tsig
a carbon based life-form
- Joined
- Nov 25, 2005
- Messages
- 39,049
Oh, triangle. Do you have any concept of the depth of the abyss you're teetering on the edge of, if not already plummeting into? In the other thread you acknowledged having wasted a lot of time peering into real and metaphorical telescopes, but this particular 'scope is more of the kaleido- variety. Reflect random arrangements off of enough internal mirrors and they'll show you beautiful patterns, but searching for meaning in those patterns is the road to madness, and finding such meaning is a major milestone on the way there.
There are people who see the teleological hand of some universal intelligence at work in the random turns of the Tarot cards, the shapes formed by tea leaves, and the arrangements that the planets and stars blunder mindlessly into and out of as they follow their utterly predictable courses. Should we credit those with divine meaning too? Does God or the gods also pass us messages in the toss of I Ching sticks, the movements of birds, and the entrails of sacrificed sheep? Are those the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, umpteenth channels of communication?
Or are people just really good at making up stories that attribute meaning to arrangements, whether they actually contain it or not?
I've examined claims like yours before. Here, I found over sixteen meaningful stylistic devices in a few lines of a pop song, to test the claim that the comparable stylistic depth of the verse in the Koran can only be explained by divine origin.
Here, I found a veritable confession (in both verbal and pictorial form) of an elaborate 9/11 conspiracy, by putting the letters of one of the most well-known quotes about the events of 9/11 into a square and then looking for words and patterns. Understanding why I did that and what it shows might take some back-story. It was based on what a member named Kingfisher2926 was demonstrating in this thread: that putting the first 64 Hebrew characters from Genesis into an 8x8 square in a particular way revealed therein all sorts of "significant" characteristics, shapes, symmetries, number patterns, and crostic words that couldn't possibly be the result of mere coincidence.
I recommend that you read that entire thread, though it's lengthy. You will either find a kindred spirit who will enlighten you with his discoveries of divine revelation, or a person whose evident departure from sense and reality will frighten you into reconsidering the course you're on.
In that thread, he claimed that the patterns he finds are self-evident from the most basic of manipulations, rather than the result of extensive searching in a vast space of possibilities. Does that claim sound familiar? I responded thus:
He also claimed that he had performed "control" searches by repeating the same manipulations that revealed divine messages in Genesis on other generic texts, and had not found comparably striking patterns. I responded thus:
The "MRC Secret Seal" referred to can be found in the second post on this page of the thread, in which member MRC_Hans (and other members who chimed in subsequently) found multiple meaningful words and "clues" in a letter grid derived directly from the opening words of Kingfisher's own first post in the thread. So two skeptical control attempts, MRC_Hans's "MRC Secret Seal" and my "Silverstein Seal," both succeeded on the first try in finding the semblance of hidden messages—and those were both based on English text, in which typical word lengths are longer and thus less likely to be formed at random. Perform the search over years of effort instead of a few minutes, and it's no surprise that more "amazing" improbable patterns will be found.
Bottom line: there are reasons why most religious authorities in scripture-based faiths discourage or forbid the kind of logomancy you and Kingfisher are engaging in here, regarding it at best a waste of effort and at worst a form of mortally sinful idolatry. You risk, in the quest to replace weak faith with hard evidence, doing the opposite instead, replacing resolute faith with the shakiest of evidence. With the further likelihood of replacing God with the kaleidoscope figures of your own imagination. Those who already consider God to be a kaleidoscope figure of people's imaginations won't mind terribly much, but it seems a strange risk to take when you maintain that such a being exists.
If you believe (as many Christians and other believers do) that a universal intelligence has manipulated language itself to preserve the (hidden coded) meanings in ancient scriptures, then why not focus on the much richer actual overt meanings conveyed by the actual words? Do you think the universal intelligence failed to guide those, and acted only upon the secret codes instead?
The Bible says that God once altered humankind, in a manner that would arguably have been responsible over the long run for more deaths worldwide than the Great Flood, in order to prevent a tribe from building too tall a building. (Most likely, the originators of the story would have envisioned the "tower" of Babel as some sort of large ziggurat.) What does that narrative mean today? Should we be concerned that erecting ever-taller skyscrapers will bring some even more destructive manifestation of God's wrath upon the entire world?
If not, if even the meaning of that straightforward story is unclear, then what meaning can all the secret codes and special numbers have? What is being communicated in this second channel?
Also what use is a communication from god if it's meaning has to wait for thousands of years? I wouldn't trust a being that went to so much trouble to disguise it's message.
Lo I refined the text and detected the code only to discover that I'd written it myself.
