Hvernig vitum við að Osama er látinn?

Ég tel að fólk almennt hafi lítið hugsað út í hvernig við vitum eitthvað fyrir víst.  Hvernig t.d. vitum við hvort að Osama Bin Laden er dáinn?  Allt í lagi, við höfum vitnisburð en þeir geta verið að ljúga. Það geta allir logið, það er alltaf möguleiki að viðkomandi hafi leynda ástæðu til að ljúga. Í þessu tilviki hafa stjórnvöld hellings ástæðu til að ljúga, svo mikið er víst.  Í þúsundir ára þá hefur mannkynið aðeins geta reytt sig á vitnisburð fólks um fjarlægja staði og liðna atburði.  Í dag erum við í aðeins betri stöðu, við höfum t.d. ljósmyndir, myndbönd og hljóðupptökur.  Þetta gerir það að verkum að í þeim tilvikum sem við höfum slíkar heimildir þá eykst trúverðugleikinn en við sitjum samt uppi með að myndin getur verið fölsuð eða myndbandið getur verið sviðsett.  Trúverðugleikinn eykst er maður getur í raun og veru aldrei verið 100% viss.  Þarna er einmitt lykilorðið, trúverðugleikinn eða trúin. Mér finnst gott að hugsa þetta þannig að mín þekking er skipt upp í fullvissu og trú. Í þessu dæmi með Osama þá er mín fullvissa 80% og mín trú 20%. Sem sagt, nokkuð viss um að Osama er látinn eins og stjórnvöld í Bandaríkjunum segja.

Í þessu samhengi langar mig að benda á samtal við mann að nafni Moshe Averick um hvernig við vitum/trúum að Mósebækurnar voru skrifaðar á tímum Móse, hérna er það sem hann hafði um málið að segja:

Evidence: Can we trust traditional texts to be reliable?
There are many safeguards in Jewish law and practice to preserve the integrity of the Torah scroll. However, the simplest and most obvious evidence of how well the system works, is that after the founding of the State of Israel, Jews from every corner of the world brought their own Torah Scrolls and the ones from Yemen ( whose community was over 2000 years old) matched the ones from Poland. This, despite the fact that there are over 300,000 letters in the Torah.

The scrolls are all handwritten, it is absolutely forbidden to use a printing press to create a Torah scroll, and a new scroll can only be copied from an already existent one. The scroll is read from publicly three times a week, Monday, Thursday and Shabbat. There are no vowels or punctuation in the scroll, if the reader makes a mistake (everyone follows from a printed edition) he is immediately stopped and must repeat the word properly.

If it turns out that there is a mistake in the text, even one letter, it is forbidden to read from it publicly and is immediately put back in the ark with a distinct sign that it is invalid, until it is repaired by a qualified scribe. Unless you have actually seen how quickly the reader is jumped on by the congregation if he makes a mistake, and unless you have actually watched a Torah scroll invalidated in the middle of the service and put back in the ark, it is hard to really understand how exacting this process is.

It is also important to understand the reverence that the community has for the Torah scroll. I’m not talking about orthodox communities, that goes without saying, I’m even talking about the most Reform, liberal congregations. They might eat on Yom Kippur, but no one, and I mean no one messes with a Torah scroll. It would be unthinkable (this is something that can only be known from experience) for the most liberal Reform congregation to write their own version of a Torah scroll, and this is despite the fact that they claim to believe that the whole thing is a bunch of man made myths.

There are 5-6 letter differences between the scroll of the Arab-Jewish communities and the eastern European Jewish communities. These are all letters that are silent in the words, and none change the meaning or pronunciation of a word or phrase. Example: Thouht and Thought , foreign and forein, etc.

Torah scrolls can easily used for up to 100 years, which means that the transmission process really only has to happen 30-40 times. This takes you back over 3000 years to the final writing of the Torah at the end of the 40 years in the desert.

I replied,

It is a good example of the use of an oral tradition to correct a written tradition as well as the durability of a written tradition – if anyone cares about it. Oral traditions are not necessarily so subject to corruption as the original commenter seemed to think. He is confusing situations where no one cares much with ones where they do and must care.Ancient Greek myths of the gods were examples of situations where no one cared much. There were many variant accounts of the soap opera lives of the pagan gods, and the only bottom to the confusion is that a good editor would sometimes fashion an account that – being a good story – would simply get told more often until it became the standard story. Somewhat like one soap opera being way more popular than others, but it was all just nonsense. Think Homer. That was a Darwinian system! – the story was shaped for fitness, not for truth. Of course, after a while, people got tired of truth-optional religion, which is why you and I are where we are today and the Greek gods are just garden statues somewhere

Mynd af líki Osama hryllileg