Historical writings

        Histories should be divided into two parts (not necessarily in the same work): narrative history and factual (factal?) or evidential history. The former is normal history: telling a tale, piecing together of facts within a framework of tapestry to weave a coherent and interesting story.
        The second or evidential history is a far more rigorous, scientific document. It delineates the facts gathered, the conclusions reached, the connections between, and—most importantly—the entire evidential chain back to its original sources, so that no conclusions are based on others’ data or conclusions without an understanding of how they reached their answers, so as to point up where errors may gave occurred, and to be able to understand not only the lineage and origins of the data (in order that the reader might draw her own conclusions) but also its degree of sureness and veracity at every point, thus giving first an indication of the likely accuracy of the current conclusions, and second a way of making apparent what of the conclusions must be called into question if any of the sources are proven wrong, without invalidating the entire work.

I also believe that history writers, after completing their research, should read a book of their favorite fiction, or perhaps Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—which does an excellent job of expository philosophy while reading like a good novel—before writing their narrative history, so that they won’t write sentences like the above.

Cracking the Bible Code

• p. 83: This accuracy/inaccuracy in the Jewish Lunar Month is, although this will surely be ignored by everyone, the greatest confirmation—yea, proof—of my theory that the Torah is the product not of myth and mysticism, nor of God, but of an incredibly advanced human culture (the same logic also rules out aliens). The proof is simply this: The Jewish calculation was more accurate than anyone else's—in fact as accurate as theoretically possible without going into space—but it was inaccurate. God—or aliens—would have known the correct value. Unless the decoding was wrong, or the Moon has slowed since then, or the value somehow got changed by this insignificant amount (in God's name, how?), or the satellite data is somehow wrong, this is conclusive unless you are willing to accept God the liar or God the fool. I would very much like to know what the Egyptian values for this are.
        Indeed, the very fact that only the first five books of the Bible are encoded in this fashion is strong evidence to support my thesis. Of all the Bible—even of all known religious works—the books written by Moses are the only ones with this sort of coding. Why? Why would God never do this again? I say it is because it was Moses himself, not God, who composed the pentateuch and the code within, based on his great arcane knowledge he learned from the Egyptians (Much thanks to Graham Hancock and his The Sign and the Seal, particularly chapters 12 and 13, for the inspiration for all of this).


Update: Monday, July 25, 2005
I have come to the conclusion that the entire Bible Code is fraudulent. Though I haven't made an extremely extensive study of the matter, the very method that is used to find coded material (deciding what you want to find and then looking for it) pretty much shows the entire Code to be spurious. You can (and people have) find any number of things in a complex work like the Bible, but that doesn't mean that they're authentic or prophetic. The Code only tells us what we want to hear. What finally convinced me was a History Channel special that, while it doesn't set out to debunk the Code, lays out far more clearly than the book mentioned above does the incredibly subjective and non-scientific way the Code's messages are "discovered." Too bad. And it fit in so nicely with Hancock too.

Reason.com has some more information on the subject.

Slavery

Here is the test of slavery—is your work something you do of your own choice, or do you work for fear of punishment from other people? By this definition, nearly all children are slaves. It is also possible to be in a slavery situation of your own devising, where a simple choice will release you. No, members of the military are not slaves; they are indentured servants. They knew what they were doing when they signed up. Draftees, on the other hand, are slave warriors, unless they were given the choice to renounce their citizenship to avoid being drafted.

More Work

So—time to write about what I originally meant to write. Work. What is work? Work is the effort we put out in order to achieve our goals and dreams. How perverse then, that we (or just I? ? ?) are taught as children, by school, by parents, that work is the unpleasant thing you must do or else get in trouble which keeps you from doing the things you want! Perverse. Insane. How—why—do we do this?

Occult

I think it would greatly behoove me to study occult magic. I started on a book about it last night, and it seemed to me nothing more than sophisticated Zen-like mind control—or mind access. I think it would work—as far as possible, anyway. And if magical powers were stored inside the mind, that would be how to get at them.

Genius

Genius: the ability to come up with new ideas.

Answers

        Last night was a good night. I have finally made a positive difference with my new ideas. Admittedly, this seems like one of the most obvious of my ideas, but, as I know all too well, just because something seems obvious, that doesn't mean that anyone actually knows it! Myself included. So—Elizabeth was wanting to know what happened after death. She said it had gone past grieving or fearful wishes into clinical curiosity [2007: Someone close to her had died recently; I don’t recall who]. So I told her. And it worked. She found (as I have) that the logic was irrefutable, given our current knowledge of physiology and chemistry. Which only reaffirms my conclusion that it is only quite recently, in our modern scientific age, that it has truly been possible to supplant religion with personal, logical, scientific knowledge, at least as far as the answers about the Universe go. Not to say that there haven't been people before now who have believed in a real, physical, non-supernatural universe—they've existed at least since the Renaissance. But their belief was also based on faith—not as much blind faith as the religionists, perhaps, but faith nonetheless. They didn't—couldn't—really know the answers to questions like How did the Universe come to be? What happens when we die? What is life? Why are we here? They could only have faith that logic and science and the human mind would one day find answers to the questions. And their faith has been justified. But it is only in the last 50 years that we have evolved modern genetic theory, the only thing which can allow relative surety in the large human answers. Everything before was merely shrewd guesses and extrapolation. The people I have been looking to for answers—Rand, Pirsig, Asimov, Heinlein—are my grandparents' age. Even people of my parents' generation—Card, for example—grew up in an age which believed in the power of hard science to solve any problem on one hand, while on the other, was very suspicious of this powerful, distant Science thing and was not, generally, personally aware of the personal philosophical ramifications of science. Besides which they were—as a generation—raised by staunch religionists. That's very difficult to get past. It has long been my belief that it takes two full generations for a social change to completely take effect. So what I'm saying is that it's possible that the reason I feel like the only one with the answers, and get so frustrated with all of the above-named genius authors for knowing only parts of the truth and not seeing the whole, is that my generation is the first with the tools to put all these pieces together, living in an environment where people who think as differently as I do do not have to carefully hide their views to be able to live and interact with society (a result of my intellectual forebears' efforts? If so, thank you), and I am not alone, but instead in the vanguard of a new way of thinking.
        And these people who went before me are not deluded geniuses possessed of almost-truths, but pioneers laying the groundwork, clearing a path for me—us—to build on and lay a foundation for the future, making the best conclusions they could form from the knowledge they had—just as I do. For I fear it will be for the generation that comes after me—my intellectual descendants—to actually do the work I envision. That's OK. It's enough for me to make the vision possible.

        How I want to be different from them is by writing down my misgivings. They were all so sure—and so wrong in many particulars, however true their overall vision was. I'm sure the same is and will be true of me. But what I have always—always—wanted to do is separate those things I am certain of from my speculations, no matter how sure of them I feel.

        So the likelihood—the great likelihood—is that there are several others out there who have found much the same answers I have. Are they just like me? Do they have my goals and dreams, my strengths, my exact beliefs (or better)? Probably not. How many Heinleins were there? How many Rands? One of each, who did what they did. But these people—these brothers and sisters in mind—are out there. I just have to find them. I think I have already found one—Nooreen. She just hasn't had time to develop the ideas yet.