View 455 February 26 - March 4, 2007 (original) (raw)

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Sunday, March 4, 2007

Subject: Urban soldiers

Jerry

Here is a fascinating short piece on urban vs. rural recruits who join our military. It says something about education. I suspect it also says something about the collective g of rural vs urban populations, but I will leave that to the reader.

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htatrit/articles/20070302.aspx

Urban Horrors
March 2, 2007: In the United States, recruiters have noted a steady decline in the proportion (to their population) of recruits coming from urban areas. This is largely because so many potential recruits have to be turned down because of the poor education they have received in urban schools. While only 21 percent of Americans live in rural areas, 44 percent of the qualified recruits come from these areas. What's strange about all this is that the rural areas spend much less, per pupil, on education, but get much better results. Part of this can be attributed to differences in cost of living, but a lot of it has to do with simply getting more done with less. Per capita, young people in urban areas are 22 percent more likely to join the army, than those of the same age in urban areas.

Why is anyone astonished? Rural schools are a bit closer to the citizens. But it's another data point. The Republic is slowly succumbing to the liberal view of the world. Unions, bureaucrats, regulations, anything but freedom and responsibility. And the beat goes on...

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I have put up more of Joanne Dow's Daily Diatribes. Apologies for the enormous format. She sends these and I paste them in and I really don't have time today to go through and reduce each one. I apologize if you have trouble reading them, but there's not much I can do about it.

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Tomb of Jesus

This is hurried because I have to do the column, but: Tonight is the big Discovery expose of the Tomb of Jesus, in which it is apparently alleged that (1) the Disciples buried Jesus in a tomb that was neither hidden nor revered, in an upper class area a long way from Calvary, with his wife and mother and son and one Matthew who doesn't appear to belong in that tomb at all but may have been a brother in law or something. And (2) the Disciples knew all about this but continued to build the Church.

If so, one thing is clear. Paul, who persecuted Christians before his conversion, didn't know about it. He says in his first epistle to the Corinthians:

15:12 Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? 15:13 But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: 15:14 And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.

15:15 Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not.

15:16 For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: 15:17 And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.

15:18 Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.

15:19 If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.

Now if lots of people knew where this ossuary is -- it wasn't particularly hidden and was marked with a rose as if to call attention to it -- then surely one would have told Paul? In which case Paul's incentive to travel all over the Middle East is pretty hard to discern.

I had actually intended to address the probabilistic model they give, but on looking at it, it's absurd. They took the frequencies of the names in those times, assumed they were independent, and multiplied the probabilities. That produces a very small number.

Which is silly. First, if this were a Christian family, the probabilities of the names aren't independent at all. Second, what has that to do with whose bones were found anyway? Third, they did DNA to show that the two women weren't related, maybe; but they haven't established that this is a family ossuary to begin with. If it's not, the fact that two people in there aren't biological relatives is hardly startling.

A better probability model would be to estimate the chances (1) that a family known to have property in Bethlehem and Nazareth would decide to establish a family ossuary in Jerusalem, (2) not anywhere near the tomb originally loaned by Joseph of Arimathea which was known to near Calvary; (3) mark it with a rose and make no attempt to hide it; (4) and fill it with ossuaries that aren't very well inscribed. I don't know the actual numbers here, but none of those events looks very probable, say no more than 1/10 surely? I think the rose on the tomb is relatively rare, and ossuaries with bad inscriptions aren't rare at all: call the rose 1/5 and the badly done inscriptions 1/2. The others we were merely guessing at. But we get (1/10)*(1/10)*(1/5)*(1/2) = 1/1000. See what I can do with numbers? Depending on the assumptions -- say I throw in the fact that fewer than 3/4 of the tombs have both sexes, and maybe the probability that the ossuary was made of a particular stone -- I can get just about any result I like.

It's more likely that this was an ossuary of a Christian family, and may well contain non-biologically related people who considered themselves members of a single family (early Christians often did). How probable? There's no way to figure that because we don't have much in the way of data. But taking a series of name frequencies and multiplying them to give a result and treating that result as if it has any real meaning is just plain silly. I don't blame Cameron for being impressed with this pseudoscience, but some of the people involved in this ought to know better.

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Having seen the program -- I am ashamed to say that I wrote the above after seeing only secondary sources about it -- I probably would have written a somewhat different essay had I seen it first, but I don't think of any substantial changes to make.

(I did say "marked with a rose" when I should have described the distinctive marking somewhat differently, but that hardly matters: it was distinctive, meaning that it doesn't appear to be hidden or clandestine.)

We are dealing with a tempest in a teapot, and the much vaunted "statistical analysis" is the bunk.

Once again I don't really blame Cameron for being interested. The tomb really should have been given more attention by the archeologists. It's worth studying to learn more about Judao-Christians in an important era. But it changes nothing.

Christianity is based on an event well outside the bounds of probability estimates. Miracles by definition always are, and the Resurrection was an extraordinary miracle. Extraordinary hypotheses require extraordinary proof, said Descartes as echoed by Carl Sagan; Saul of Tarsus thought he had seen extraordinary proof, so that he changed from persecuting early Christians in the name of Judaism to becoming St. Paul the Apostle to the Gentiles. He interviewed hundreds of witnesses. If there had been some sort of conspiracy -- it would have had to involve a Roman execution detail and Herod's temple guards and watch (who were presumably bribable, and who would presumably have been terrified by the furor their botched execution caused and thus would have an incentive not to brag when in their cups), as well as a number of disciples so terrified that their chief denied their leader three times before dawn -- it is unlikely that Paul would not have learned of it. Whatever else Paul may have been, he was charismatic and persuasive both before his conversion and after. It seems to me that he would have found out. His Epistles do not reflect any such guilty knowledge; nor do his deeds.

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