From the Spam Folder..
Being a bit under the weather today, and not feeling feeling any inspiration to write an actual blog post, I thought I’d do a bit of tidying up, including emptying the spam comments folder, which had over a thousand items in it. Several of the comments that didn’t make it through the filter were from the chap who wrote this one, which features an impressive segue from the condemnation of gay sex to the value of the Hubble constant.
I haven’t read the “book” mentioned at the end of this comment. I wonder if it gives the units in which the Hubble constant is 70.98047? I ask because as far as I know neither the kilometre nor the Megaparsec were used in the New Testament.
P. S. My spam filter has now blogged over 2,000,000 comments on this blog; just over 30,000 have been published.
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In the Dark 
July 29, 2018 at 7:57 pm
I saw this reply briefly on the comments page after one of your recent blogs. I wondered for a while whether you were deliberately allowing it in the name of open comment. Who are we to police what is sensible and all that. That it then vanished must have involved your moderation. Or perhaps divine intervention? I was pleased regardless.
July 29, 2018 at 8:01 pm
It was followed by a string of other ones that I found much more offensive. That annoyed me so I blocked the sender and removed those that had been published.
July 29, 2018 at 8:06 pm
He gives his units (elsewhere) as kilometres per sec per meg parsec. He’s been posting this figure all over the place – just google “70.98047”, or buy his book – only 99p for the Kindle version, says Amazon. Alternatively, you could do something useful …
July 29, 2018 at 8:17 pm
I’m not going buy it. It’s too expensive.
July 29, 2018 at 8:18 pm
I agree.
July 29, 2018 at 9:04 pm
Hebrew has the same ambiguity in its word YOM (as in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement) as does English for DAY. It can mean 24 hours but it can also mean age or era, as in “the day of steam railways”. Indeed there are at least two places in the Old Testament where it can only mean era (Job 15:23 & 18:20).
July 30, 2018 at 10:43 am
Here is part of a reply:
😮
July 30, 2018 at 10:58 am
I see that Jesus has also mastered time travel, unless that’s with his God hat on, in which case he was there already.
(I’m pretty sure that stating that Jesus has a “God hat” is a heresy, probably something to do with diaphytism)
July 30, 2018 at 10:58 am
I’m intrigued by the phrase `I’m Jewish, so take that as Gospel.”
July 30, 2018 at 1:22 pm
That is a frequent reply by secular people and 6*24-hour fundamentalists, who usually have little else in common!
The usual translation of the Hebrew is “there was evening and there was morning: day two” (Genesis 1:8, and similarly for the other ‘days’), but this verse comes before the sun and moon appear (1:14), and the Hebrew can equally well mean “there was a disordered mixture and there was supervision: the second era.” Ancient Hebrew wrote only the consonants, so that different vowels inserted give different meanings: BOKER is morning, and BAKARA is supervision (as in Ezekiel 34:12). Each day shows a transition from darkness to light due to God’s ordering work. I suspect the double meaning between evening/morning and disorder/supervision (noted by the mediaeval Jewish scholar Nahmanides before modern science) is intentional; but, unlike the double meaning of yom = day, it is untranslatable into English.
July 30, 2018 at 3:27 pm
Nahmanides had no commitment to it for a start.