[ExI] The Improved Man will be a king over you (and give women their dowries as appointed)

[Amara Graps]

Anders Sandberg, that eternally mischievous optimist, hacked together a
small Markov chain program that constructed a new medley text out of
another, based on its statistics, with inputs from the Quran, Genesis,
OT III, Ingersoll's _The Improved Man_, providing an equal insolent ear
to several religions and one nonreligion at the same time.

http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2007/08/the_improved_man_will_be_a_king_over_you_and_give_women_their_dowries_as_appointed.html

He says:
"What about a more constructive desecration, to _play_ with the
information itself?  I think indeed "overwrought sanctimony must be met
with disrespectful insolence" One might respect something and yet play
with it. It is when play and respect become mutually impossible one has
lost one's humanity. And this is especially true for textual
literalists."


Out of the medley text :
http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/images/medley.txt

we find such gems as:

<<among whom I turn to you with somewhat of fear and hunger and loss of
it; most surely they are alone, they bite the ends of their Sabbath,
appearing on the day when Allah said: O Musa! surely there will come
again.>>

<<and he begat Arphaxad five hundred ninety and five years, in the
cities that were speckled and spotted among the goats: and of the
heavens and the souls that came up after them, poor and very ill
favoured and fat kine.>>

<<And God said unto him, Beware thou that thou hast taken my husband?>>

<<And the uncircumcised man child among you has not yet joined them,
that they were the isles of the Galactic Federation (76 planets around
larger stars visible from here) (founded 95,000,000 years ago, very
space opera) solved overpopulation (250 billion or so per planet - 178
billion on average) by mass implanting.. >>

<<The Improved Man will be a king over you  (and give women their
dowries as appointed)>>

(If you notice your blog hit rate spiking, Anders, it is because
I submitted this to boingboing. It's too good to let slip by.)

Amara

-- 

Amara Graps, PhD      www.amara.com
Associate Research Scientist, Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson
INAF Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Roma, Italia