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November 05, 2024 |
| How I Got Here | ||
I was born in a Christian home, the son of a preacher. As children do, I came to understand right from wrong and later I understood what it meant to be a Christian. I always wanted to do what was right but there was also something in me that wanted to be in control of me. I wanted to be a Christian and at the same time wanted to run my own life.
As a young teen, there were multiple times when I went up for altar calls because I knew I wasn't living right. Almost immediately I would go back to being the way I was.
I was raised to think about the future. What would I be? Who would I marry? Along with that, there was the idea that God had the best plan for me, including the best woman to be my wife, the best career, etc.. But I found myself asking, what if I didn't like God's choices for me.
I sometimes wonder if someone had explained it better to me, would my life have been different. I doubt it. My problem was that I didn't trust God to run my life in a way that would meet my standards.
I had another problem. I was an introvert. I didn't want to be the guy who stuck out. I didn't want to be the one in front of people. The way I was taught, Christianity pretty much required that.
As a result, my view on things was noticeably different from other Christian kids my age. I remember one case at summer camp. The teacher asked us to close our eyes and imagine that each of us was walking along and Jesus came from behind and started walking with us. "What would that be like?", she asked us. All the other kids imaged how great it would be to talk to him, to ask him questions, or to introduce him to their friends. I imagined that all my friends were laughing at me.
A couple days later I was in a camp building looking for my cousin. A young woman came up the stairs and said God had told her to come here. She told me some things about trusting God. I don't remember what she said but I could see that she had a relationship with God. That kind of trust was still beyond me though.
As I grew up, I wanted to run my own life more and more. It wasn't so much that I didn't believe in the existence of God. I just didn't trust him to run my life the way I wanted it run.
By this time, my father was teaching at a Bible School. His boss' family and ours were close friends. After a while, I became close to his son, though he was a little younger than me. He also had a desire to live his own life. He was different though. He really chased after the pleasures of the world, as we say. I was much more careful, but I think that difference only meant it took me longer to get into those things and not to the same extent.
I was pressured by my father to attend the Bible School where he taught. He was making a mistake that is commonly made throughout Christianity. He felt that exposure to Bible classes and other Christians would change me. But, if you get too many contrarian people, they find each other and can work together to cause a lot of trouble. The same mistake is often made in churches.
Other fathers, some also pastors, were thinking the same things that year and sending their teens. There were enough of us that we made that year one of the school's worst. One of us was kicked out for going to the bar. I started a relationship with another one, a girl.
I knew I had signed an agreement that outlawed public displays of affection, but I wanted to set my own rules. One day, we were studying outside one day and she rested her head in my lap. One of the teachers caught us that way and we were punished. I was pretty arrogant and thought there was nothing wrong with what we were doing - in the secular world, it wasn't. I never did do the punishment I was given. I should have been kicked out but probably wasn't because of my father's position there.
There were other things that happened but I'm still too embarrassed about them to relate them. There would be no edification anyway. Satan gets enough credit as is.
The next year, I went to the technical institute where I would start my career. While I was there, I attended a church, at first. There were problems in the church, and some people who had no more business being there than I did.
I wrestled against and found fault with most of the teachings. Some of the teachings were inconsistent, contradictory, or not logical. For example, the church was very against drinking alcohol but here is Jesus creating alcohol and drinking alcohol. Some people tried to find ways to deny that Jesus drank alcohol. They claimed things like, Jesus created non-alcoholic wine - a common Just-So story. This and other teachings of the church didn't line up with the Bible and I pounced on them to build a wall against God. I'll come back to discussing church teachings much later.
I soon stopped attending the church. This began a slow distancing from Christianity. After technical school, I got a good job and ran into educated people who had no interest in God. I began reading Atheist literature about how there couldn't possibly be a God. Eventually I considered myself an Atheist.
I lived this way for almost 40 years. After 19 years at that job, I moved on. A little later I moved to Texas. Looking back on it, I have to say that God was plotting against Stan the Atheist, and this was the start of the plan.
I got a good job in Texas with a good company. I was stunned to find that many of the leaders of the company were Christians. When they had a staff party, one of the leaders would bless the food. This was completely the opposite of my previous job. I began to learn it wasn't only them. Things are different in Texas. Unlike Canada had been, Texas was comfortable with Christianity. Those who didn't believe, didn't believe; those who did believe, did. There wasn't the arrogant animosity that I had seen and become part of.
A day came when I felt I needed to find something new. The internet was available and filling up with web pages about everything, so I searched for all sorts of things that interested me. I had heard about Maxwell's equations. They are normally taught to Electrical Engineers but I had trained as an Engineering Technologist and that wasn't part of the course. I started learning about those.
After I had gone as far with Maxwell as I wanted, I searched for more interesting stuff. After a while, I ran into something I had never heard of: Bible Codes. The idea is that there are messages spread throughout the Bible. These can be found by pulling characters from the Hebrew and Aramaic Bible texts using periodic intervals. For example, you might move 400 characters into the text and then look at every 12th character. Sometimes, these characters would form words.
This discovery began accidentally with a Catholic priest about 300 years ago who was copying Hebrew text into columns (for some reason). As he did this, he noticed that a Hebrew word appeared in one of the columns. He had created what looked like the Word Search puzzles we know and had found a word. He found that very strange and began a search for other words, but he never found another.
In this computer age, we can do those searches in the blink of an eye using all possible offsets and intervals. In fact, it can be done the other way, looking for specific words. The people in this Bible Code group had found not just words but impossibly long coherent sentences.
I wanted to know what those messages said. It turns out that what they say isn't that important. That's just the hook. The fact that they exist, at impossible levels of probability, is a real problem. I didn't get that at first - I went for the hook.
In all languages, some characters are used more often than others and some words are used more often. If you search a large text like War and Peace for the word "The" you will find it everywhere. If you search for "Zoo" instead, it is likely you won't find it even once. Therefore there are different probabilities associated with different sequences of characters. Thus it is possible to calculate the probability of finding a word or sequence of words in a text of a known size.
Generally, the longer the word or groups of words (sentences), the less likely you are to find them. These people were looking for low probability words, like the names of well-known people in our time. When they found a word, they would check the preceding and following characters to see if the word was part of a sentence.
This group was very scientific about their work, recording everything, calculating probabilities, etc.. If they hadn't been, I would have written them off as crackpots. They would also search other large books to see if such improbable things could be found there. They were never found, which is what you would expect.
I did find other people who were also claiming amazing finds … but they wouldn't show their work for verification. I contacted one of them and asked to see his work. He said he was very busy and had chosen not to reveal it. I asked if I could donate something in exchange for the work. He said he could use a new computer. He was a fraud.
Throughout my life it has amazed me that there are people out there who will take the time to perpetrate a hoax like that, just for the giggles of doing it. He had never asked for money or suggested he would make his work available for money. That was me who started that. I think, "Maybe you could put your talents to better use." Amazing. Satan's little minions running around.
There were hundreds of such finds in the real group's collection. Some of them referred to well-known people and even to controversial pastors and said things about them that were known to be true.
One technique the group would use once they found a name like that was to search for other known aspects of the person. Often they would find these in the same column matrix with the first search. These would be at different "angles" in the matrix. I'll show an example later.
Sometimes they would find a word or phrase that would land on a word in the original text that was related. By that I mean that a character in a found word would also be a character in a word in the Bible in a verse that was related that was related.
Part of the reason I don't tell many people this story is that few can grasp the statistical significance of these findings. I think a lot of people fall back on the idea that, if you give typewriters to enough monkeys eventually one of them will type one of Shakespeare's works. It's off topic but recently a study came out showing that isn't true.
It is difficult to grasp how improbable it is for randomly chosen characters to form a short sentence. These groups were finding sentences as long as 100 characters in length. The following is a description of a sentence that was found and the probability associated with it.
Each letter in this 25 letter Hebrew message is separated by exactly 18,474 letters, and spans almost the entire New Testament!
owbyab ewsy Uyny la Nb yha Nlhl (English equivalent characters for the Hebrew characters - SB)
in a manger Yeshua will blossom of God the son where? to lodge (Translation - SB) - Aramaic New Testament
The probability of this message occurring randomly is 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000. The distance in the Bible text between each character of this message is 18,474 characters, which means the message is longer than one Bible book. In fact it crosses over most of the 27 books of the New Testament, picking 1, 2, or 3 characters from longer books and none from shorter books.
Some factors that would increase the improbability cannot be included in that probability calculation. What are the odds that the Bible books would be ordered in the way they are which produce this message? The books were written by many authors at different times. The ordering of the books into what we call the Bible was not set until at least one hundred years later (some would say much later than that). The order is not chronological, nor alphabetical by author or title, nor anything obvious like that. The order is Gospels first, Revelation last, and by book size (largest first) for everything between them.
Another factor that can't be included is, what are the odds that the copy we have would be identical, character for character, to the original. The text we have has to be something like the 50th copy of a copy, all done manually. The chances of that are practically zero. Yet here we have this low probability message in our copy. The only answer is that the author of the message knew what changes would happen to the text over time and compensated for those, just as he had to know how the books would be ordered.
Another factor that can't be included in the probability calculation is coherency. The calculation only gives the probability that a word or words would be found. If the result is "cat themselves dog his", it isn't a sentence. A comprehensible, meaningful, and relevant sentence is even less likely.
I don't read Hebrew or Aramaic, but I was able to do some searches myself. The searching program and original texts were available. With that I could enter an English word, which the program would translate to Hebrew and search for. I could confirm other's search results and search for things myself, though I never found anything significant.
I did manage to be the motivation for a search that found something. I was chatting with the group about something that a person had said in a different group. He thought that part of God's punishment for the sins of Adam and Eve must have been an increase in entropy.
That caught the eye of one of the searchers who knew Hebrew and Aramaic. He looked up the Hebrew word for Entropy, searched for it and found two instances. He checked the lowest probability instance to see if the word was part of a sentence and it was. The sentence was:
Entropy is a witness to suppress
"suppress" could also be "descend", "go down", "decline")
The meaning would be that entropy was created to be a witness (presumably to God's judgment of the sins) that would cause a suppression. Entropy is a difficult concept, but suppression could be a fair one-word description of the effect it has.
What makes this special is that one of the characters in this sentence is also a character in Genesis 3:6, which talks about the punishment for the original sin.
There was another find that got my attention. I've tried to show below what it would look like. The matrix would use Hebrew characters of course, but I've rendered it with English characters as if it was in English.
The word "man" appears twice and shares the last letter, "n", between them. The two words "life" and "death" are on the same vertical, but the letters are interleaved and read in opposite directions.
When I first saw this matrix, I thought it was odd that opposite words would be interleaved and in opposite directions. It was also odd that a repeated word would share a letter. I hadn't even seen a repeated word in any other matrix. The words were not so rare or so long, so the probability was not all that low. I moved on.
But that matrix bothered me. Sometime later, I went back to that one and looked at it again. Suddenly I realized it wasn't just words, like the other matrices had been. It was an illustration for a story about mankind crossing into life for a time and then crossing back out by death. All my career I had lived by illustrations, charts and graphs. This meant something to me.
"There is a God!!!", I realized. There was nothing to do but bow my head and pray.
All the Atheist arguments I had read were nothing in the light of this revelation. Now, impressed by a God like that, I could trust in him to run my life.
I began to try to remember all the Bible stuff I had heard. I remembered there was a father, a son, and a holy spirit but I didn't remember how that worked or who they were to each other. But another question burned inside of me. What about the Sabbath? It was an odd question to focus on. I didn't realize it would be part of my direction.
I remembered our family had kept a Sunday Sabbath when I was young. We wouldn't buy anything on Sunday, and we rested … sort of. When we moved to a new city where the Christians there had stopped doing that, we stopped too. Was the Sabbath for Christians?
I began reading everything I could about the Sabbath. It seemed like all the Protestants were very against it but they couldn't agree on why it wasn't for Christians.
I read the history of Sabbath observance by Christians. I found the Catholic church had moved its observance from Saturday, when the Jews kept it, to Sunday. I wondered what gave them the right to do that. I read that they began persecuting, torturing, and killing people who continued to keep the Sabbath on Saturday.
I read accounts written by people about the time when that change was made. They said that most Christians were keeping the Sabbath on Saturday, but Rome had decided to do it their own way. The further you were from Rome, the more likely you would keep it on Saturday.
After 2 months of researching it, I came to the conclusion that keeping the Saturday Sabbath was for Christians. I began doing that.
This was just the start. As I read the Bible more and more, I realized the modern church was a long way from being the church described in the Bible. In sequence, these were the realizations I was led to understand:
These bad teachings may not seem like a big deal, but they affect many areas even unexpected areas like, where did Enoch and Elijah go when God took them?
There are not many churches that agree with the above list. I find myself to be a stranger among Protestants and Christians generally.