The Atheist Blogger

I have recently been messing around with a few “Bible Code” generators, purely to see what I could find. For those who don’t know, the Bible Code is the idea that you can find a series of words in the bible by picking a letter and “skipping” letters by 5 each time, possibly more. The idea is flawed, and several statisticians have come forward and revealed that given a large enough volume of text, you can find all sorts of “hidden” messages.

I’ll save my results for another blog post, since I have only just started doing some tests. This blog post details how I set up my comparison text. In order to perform the tests, I decided to use a text version of the King James Bible, and also a randomly generated text of the exact same file-size.

Getting the KJB text was easy enough, as Project Gutenberg has it for free download. All I had to do was remove the long introduction from the beginning, stopping when I got to Genesis 1:1. I then needed to strip everything other than the 26 letters of the alphabet, because the Bible Code algorithms only accept these. So numbers, spaces, carriage returns, apostrophes, colons all had to go. On Linux systems, this is easily done:

dd if=kjv10.txt | grep -ao “[A-Za-z]” | tr -d “\n” > bible-text.txt

dd is a command that copies / converts files, and I gave it the input file (if=kjv10.txt) of the full King James text. I then piped this into grep, telling it to only output characters that matched either A-Z (uppercase) or a-z (lowercase). grep outputs every match on a new line, so I fed that result through tr, which when given the “-d” argument, deletes the following character from the input. The character “\n” is the standard way of showing a new line as a character. The result of all these commands is a long string of characters, and is saved to the file “bible-text.txt“.

A simple command for listing directory contents told me the size of the file.

ls -l

Now I had a file that was 3,224,520 bytes (3.2 megabytes) in file-size, and I needed to procure random data of the exact same size. This was done by a couple of slight modifications to the original command:

dd if=/dev/urandom | grep -ao “[A-Za-z]” | tr -d “\n” | dd bs=1 count=3224520 > random-text.txt

As you can see, the input for the first dd command is now the built-in Linux random generator, which is piped into the same commands to remove illegal characters. This output is then piped back into a dd command, but is set up so that it creates a file with a specific amount of data. The bs value is the blocksize, which for ease of calculation I set to 1 byte, meaning I can then set the output file-size (count) as 3224520. The output of these commands is a string of random characters, equal in size to the string in bible-text.txt, and I saved this to the file random-text.txt.

A further use of the ls -l command confirms that both files are indeed the same size.

This method of generating a set size of random data is fast and easily scripted, which is why I thought it should be shared. Now I need ideas for experiments to run on the random data…

Angelpuriran recently posted a few questions in a comment to an old post about Questions for God.

Why you decided to become an atheist..? WHAT gives you benefits to become an atheist? does it makes sense? what if you died and you proved that there is hell, eternal death in hell and the only way to go to heaven is to believe to Jesus, what would you do? will you repent?

I don’t know if “decided” is the correct word to use. I would have said it was more that I “realised” I was an atheist. I did so because I saw that whilst I had believed in God and Jesus for many years, I didn’t have a valid reason for believing in them. There was no evidence for God existing apart from in a book which is claimed to have been inspired by him. Such circular evidence went against how I came to know reason. I also saw problems with the whole form of a God that created the universe, because it doesn’t answer the questions about what created God. Why did something so natural like the universe have to be created by a non-natural phenomenon, especially when there have never been any recorded supernatural phenominon in science.

I guess the major benefit to being an atheist is the freedom from the constant worries about death. I believe that when I die, that will be it. My mind will cease to function and I will become a non-concious entity. This is actually one of the hardest things to wrap your mind around, and I think it might be why some people have problems with atheism. Trying to imagine no life after death is akin to trying to think what “not thinking” would be like. It is a mental impossiblity to do because such an action is a contradiction of itself.

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It turns out that the corporate fast food chain McDonald’s has incurred the wrath of the American Family Association, and by their logic, God. The AFA has issued a boycott against the popular restaurant due to their sponsorship of the 2007 San Francisco Gay Pride parade, as well as donating $20,000 to the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce.

Just to makes things crystal clear, McDonald’s donated 0.0001% of their 2007 earnings to a pro-homosexual organization. God must be pissed.

Of course when the AFA boycott something, they really go all out. They claimed that “McDonald’s will aggressively promote the homosexual agenda.” based on this obviously aggressive quote from the CEO:

Being a socially responsible organization is a fundamental part of who we are. We have an obligation to use our size and resources to make a difference in the world … and we do.

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The title of this blogpost comes from a popular quote by Robert A Heinlein.

Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a God superior to themselves. Most Gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

I personally think this is shown quite well in Edward Current’s latest video on YouTube entitled “An Atheist Meets God”.

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I was trying to think up new ideas for articles on this blog, and I realized that whilst I have talked at great length about what I believe as an atheist and why, I haven’t really covered why I rejected Christianity. So this is the first article in a new series.

Whilst I can’t speak for all atheists who have deconverted from Christianity, these are my personal reasons for losing my faith. I was brought up in a semi-religious family and attended two Church of England schools, one of which was situated right next to the church.

Sexuality

One of the main reasons I think I rejected Christianity (as well as other religions) is the issue of sexuality. I was brought up under the Church of England, and whilst I wasn’t a fundamentalist per se, I did believe that women were responsible for all sin. Whilst I had no idea that homosexuals existed (I was younger than 10), if I had met one of been told about one, I would probably have been disgusted.

Of course in a secular place like England you cannot hold these views rationally for long. I eventually became very anti-sexist as I learned more about biology and humanity as a species. Science dictates that whilst the differences between male and female are distinct, there are “advantages” to both. Without women, we wouldn’t have children, and their minds are more adept to solving complicated puzzles faster. Men on the other hand have the obvious higher average strength and height, a gift from years of Evolution. They are also more adept at visualizing problems in their head without the need for paper.

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