Slashdot Mirror
Computer Network Piecing Together a Jigsaw of Ancient Jewish Lore
First time accepted submitter aravenwood writes "The New York Times and the Times of Israel report today that artificial intelligence and a network of 100 computers in a basement in Tel Aviv University are being used to match 320,000 fragments of documents dating as far back as the 9th century in an attempt to reassemble the original documents. Since the trove of documents from the Jewish community of Cairo was discovered in 1896 only about 4000 of them have been pieced together, and the hope is that the new technique, which involves taking photographs of the fragments and using image recognition and other algorithms to match the language, spacing, and handwriting style of the text along with the shape of the fragment to other fragments could revolutionize not only the study of this trove documents, which has been split up into 67 different collections around the world since its discovery, but also how humanities disciplines study documents like these. They expect to make 12 billion comparisons of different fragments before the project is completed — they have already performed 2.8 billion. Among the documents, some dating from 950, was the discovery of letters by Moses Maimonides and that Cairene Jews were involved in the import of flax, linen, and sheep cheese from Sicily."
According to Wikipedia, Maimonides lived Passover Eve, 1135 to December 12, 1204; how was he able to write a document in 950?
The summary states "Among the documents, some dating from 950 ...". It is pretty clear that the "950" refers to the earliest known date of any of the documents, not the date of all of them.
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
People made stuff up and years later, hundreds of millions of people thought it was real ...
Some of the documents are religious texts, but many others are bills, receipts, inventory lists, and even personal letters. These mundane documents often shed a lot of illumination on how ordinary people lived their lives. Archeologists often learn far more from looking at a civilization's garbage dumps, than from their treasures.
Should all of mankind's endeavors grind to a halt until the world is in a state of perfect harmony and prosperity?
Humans, in our great numbers, are capable of multi-tasking. Is every penny not spent on helping the helpless a selfish waste?
An infinite amount of money cannot solve all of the world's problems in a day, and there are more problems everyday. More often it is not a question of money but of resources, money is only a means to trade for such finite resources. With finite resources like time, energy, innovation, and persuasion, every do-gooder has to pick their battles.
Thanks for the information. My understanding is that devout Jews will not say the name YHWH as they see it as being sacred and it is profane to use it. Hence they use terms like "Ha Shem" == The Name, Adonai == Lord, Melek Ha Olam == King of the World etc. Sorry, my Hebrew is very poor. The take-away is that the ancient Hebrews would use substitutes instead of invoking the personal name of God. In contrast, Islam uses the word "Allah", which comes from "il illah", "The (One) God", which is a title and not a personal name.
Also note that despite the claims of the Muslims that Allah is the God of Abraham, this claim must be false when scriptures are compared. See the following for such a comparison, which concludes based on Islamic sources that Allah and YHWH cannot be be same (in fact, Allah has the *opposite* attributes of YHWH, read into that what you will): http://www.answering-islam.org/Shamoun/god.htm
Similarly, when scripture is compared the Islamic "Mehdi" pretty much has the characteristics given of a Christian Anti-Christ (there is more than one, this one just happens to be the one most detailed in Revelations). I'm an atheist so "have no skin in the game", I'm just giving a comparison of mythologies since that comparison is not known even to most religious and educated people.
They should have used 40 computers. Its a biblical number, which would make the resulting prophecies more believable.
Meanwhile, work is underway to recover old Slashdot posts on a 666 node cluster.
Have gnu, will travel.
Are any shopping lists? Can of kraut? Tuna? Bring home for Emma?
I'm pretty sure there's supposed to be a bagel somewhere in there.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Just a few points:
Except that they both use the same original scriptures. Islam just adds on the words of their prophet similar to what Christianity does.
Except that the concept of "anti-Christ" does not exist in the original scriptures. Only in the addendum of the Christians.
The problem is that none of the mythologies make any sense unless you are already a believer. So comparing three mythologies that do not make sense to each other will not result in any insights except that they are different.
From your link:
Are you obligated to consider MY fan-fiction to be canonical? Am I obligated to consider YOUR fan-fiction to be canonical? Particularly when the ORIGINAL material was a "shared-world" effort with lots of individual contributors who dealt with a lot of allegories and parables and such.
When you have a monotheistic religion where EVERYTHING was created by a single omnipotent, omniscient god then arguing about whether that god created "evil" or "sin" is kind of silly.
Whomever wrote the link that you linked to has a religious point-of-view.
Not all Christians interpret the Bible to teach a "trinity". Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, interpret John 1 to mean that in the beginning, God (i.e. YHWH) created the Word (i.e. Michael), created all other things through the Word, and later the Word became flesh (i.e. Jesus). Thus Jesus and YHWH "are one" (John 10:30) in the same sense that Jesus and the congregation are one (John 17:21-23).
Perhaps it's a fear of the end of the world that leads to such superstitions such as not saying god's name, or in Harry potter stories the continual references to "He who shall not be named" for [spoiler alert!!!] Voldemort (vol-de-mort? flight of death? orgasm? wtf???]
The summary from wikipedia:
This short story tells of a Tibetan lamasery whose monks seek to list all of the Names of God, since they believe the Universe was created in order to note all the names of God and once this naming is completed, God will bring the Universe to an end. Three centuries ago, the monks created an alphabet in which they calculated they could encode all the possible names of God, numbering about 9,000,000,000 ("nine billion") and each having no more than nine characters. Writing the names out by hand, as they had been doing, even after eliminating various nonsense combinations, would take another 15,000 years; the monks wish to use modern technology in order to finish this task more quickly..
They rent a computer capable of printing all the possible permutations, and they hire two Westerners to install and program the machine. The computer operators are skeptical but play along. After three months, as the job nears completion, they fear that the monks will blame the computer, and by extension its operators, when nothing happens. The Westerners delay the operation of the computer so that it will complete its final print run just after their scheduled departure. After their successful departure on ponies, they pause on the mountain path on their way back to the airfield, where a plane is waiting to take them back to civilization. Under a clear night sky they estimate that it must be just about the time that the monks are pasting the final printed names into their holy books. Then they notice that ''overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.''
There are *numerous* differences between Islam and the Torah & Christianity. The evil warlord Mohammed used Arian Christian heretics to base some of the superstiton in the Qur'an on
WOAH -- with that sort of rhetoric, it's pretty reasonable to assume you're a Christian or Jewish troll debunking Islam while pretending to be an atheist. (Or, if you're really not either, you need to reconsider the implicit respect you seem to give to the Torah & Christianity while throwing out such vitriol against other things.)
Here, please allow me to enlighten you with numerous additional sources that show that the Qur'an is not the direct and eternal word of God
And I can provide you with numerous apparent contradictions from the Torah and New Testament that seem just as bad. (Scholars of Christianity and Judaism of course don't think they're bad, just like Muslims don't notice their own apparent contradictions.)
(another bold yet provably false claim, even when you don't consider the Sa'ana Qur'an), because it is plagarised from material written 500 - 1000 years earlier, gets it wrong,
Lots of the New Testament gospels are reinterpretations of Hebrew scripture written hundreds of years before. Many Jewish scholars would say that the New Testament glosses on the Torah get a lot of things wrong.
and then throws in a bunch of anti-scientific stuff to boot (that is, modern science *proves* statements in the Qur'an to be *false* - its claim to be *perfect* is simply rubbish):
Because there isn't ANYTHING in the Torah or New Testament which seems to go against science... [/sarcasm]... Creation myths, worldwide floods, creating food from nothing, floating axheads, sun standing still, and... of course... multiple stories of resurrection from the dead are just a few things that come to mind.
Now, you can choose to believe in an anti-scientific falsehood if you like. I'd rather not. It is clear that Islam makes many claims. Upon close examination those claims are *simply not true*.
Again, I'm not getting what's different hear from those who would criticize Christianity or Judaism. (No offense to any believers at all intended, but these are criticisms that could be leveled at any of these religions by those outside of them.)
You can deny the sources I've given, but that is simply denial of reality because you would rather cling to the lie of the mythology you were born into.
Huh? By the way, some of your sources are pretty darn generic links to vast resources...
Making that choice is perfectly valid, (although stupid in the 21st Century, IMHO) - you just have to understand that you are choosing to deny all the evidence that shows the various claims of your superstition as false.
I don't see that in the GP's comment at all. He was pointing out that ALL of the religions you mention appear to have these flaws. ALL of them have apparent self-contradictions and superstitious elements. To claim this is only true of Islam and not Christianity or Judaism is just deluding yourself.
Fortunately, as the wikiislam site shows, many people are realising the falsehood of religions and choosing to live a Free People (not slaves under Islam) and having to be virtuous because they want to be - not because they fear the nightmares of Bronze Age desert barbarians.
I don't get it. Why, if you're such a "free thinker," do you believe that Islamic texts are somehow "worse" than Christian or Judaic texts? If you doubt all religions, surely you must recognize that the same criticisms are true of all these.
Your specific targeting of Islam suggests a larger agenda, and from your earlier link to a site that critiques Islam from a Christian perspective suggests that something else is going on in your posts here.
If you r
yea but fortunately there are only a few thousand of those, vs hundreds of millions of the other
its howard you dipshit, says so in the loards prayer
"The problem is that none of the mythologies make any sense unless you are already a believer." Kindly wish to back that up? Simply repeating ignorant arguments that you've heard like a parrot is meaningless.
Let's stick to the scriptures of these religions, for the sake of argument (since that's essentially how this thread got started, with someone posting a critique of Islamic scripture).
It's pretty clear that theologians in each of these religions have debated the internal consistency of their scriptures for thousands of years. They've come up with various solutions, but the fact is that the most learned scholars of Christianity and Judaism clearly recognize that their own scriptures have apparent flaws when read at face value... and they've spent considerable time and effort to reconcile them.
So, aside from GP's use of the term "mythologies" (which can be offensive to believers), I don't get how he's wrong. Scholars of these religions themselves recognize that their own scriptures don't quite make sense until you figure out how to make them make sense... which usually means you're already a believer in that religion to go to that trouble.
Including your next bit of ignorance: "When you have a monotheistic religion where EVERYTHING was created by a single omnipotent, omniscient god then arguing about whether that god created "evil" or "sin" is kind of silly." Where does the Bible say that God created EVERYTHING including the acts of men who were given free will to make their own choices? I'm not here to argue for or against anything but allowing stupid people to get away with saying stupid things.
Umm, again, there are literally thousands of years of Jewish and Christian theologians who have debated the Problem of Evil.
If it was readily apparent that "evil" came from ?? (some other source outside of Creation, which is supposed to be all there is), while God made everything else, I doubt that the most learned folks in Christianity and Judaism would spend millennia trying to figure this problem out.
Of course you feel it doesn't make any sense. Regardless of its own merits you seem to lack the intelligence to even know what it says, much less make a judgment on its contents.
Given that the GP seems aware of conflicts in Christianity and Judaism that go back thousands of years, while you seem to be incredibly ignorant of the philosophical history of the religions you're trying to defend, I don't think you should be pontificating about the "lack of intelligence" in others.
Thank you for spending all that time getting around the fact that scripture is what matters to people that believe
Given your use of terms, I'm going to assume you're arguing from a Christian (and not Judaic) position.
The sola scriptura doctrine was not particularly strong until the Reformation, when Martin Luther championed it. For most of the history of the church, and still in the Catholic, Orthodox, and many Protestant Churches (Episicopal, Methodist, etc.), church tradition has also been an essential source for understanding Christianity. There has been a very strong tradition of the smartest Christian theologians debating the "Problem of Evil" for all of church history. (For the record, the rabbinical tradition in Judaism has done similar things.)
Whether YOU think it's a problem or not is irrelevant. Perhaps in whatever branch of Christianity you believe in, it isn't perceived to be a problem. Fine. But for the vast majority of Christian theologians throughout history, it was something that merited significant discussion.
and you couldn't come up with a single verse to back up God making Evil or the Bible saying God is responsible for everything. Good job.
It's not my job to educate you on the basics of your religion. Nor is it my job to READ for you -- did you even look at the links I gave in my post?
If you skimmed the "Problem of Evil" article, you'd discover that there are in fact parts of the Bible that many people have interpreted to imply that God is the ultimate source of Evil.
The most obvious example (discussed in the link) is the entire book of Job, where God is the one responsible for inflicting all manner of bad acts upon Job's family. When Job -- who according to scripture itself, did nothing wrong to deserve this -- dares to question God's plan, God just yells at him from a whirlwind for a while, saying essentially, "Were you there when I laid the foundations of the world??" Implication: You have no concept of how great my power is or why I need to wield it in certain ways. And if I decide to inflict evil into the world, or even on you and your family, that's my business... you can't hope to understand why.
Again, just going on sources mentioned in my link, another common passage discussed is Isaiah 45:7: "I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things." And there are plenty more verses that other theologians have discussed in this context.
And please note that I'm not the one interpreting these passages to imply that God created evil -- it's many Christian theologians who debate these points. I wouldn't presume to interpret the Bible for you, but you have to acknowledge that a lot of smart Christians -- who probably know a lot more about the Bible than you do -- have seen problems here.
By the way, you're the one skirting the logical problem here, which is perhaps what troubled Christian philosophers the most. Regardless of what scripture says, if a Christian believes in an all-powerful and all-knowing God, that God should have the power to create good things. For some reason, he chose to create humans that could also do evil. From scripture, it seems implied that he created the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the book of Genesis, so it appears he even made it possible for humans to acquire the knowledge to do evil. (Of course, in the story, Satan is involved in this acquisition, but most Christian theologians acknowledge that Satan too much have been created by the all-powerful God, so that tempting toward evil must also have ultimately been part of God's creation.) Why would an all-powerful, all-knowing, and presumably all-good God choose to create beings that MIGHT do evil?
"The Problem of Evil" is a major theological conundrum that philosophers have debated for centuries. The fact that you think you solved it in a couple sentences speaks of great ignorance and great arrogance.