[~ot] why is programming so fun?

[Yigal Chripun]

BCS wrote:
> Reply to Yigal,
> 
> 
>> Just to add some relevant facts:
>> the article above about YAWEH is Christian nonsense.
> 
> What about it is nonsense? You seem to be making a point about how the
> word sounds. Are you claming that that there is some ambiguity regarding
> which spoken word it is being written?
> 
>> Since this
>> article derives everything from English translations made 1000s of years
>> after the original was written in Hebrew, it is based solely on that
>> English
>> translation and _not_ on the original text.
>> Fact is Ancient Hebrew didn't have vowels and the bible (the original
>> Hebrew version 1.0) contains here and there words that we do not know
>> how to read. 
> 
> A while back I was talking to a Hebrew scholor and I seem to reacal that
> there is even some question as to where the word breaks are.
> 
>> most of the Bible does have Nikud (marks for vowels in
>> modern Hebrew) since the knowledge of how to read it was preserved but
>> here and there there are words and phrases we do not know how to
>> pronounce. In order to be able to read the bible there were added
>> explanations in the margins (most of the time, it's quite clear that
>> some word simply contains some typo, or that the letters only have one
>> way to be pronounced) but the original text is not changed since it's
>> considered holy.
>> This is a long explanation to the simple fact that the pronunciation
>> of
>> "יהוה" got lost in time in the same way, and since it's not a simple
>> case of a typo, we simple do not know how to pronounce it. Hebrew
>> speakers (like myself) read this word as "adoni" or "Lord" in English
>> and this is in fact how it's translated in the [much later] English
>> version.
> 
> Interesting, I remember hearing that the choice to use adoni was because
> it ensured that the original name is never corrupted. Actually, come to
> think of it, I seem to recall that the name was actually not written to
> avoid spelling it wrong by accident
> 
>> one last thing, let's consider god from a logical POV:
>> god is all powerful => God can create a rock no-one can lift => god
>> cannot lift the rock or god cannot create such a rock => contradiction
> 
> That assumes that god is inside the universe. That in and of it's self
> is a problem. When you start dealing with absolutes and infinities
> things fall about in all domains of logic.
> Look up Russell's paradox or the halting problem for some real examples
> of where this happens in domains that are not theological.
> 
>> --Yigal
>>
> 
> 
My claim here is simple: no one knows how to pronounce יהוה so reading
it as "YAWEH" is a blind guess. Since we do not know how to pronounce
this word, we can't read it, and we do not know its meaning. As I said
(and you agree with me, from your reply) we read it as adoni and it's
translated roughly to "lord" in English. adding any other meaning to the
word as the article linked in this thread tries to do is based only on
that author's personal beliefs and has nothing to do with the actual
word as it is written in the bible - hence nonsense.
in the same way, I can claim יהוה means "cat", and write a long article
explaining that.

about that logical claim of god:
everyone has his own view of what god is. the problem is with _your_
definition of what god is. besides, I wrote it only half seriously (I
probably should have mentioned not to take it that seriously in the
original reply, though)

a general reply to anyone claiming that being atheist is a religion:
religious people assume that everyone must have a faith in something so
they interpret an atheist as someone who believes in a lack of a higher
power, a belief of realism, a belief in logic and causality, etc..
this is false.
atheist means without a faith. not a faith in an opposite claim.
it is the same as asking a healthy person what is his sickness. He is
not ill with a lack of a disease, he simply has no disease.
religious people think that our world view must be based on some faith
be it a faith in god or a faith in reason. well, that's wrong. a world
view can be based on facts alone without any faith underlining it.
I don't believe in reason or causality, it is just an observable fact of
the world we live in, it simply exists in the universe we occupy.
we know for a fact that some things cause other things in our universe.
there are other things that are not caused by anything and are random.
those are just observable facts. not a belief of existence of causality.

to summarize:
A->not(B) is not equivalent to not(A)->B where:
A is "I/an atheist believes"
B is "god exists".

--Yigal