Christians subsumed the Easter festival, it became the time of the year when Jesus died and was resurrected.
So the moral of the story ? Reocurring symbols one and all Kids. Same ideas different deitys. Dig a little deeper under almost every "Christian" feast day/celebration and you'll find some earlier foundations of an entirely different nature.
But having said all this Oestre was undoubtedly overlaid on an ever earlier God/Goddess etc. etc.
But next easter whilst you enjoy your "easter eggs" and "bunnies" do spare a thought for an old European goddess.
Praise "Bob" (and leave Chthulu out of it) !
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Jewish though on Angels is very different from Christian. The most important thing to understand is that as far as Jews are concerend Angels don't have any free will. They exist only to do what G-d tells them to do. So the idea that one of them could "Fall" or defy G-d makes no sense. The Satan (its a title not a name in Hebrew) is an angel who tests people but he does it at G-d's command.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Not really, Chrisitanity has the devil for example, Judasim doesn't belive he exits. After all how is it possible for there to be an evil force that is independent of God? Nothing can be independant of God.
Just curious, what about the entity called "Satan" in the book of Job?
No sig for the moment.
{shakes his head} Please don't think I'm attacking you in all of this. I agree that photographic evidence is something which should solve a lot of problems. Problem is, it doesn't. Truth of the matter is, law pretty much comes down to how good your lawyer is at presenting the case and how good he is at dismantling the other side's case. Evidence and testimony play a part, but in the end, it comes down to the lawyers and the whims of the jury.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Now there are even fewer errors - new torahs from reputable sofers are computer checked. Each page is scanned and compared to a master - every error is flagged.
Obviously you didn't read the article. Maton Ot, the second registry, does this very thing.
"Why do you think Clarence Darrow was interested? Racial and sexual equality were his main fights."
Hello? Clarence Darrow was defending Scopes. What on earth is your point?
"You don't think perhaps the legislators were trying to slowly remove racism, perhaps by first removing it from the biology textbooks?"
Is this a joke? Completely implausible in the context of the time and place.
You continue to abuse logic. There is no logical connection between the truth of a theory and the morals of its propounders.
You make a false dichotomy between religious belief and accepting evolutionary theory. The Pope, the Anglican Church and the majority of other Christian denominations disagree with you.
You snip my criticism of your misunderstanding of the title of The Origin of Species. Nobody who had read the book could have made such a mistake.
Are you a troll, or just regurgitating material third hand?
And I'm saying out loud that I agree with every God-damn thing you said!
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Clearly most of the DNA will be destroyed over time and in the process of processing the skin to make the parchment. However, I can't imagine that there wouldn't be enough genetic matter left over to uniquely identify the document.
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
Sorry, I meant William Jennings Bryan. From here
Is this a joke? Completely implausible in the context of the time and place.
Maybe you should read what Gould had to say on the subject. He agreed both that they were teaching racism as science and that Bryan's opposition was to a large extent on racial grounds.
You continue to abuse logic. There is no logical connection between the truth of a theory and the morals of its propounders.
I agree with your statement as you formulated it. However, there _is_ a connection between how you view the world and how you view morality. It is inescapable. Notice that I was not criticizing Darwin's morality per se, but the fact that he codified his morality as scientific fact.
You make a false dichotomy between religious belief and accepting evolutionary theory. The Pope, the Anglican Church and the majority of other Christian denominations disagree with you.
I stopped caring what the Anglican church had to say when they started promoting Ashera worship on their homepage. The Catholic Church actually isn't officially evolutionist, though they do not regard evolution as heresy. Personally, I don't care much about establishment, and more about the meaning of the scriptures.
You snip my criticism of your misunderstanding of the title of The Origin of Species. Nobody who had read the book could have made such a mistake.
You are partially correct. When you read the follow-on works, however, it is obvious that he applied the same ideas to the human races.
Are you a troll, or just regurgitating material third hand?
Why do you insist on pretending that people who disagree with you are disingenuous or stupid?
Engineering and the Ultimate
I am sorry, I guess I misinterpreted "get over all of this religious sillyness". Even so, Israelis are not killing Palestinians because they have an excuse to do so. There is a huge amount of terrorism coming from the Palestinians and Israel needs to protect itself. Study the history a little closer. I think you will find that the Israelis have been trying a lot harder to make peace than the Palestinians.
How did that even get modded insightful? The IDF can't under code due to the on-going legal rambling that's been on going. Surprise. Btw have you ever seen one of these things? You can't see out of them because they are covered with bullet proof armor and bullet proof glass, giving the snipers very small spots to shoot through.
And contrary to popular belief, they don't use them to simply 'destroy' houses, but in hot-sapper operations as well to remove bombs that these terrorist scum put along the roads.
Wait...you've never heard of them doing that either? Why am I not surprised.
Om, nomnomnom...
the funny part is that people who are strong athiests fall back on the same types of arguments as strong religious types.... God's existance, or the lack of it is not obvious in any way...it is a belief. Without solid proof in one direction, we cannot say for certain whether or not God really exists because we have no solid proof either way. If we did, and it was really so obvious, well...argument over, we'd all know for sure. But the fact is that we don't have facts and proofs, we have beliefs and ideas, which differ from person to person and religion to religion. If it is your belief that there is no such thing as god, then fine...that is your belief and you are entitled to it, and I'm sure there are good reasons for it...but don't pretend this is some obvious truth that everyone should suscribe to, because beliefs about the nature of god are rarely obvious and are speculation on both sides of the road.
...no two people are not on fire.
Note that the Wikipedia entry assumes the existence of precursors to Mitochondrial eve, but that is only resting on the assumption of evolution. Mitochondrial Eve would look the same whether or not Eve herself had ancestors or not, or whether or not she was the only person alive when she was born/made. The existence of her ancestors and contemporaries flows from the theory of evolution only, and not from data.
Now that is an outright lie. We have tons of skeletons of humanidae much older than 6,000 years. The dates are firmly established by isotope measurements. Feel free to provide any proof that the half-life period of carbon 14 is much shorter then we have previously thought.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
We have tons of skeletons of humanidae much older than 6,000 years.
That's assuming the dating methods are accurate. If the flood hypothesis is correct, then that would have removed a great deal of C12 from the biosphere, making the C14 from the atmosphere much more prominent in the biosphere, and giving much older dates to everything before that point. Given that the flood occurred about 4,500 years ago, that fits the recorded dating very well.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Someone else mentioned this briefly, but I'll expand on it, Satan is very very different then the devil.
He's just an angel with no free will, who was ordered by God to test people and act as a prosecutor. However he has no ability to act on his own, and he isn't even "evil" in the christian sense of the word.
He has even been described as working under protest of sorts: i.e. he actually does not want the person to fail the test, it's just that he was ordered to test the person, and therefore he will do his best at it. Even if it's not what he really wants.
Poor guy in a way, he an angel like all the others, but because of his job everyone hates him and tries to avoid him. (I'm majorly personifying here.)
The fallen angels that someone else described are not satan, they were angels who told god during the time of Noah that they could do a better job of living in the world. So God dropped them down to earth to see how they do - and they did really really badly. They had no ability to control their impulses. The giants mentioned there are all descended from them.
-Ariel
God just told me those are not his words.
Can you prove that he did?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
On top of that perhaps you need to question who she was staying with...they were 'questionable' at best.
So, what then - she had it coming because of whom she was associating with? There's Israeli justice for you.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Flood? What flood? The flood you're talking about must have covered the whole planet without leaving a trace in the biological records. There's no record for that.
If what you said were true, we should see a sharp drop in the amount of fossils dated "just before the flood". Is there any?
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
s/biological/biological, historical and geological
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Seriouly though this is ridiculous... the Text of the book is different than a label on the text identifying it's owner... this is where the whole jewish thing jumped the shark a very, very long time ago with all sorts of work arounds to very simple rules. [and that started happening BC!]
They could always add picture too! I mean the thing says nothing about pictures... how stupid are they?
now i have to burn my eyes out... how dare you use the name of god on slashdot. That's worse than in vain!!
Actually, it was the Ottoman Turks' territory and they gave it up...
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
...it's not even about what G-d you pray to.
Religion today is simply a roadmap of how to behave towards one another, and a set of tennants on how to live one's life.
The Jewish faith is rich with history and tradition, and it gives a lot of people purpose. Just like programming, inventing, or music gives others purpose.
Protect the Torah is obviously something that is important to the Jewish community, just as anti-virus software is important to the computer community. You would think that as enlightened as the computer community claims to be, we coud forego the anti-semitic comments.
Who cares about the ozone layer?...thanks to CFC's I can write my name......IN CHEESE!!!
Disclaimer: I am an atheist.
"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me." --Ayn Rand
Santa doesn't exist ? Now you've ruined my day. But who fills my stocking then? The tooth fairy exists - she left a shilling under my pillow just 51 years ago; being a Scot, I remember this well. And why did my mother instill the habit of going to church on Sunday ? You can't fool a Scottish mother. Come on, eh. Stealing is not a good thing to have happening. Good idea to do what can be done to stop it. Smile
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
Apparently there is. I haven't read the article, but if you look at the abstract of "Time, Life, and History in the Light of 15,000 Radiocarbon Dates" it says:
I'll see if I can dig up a copy from someone.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Sorry, forgot to give you the link to the abstracts.
Engineering and the Ultimate
for this guy's sake, I *really* hope he's kidding..
I wanted to buy a candle holder, but the store didn't have one. So I got a cake.
You can stick it up your ass, fuckface.
--
make install -not war
There is on thing in life that is very certain. Death.
Religion explains 3 things to people. Where we came from. Why we're here. Where we're going after.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano