I always keep an eye out for visualizations, and here is a visualization describing how people share passages in the Bible.
The left axis shows the number of verses shared (log-axis), naturally it would appear the people mostly share one verse. The bottom axis shows what verse of the bible was used (I assume its all in verse order).
Very cool how Psalms has a big spike of (~6) verses shared.
I have been pondering off and on about this passage from Mere Christianity:
He always sends errors into the world in pairs-pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.
I have been thinking that as we grow in Christ-likeness that the Devil uses more subtle means to deceive us and eventually reverse our direction towards Christl-ikeness. I feel as though it looks something like this image:
What if at some point, when we get to heaven will will reach, (rather we will be giving) Christ-like ‘singularity’ where we will be perfected and immune to sins of the left or the right.
Recently I read this article and was struck by one of the quotes. “It’s my data” say Sharon Terry, the CEO Genetic Alliance. So I got to thinking that each person has a unique ID in their DNA and how tables in databases also have unique keys. What if the Database of Heaven used our DNA as its unique ID. For each new person that arrived on earth, it would made sense to create a new unique ID from combination of the two unique ID’s that begot that person. I mean maybe Angel of Data in Heaven could just makes a unique numeric ID that was increased from previously used number. Adam being 1, Eve being 2, etc.etc. This would make some sense except for people who were conceived a the same time. The moment that DNA combines is like a new entry into the database of Heaven and that unique key can not be used again. This would be a rationally way of maybe convincing some that life begins at conception. Every time an embryo undergoes artificial or natural splitting for a twin then a new ID is created each time because a new viable life has been formed!. (“But wait! what about Identical twins?” Okay I didn’t have that on my mind when I originally thought about this, but maybe God throws on another identifier somewhere in the key, like mass, or some SequenceID field.)
I love that at times I get to zoom into a single row of data and at other times I zoom out and look at the entire grandeur of my whole table, and then the whole database. Each thing is thrilling. Sometimes I have to attend to a few rows of data and help them out by correcting something that erred. Other times I am crunching the entire database and visualizing what millions of interactions produces. Sometimes I look and person XXXXX-XXXX-XX and think “you don’t realize this, but I’m making some update to your record, which at times is a really mundane task, but it makes sure your data flies through the database without kicking back errors so you can go on with your life.”
The point of this post is offering up an explanation of the sacredness of life and the importance of each person. Of course this is all from the perspective of a data nerd pondering verses in the Bible such as these:
“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
Of course the second verse harkens to something that indicates that maybe the ID’s already exist and are predestined… but more on that later.
What if Faith, Hope, and Love are the extra dimensions that God exists in and those dimensions become visible and perceptible in Heaven. Imagine that the Trinity in their full revelation is a 7 dimensional figure and the only way to perceive them is to develop an understanding of all the extra dimensions. The inability to perceive those dimensions would render a person unable to participate in the fullness of Heaven. An undeveloped sense of Faith, Hope, and Love, would prevent the mind from being able to picture a concept of Heaven at all. Imagine for a moment that Heaven is like our four dimensional world, and Hell has no concept of three of the dimensions. Then the entire contents of Hell would be a single point in a brief fraction of time. In the infinite space and time we as Citizens of Heaven would get to enjoy, those in Hell would pass by without a thought or worry. They would be unable to influence our enjoyment of Joy. Those in Hell also could not perceive the fullness of Heaven either. Imagine that to visualize Heaven you would need a dedicated 256 GB dedicated Graphics Processing Unit but you’re only rocking an old VGA card build into the motherboard with only 256 KB Video RAM from the mid 90s. What you have just wouldn’t be able to display anything. I would ask that if you want to investigate this concept further then read the Great Divorce by CS Lewis. It is an attempt to capture the situation of Heaven and the inability of those in hell to perceive it.
One might ask though, what about the fallen angels? They had a concept of the Holy One and were able to perceive Him, and then fell from grace. How did they then lose the ability to understand those other dimensions. I believe that the fallen one tried to supplant God’s glory with his own and I suppose that instead of developing the dimensions Faith, Hope, and Love the devil instead tried to establish that Skepticism, Doubt, and Hate were dimensions that were of equal footing. Ultimately the three negative dimensions were actually found to be nonexistent by the Devil and he was expelled. A study of physics will show that coldness is an absence of heat, darkness is just an absence of light (which is equivalent to the previous statement because both are part of the electromagnetic spectrum), vacuum the absence of matter, silence is an absence of sound etc. Likewise instead of being full dimensions of their own full weight, Skepticism is an absence of Faith; Doubt is an absence of Hope; and Hate is also just an absence of Love. So these negative dimensions cannot exist on their own and are nothing in their own right.
No one is sent to Hell, they choose it. I hope this post gives you some idea as to the possible Physics of Heaven and that there might be ways we cannot imagine that precludes someone from being able to be Rendered into the New Heaven and the New Earth and prevent someone from being able to interact with it.
I will from time to time post other links from websites that I think are relevant to “Jesus” and “Data”. I have read over some of the fine print and yes it would appear that some of the passages might not be truly ‘negative’ at times.
Below is the chronological display of the bible brought to you by OpenBible.info. Their website’s content is fantastic. Please check out many of their other pages.
Sentiment analysis basically tries to algorithmically determine if a section of text is “good” or “bad.” According to Wikipedia, It’s also called “opinion mining” which I like the sound of that a little better, probably because I can actually spell “opinion” whereas I always get a wavy red line when I try to spell “sentiment.”
There are also some people out there in our crazy world of ours, who think that gravity is just a normal fundamental phenomenon. A law of nature written into the world that is special. Then there are other weird people (physicists, or maybe he’s just a potential huckster trying to sell books) who make some bold claims that the law of gravity arises from the simple interactions of billions of particles (entropic gravity). Naturally there are detractors to this second new-fangled theory. I mean, no one goes up against 300 years of teaching and Sir Issac “Inventor of Freaking Calculus” Newton and gets away with it. I mean the guy INVENTED Calculus! But to me, as a data-nerd, this idea seems very plausible and simple. If I am looking in the right place, then (hopefully) a relationship emerges from a number of simple data points and people who had no relationship between them. Its like if I had the data on trillions of atoms, I could probably derive a significant relationship between the atoms and discover gravity. (That’s of course way short of a Law, I don’t get paid to ponder Laws, all I can offer is rules of thumb and statistical significance. Actually now that I think of it, as a data cruncher, do I really care how gravity works? Or do I just care that it does work and keeps working… hmm anyways I digress)
In other realms of science, there exists a central notion that complex structures are not ‘planned’ (from our perspective) but emerge from the interactions of simple things. Like ant hills and termite mounds. The science of Economics is a huge believer in self-organization and the invisible hand (I’m not going to entertain some drugged-out Occupy Wall Streeter’s asinine comments to the tune of “but look where laissez-faire and supply and demand has got us!” I’m not talking about the crappy state-corptatorship / crony-capitalism we have in this country, I’m talking about old-school liberty we used to have that we haven’t seen in ages). Some even propose that life is just an emergent phenomenon that is the result of chemicals involved in a self-organizing loops. Another idea out there is that our consciousness is an emergent result of the interactions of ~100 billion neurons. To me, there appears to be a force in the Universe that forces things to transform into better things, and then build more abstract features on top of the interactions of the things underneath. Maybe this is the way God works to create form and focus in the Universe. Some of these super-structures might not be understandable for the things that go into making up the structure. Does an ant know why it does it’s one task, but the ants still manage to build an anthill. Similar to Isaiah which says ‘Can the pot say of the potter, “He knows nothing”?‘ An additional thought I’ve had is that the Bible itself is possibly an emergent phenomena that arises out of numerous authors based on the interactions of hundreds of thousands of people chosen by God for a purpose.
So when I take what I have learned from complex structures and I read a passage like “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” I fully believe such a claim and it makes sense to me. We can’t understand all the emergent phenomena that emerge from human interactions right now, let alone when we are purified by Christ in the New Heaven and New Earth. There are additional things that will likely emerge from the interactions of billions of purified minds.
The book of Revelation talks about a number of crazy topics and one of the chapters I really enjoy is the 21st chapter. Specifically I like this verse “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.” The New Jerusalem to me sounds like some sort of emergent multidimensional super structure which might be an outcome from the interaction of billions of Christians. To me, as a data nerd who studies people, I am curious about what patterns would emerge from all those people in one place. What is additionally cool and will really melt your brain is the way it is described as a bride. A bride is obviously intelligent-being, since a bride has to give her consent to be married. Could that then indicate that maybe the purified Church might bring forth a new super-consciousness? Might it also be the case that Christ and his Bride will then bring forth some new form of unimagined life?
Just something to ponder.
Saving yourself is a laughable proposition from God’s perspective. You are a powerless peon.
So lets say I’ve crafted a Simverse (simulated universe) and populated it with some Sim-peons I could boss around. They are cool to look at and all, and they make some cool art and maybe some pretty songs, but these peons could not do anything that could substantially affect the dimension I live in. Yes, they reside on a computer and take up disk space, but I want them to exist, and they are still doing my will and they exist only through my sole decision to create them and my continued decision to let them exist. Since matter is neither created nor destroyed (in our dimension) they are not really affecting my world, other than what I allow them to. I want to simulate life and I wanted to create a computer and etc.etc.etc. These simulated-peons obviously could not do anything to me physically (no I haven’t installed a USB nerf shooter with a camera and taught them how to operate it) and they would have no real way of forcing a change in my world or forcing my hand. I could just pause them for an indefinite amount of time and just go and play Starcraft 2 and then come back at my leisure. It would be relatively easy to go about my life and they would have no impact on it (they would be on my mind though)
As the world that simulated you will come to an end, there are only a few real ways to save yourself from my simulated world.
A) Hacking: “I’m so good that I could hack into the root user of your computer and upload myself into their physical dimension, preferably into a huge robot, and then I could take over your dimension and make you, my creator, do what I wanted!” Great, but what if you happened to upload yourself into a Roomba and you had to vacuum my house? (Thanks!) I mean yeah it ‘could’ happen, but:
B) Self-Uploading: I put a magic button somewhere in your mind, and if you meditate long enough you can press it. More about this in a later post, as we will touch off a likely flame-war of Calvinism vs Arminianism
C) Works: Similar to the first, as your salvation is in your hands. You’ve won my favor by being such a perfect person (a la Ned Flanders) and your works are sufficient to force my hand. I will also handle this in another post but essentially maybe I’ve made a IF THEN statement to the tune of:
IF (GoodnessUnits > GoodnessThreshold)
THEN Simpeon.uploadFlag = True;
So as you can see, if you accept the premise that this world is a simulation, there are only a few limited ways to save yourself (note that I have not touched on the topic of a creator selecting those whom he desires to save, this is strictly trying to cover self-salvation). Given that this world we live in might be a simulation, then its fairly clear to see that you really don’t have much power to save yourself.
The purpose of this post is to get people on the correct path of thinking. I heard a song with the lyrics “Son fear is the heart of love“, which is the wrong interpretation of a passage (note that I am not disparaging that author’s experience, he probably did hear that from someone in charge). The passages says “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.” (Proverbs 9:10). A similar thought is also echoed in Psalm 111:10. So when a simulated peon realizes that they could be simply deleted, and cannot force the hand of the creator, then they begin to understand the nature of the simulated world that I put them in. It would be a lie to tell them something else and would not help them understand the true nature of their world or mine. Fear in this case should not be construed with a terror or a slavish fear of retaliation, it is a fear of respect. When I go out hiking I have a healthy respect for powers beyond me but I don’t have a terror of the woods. If I had a terror of the woods I would never explore it. Likewise this is a similar reverential fear.
Lets say I’m some hugely intelligent super-datamancer (not a hard thing to imagine) and I one day decide to create a simulated ‘universe.’ Now I could take what’s already around me, and use their outward forms to simulate in this sub-dimension things similar to what I already see. I could take the underlying rules of this dimension and simulate them in my computer. Or I could just think of new things (create) that are not possible in my world and bring them to life in another world that I designed. Probably I would use a combination of those things.
I’d probably start by developing some algorithm to populate the Simverse in a few fairly predictable ways. Lets say I have a two dimensional world, a basic formula or algorithm I could use is say “abs(sqrt(x))” Now this algorithm is based on math, and everyone knows math represents a universal language. So even the most peon-minded readers of this humble blog must admit that this very algorithm is essentially a language, the very words of its creator, and that these words spoke something into existence. Lets say I create a more complicated graph, but still very simple to implement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set
This would not be a hard thing to imagine, I mean I’ve made various computer programs to process tons of data, using a variety of algorithms to make a choice. When I was a younger-data nerd I have crafted a simulated Earths (SimEarth!) full of artificial life. These e-creatures could be paused, sped-up, squished, moved, downloaded, saved, backed-up, transferred, etc.etc. The more complicated algorithms in the program were fairly simple to implement, I mean I was running it on a 386. It wasn’t that complicated to ‘speak’ a world into existence and run it on a simple machine.
Ultimately when I read the passages of the Bible, it doesn’t seem impossible or even improbable that this Universe was spoken into existence. Taken Genesis 3 (NIV): ‘And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.”’ This clearly describes a data-nerd creating a situation in which he turns a simulation on and originally populates it with energy. The Bible might as well said (this is CreationPseduo Code by the way):
void CREATE (
Universe ThreeD[ ][ ][ ] = new Universe[x][y][z]; //create Universe object
int t = 1; // smallest unit of time // plank time of course.
initialE = 10^x; // initial energy deposited into our world
While t <= MaxTime (
/* exponential inflation and all of physics,
which I’m not going to even attempt to code here */
) // end while loop
)// end creationI mean, its not like God could have explained that any better to a bunch of scruff-looking nerf herders in the desert. Showing them the code He used to create the world would have been utterly incomprehensible then, and likely just as unknowable now. God phrasing creation as ‘speaking’ the Universe into existence makes sense then and now.
Here is another passage that I think highlights what I’m trying to say, and it comes from Hewbrews 11:3 “ By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.” Again, the word of God, (aka algorithms which are not ‘visible’ per se), brings something into sight. Another passage I really enjoy comes from John 1. “1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. “ … and later… “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”
It is not shocking or improbable for me to have faith that Words can bring forth life.