Pentecostal Parents

[drfuzzy]

Just got back from visiting family in Rantoul, IL. My father and step-mother are United Pentecostals. They know I'm an atheist, so my visits are mostly me humoring them while they tell me story after story of miracles and so forth.

And just as data is not the plural of anecdote, evidence isn't the plural of stories. To me, piling up all those stories makes them less credible, not more. One story that can be verified is worth a thousand that are merely hearsay.

The United Pentecostal Church thrives on vivid story-telling, but I don't think it would last long if it had to survive on fact-checking.

One of the claims I was subjected to was Ivan Panin's Bible Code work: A brilliant Russian mathematician who went to Harvard and lectured there and was an atheist who set out to disprove the Bible spent 50 years analyzing the numerical values of the Hebrew and Greek the oldest copies of the Old and New testament, and found patterns that were mathematically impossilbe unless a single guiding intellect composed the whole thing (except the Catholic parts). His work (43,000 pages) was left to the Nobel Prize committee, and there's a $50,000 prize for anyone who can refute it.

Filtered through my dad's mind, he originally claimed Panin wrote 43,000 papers, which I observed ought to land him in the record books. While researching this, I found it's also popularly claimed that Panin won the Nobel Prize for Mathematics in 1943, but it seems no prize was awarded that year--that was the only part of the tale I didn't hear from my father.

The source of my dad's story was a sermon from a revival, which he had on tape, and which I endured. Of course it's impossible to refute 50 years of work without spending many years critiquing it, but I quilckly found on my Android that Panin wasn't even a math major, let alone a mathematician. He got a BA from Harvard, and what he lectured on was Russian Literature. He did have a Bible Code obsession and spent 50 years on it. In describing his method, he reveals that he cherry-picked from numerous manuscripts to construct a version of the Bible that fit his thesis, and seems to have been entirely unconscious of the fact that proceeding in that way invalidates all his hard work. And even so, there are mistakes in his work. There doesn't seem to be any prize for refuting it that I can find (a shame, I could sure use the money), and the whole thing is sheer crankery. Panin did leave his work to the Nobel Prize Committee, but I suppose I could do the same, it doesn't mean there's anything special about it.

I also got to hear about rock and roll back masking with devil messages. I confess, I didn't let the bit about the Second Law of Thermodynamics disproving evolution slide by, but other than that, I took it to avoid pointless arguing. My dad is 78, and I don't want to get on bad terms with him when he's nearing the end of his life.

So I'm doing my venting here. Thanks for bearing with.

Greetings, brother from another mother.  My parents started out Southern Baptist and then went Pentecostal.  Yes, saved and sanctified, glory hallelujah, rolling in the aisles and speaking in tongues Pentecostal.  My mother loved the painting of the Rapture behind the altar - Jeebus and his flock flying above crowds of people dying in rivers of lava - that she took pictures of it and made it into a poster.  There was one hung in each bedroom.
I hear ya.  I feel your pain.   I celebrate our freedom!!!
It's a cult.