CADRE Comments

The original Star Trek television series (featuring William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk and Leonard Nimoy as Commander Spock) introduced Americans unaccustomed to reading science fiction to a number of interesting conjectures. One of which played out in an episode entitled " Mirror, Mirror " where Kirk, McCoy, Scotty and Uhura were exchanged with their counterparts from an alternate universe. The universes were very similar in many respects, but in the alternate universe the United Federation of Planets is known as the Terran Empire and instead of being a force largely for good, the Terran Empire is barbaric and ruthless. This raises the question of whether it is possible that alternate universes exist like the Terran Empire where exact replicas of each of us exist, but the replicas are evil rather than good. (For those reading this article who are already evil, just ask if you have a good counter-part living in an alternate universe. It comes out the same. But I en...

I like Bart Ehrman and I was greatly amused by his take down of Richard Carrier imn their tussle over the Jesus myther delusion, Yet I have an ax to grind against Ehrman because no matter how good his scholarship (it is fine ) he put's a pin on everything that purposely casts a poll over belief, His book Forged is a good example. [1]  I have not read the book but I am going by what he says in his Cambridge lectures,which I have seen on You Tube. [2] In his review of Forged   Mike Licona   says:   Ehrman’s bottom line message is that literary forgeries were plentiful in antiquity, many of which were written by Christians and that approximately 70  percent of the New Testament writings were not written by those to whom they are attributed. Ehrman is well read on the subject, citing from a number of doctoral dissertations, scholarly monographs, and journal articles in both English and German. Why is    the subject matter of this book important? F...

Last time , I wrote about the Infinite Monkey Theorem, i.e., the thought-experiment that posits that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of keyboards for an infinite period of time would ultimately be able to write all of the books in the Library of Congress. I used basic probability mathematics to determine the likelihood that ten billion monkeys typing for three hundred million years would be able to write just the first two clauses of the beginning of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities . As shown in the post entitled, " Infinite Monkeys, Keyboards and Time - What are the Odds? " even with ten billion monkeys each typing 52 letters, spaces and punctuation every minute of every day for 300 million years, the odds of those monkeys randomly typing those two lines calculated to one time in every 2.98*10 77 years (that's once in every 298 million, million, million, million, million, million, million, million, million, million, million years...

Yesterday, a milestone was reached. It has been more than 10 years since I legally changed my name to James Patrick Holding. And yesterday, a fundy atheist on TheologyWeb called me by my old name, Robert Turkel. After more than ten years. I have a thread started on TheologyWeb about this. An original version of the thread was lost when TWeb crashed; but the idea was to keep track of fundy atheists and others who refused to acknowledge the change. After the change in July 2007, I started a thread with a poll with this question and options: How long will fundy atheists continue calling me by my old name? One year 5 years 10 years Farrell Till will still be calling me “Turkel” in hell At the time, I figured the last two were a joke. Now it looks like the last option is as much reality TV as Live PD . Why fundy atheists persist in this foolishness is anyone’s guess. One suggestion made on TWeb is this one: I'm pretty sure the m...