Principiul Maturităţii

"Fable should be taught as fable, myth as myth, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truth is horrifying. The mind of a child accepts them and only through great pain, perhaps tragedy, can the child be relieved of them. Men will fight for superstition as quickly as for the living truth -- even more so, since a superstition is intangible, you can't get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable."
- Hypatia

David Brin formulează în Foundation's Triumph un concept pe nume "The Maturity Principle":

“Some called their approach the Maturity Principle. A belief that children can be brought up with just the right combination of trust and skepticism--a mix of tolerance and healthy suspicion--so that any new or foreign idea could then be evaluated on its own merits. The bad parts rejected. The good parts safely incorporated into ever-growing wisdom. Truth might then be won, not by dogma, but by remaining open to a wide universe of possibilities.”

“Fascinating, Daneel. If such a method ever proved valid, it would have staggering implications. There would be no inherent limit to the exploration or growth of human souls.”

Bible Codes

Credeai că ştii toate aberaţiile spuse despre Biblie? Pun pariu că puţini au auzit de Bible Codes!
Despre ce e vorba?

Over the past few centuries, numerous theories have arisen about “hidden messages” supposedly inscribed in the Bible (and other holy texts). These messages can only be revealed, for example, by reading every other letter of the text, or every seventh letter, and so on. Many believe that these messages have prophetic value, and even that the “true” word of God is somehow tangled within these codes.

Ideea e că "cercetătorii Biblici" practică selecţia observaţională, căutând cuvinte după diverse pattern-uri. Legea numerelor mari spune că vor găsi multe expresii pe care le caută.

Dar legea numerelor mari e o armă cu două tăişuri, fiindcă dacă religioşii pot găsi ceva pe placul lor, atunci oricine poate găsi orice!

Dmitry Brant a găsit nişte exemple interesante ca God Ain't Real sau Hello Kitty.

În plus:

I ran the exact same program on a large Microsoft help file, and obtained quite similar results. I suppose that even the above “prophecies” cannot be valid because the King James Bible is only a translation of the original Hebrew and Greek. But we can safely hypothesize that, given a large enough source of text, no matter what language, any word or phrase can be found using similar methods.