I CAN SEE THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL
Dr. Newto Joseph
By New10.
XXXX
I read an article in Life Magazine "Higher Learning" "Christian colleges are
booming--and reinventing the meaning of faith-based education". The
Evangelical movement is taking over the education of are youth. The
professors must sign a pledge affirming that they "believe the Bible to be
the inspired, the only infallible, authority's word of God" to work at these
colleges. These students will not come out of college free from religious
taint on matters of biology. They will be semi-educated and superstitious
when they leave school. I also think these students will be mentally
disturbed to the extent they believe that a man died, came back from the
dead and is now invisible interacting with Christians who believe in the
supernatural. One thing they did not learn that the supernatural does not
exist accept in their own imagination.
It is not difficult to understand the raising tide of Christian
Fundamentalism, advertising. It seems one cannot escape the inundation of
Christian fundamentalism in the media and from Christian politicians. One
person said they voted for Bush because he was anti-abortion.
Between Pat Robertson's school of law that will be graduating
future lawyers who will become politicians and evangelical schools America
will soon become a theocracy of superstitious automatons that will destroy
free thought. There is no doubt in my mind that we will soon have blasphemy
laws.
Allan Adler
> I CAN SEE THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL
I'm glad you've got it all figured out. ;-)
> I read an article in Life Magazine "Higher Learning" "Christian colleges are
> booming--and reinventing the meaning of faith-based education". The
> Evangelical movement is taking over the education of are youth. The
> professors must sign a pledge affirming that they "believe the Bible to be
> the inspired, the only infallible, authority's word of God" to work at these
> colleges.
If that is a correct quotation, it has nothing to do with biology, only
with theology.
I know from trying to get a job at such a place, an act of desperation,
that one can't even get a job as a janitor without being one of the flock.
> Between Pat Robertson's school of law that will be graduating
> future lawyers who will become politicians and evangelical schools America
> will soon become a theocracy of superstitious automatons that will destroy
> free thought. There is no doubt in my mind that we will soon have blasphemy
> laws.
We already have blasphemy laws. They aren't enforced.
Anyway, while I have some sympathy with the sentiments expressed, it
is really pretty flimsy. The evangelists have their prophets of doom
and we, apparently, have drnj...@socal.rr.com.
--
Ignorantly,
Allan Adler <a...@zurich.csail.mit.edu>
* Disclaimer: I am a guest and *not* a member of the MIT CSAIL. My actions and
* comments do not reflect in any way on MIT. Also, I am nowhere near Boston.
Travis
> I really think something must be done about this.
Maybe we could, like, propose a constitutional amendment separating
church from state?
That'll stop those evangelical fundies from undermining the secular
society and imposing their midieval superstitions on us all!
Who do we talk to if we want to propose something like this?
Travis
Steve Kelley
official religion. Of course that means that the people representing the
state are free to express their religion however they want. That's not
the state doing it no matter how disenfranchised that makes anybody
feel. Everybody knows that ;-)
--
Steve Kelley
Protean Instrument Corp.
Jive Dadson
writing on the wall." The hand [pause] writing. Not the handwriting.
Allan Adler
> I can see you are not familiar with the origin of the phrase, "the hand
> writing on the wall." The hand [pause] writing. Not the handwriting.
This is an important distinction. One can see handwriting on the wall,
but not necessarily the hand that wrote it. Likewise, one can see the hand
writing on the wall, but maybe not the handwriting, e.g. if the hand writes
in invisible ink or in ink that is exactly the same color as the wall.
But you didn't enlighten us as to the origin of the phrase, only that
the OP was not familiar with it. I think it is somewhere in the Tanakh
(i.e. the Hebrew Bible) maybe involving Darius or some Persian king, but
I don't remember exactly. My vague recollection suddenly yielded the
phrase, "mene mene tekal upharsin" as being what the moving hand actually
wrote. upharsin is related to the word Parsi, i.e. Persian. With that much
of a hint, let me consult my trusty concordance of the Tanakh, i.e. A New
Concordance of the Bible..., edited by Abraham Even-Shoshan. I guess I can
also consult my handy copy of Brown-Driver-Briggs' Hebrew and English Lexicon.
Let's start with the former. OK, I got nowhere with the former, which probably
just proves that I'm no good at using it yet, due to lack of skill at spelling
Hebrew from the way it sounds when pronounced by a native speaker of English.
More on this below.
OK, BDB p.828 of my edition, has poras as meaning Persia and parsy meaning
Persian. The triliteral root is pay resh samech. That should make it easier
to consult the concordance, if necessary. For parsy (pronounced parsee),
the only reference in BDB is to Nehemiah 12:22. Let's take a quick look in
my copy of The Holy Scriptures, published by The Jewish Publication Society
of America, 5719-1958 (the former year being based on the alleged date
of creation). No, it is not the moving finger; it's just genealogical
information.
This isn't working. I've tried all three words in both reference works.
Now let's try my copy of Ben-Yehuda's Hebrew <-> English dictionary and
look up the English word "finger". Too many corresponding Hebrew words...
OK, since I think this might have something to do with Darius, let's try
looking for that in BDB. I find it on p.201, spelled (in Hebrew letters)
doryovesh (o being pronounced like aw). This corresponds to the way the
Persians themselves pronounced it, which was DArayava'ush. Citations are
broken up into groups because there was more than one Persian king named
Darius. References are to:
(1) Ezr 4:5
(2) Hg 1:15 2:10
(3) Zc 1:1,7 7:1
(4) Ne 12:22 (which we've seen before)
(5) Dn 9:1 11:1
OK, let's look at them.
(1) No.
(2) No, no.
(3) No, no, no.
(4) No.
(5) No, no.
I guess maybe it wasn't Darius. How about Cyrus, Nebachanezzar, Ahasueros?
How about Google?
Searching for
mene mene tekel upharsin
leads to lots of hits, including a wikipedia article on the writing on the wall
which gives the citation Daniel 5:1-31. The king is Belshazzar. So, now let's
see the indicated part of Daniel. Huge feast, lots of drinking. Fingers of
hand appear and write on the wall. This is cute: "Then the kings countenance
was changed in him, and his thoughts affrighted him; and the joints of his
loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against the other." Skipping
to 5:25: "And this is the writing that was inscribed: MENE MENE, TEKEL,
UPHARSIN."
Anyway, this clarifies that there was NOT a hand writing on the wall,
only some fingers writing on the wall.
Now let me see where I went wrong trying to use BDB and the concordance
to find this. For this purpose, let me dredge up my bilingual Hebrew-Yiddish
edition of the Tanakh, that I picked up used for 2 bucks, and see what is in
Daniel 5.25, which is on p.1222. OK, MENE is spelled mnA' (A is a long a,
indicated by a horizontal line of two dots under the n, and ' is aleph),
TEKEL is spelled tkAl (where t denotes the letter taw, the last letter of
the Hebrew alphabet, not the letter tet), and UPHARSIN is spelled
vparsyn (v being the letter waw, pronounced as a vowel u before the p
at the beginning of the word, and there also being an i, indicated by a single
dot under the s, and the s is the letter samech, not the letter sin or shin).
Now let's try BDB again. I don't find anything with triconsonantal root mn'
but I do find mnh, which means count, which I think is the right meaning.
I think h can change to aleph during inflection. I still don't see a
citation of Daniel 5.25. Let's try the concordance. The concordance does
have mn'. It doesn't say anything other than to refer the reader to mnoh
and mnot. Instead of writing cf., as one might in English, it writes
`yn, where ` denotes the letter ayin, the name of which means, I think, eye,
and `yn literally spells out ayin and tells one to look. No Daniel's in
the mnot entries. Ah, here it is, p.680, under mnoh, the very line.
I'll experiment with the other words of the inscription later on my own.
Then there is something else to consider, namely the reference that
Omar Khayyam has of this in his Rubaiyat. Googling
omar khayyam rubaiyat finger
leads to http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/545.html
which has the relevant lines from Fitzgerald's translation of the
Rubaiyat:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it
I have a computer file somewhere that contains the Rubaiyat in Persian,
that I downloaded from the net.
So, let's see. We started with a hand writing, then found out that there
were instead fingers writing, and now we are reduced to a single finger.
Now, to get back to how I just happen to know the phrase MENE MENE TEKEL
UPHARSIN in spite of having done my best to avoid religious education,
I learned it in the 1980's when my friend Dan Foss, a comparative historical
sociologist reduced to doing clerical work, suddenly acquired an office mate
named Cyrus. Noting the reference to the ancient Persian king, Dan started
quoting this phrase from Daniel 5:25 (maybe the fact that his own name was
Dan also had something to do with it) and telling me about it. Having heard
about it several dozen times in this connection, it was hard to ever forget it.
Larry
news:aHc6f.1786$Jo3...@tornado.socal.rr.com:
> I read an article in Life Magazine "Higher Learning" "Christian
> colleges are booming--and reinventing the meaning of faith-based
> education". The Evangelical movement is taking over the education of
> are youth. The professors must sign a pledge affirming that they
> "believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible,
> authority's word of God" to work at these colleges. These students
> will not come out of college free from religious taint on matters of
> biology. They will be semi-educated and superstitious when they leave
> school. I also think these students will be mentally disturbed to the
> extent they believe that a man died, came back from the dead and is
> now invisible interacting with Christians who believe in the
> supernatural. One thing they did not learn that the supernatural does
> not exist accept in their own imagination.
>
Very well put. I also believe this is the reason they are SO terrified of
their young reading Harry Potter. They've bred and inspired a new
generation of easily-impressioned, ultra-superstitious children who would
just as easily attach to the Harry Potter wizards and warlock fastasy as
the intended religious fantasy....making little Harry one of the most
dangerous fantasy characters on the planet!
.