Theology in the News

The FBI has launched an investigation after 18 church websites across the United States were hacked and their regular content replaced with an appeal for Christians to convert to Islam.

The Rev. Vinnie Dauer of Fallen Timbers Community Church in Waterville, Ohio, said he received a text message from a church member telling him that someone had posted “Muslim propaganda” on the church’s website.

Mr Dauer, who is the assistant pastor of Fallen Timbers, said:

“It was unnerving, but I think also it was an indicator to me of the different world we live in. No one could walk into this church building and put up propaganda that’s contradictory to our belief system, but yet our website is a representation of who we are.”

Churches in other parts of the US, including California, Seattle, Texas, North Carolina and Florida, were also affected by the hacking.

The hacker, who identified himself as a Muslim and signed his work “Mr HAiL”, gained access to the website host’s entire portfolio of sites, but altered only the church sites.

He deleted the content and replaced them with a photograph of Mecca, a few paragraphs about Islam, and a list of twelve other websites purportedly containing more information about the Muslim faith.

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Fascinating:

The program, part of a sub-field of artificial intelligence studies known as authorship attribution, has a range of potential application – from helping law enforcement to developing new computer programs for writers. But the Bible provided a tempting test case for the algorithm’s creators.

For millions of Jews and Christians, it’s a tenet of their faith that God is the author of the core text of the Hebrew Bible – the Torah, also known as the Pentateuch or the Five Books of Moses. But since the advent of modern biblical scholarship, academic researchers have believed the text was written by a number of different authors whose work could be identified by seemingly different ideological agendas and linguistic styles and the different names they used for God.

Today, scholars generally split the text into two main strands. One is believed to have been written by a figure or group known as the “priestly” author, because of apparent connections to the temple priests in Jerusalem. The rest is “non-priestly.” Scholars have meticulously gone over the text to ascertain which parts belong to which strand.

When the new software was run on the Pentateuch, it found the same division, separating the “priestly” and “non-priestly.” It matched up with the traditional academic division at a rate of 90 percent – effectively recreating years of work by multiple scholars in minutes, said Moshe Koppel of Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, the computer science professor who headed the research team.

“We have thus been able to largely recapitulate several centuries of painstaking manual labor with our automated method,” the Israeli team announced in a paper presented last week in Portland, Oregon, at the annual conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics. The team includes a computer science doctoral student, Navot Akiva, and a father-son duo: Nachum Dershowitz, a Tel Aviv University computer scientist, and his son, Idan Dershowitz, a Bible scholar at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The places in which the program disagreed with accepted scholarship might prove interesting leads for scholars. The first chapter of Genesis, for example, is usually thought to have been written by the “priestly” author, but the software indicated it was not.

Similarly, the book of Isaiah is largely thought to have been written by two distinct authors, with the second author taking over after Chapter 39. The software’s results agreed that the book might have two authors, but suggested the second author’s section actually began six chapters earlier, in Chapter 33.

The differences “have the potential to generate fruitful discussion among scholars,” said Michael Segal of Hebrew University’s Bible Department, who was not involved in the project.

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Christianity continues to dominate Facebook interactions with Jesus Daily at number one with 5,190,378 fans and 2,306,342 interactions, and The Bible at number two with 7,041,782 fans and 1,082,569 interactions.

This performance outstrips both Lady Gaga and Justin Beiber as well as all sport.

The Facebook page Jesus Christ is at number 10 on the list.

This trend has been going on for weeks now.

The last time I reported religion as the top interacted pages on Facebook, the rise in engagement rates with certain religious pages was thought to reflect the time of year, namely, the approach of Easter and Passover.

So what accounts for these ongoing trends?

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Top ten most quoted bible verses on social media following the death of Osama bin Laden:

1. Proverbs 24:17 “Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when they stumble, do not let your heart rejoice.”

2. Psalm 138:8 “The LORD will make PERFECT the things that concern me”(KJV). (NIV: “The LORD will vindicate me; your love, LORD, endures forever—do not abandon the works of your hands.”)

3. Proverbs 21:15 “When justice is done, it brings joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers.” (Rick Warren started this one):

4. Ezekiel 33:11 “Say to them, ‘As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, people of Israel?”

5. Ezekiel 18:23 “Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign LORD. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?”

6. Isaiah 1:18 “Come now, let us settle the matter,” says the LORD. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.”

7. Proverbs 11:10 “When the righteous prosper, the city rejoices; when the wicked perish, there are shouts of joy.”

8. Proverbs 24:18 ” … or the LORD will see and disapprove and turn his wrath away from them.” (The popularity of this verse is due to it finishing the sentence begun by the #1 most popular verse.)

9. Proverbs 24:1 “Do not envy the wicked, do not desire their company;” (probably an effort to quote Proverbs 24:17)

10. Proverbs 28:5 “Evildoers do not understand what is right, but those who seek the LORD understand it fully.”

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“The Bible says that every eye is going to see [the second coming],” Graham told “This Week” anchor Christiane Amanpour. “How is the whole world going to see [Jesus Christ] all at one time? I don’t know, unless all of a sudden everybody’s taking pictures and it’s on the media worldwide. I don’t know. Social media could have a big part in that.”

SOURCE

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The following article is an excellent summary of the current archeological battle raging between Islamic organisations and Jewish.

I have touched on some of this previoulsy here.

The Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) was founded in 1979 by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). It has three basic goals. The first is to spread a Saudi version of Koranic education throughout the Islamic world. The second is to publicize Islam to the non-Islamic world, both positively by touting Islamic civilization and its accomplishments—this it dubs “Dialogue among Civilizations”—and negatively, by protesting what it calls the “anti-Islamic campaign.”

The third goal is to oppose the “Judaization of Al-Quds”—i.e., Jerusalem. To that end, a recent ISESCO meeting in Amman has bitterly attacked archeological projects in the Holy City conducted by “the Israeli occupation authorities . . . in full breach of the relevant international laws and conventions.” Citing supposedly “objective and well-documented information on the alteration of the Sacred City’s character and obliteration of its Arab and Islamic identity,” ISESCO vigorously denounced all such “attempts to Judaize Al-Quds Al-Sharif.”

Of course, Muslim claims that Jews are threatening Jerusalem have a long pedigree. So, in particular, do attacks on Israeli archeological practice there. In 1974, UNESCO—the international organization that ISESCO nominally apes—was forced by the Arab states to vote sanctions against Israeli digs in Jerusalem and to deny Israel membership in the organization’s European regional group. Although Israel was readmitted in 1977, UNESCO’s bias continued to be so blatant that in 1984 the U.S., UK, and others temporarily left the organization.  Such a principled act is difficult to imagine today, even after UNESCO has declared Rachel’s Tomb to be a mosque and has condemned Israel for putting West Bank archeological sites on its list of National Heritage sites.

Is it necessary to point out that, in this area as in others, the true situation is the exact opposite of the one being portrayed? Israeli archeologists and the Israel Antiquities Authority have studied and preserved Islamic sites throughout the country. In the meantime, Islamic authorities and activists have exercised to the utmost their ability to deny and, if possible, obliterate evidence of any pre-modern Jewish connection to, in particular, the city of Jerusalem.

Islamic authorities have, for example, converted interior spaces of the Temple Mount into mosques and have removed immense amount of debris that happen to contain remains of earlier periods of Jewish occupation. Muslim “graves” have appeared overnight on disputed plots of land around Jerusalem. Efforts have been made to have Canadian authorities seize Dead Sea Scrolls being exhibited in Israel on the grounds that they are Palestinian cultural property illegally obtained. And, in a move as illogical as it is brazen, Palestinian intellectuals have attempted to manufacture a claim to Jerusalem that predates that of Jews by arguing descent from “Jebusites”—the city’s pre-Davidic residents whose presence is attested only in the Bible itself.

….continue reading

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The following cross-post by Stacy – Accepting Abundance – is in response to a recent BBC article entitled: ‘Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says‘, which I posted about yesterday:

Why math can’t predict the extinction of religion, or rainfall

Math cannot predict the extinction of religion any more than it can predict when and where the next rain drop will fall.

We are right to be indignant when researchers use mathematics improperly to assume they can predict such things as is the case in this research paper about religion being driven to extinction. It is possible for academics throw a bunch of Greek letters at an audience with the sole purpose of intimidating them to accept the premise because they don’t think people are smart enough to figure out what they really mean. Some people are too happy to lazily accept the conclusion because it’s what they want to believe.

A number of Catholic writers picked this up. I saw Christopher’s post on it at Christopher’s Apologies and he and his wife point out that the researchers had a predetermined conclusion. Stuart at Theology in the News mentioned it and linked to Joe Carter’s article via Rod Dreher at First Things. He points out that the conclusion can be turned on it’s head. If religion can become extinct, then it can also become 100% pervasive.

I want to add to these astute comments a broader explanation about why mathematics cannot prove such things so that when this stuff pops up, it can properly be smacked down. It’s not only offensive, it’s potentially dangerous. Science has become the marketing wrap for ideas in secular culture. My husband has advanced degrees in applied mathematics and numerical theory and he has worked in the financial industry for over 25 years. He spends his life modelling human behavior and trying to predict what people will do, but not so he can publish papers with predetermined conclusions funded by people with agendas. In his field, he has to be objectively right or people become unemployed, including him. He knows very fundamentally what people sometimes try to get us to deny:

Humans and natural systems are inherently unpredictable.

Any prudent, rational, responsible and honest researcher must keep this truth before them at all times because mathematical models can be manipulated to deliver any outcome one wants to make. If the foundational assumptions are wrong, the conclusion will be unreliable…or, if done intentionally, the conclusion will be what you want it to be. That’s why in the scientific method forming the hypothesis is so critical.

For example, it’s rather straightforward to design an experiment to correlate violent death with eating french fries, and then warn people to never eat them again. However we all know instinctively that any such model would be utterly incapable of predicting what will happen the next time you eat a french fry. You don’t have to be able to rip through formulas to know it. The math in the correlation may be perfectly correct, but the hypothesis is flawed. Here’s one sentence to remember whenever any research references a mathematical model.

Models that explain past behavior can only reliably predict future behavior if the component parts 1) behave according to the laws of physics, and 2) the conditions can be controlled.

Anyone who’s baked more than a few loaves of bread knows this from experience. You more or less know what will happen if you cut the quantity of an ingredient in half, and all other things being equal, it’ll happen that way every time. In this case both rules apply. Food follows the laws of physics and the conditions for cooking can be controlled.

Now consider rain. In a parking lot it would be possible to mathematically model why all the raindrops hit the ground when and where they did during the last shower. It would be a massive thing to model, but it could be done. This is somewhat how weathermen predict the weather, but we all know from experience that they are often wrong about the prediction. Why? Because there are endless factors we cannot account for that cause rain to fall or not fall. Back to the parking lot, there are almost endless factors that affect when and where a single raindrop will hit the ground. This is why predicting where the rain drop will fall, even if you have a good model about the past, is utterly impossible. Water molecules follow the laws of physics, but the conditions for rain fall cannot be controlled.

To know scientifically why the rain drop hit when and where it did, one would literally need to ask a series of “what caused this” questions all the way back to the beginning of time and space. This is what St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Aristotelian epistemology, meant by God being the “first cause” of all things.

Now consider human behavior. Humans are not just physical, like the water molecules in a rain drop predictably affected by the movement of other molecules in the environment. Humans are spiritual, and they have free will. It should be glaringly obvious by now why it is impossible to predict human behavior, no matter how mathematically savvy any model that explains the past may appear.

Karl Marx based his “cultural materialism” on the idea that humans were objects that followed physical laws and he constructed social systems with controlled conditions. Communism didn’t work precisely because people denied that humans are spiritual. Let that sink in.

To repeat, humans and natural systems are inherently unpredictable. If it really and truly were possible to model and predict human behavior…the stock market would not exist, insurance companies would not be necessary and raising kids would be like turning on your computer. And George Soros would be mowing my lawn.

When you consider the reality of our universe, math and science properly viewed direct us to the existence of God Almighty. When people deny that, the utilitarian outcomes can be destructive. Maybe this paper about religion becoming extinct doesn’t seem so offensive as to deserve accusations of dishonesty or social engineering, but to people who devote their lives to math, science, and first and foremost to family and God, the paper deserves an honest light of exposure. Any perversion of math and science to promote an agenda deserves a righteous smack down. If anyone can lay claim to math and science, it’s the faithful believer who does so in humility.

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I’ll leave to your imagination the storm of protest currently emanating from the LGBT online community….

Computer firm Apple has approved an iPhone and iPad application which claims to ‘cure’ gay people.

The app, called Exodus International, is targeted at ‘homosexual strugglers’ and teaches them that gay people have a choice about their sexuality.

Its Christian makers claim the app gives them a chance of ‘freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus’.

The free programme, which is available in Britain, was given four out of five stars by Apple, which means it is deemed to have  ‘no objectionable content’.

But the computing giant is now under pressure after gay rights campaigners started a petition to have it withdrawn.

U.S. pressure group Change.org said that Exodus’ claims are ‘hateful and bigoted’ and send out an appalling message.

….continue reading

UPDATE: Apple have bowed to pressure and have pulled the App.

ABC News: Appls Pulls ‘Anti-Gay’ App After Pressure

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So, ICANN have finally approved the top level domain [dot] .xxx for porn sites.

ICANN are entering into an agreement with ICM Registry who proposed the domain name .xxx back in 2004.

With over 30% of Internet activity dedicated to pornography this is hardly a surprising development, especially given the potential for this to generate $1 billion in online transactions a year.

Apparently there have been 239,836 pre-reservations for .xxx domain already. (This figure is accurate at time of posting.)

The justification for this move is that it will be easier to filter out inappropriate content. This is of course bunkum, as pornographers will simply utilise the .xxx domain in addition to traditional domains.

Interestingly, the porn industry is not overwhelmingly supportive of this move as they are concerned their content will be ghettoised. They also fear governments could try to control the domain’s usage, so that pornographic content is more easily blocked.

The ‘ghettoisation’ effect is the same concern levelled against the creation of the .god domain.

Intriguingly, back in 2009 the Pope called on ICANN to keep religion out of the domain name system.

The genie is out of the bottle now for the .xxx domain and the message given by this move is undoubtedly one of legitimisation for the pornography industry.

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