What Do You Think Of "The Bible Code?... Fact Or Fiction?

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Has anyone here ever heard of the “Bible Code”, because from what I have read there are secret codes hidden in the bible that would be nearly impossible for it to be coincidental because there are so many.

These range from World War 2, to assasinations, and Hiroshema (sp?). I read that this can and has been proven as fact, although controvercial with many… This is the first I’ve ever actually read about this that I can remember, but now I don’t know what to think… What about you guys?

Link: bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/biblecode.shtml

Link: detailshere.com/biblecode.htm

I also read that on a BBC news special, if you scan a winnie the pooh book you can find links to princess diana (don’t know how true this is tho)
 
Take ANY book in ANY language which has the same number of words in it as the bible and you will “discover” this amazing bible code.
Don’t waste your time… it’s a red herring of phenomenal proportions.
nianka
 
What the bible code founder said about that BBC documentary is actually really convincing. He says that the chance of the bible codes being a coincidence are like 1 in 5 million and the random book that they tried to get messages out of was like 1 in 20 chance of a coincidence.

For example on one page it says something like “Pincess Diana” and then “they killed her” and then “Paris” (where she died) is also found on this page in the bible.

The link for this is mpelembe.mappibiz.com/archives_02/Bible_Code.html
 
I see there is really only one claim of prediction–the assassination of the Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel. This does not particularly amaze me considering Isreali prime ministers are walking targets. Note also that he told him he was in danger but didn’t give clue one on how to avert the danger. That would be a handy piece of information don’t you think?

All of the rest of the “predictions” are reverse engineered so to speak. That is, the event already happened, and he looked for the code afterwords. This is like a historian starting with a conclusion about the past and then considering only the evidence that supports it.

Scott
 
I put the “Bible Code” kooks a notch below those who toke a few isolated verses from the Bible and try to base a theology on it. Both dupe people into believing something that is utter nonsense at best, and a sure path to eternal damnation at worst.
 
another conspiracy theory to make money. Watch John Safran Vs God (if anyone can find it) and you’ll see that you can see that even if we feed moby dick into the program that guy uses we can come up with predictions of september 11 (may they all rest in peace). Someone please post on my threads.
 
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Steven87:
Has anyone here ever heard of the “Bible Code”, because from what I have read there are secret codes hidden in the bible that would be nearly impossible for it to be coincidental because there are so many.

These range from World War 2, to assasinations, and Hiroshema (sp?). I read that this can and has been proven as fact, although controvercial with many… This is the first I’ve ever actually read about this that I can remember, but now I don’t know what to think… What about you guys?

Link: bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/biblecode.shtml

Link: detailshere.com/biblecode.htm

I also read that on a BBC news special, if you scan a winnie the pooh book you can find links to princess diana (don’t know how true this is tho)
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Randal Ingermanson wrote a devastating analysis of the “Bible Code” in his book Who Wrote the Bible Code?

In effect, all the Bible Code does is turn the consonants of the Hebrew version of the Pentateuch – the first five books of the Bible – into a giant word search game made of almost as many word search rectangles as there are Hebrew consonants in the Pentateuch, and the power of these to contain words is geometrically increased by adding to the word search game a rule permitting the word searcher to find words in non-contiguous letters. The ambiguity of the vowelless Hebrew alphabet re-multiplies the word searcher’s ability to find “messages from God” in the Bible Code matrices.

In this collection of word search rectangles made out of the Pentateuch, made vast beyond understanding by a computer program, the Bible Code computer program finds far, far, far more nonsense in the Bible Code matrices than words. In effect, the Bible Code computer program turns the Bible into that nonsense hypothetical to the effect that if we had 1,000,000 monkeys pounding randomly on 1,000,000 typewriters for an infinite period of time, **one **of them will finally produce good Shakespeare.

Ingermanson got hold of a copy of the Bible Code computer program, and applied it to a Hebrew version of War and Peace, which is about as long as the Bible, and in effect generated “messages from God” at about the same rate the Bible Code computer program found “messages from God” in the Pentateuch. The Bible Code authors have succeeded in using a computer program to turn the Bible into the 1,000,000 monkey hypothetical.

In other words, the Bible Code is a fraud. The authors Drosnin and Ripps may have bamboozled themselves into thinking that the Bible Code is real in the first book, but when one analyzes how the Bible Code matrices in the first and second books must have been created, and understands how any well-educated Israeli third grader could create fake “messages from God” which look *perfectly identical *to Drosnin and Ripps’ “messages from God,” it simply isn’t plausible that the authors are not aware that the Bible Code is nonsense.
 
I am always sceptical when a method is found for predicting the future, but is proven by how it predicted the past. There is a difference in knowing today that the Second Coming will happen, and finding a prediction about the Titanic in the Declaration of Independence after the fact (Now don’t go looking, I made that up, although it’s probably there if you look hard enough).
 
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Steven87:
Has anyone here ever heard of the “Bible Code”, because from what I have read there are secret codes hidden in the bible that would be nearly impossible for it to be coincidental because there are so many.

These range from World War 2, to assasinations, and Hiroshema (sp?). I read that this can and has been proven as fact, although controvercial with many… This is the first I’ve ever actually read about this that I can remember, but now I don’t know what to think… What about you guys?

Link: bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/biblecode.shtml

Link: detailshere.com/biblecode.htm

I also read that on a BBC news special, if you scan a winnie the pooh book you can find links to princess diana (don’t know how true this is tho)
Click to expand...

Nianka is right - the problem with the so-called BC, is that the sum total of possible combinations of letters is so great, & the conditions for testing the BC are so lax, that it is almost inevitable some of those combinations will yield a set of letters which can be construed as a coherent message.​

And - it is only the reader who finds a particular juxtaposition of letters coherent: the words “rabies” and “Bush” (to take a hypothetical example) may mean to one person that a certain politician is a mad dog who should be killed - or they may mean that Jeb Bush will be bitten by a rabid dog. Or that Usama will be defeated by Dubya and killed like a mad dog: there is far too much room for the imagination of the reader, and far too little stable meaning for the supposed messages to be real messages - there is too much room for arbitrariness. So there is no reason to think there is any objectively existing BC in the Bible:because a code presupposes a stable meaning - not something as arbitrary as this is.

And, why choose “rabies” & “Bush” ? There may be other series of letters on the same page which are equally well-able to be interpreted as messages.

A code which:
  • is written in consonants only
  • can be read diagonally
  • upwards
  • downwards
  • horizontally left to right
  • horizontally right to left
is capable of yielding any sense one can see in it. People are being conned into parting with money for a book which even someone with zero knowledge of Maths (like yours truly) can see is riddled with logical fallacies. There was a programme about the BC on UK TV, and I didn’t need to see it all to see that the whole idea of a BC is utter tosh from beginning to end. Maybe gullible people deserve to be deceived 😦

If you must read this balderdash - borrow a copy from a library & save someone else from taking it out 🙂 But don’t waste your cash ##
 
Scott Waddell:
I see there is really only one claim of prediction–the assassination of the Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel. This does not particularly amaze me considering Isreali prime ministers are walking targets. Note also that he told him he was in danger but didn’t give clue one on how to avert the danger. That would be a handy piece of information don’t you think?

All of the rest of the “predictions” are reverse engineered so to speak. That is, the event already happened, and he looked for the code afterwords. This is like a historian starting with a conclusion about the past and then considering only the evidence that supports it.

Scott
Click to expand...

It is like the SDA tactic of deciding that the Papal Beast “received a deadly wound” in 1798, because the arithmetic works out that way​

  • if the rise of the PB was in 538, and
  • if the PB = the 666, and
  • **if **666 is the correct reading, and
  • **if **the exegesis is correct
  • and then working out that, lo and behold, the events of 1798 were the fulfilment of prophesy 🙂
And talking of fake prophecy, Drosnin thinks some sort of world-shaking disaster will occur in 2006. Since the rapture-mongers were wrong a few years ago, I’m certain he will be no more accurate. 🙂

The BC is simply a secular form of prophecy mongering-in-reverse. And its as intellectually respectable. No wonder if atheists think the Bible is unmitigated equine effluvium 😦 ##
 
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nianka:
Take ANY book in ANY language which has the same number of words in it as the bible and you will “discover” this amazing bible code.
Don’t waste your time… it’s a red herring of phenomenal proportions.
nianka
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No actually you wont. Very long novels like War and Peace are used as control.
 
😦 The other thing that bothers me about the “Bible Code” is the hook they use to sell the CD: “Not that we recommend it, BUT you can search for your own name and discover what’s in store for you!” To me, that is tantamount to using the Holy Scriptures (Old or New) as an Ouija board, which is, at best, despiccable, at worst, diabolical. :eek:
nianka
 
It seems to me that the only way you could think that the BC might be true is if you don’t know what the Bible is for in the first place, and if you know what the Bible is for, then you know that the BC is at best an interesting coincidence, at worst, a hoax to distract people from what the Bible is really for in the first place. We have the assurance of our faith what the Bible is really for. Only if someone doesn’t know this (or ignores this fact) can one be interested in some hidden secret. It is as though one said “well we have this big ol’ book, and its obvious meaning can’t be significant to our lives, so let’s see what non-obvious meaning it might have. I’ll just feed into the DeCodinator 1000 and viola!”

The Bible communicates in many and various ways God’s love for a sinful humanity, and his relentless efforts to make us holy enough to be worthy of his love. It is definitely not for communicating cryptic “predictions” that can only have been decoded with the help of late 20th century computers (even if the cryptic predictions had been placed there from a supernatural source) since, on this account, the Bible would have been essentially useless for its main purpose for 3000+ years. [BTW, I really don’t believe God would have cared too much to warn the whole of humanity about the impending death of Princess Diana in Paris!]

If highly disputed and oracular “predictions” arise from the peculiar and totally unnatural arrangement of Hebrew characters when interpreted according to elaborate computer algorithms, then it is about as interesting as images of the Virgin Mary (or Marlene Dietrich) appearing on grilled cheese sandwiches.

The Bible contains no secrets beyond, “reform your lives and believe the Good News”!
 
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aridite:
It seems to me that the only way you could think that the BC might be true is if you don’t know what the Bible is for in the first place, and if you know what the Bible is for, then you know that the BC is at best an interesting coincidence, at worst, a hoax to distract people from what the Bible is really for in the first place. We have the assurance of our faith what the Bible is really for. Only if someone doesn’t know this (or ignores this fact) can one be interested in some hidden secret. It is as though one said “well we have this big ol’ book, and its obvious meaning can’t be significant to our lives, so let’s see what non-obvious meaning it might have. I’ll just feed into the DeCodinator 1000 and viola!”

The Bible communicates in many and various ways God’s love for a sinful humanity, and his relentless efforts to make us holy enough to be worthy of his love. It is definitely not for communicating cryptic “predictions” that can only have been decoded with the help of late 20th century computers (even if the cryptic predictions had been placed there from a supernatural source) since, on this account, the Bible would have been essentially useless for its main purpose for 3000+ years. [BTW, I really don’t believe God would have cared too much to warn the whole of humanity about the impending death of Princess Diana in Paris!]

If highly disputed and oracular “predictions” arise from the peculiar and totally unnatural arrangement of Hebrew characters when interpreted according to elaborate computer algorithms, then it is about as interesting as images of the Virgin Mary (or Marlene Dietrich) appearing on grilled cheese sandwiches.

The Bible contains no secrets beyond, “reform your lives and believe the Good News”!
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Wish I had thought of all those points 😃​

IOW - the alleged messages are religiously trivial; there is no point in their being encoded in the Bible (what would a Torah scholar of 1095, or a Jew of 300 BC, learn from seeing Princess Di’s name in the Torah ? That’s right - nothing); and the Bible is not Old Moore’s Almanack ##
 
I remember watching an interview on TV with a professor out of Austraila, who used the same criterea that was used in formulating the “Bible Code” and used it toward Moby Dick, and came up with simular “eye-popping” furtunes. Simply put, with a book with enough words in it, chances are you will end up with some type of code, whether the Bible or Moby Dick. So it’s nothing special.

The idea of out-landish secret/hidden knowledge in the Bible is a tad too gnostic for me anyways… 😉
 
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Steven87:
I also found this link ( cs.anu.edu.au/people/bdm/dilugim/moby.html ) and it makes it look like a complete hoax, but isn’t it wierd how there are 1 in a million chance of this happening and it happens several times through the bible?
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Gobbledygook is what I say. Just follow Christ’s teachings. If the founding Fathers didn’t see anything but Christ in the bible - why should we be looking for something other than our Lord?
 
I have watched the TV shows on it and it is kind of amazing. But so are the TV shows that tell us that UFOs are in our friendly skies. What does it really do for our everyday walk of faith? Zippo. It’s just something Fox Mulder might say. The truth is out there somewhere.
 
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