Christians and “Coincidences” or Is There a Hex in the Patternicity?

This article has many images and footnotes; I encourage the reader to download it as a pdf here: Shogren_Christians and Coincidences

It happened just the other day: I had been thinking about James Bond, and later when I pulled out a form of identification for the bank teller, I noticed that my ID number began with 007! Was I a secret agent? Perhaps one suffering from amnesia?

Or, let’s say a man “has a system” for beating the Vegas roulette table. He has noticed that black has come up eight times in a row. So he bets everything on black, because “there’s clearly a pattern to the wheel tonight.” Meanwhile, a man across from him is thinking to himself, “I’d better put everything on red, since it looks like it’s due to come up.”

A child and her companion lie on their backs, looking up at the clouds. “That one looks like a giraffe!” she says. “And that one a camel!” “No, not a camel, look at it upside-down, it looks just like an octopus.” One child says, “An angel!”; another says, “Actually, it looks quite like Charles Darwin!”

We have all played this game without realizing that we were doing pattern recognition. As Paul Simon wrote many years back, in the song “Patterns”:

The night sets softly
With the hush of falling leaves,
Casting shivering shadows
On the houses through the trees,
And the light from a street lamp
Paints a pattern on my wall,
Like the pieces of a puzzle
Or a child’s uneven scrawl.

Leaves, shadows, trees, indecipherable scrawling – these can all seem like messages because of our human tendency for patternicity. So can tortillas and numbers and corporate logos, as we shall see.

This is why astronomers speak of the Horsehead Nebula, which was not modeled after a terrestrial animal, but just sort of looks like a horse!

From ages past, people have imagined patterns in the stars and constructed “constellations” of animals, gods, heroes. And we can get a cross-check on patternicity by seeing how different cultures “read” the same stars –  it’s Orion in European legend, but the same stars are a hunter and his dogs chasing a deer in India. Mr. Rorschach invented his famous ink blots on the basis of human pattern recognition (“Ummm…is it, maybe, two ducks kissing?” “Okay, Mr. Anderson, we’d better make it three sessions per week!”)

We are wired to quickly detect patterns in the data we see and hear. This is a huge help to get us through the day: when our alarm clock goes off, we don’t have to puzzle over, “Now, what could that buzzer possibly mean?”

But for some people, that recognition faculty goes beyond what is useful (more…)

Published in: on March 20, 2017 at 3:24 pm  Comments (1)  
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Love, sure, but during an election year?

A fresh preface to my essay, “The Forgotten Sign of the End Times: icy relations among God’s people.” I include here not only things I observe in others, but principally the things I’d like to root out of my own heart.

The Lord’s return may – or may not – be near, but no-one who reads church history would conclude that we clearly live in the last days. There are relatively no more wars today than throughout history (probably fewer), no more frequent earthquakes, no worse famines. And we have 2000 years of unloving actions on the part of the church to make our current lack of love seem mild by comparison.

Still, Jesus warned us in Matthew 24 that part of the future apostasy will be that “the love of most [believers] will grow cold.” And while 2016 isn’t necessarily the end of history, the fact that it is a political season gives us pause to gauge our level of charitableness.

The Evil One wants to freeze your helping hand

The Evil One wants to freeze your helping hand

The Enemy is pleased to put our love on ice, and he uses arguments both old and new to entice us to join in with him.

A few of his LIES:

“If you really have the truth, then you have the right to be reckless in how you present it.”

“If you feel charitable toward the needy, that is just as good as actually doing something to alleviate their needs. E. g., if you ‘share’ a post about starving children, that’s as filling as a sandwich.”

“Violence is tolerable, so long as it is doled out against the Other, not Us. Because They probably deserve it.”

“Using bad words, even from the pulpit, is okay, since if we love people, we need to get their attention, and fast.  If not curse words, then at least use sheeple, wingnut, moron, etc. Oh, and again, this is cool so long as it’s against the Other, not Us.”

“If you want to help a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, don’t worry about saving the child she is bearing.”

And conversely, “Keeping her from ending a pregnancy is the sole expression of love we need to show toward her.”

“Take up your cross and follow Christ refers to abstract, spiritual things, not our daily behavior toward other human beings, and certainly not to our behavior on social media.”

“Hasty and off-the-cuff responses are sweeter to the tongue than slow-brewed wisdom.”

“It’s okay to hate the haters.”

“Well, they started it!”

“Those victims probably deserved it and shouldn’t complain, Our victims are faultless.”

“When people encourage us to act with respect to others, that’s just a ploy of the Politically Correct to shut us down.”

“We should love ‘our own’ first (family, neighborhood, race, religion, tribe) and others less.” [Note: Charity begins at home, while a Christian truth, is perverted when in Satan’s hand.]

Cynicism is a favorite of Hell, to despise the sinner, to make the Other the focus of evil in the world and the butt of “Well, what do you expect of Them?” The fruit of cynicism is sarcasm, sneering, suspicion, contempt, and given time, hatred. Love teaches us remain vulnerable, and endure and even embrace the pain that results from being witnesses to wickedness.

Christ was the one who was “oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth” (Isa 53:7), and he invited us to take up our cross and follow him, even during presidential elections, and he gives us the mighty Holy Spirit to rewrite the code of our mind to enable us to do it. This is what separates Christian charity from mere pleasantness or good manners.

But from all indications, Christian love apparently is meant to follow some weird liturgical calendar, by which the church allows us to lay it aside in 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020, etc., you do the math. That’s why Francis’s prayer of self-dedication, “grant that I may not so much seek to be understood as to understand” (see more below), strikes us nice and Christ-like, but only applicable outside of election seasons. Don’t eat meat on Fridays is sooo medieval; Don’t be charitable every four years is the new fashion!

I urge myself, and invite you, to take Francis at his word, in the run-up to the November election and in any season:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.

CLICK to go to “The Forgotten Sign of the End Times: icy relations among God’s people.”

“Should we be loving during election years?” by Gary S. Shogren, Professor of New Testament, San José, Costa Rica

Published in: on August 1, 2016 at 3:45 pm  Leave a Comment  
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April Fools! No, they have not discovered the Gospel of “Q”!

What an announcement, that they discovered a Hebrew manuscript of Q! So wrote someone on a website from New Zealand (liturgy.co.nz) earlier today, but not everyone took note that it was published on April 1, 2016!

 

image

In fact, the photo of the papyrus is nothing new; it’s the Nash Papyrus, which was discovered over a century ago (click HERE). And the authors left plenty of other clues in the stor, for example, that two of the scholars involved were Justin I. Dea and Ida Claire.

I love a good gag, but the problem is that this is already circulating in Spanish and will have ramifications: it will be used as “evidence” by certain false Messianic rabbis, who teach that the NT was originally written in Hebrew and use that notion to justify their rewriting of the Bible. They remove the deity of Christ, the person of the Spirit, salvation by faith, freedom from the Law, etc, because supposedly they were not in “the original Hebrew.”

For that reason I wrote, asking the site to explain that it was a hoax.

Whether Q existed it or, no, they haven’t discovered it yet, and according to the best available date, it would be written in Greek, not Aramaic or Hebrew.

Jokes are fun, until someone gets hurt!

April Fools! No, they have not discovered the Gospel of “Q”! by Gary S. Shogren, Ph.D., Professor of New Testament, Seminario ESEPA, San José, Costa Rica

 

Published in: on April 1, 2016 at 2:12 pm  Leave a Comment  
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“I don’t believe it!” Thoughts on truth and social media, Part II

In Part I I began an extended-play rant against internet disinformation. I’m against it for two reasons: I don’t like false information; I don’t like to look foolish when I fall for it.

Here are other areas where we need to show some healthy skepticism:

ECHO CHAMBER EFFECT

In 2015 the social media were packed with people reporting that Pope Francis had announced that Islam and Christianity were equally valid and that the Koran and the Bible were basically the same message: “Jesus Christ, Jehovah, Allah. These are all names employed to describe an entity that is distinctly the same across the world.”

“I’m the pope, but I’m broadminded!”

People were outraged! The Vatican denied it which, for some of us, was evidence that it must have really happened. It appeared on the bogus Washingtonpost.com.co, conservativebyte.com, also civictribune.com (which altered the story, so that the pope supposedly said this at the White House). So, I have seen the same exact story, usually quoted verbatim, on four websites. Does this mean there are four “sources”? No, only one, and that original source (National Report again!) said they were just joking! But the echo effect means that the reader senses that, “It must be so, because everybody is talking about it!” The National Report was also responsible for the spoof that the Pope wants everyone to be micro-chipped by 2017.

For the Christian there is a special sort of news source, the Prophetic Site. If one blogger says he, I don’t know, saw four grim horsemen riding around in the field ‘back of his farm, then the story will spread far and wide within days, if not hours.

TABLOIDS

Ah, for the days when tabloids were clearly labeled and placed at the supermarket checkout. Then you could give a quick glance and find out when Elvis was spotted with what Venusian or how a Wolf-Boy was loose in the Maine woods.

Here’s one you won’t soon forget:

wtf tabloid headline

Now you just have to click on and find tabloids online, for example, WorldNewsDailyReport.com. Read all about it! “Man who spend 57 Years Counting the Bricks in the Great Wall of China.”

Of course, (more…)

Published in: on January 30, 2016 at 5:27 pm  Comments (2)  
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“I don’t believe it!” Thoughts on truth and social media, Part I

Capture

“You must not pass along false rumors.” Exodus 23:1

My friends know what a skeptical soul I am. Whenever I see a post on the social media, my first reaction is to shake my head and say, “Yes, but, how do you know this to be so?”

And they know me as the one who annoyingly responds on Facebook, “Is this true??”

I really, really, don’t like to be “had”. They “got” me badly, once, when I saw an announcement that MTV was going to start putting operas into their mix of music. MTV!! Twenty years ago, and it still burns me. Later I realized that the announcement came out on April 1.

Set aside videos of cute kittens or adolescents cracking up their skateboards. Let’s focus on those other things – political, social, religious, etc. – which get posted on social media and spread like wildfire. They go viral because of a factor in the human mind called “cognitive bias”. Everyone has cognitive bias = that when I hear things from certain sources, or which resonate with what I already “know” to be true, I more easily assume it’s true, at least until someone proves otherwise.

Let’s take an example: ISIS

In December, after the San Bernadino shootings, these two pictures circulated the internet. If someone put them on Facebook, you and I would probably be more likely to accept one as “real” and the other as faked or at least less important information. The first looks like a pro-ISIS rally, the second something else:

Photo 1

Photo 1

Photo 2

Photo 2

Answer: Both were taken in Dearborn, Michigan. Photo 1 was a march on Dec 5, 2015, by Muslims against ISIS. The other picture in front of “City Hall” is, I was able to confirm, Dearborn City Hall, located at 13615 Michigan Avenue; it was a march by Muslims again, against ISIS, in August 25, 2014. And I learned that there have been a number of these marches by Muslims in Dearborn. (more…)

Published in: on January 28, 2016 at 7:15 pm  Comments (4)  
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My four decades in the Bible – Part I

Congratulate me! I just passed an anniversary – in September 1972 I picked up a Bible, opened it and began to read it for myself.

To be sure, I had grown up in a Bible-believing Baptist church. I went to Sunday School, memorized Bible verses, could recite the books of the Bible. I knew what Revelation was about and the basic plot of many books. I knew what Paul did, I knew who Jeremiah was. In fact, I was known as the “religious one” in my family.

I started my real journey at the same time I had an experience that turned my life upside-down. Although I had professed faith in Christ and been baptized, it was then that I knew that I was a child of God and that he was calling me to be his disciple.

Chapter One – I react against false teaching

Like Pilgrim in the story, I was barely on my way when I met with danger and confusion. (more…)

Published in: on October 30, 2012 at 4:08 pm  Comments (16)  
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Was Jesus Married? Eight Days in September, 2012

UPDATE. On April 10, 2014, scientists announced their finding that this document is not a fake, that is, it’s not a modern forgery. It is a centuries-old copy of an earlier book, but not from as early as the time of Jesus. That doesn’t mean Jesus was married, but as Dr. King originally said, it may attest to the belief of some in the early church that Jesus was married, to Mary Magdalene. Nevertheless, marriage is probably a metaphor for spiritual union rather than literal marriage.

FURTHER UPDATE, May 3, 2014. Although the ink is ancient, it now appears that the text itself is not – that is, the best guess is that someone in the last couple of years forged the text, by moistening ancient ink and using it to write a new text.  As usual, the guys from Tyndale Fellowship are on top it this! http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-gospel-of-jesus-wife-latest-news.html

Also http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-gospel-of-jesus-wife-latest-news.html

In December of 2011, Dr. Karen King of Harvard welcomed an antiquities dealer to her office. He offered for sale the sort of artifact that makes historians’ mouths water: sealed in glass was a piece of papyrus, about the size of a business card. In it there was a cryptic reference to Jesus’ wife; and it was old, perhaps from as early as the 4th century AD.

The section in red reads “and Jesus said, My wife…”

 

Dr. King spent some months analyzing the tiny scrap; since she is a Harvard professor of history she lends a certain authority that the document is genuine. She submitted an article to the prestigious journal Harvard Theology Review, which accepted her work for publication. Then she introduced the world to its content in a paper she gave in Rome, last week, on September 18. The next day it hit the press (click HERE). Today, eight days later, the theme has been announced, affirmed, batted back and forth in the media, used by people with pent-up feelings against Christians (more…)

Published in: on September 26, 2012 at 3:01 pm  Comments (4)  
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So I guess theology IS relevant

Published in: on June 5, 2012 at 4:45 pm  Comments (4)  
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