I normally try to ignore things like this, but this is just too funny.<\/p>\n
In general, I find arguments like this to be extremely silly. This is, basically, like
\nplaying with gematria – only instead of doing real gematria (which can be quite silly enough),
\nit’s like our friend “Gotcha” – mixing systems and screwing things up until you get the results
\nyou want.<\/p>\n
Lots of the particularly crazy strain of Christians really, desperately want to believe Which gives us things like this. For more mockery, see beneath the fold.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n According to the video, if you take a phrase from the new testament that supposedly talks about the There are a few oh-so-minor problems with this.<\/p>\n So… If you mis-translate greek to english, and then translate the english to hebrew making I’ll just point out (in an attempt to work in something vaguely on-topic) that Looking at this, it looks unlikely. The number of phonemes is fixed, but it’s And for that, we go back to the bible codes. You’re not working forwards<\/em>, looking for what’s Let me show you an example. I’m going to “prove” that I<\/em> am the antichrist.<\/p>\n Let’s start with my first name, “Mark”. The name “Mark” has several possible histories to Now, let’s look at with my pre-marriage last name. One way of transliterating it into “Chu” has no direct translation to hebrew, because hebrew has no “Ch” sound. But So my name could be (stretching, but stretching no more than this Barak Obama” thing) So, the things that I’m saying to you are the melody of the devil. Sure sounds like I’m the I normally try to ignore things like this, but this is just too funny. In general, I find arguments like this to be extremely silly. This is, basically, like playing with gematria – only instead of doing real gematria (which can be quite silly enough), it’s like our friend “Gotcha” – mixing systems and screwing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bad-probability","category-fundamentalism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-cP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nthat Barack Obama is the antichrist. They want an explanation for how this black man with
\na muslim name could possible have actually been elected – they don’t believe it could possibly
\nhave happened honestly. And their doctrine requires the antichrist to come soon<\/em>. Combine
\nthose two, and you’ve got what, for them, is a sort of perfect storm.<\/p>\n
\nantichrist, and then you translate it to english, you’ll get the phrase “lightning from above”. If you then
\ntake the word lightning, and translate it to a third language, hebrew, you get “xarak”. If you then take the
\nword “above”, and translate it, you get “bamah” or “bimah” (depending on conjugation). If you put those words
\ntogether, hebrew requires a prefix on the “bamah” part, which our oh-so-brilliant video author claims would
\nbe “O-“. So, according to this fundie nutcase, if you translate a line from the new testament into hebrew
\n(using English as an intermediate), you’ll get “Barak O-Bamah”.<\/p>\n\n
\na clear, blatant mistranslation. But hey, what’s a minor mistranslation if it
\nproduces the results you want?<\/li>\n
\nprefix would cause the initial consonant to be shifted to the “V” form. So
\nthe phrase in hebrew wouldn’t be “Barak Obamah” but “Barak Uvamah”<\/li>\n
\nthe Hebrew name “Barak”. Our presidents name is arabic – the corresponding hebrew name
\nisn’t Barak, but “Baruch”. The two words are quite different in Hebrew – Baruch means “Blessed”;
\n“Barak” means lightning. They’re different words, pronounced differently.
\n(Barak ends with a hard-K sound; Baruch ends with an aspirate-H. The K and the CH are
\nwritten with different characters – BRK versus BRC.)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
\na conjugation error, you get something which sounds (to an english speaker) kind-of like the name
\nof the current president of the US. Therefore, he’s the antichrist.<\/p>\n
\nmathematically, this really isn’t surprising at all. It’s basically exactly the same
\nas my usual critique of gematria-type stuff. There are a finite number of phonemes in
\nhuman languages. Almost any combination of phonemes that you can imagine is a word in some
\nlanguage. If you’re willing to search a bit, and be flexible in your translations, you can
\nfind almost any kind of pattern or correspondence that you want.<\/p>\n
\nbig enough that the number of combinations is pretty staggering. For instance, english has
\nsomewhere around 40 distinct phonemes. It’s a whole lot. Even if you’re willing to cheat,
\nwhat are the odds that even a mistranslation of a passage would produce a result like this?<\/p>\n
\nthere. You’ve got a result that you want, and you’re working backwards<\/em> from it. You’ve got a name,
\nlike “Barak Obama”, and you want to make an argument that he’s the antichrist. So you try to find some
\nway<\/em> that you could translate something close to those phonemes into something from the texts that
\npurport to speak about the antichrist. It would be surprising if you couldn’t. There’s no shortage
\nof passages in the bible, and for many of the fundies, they see a huge number of them as being, in
\nsome way, about the antichrist.<\/p>\n
\nit. One connects it to the god Mars; another one to the babylonian god “Marduk”. Some christian
\nsects associate Marduk with the devil, because among other things, he was the god of magic.<\/p>\n
\nhebrew gives us the word for “melody”.<\/p>\n
\nthe closest thing I can come up with is a hebrew prefix which translates as “the”.<\/p>\n
\ntranslated as “The melody of the devil”.<\/p>\n
\nantichrist, doesn’t it? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"