The Mysterious

Looking back through the blog .. you had a comment back in January .. http://ascendnextlevel.blogspot.com/2005/01/problem-of-pain.html#comments

The author of that comment did not think that God was in control of everything, which to me goes against what one would expect from a perfect being.

You were talking about the problem of pain and your response was to me more interesing ... you wrote:

"Mystery -- This is the easiest answer, but is deeply unsatisfying."

When it comes down to religious discussion that is usually what it boils down to eventually -- "it's a mystery". It's quite jolly that the most important thing in the Universe should be deeply unsatisfying don't you think? I think this single thing is the biggest problem today with people believing in God.

My observation of intelligent (and we discussed that some humans are more intelligent than others) humans grasping with the concepts in the Bible matches this.

I see them denying the fruits of investigation. "I don't want to know that ..." like the Pope who refused to look at the moons of Jupiter through Galileo's telescope. My priest once said he was not interested at all in the fact that every 50th letter in Genesis was significant.

In 1994 Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg published an article in the journal Statistical Science. It was entitled Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis. This article describes an experiment which seems to show a remarkable proximity between names of rabbis and their dates of birth or death in the Book of Genesis. These names and dates occur as sequences of letters in the text which are the same distance apart. As an example of an Equidistant Letter Sequence (or, more briefly, an ELS) , it was noticed several decades ago by Rabbi Weissmandel that the word Torah occurs spelled out as T, O, R, H (in their Hebrew equivalents) in the Book of Genesis by starting from the first T. The 50th letter after that T is an O. The 50th letter after the O is an R. And the 50th letter after the R is H. In this example, the "skip length" is 50 letters. It turns out that TORH is spelled out more than 56,000 times in the Book of Genesis (with various skip lengths). Genesis itself is slightly more than 78,000 letters long.

Someone put these letters in sequence for a reason. Who and why? I am interested to know, forget all the Drosnin stuff of course. And if letter sequences are being forced into The Bible then what does that say about the story that The Bible is telling?