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.”