Social Impact Of Poor Biblical IDQ

[20090617. Added References] This article explores the Social Impact of Poor Biblical Information and Data Quality focusing on two of the sixteen IDQ dimensions, Understandability and Interpretability and provides a method for scoring them relative to other fields.

How does one measure the success of a Philosophy or Religion?
There are "positives" and "negatives" to almost everything, including philosophies. I will consider Religions philosophies because they are methods of deriving, among other things, how we should behave and what we should value. Philosophies can be measured by their success. Their success should be measured by how "trustworthy" and "reliable" they are. Measurements of their "reliability" and "trustworthiness" should be dependent upon how consistent or reproducible the results are. Some philosophies have become so reliable that they have become a science and some have splintered, become obsolete, and neglected. I agree with some who say that Epistemology is one the neglected philosophies. However, in my view, Epistemology is one of the most important endeavors humans can undertake, and I think it is thriving under other names, such as Law, Statistics, Measurement, Science, Artificial Intelligence, Informal Logic and Information and Data Quality Research.

How Recipes are similar to Religions and Philosophies.
Virtues, Morality and Truth Seeking are areas where Religion and Philosophy overlap. It can be summed up as "What is the right way to live?". We can rephrase this question to derive an analogy as "What is the right way to do something?". This is how Recipes, Religions and Philosophies are similar. Once someone has an Epiphany, or a "Good Idea" or a "Good way to make a sauce" they can write it down so it can be learned, reproduced and used as a basis for other things. Once it gets recorded once, it will be read (consumed), interpreted and acted upon to behave in a certain way. The measurement of how successful the Recipe, the Religion or the Philosophy should be is how easy it is reproduce the results or how well it consistently reflects real world states.

The success of Recipes, Religions and Philosophies depends on how easy they are to Understand and Interpret.
My Grandmothers cooking was widely regarded as being some of the best cooking in the area. Not only the family loved her cooking, the Church "Pot-Lucks" eagerly awaited what she was going to contribute next. In her last years, we tried to get her recipes written down, but we were largely unsuccessful. She didn't use recipes. She used her intuition. When she said to add something as a "pinch", "little bit", "dash" etc. it meant nothing to us. When she said "do this until it makes a noise like...", it meant nothing to us. Her terms were too ambiguous for any of us to take a recipe dictated by her and recreate what she cooked. One person, a neighbor, was successful in getting some recipes made from her and built a local catering business out of it. She sold it when she wanted to retire.

Christianity is split up into an heirarchy of denominations and one explanation for that could be that it has a low score in the IDQ dimensions of Understandability and Interpretability.
Recipes, Religions and Philosophies depend on concepts, described by language. It is possible for a word to describe a concept, but sometimes the word depends on the context. Sometimes when you are translating concepts between languages, some languages don't describe a concept in the same way as another language and some languages are missing words for concepts that exist in another language. When this happens, then error creeps into the understanding and interpretation of concepts. A word is used to generally approximate a concept and then it is read (consumed) by another mind through a network of cognitive biases and prior knowledge and stored away categorically in biological storage media, the brain. There is a lot of room for error and ambiguity which leads to poor understandability and interpretability. Interpretability depends on Understandability, so if the information is hard to understand, it will be hard to interpret.

What does Understandability and Interpretability Mean?
The definitions of "Understandability" and "Interpretability" from the Total Data Quality Managment literature are as follows.

Understandability (Ease of understanding):
The extent to which data is easily comprehended.

Interpretability
The extent to which data is in appropriate language, symbols, and units and the definitions are clear.

Interestingly, intepretability plays a very important role in Imaging. I got the following defininion of "interpret" from the field of Military Imagery from answers.com

Military Imagery

"(DOD, NATO) Suitability of imagery for interpretation with respect to answering adequately requirements on a given type of target in terms of quality and scale.
a. poor -- Imagery is unsuitable for interpretation to answer adequately requirements on a given type of target.
b. fair -- Imagery is suitable for interpretation to answer requirements on a given type of target but with only average detail.
c. good--Imagery is suitable for interpretation to answer requirements on a given type of target in considerable detail.
d. excellent--Imagery is suitable for interpretation to answer requirements on a given type of target in complete detail."
["interpret." Military and Associated Words. US Department of Defense, 2003. Answers.com 04 Jun. 2009. http://www.answers.com/topic/interpretability]

And from Data Warehouse Literature
"the extent to which the data warehouse in modeled effectively in the inforamtion repository and how well maintained the Data Lineage (where the data come from)", "Fundamentals of data warehouses" By Matthias Jarke, Maurizio Lenzerini, Yannis Vassiliou, Panos Vassiliadis
- How easy the queries can be posed? How successful are they?

We all know what an Interpreter is.
When you don't speak the language you need an Interpreter, but "interpret" also has specific definitions in other fields such as Mathematics and Logic.

In the Total Data Quality Management literature the Information and Data Quality dimensions are organized into four categories. The catagories are
- Intrinsic IQ,
- Contextual IQ
- Representational IQ:
- Accessibility IQ:

Interpretability and Understandability fall under the "Representational" Category.
Most of the IDQ dimension have clear cut metrics and methods for deriving a score but Understandability and Interpretability are more subjective and require surveying people and analyzing their answers using weighted averages and whatever is common between them. For example if there are two witnesses to a crime.
Witness 1: It was a Black Car.
Witness 2: It was Blue Car.

Using a what is common between them, we can say it is a car. Using a weighted average, without further questioning, we can say that it was more likely a car than a truck so we can give more weight to the car.
1. Car
2. Truck

and we can say that the blue car from witness two was probably a darker shade of blue so we give more weight to darker colors.
1. Dark Blue
2. Light Blue

An example using Christianity is that they all believe in Jesus Christ.
How they define Jesus is another topic.

Quantifying The Understandability and Interpretability Score For Christianity
Since I don't have a survey prepared and don't have the time to randomly select 1000 Christians from random points around the world, It seems to me that one ROUGH way to quantify the IDQ dimensions of Understandability and Interpretability would be to assume that a Christian denomination represents an interpretation of Christianity and to take the total number of Christian denominations and use that as the denomenator, and use the number one to represent Christianity in the following manner.
Just to keep it simple, lets say that there are only two denominations of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant (but we really know there are more)

Christianity/Total Number of Denominations = some percent or score.

so plugging numbers into that, it would be

1/2 = .5 or 50%

So Protestants and Catholics each get a score of .5 out of 1.

Note, that if there were only one denomination of Christianity, the score would be 1. So one is the perfect score. Also note that this method can be used for other things besides Christianity to enable COMPARING the relative scores of Interpretability and Understanding in different fields. If we were a sociology class, we could do it with a newspaper article and survey students about it. Additionally and more importantly, this type of thing is done as part of the reading comprehension portion of some standardized tests.

To derive a score for each denomination of Catholicism and Protestants you could do the same thing, and the number would come out even smaller as you would then have a percentage of a percentage. For example, taking the score for Protestants, and plugging it back into the equation, and assuming a ridiculously small number of protestant denominations would give us a formula as follows

Protestant Score/Total Number of Protestant denominations = Protestant denomination score

so lets assume only two protestant denominations and plug that into the formula as follows

.5/2 = .25

So now each protestant denomination gets a score of .25 out of 1. The more denominations there are the lower the score becomes, justifiably.

As we can see, the scores for Understandability and Interpretability come out pretty low, and that is reflected by the fact that only ~33% of the world is christian and that ~33% is subdivided into smaller denominations.

Who has the right Understanding and Right Interpretation? Who Knows? How are any of them Justified in saying they know anything about "What is the Right Way To Live?".

They are NOT justified, yet they act as if they are, and make decisions that impact society as a whole.

The key problem with information that is not easily understood and interpreted is Ambiguity.
Ambiguity is derived from poor definitions of terms, leading to unreproduceable results. The information is not mapped properly to real world events and objects. The information does not accurately represent the real world.

There are plenty of examples in the real world that depend on non-ambiguous information to produce consistent results.
Mapping
Medicine
Safety
Logistics
Engineering
Recipes
Mathematical models
United nations
and I'm sure you can think up a lot more on your own.

So now, without further delay, I present to you.....

THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF POOR BIBLICAL IDQ
FURTHER READING AND REFERENCE
[Wikipedia should not be considered authoritative but it is a good place to start.]

Inhumane Treatment Of Others
- Anti-abortion violence

- Torture as means to a Justifiable End
-- Torture in the Past
-- Church Attendance And Torture Approval, Valerie Tarico

- Witch hunts
-- Children Are Targets Of Nigerian Witch Hunt, Lee Randolph
-- Causes and Sociology of Witch Hunts, Wikipedia
-- The Terrible Christian Legacy of the Witch Hunts, John Loftus

- Exorcism
-- Exorcism, Wikipedia
-- A Call For The Scientific Investigation of Exorcism, Lee Randolph

- Mental Illness in the Middle Ages
--History Of Mental Disorders, Wikipedia

- Slavery
-- Christianity And Slavery, Wikipedia
-- Slavery And Religion, Wikipedia
- Address To The Colored People, Robert Ingersoll
- Slavery? NO WAY...NONE!

- Manifest Destiny, Exploration and Conquering
-- Manifest Destiny, Wikipedia
-- The Protestant Atrocities: Manifest Destiny and Slavery, John Loftus

- Heresy, Blaming the victim, Wrong Interpretation, "Not Real Christians" when obviously, if they don't get it, its not their fault. The information is of poor quality.
-- Christian Heresy, Wikipedia
-- List Of People Burned As Heretics, Wikipedia
-- Arianism, Wikipedia
--- Inquisition
--- Inquisition, Wikipedia
--- Words From the Inquisition: "Convert or Die!, John Loftus

- Crusades
-- Crusades, Wikipedia

- Behavior, Sin, Biological Bases of Behavior.
-- Link to Many Articles on this topic by Lee Randolph

DENIAL OF ESTABLISHED KNOWLEDGE
- Human Origins and or Evolution
-- Twenty Reasons Why Genesis and Evolution Do Not Mix, Answers in Genesis
-- Answers in Creation, Christian site that generally refutes Answers In Genesis
-- Debunking Creationism

- Faith Healing
-- Court Rules Faith In God And Prayer As Child Abuse, Harry McCall

UNHEALTHY PSYCHOLOGY
Self-Esteem
-- Is Self-Esteem Contrary to Christianity, Christian Article

- Martyr Syndrome
-- Overcome Martyr-Syndrome, WikiHow

- Co-Opts Humans Natural Flawed Reasoning Algorithms
-- List Of Cognitive Biases

MORE ABOUT THE IDQ DIMENSIONS
In the Total Data Quality Management literature the IDQ dimensions are categorized as follows. Interpretability and Understandability fall under the "Representational" Category.
Intrinsic IQ:
Accuracy (Free-from-error), Objectivity, Believability, Reputation

Contextual IQ:
Relevancy, Value-added, Timeliness, Completeness, Amount of Information

Representational IQ:
Interpretability, Understandability, Concise Representation, Consistent Representation

Accessibility IQ:
Access, Security

"Quality Information and Knowledge", page 43. Huang, Lee, Wang. Prentis Hall PTR

IDQ REFERENCES AND RECOMMENDED READING
Information and Data Quality (IDQ), Newest to oldest
* Journey to Data Quality, 2006, from Amazon
* Data Quality Assessment, 2002
* Information Quality Benchmarks: Product and Service Performance, 2002
* Quality Information and Knowledge, 1999, from Amazon
* AIMQ: A Methodology For Information Quality Assessment, 1997,
Direct Download, may not work
Download from link on the site
* Beyond Accuracy: What Data Quality Means To Consumers, 1996
* Anchoring Data Quality Dimensions in Ontological Foundations, 1996

//////////////////////////////////////
IDQ Applied To The Bible, oldest to newest
1. How Accurate is the Bible?
2. Applying Data and Information Quality Principles To The Bible
3. Applying IDQ Principles of Research To The Bible
4. Overview of IDQ Deficiencies Which Are Evident In Scripture
5. Jesus As God From IDQ Design Deficincies
6. "Son of Man" As Jesus From IDQ Deficiencies
7. IDQ Flaw of Meaningless Representation In The Bible
8. Accuracy In Detecting The Spiritual Realm Using "Triangulation"
9. As You Celebrate The Horror of Easter
10. Where is Jesus's Diary? Information As A Product, Not A Byproduct
11. Social Impact Of Poor Biblical IDQ

///////////////////////////////////
Triangulation, oldest to newest
* "Triangulation", University of California, San Francisco, Global health Sciences
* "Triangulation", Wikipedia

///////////////////////////////////
IDQ Applied, oldest to newest
* National Transportation Safety Board information quality standards
* Thank Sully!
* Information Professionals Caught Not Checking Sources

//////////////////////////////////
Rebuttals to Criticism of its application to assessing the Bible, oldest to newest
* IDQ Flaws Relevant To The Holy Spirit
* Cooking The Books To Avoid IDQ Principles
* Accuracy In Detecting The Spiritual Realm Using "Triangulation"
* Christians Must Be Agnostic

What is the Scope and Definition of Evil?

Over in the "In a world without God...why does evil exist?" article, Brad Haggard said  make that post into an article so we can discuss it", so I did. Enjoy.

What is evil?
What can be evil?
Is something produced as evil?
Does it become evil?
When does something become evil?
What qualifies as evil?
Can time and/or evironment change a thing to or from something other than evil?
Is needless or pointless suffering evil?

What is the Scope and Definition of Evil?

Is that scope and definition objective?

Does the scope and definition depend on a context?

Who decides?
If God, then how does that knowledge get to us if he's going to remain silent?

If a thing has scope and definition then it can probably be measured, quantified and or evaluated, assessed and compared.

Can we do that with evil?

is it evil to stick a needle in a baby?

Is it evil to kill someone?
To kill a spider?
Is it evil to kill for sport?
Why or why not?

Why does something qualify as evil?

Can evil be useful? If its useful and leads to greater good, is it really evil?
Can good come from an evil proposition?

Can any of the components of something good be evil?

Is an act evil if the intent is not evil?

If a bear kills a human, is it evil?
Or is it just Chance?

It seems to me, evil is in the eye of the beholder.

now I'm standing by for the shower of mischaracterizations, strawmen and equivocation.

Information Professionals Caught Not Checking Sources

The Fallacy Files, Wikipedia Watch has revealed ANOTHER case of Journalists using Wikipedia as an original source. This is a real life example of how people that should know better will reproduce poor quality information. I'm sure there was no malice involved, just people trying to get a message accross that they believed likely to be true, similar to the authors of scripture.

The Fallacy Files regularly exposes Wikipedia faults, but Wikipedia is not authoritative and doesn't claim to be. As The Fallacist points out, it should be used as a starting point. Wikipedias strength is also its weakness. It depends on people to originate and maintain the information. So while Wikipedia was found by the Journal Nature to be as accurate as the Enycyclopedia Britannica in the Field of Science, occasionally something turns up inaccurate.

One Step Closer To Making Life In The Lab

From Nature.com (requires login), "RNA world easier to make": Ingenious chemistry shows how nucleotides may have formed in the primordial soup. Here's a link from "Wired" that is freely accessible "Life’s First Spark Re-Created in the Laboratory"

Where is Jesus's Diary? Information As A Product, Not A Byproduct

I'd like to propose an analogy to represent the relationship between God, Us, the Bible and the World. God would be in charge, and the source and producer of information, and the majority of us would be his potential customer, subscriber or consumer. We would have a value to him and lets assign the value the number 1. So if one of us 'subscribes' to Gods information, then he correspondingly gets to add that to his return on investment.


God Continues To Operate In The Red After 4000 Years.
God is and has been working at a loss since he supposedly made himself known to Abraham. He continues to lose his investment. This year alone potentially AT LEAST 4.5 billion people are going to hell, some of them will be unborn fetuses, some of them will be Muslim Children that don't care anything about differences between religions and politics, and unless their interpretation is correct, some of them will consider themselves Christians. Most of them simply don't find Biblical Information to be believable, in the same way they simply don't find other information to be believable.

World Population: 6,790,062,216 (July 2009 est.), CIA World Fact Book [1]
Christians make up only 1/3 of the world [2] (2,263,354,072 people), and even then they are divided about who the true Christians are, so True Christians make up less than 33% of the world. The cause of divisions between the Christians is the interpretation of the text. If the text were of high enough quality, no interpretation would be needed. It would accurately reflect real world states and the Quality of Knowledge would be high and therefore the outcomes from the use of Biblical Information would improve. There would be fewer denominations, and more Christians. Gods return on investment would improve.

Quality Information and Knowledge
Civilizations are advanced by taking advantage of Quality Information and Knowledge. The machine age and the industrial revolution translated, captured and reproduced with machines the accumulated knowledge of artisans which standardized and sped up production of Goods. The increased productivity and efficiency gave companies competitive advantages. Quality Knowledge was derived from Quality Information and that Quality Information was intrinsically useful.

The Computer revolution and the Information Age transformed how information is captured, stored, distributed and reproduced. It has torn down the traditional boundaries of accessible information and put information on demand at peoples fingertips. It has increased communication and fostered collaboration and created a Global Community of people that produce, provide, maintain and consume information. To ensure quality information, the principles of manufacturing are adapted to guide information production. Quality Information is information that has been treated with some care and control to ensure its accuracy and usefulness. To ensure Information Quality, Information must be treated like a product not a byproduct. Capturing real world states as accurately as possible and as timely as possible using DUE CARE and DILIGENCE is one way to do that. Companies that treat information as a product have a competitive advantage. Quality Knowledge is derived from Quality Information and that Quality Information is useful.

Since the formulation of the principle of Falsifiability and its endorsement by Karl Popper, Science acquired scope and definition. Since that time, co-opting the computer revolution and accessible information, science has also enjoyed a revolution of a sort. Using sound principles and Quality Information, science is a method for creating Quality Knowledge and that information has proven useful. The past fifty years have arguably been the most fruitful in creating useful Quality Information and Knowledge.

Two propositions follow from this. To increase successful outcomes,
1. Organizations must create a reservoir of Quality Information
2. Organizations must use that information to create a reservoir of Quality Knowledge.

Create Knowledge with Quality information
Supposedly God wants to produce Christians, and the bible was created to aid in producing Christians. But the Bible was not created using principles of Information Quality even up to the standards of common inventory, household finance, or tax keeping of the time. The fact that accurate records are important has been understood since merchants started trading. However, scripture didn't use those simple record keeping principles about accuracy. Obviously, The Bibles accuracy and clarity was not of primary importance and the limited and splintered success of Christianity is what you'd expect and typical of organizations that create their information similarly.

Make an Inventory of What You Know In Real Time
Capturing the information about God and Salvation was not given the same importance as God and Salvation or even equivalent importance that a merchant has for his inventory, or even a household shopping list. The representation of God and Salvation in the medium of language is as important as God and Salvation itself, because the medium is supposed to represent it. If the medium doesn't represent its object accurately, then there is no accurate representation of the object to be understood. Therefore the real world states of God and Salvation are not represented anywhere for human understanding. Similar to the inventory, if records don't accurately reflect the real world state of an inventory, then the state of the inventory is unknown. It is demonstrably an open question.

It should be self-evident that the INACCURATE production of information directly NEGATIVELY impacts the PURPOSE for the production of that information.
For example, if I go to a biology lecture and I don't record it or take notes, there is not much point in going. If I don't capture the information as it occurs, then I won't be able to accurately recreate it later on the exam. My score on the exam depends on how well I record that information and am able to review it before the exam. If I were to use someone else's notes, then I'm lucky if they've "taken good notes" and I'm lucky if I don't have to INTERPRET them or look to the book for interpretation due to missing information, inconsistent representation or ambiguity. If the information is treated as a product, and DUE CARE and DILIGENCE is used to ensure that it is captured accurately in real time, then it will be of higher quality than if it is treated as a byproduct and captured after the fact from memory. The Quality of that information directly impacts the quality of Knowledge that is derived from it, and this principle is put into practice and used every second of every day and is measured periodically by such things as tests in school.

Where is Jesus' Diary? Examples of Treating Information As A Product
At the time of Christ, the Roman Centurion, in charge of one hundred troops kept a daily log book and passed that information up to his commander and that information made its way up the chain of command to be used in logistics and decision making[3].

Optometrist
When I go to the Optometrist, I do a few tasks, and the optometrist records some values on a piece of paper. Those values represent the real world state of my lenses. Any interpretation by the manufacturer of that prescription will lead to increased risk of inaccurate production of the lenses.

Airline Safety
Similarly in the airline industry, inspecting and recording the states and results of maintenance is treated as a representation of the state of the aircraft itself. If the records show that aspects of the airplane are out of tolerance, the airplane is taken out of commission.

Medical Records
In the medical field, the record that represents the health of the patient must necessarily be as accurate as possible because it is used to make decisions on the welfare of the patient.

Copying a Song From A CD
When you want to make a copy of a song off of a CD you have many options about the sampling rate. The Sample rate is how often the computer records the state of the song in realtime. The more often the the computer samples the song, the higher the quality of the copy, and you can hear the difference. It is a perceptible demonstration of Information Quality principles.

In each of these cases information is treated as a product. The person who gathers the information acts in the role of the information provider. In the case where the information is inconsistent, ambiguous or missing, a reassessment is necessary before any sound decisions or conclusions can be made. The Quality of that Information directly impacts the Quality of Knowledge derived from that information which directly leads to measurable outcomes.

Information Quality is Quantifiable and Measurable.
High Quality Information has several characteristics that distinguish it from lower quality information. Biblical Information has few of these characteristics. For example, even Christians, the consumers of information in the bible, are divided about what is accurate, and what is metaphor and this is the underlying reason for the different denominations within Christianity.

Its not a "representation of the body of Christ", its the result of Information that has a low Interpretability score.

Therefore, God continues to operate in the red after 4000 years,
not because human beings reject him,
but because they simply don't get it.

Because the Information Providers simply and demonstrably didn't do a good job.

List of Information Quality Dimensions And Their Categories That Are Used To Derive Metrics

INTRINSIC
- Free-of-Error (a dimension of Accuracy)
- Objectivity
- Believability
- Reputation

REPRESENTATIONAL
- Interpretability
- Ease of understanding
- Concise representation
- Consistent representation

CONTEXTUAL
- Relevancy
- Value-added
- Timeliness
- Completeness
- Amount of information

ACCESSIBILITY
- Access
- Security

Further Reading and References
1. CIA World Factbook

2.Religion by Adherents

3. The Laws Of The Roman People, Callie Williamson, page 209

Quality Information and Knowledge, Chapters 1, 2 and 3.
Kuan-Tsae, Yang W. Lee, Richard Y. Wang
Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 07458

MIT Total Data Quality Management Program

Social Impact Of Poor Biblical IDQ

This article explores the Social Impact of Poor Biblical Information and Data Quality focusing on two of the sixteen IDQ dimensions, Understandability and Interpretability.

There are "positives" and "negatives" to almost everything, including philosophies. I will consider Religions philosophies because they are methods of deriving, among other things, how we should behave and what we should value. Philosophies can be measured by their success. Their success should be measured by how "trustworthy" and "reliable" they are. Measurements of their "reliability" and "trustworthiness" should be dependent upon how consistent or reproducible the results are. Some philosophies have become so reliable that they have become a science and some have splintered, become obsolete, and neglected. I agree with some who say that Epistemology is one the neglected philosophies. However, in my view, Epistemology is one of the most important endeavors humans can undertake, and I think it is thriving under other names, such as Law, Statistics, Measurement, Science, Artificial Intelligence, Informal Logic and Information and Data Quality Research.

How Recipes are similar to Religions and Philosophies.
Virtues, Morality and Truth Seeking are areas where Religion and Philosophy overlap. It can be summed up as "What is the right way to live?". We can rephrase this question to derive an analogy as "What is the right way to do something?". This is how Recipes, Religions and Philosophies are similar. Once someone has an Epiphany, or a "Good Idea" or a "Good way to make a sauce" they can write it down so it can be learned, reproduced and used as a basis for other things. Once it gets recorded once, it will be read (consumed), interpreted and acted upon to behave in a certain way. The measurement of how successful the Recipe, the Religion or the Philosophy should be is how easy it is reproduce the results or how well it consistently reflects real world states.

The success of Recipes, Religions and Philosophies depends on how easy they are to Understand and Interpret.
My Grandmothers cooking was widely regarded as being some of the best cooking in the area. Not only the family loved her cooking, the Church "Pot-Lucks" eagerly awaited what she was going to contribute next. In her last years, we tried to get her recipes written down, but we were largely unsuccessful. She didn't use recipes. She used her intuition. When she said to add something as a "pinch", "little bit", "dash" etc. it meant nothing to us. When she said "do this until it makes a noise like...", it meant nothing to us. Her terms were too ambiguous for any of us to take a recipe dictated by her and recreate what she cooked. One person, a neighbor, was successful in getting some recipes made from her and built a local catering business out of it. She sold it when she wanted to retire.

Christianity is split up into an heirarchy of denominations and one explanation for that could be that it has a low score in the IDQ dimensions of Understandability and Interpretability.
Recipes, Religions and Philosophies depend on concepts, described by language. It is possible for a word to describe a concept, but sometimes the word depends on the context. Sometimes when you are translating concepts between languages, some languages don't describe a concept in the same way as another language and some languages are missing words for concepts that exist in another language. When this happens, then error creeps into the understanding and interpretation of concepts. A word is used to generally approximate a concept and then it is read (consumed) by another mind through a network of cognitive biases and prior knowledge and stored away categorically in biological storage media, the brain. There is a lot of room for error and ambiguity which leads to poor understandability and interpretability. Interpretability depends on Understandability, so if the information is hard to understand, it will be hard to interpret.

What does Understandability and Interpretability Mean?
The definitions of "Understandability" and "Interpretability" from the Total Data Quality Managment literature are as follows.

Understandability (Ease of understanding):
The extent to which data is easily comprehended.

Interpretability
The extent to which data is in appropriate language, symbols, and units and the definitions are clear.

Interestingly, intepretability plays a very important role in Imaging. I got the following defininion of "interpret" from the field of Military Imagery from answers.com

Military Imagery

"(DOD, NATO) Suitability of imagery for interpretation with respect to answering adequately requirements on a given type of target in terms of quality and scale.
a. poor -- Imagery is unsuitable for interpretation to answer adequately requirements on a given type of target.
b. fair -- Imagery is suitable for interpretation to answer requirements on a given type of target but with only average detail.
c. good--Imagery is suitable for interpretation to answer requirements on a given type of target in considerable detail.
d. excellent--Imagery is suitable for interpretation to answer requirements on a given type of target in complete detail."
["interpret." Military and Associated Words. US Department of Defense, 2003. Answers.com 04 Jun. 2009. http://www.answers.com/topic/interpretability]

And from Data Warehouse Literature
"the extent to which the data warehouse in modeled effectively in the inforamtion repository and how well maintained the Data Lineage (where the data come from)", "Fundamentals of data warehouses" By Matthias Jarke, Maurizio Lenzerini, Yannis Vassiliou, Panos Vassiliadis
- How easy the queries can be posed? How successful are they?

We all know what an Interpreter is. When you don't speak the language you need an Interpreter, but "interpret" also has specific definitions in other fields such as Mathematics and Logic.

In the Total Data Quality Management literature the Information and Data Quality dimensions are organized into four categories. The catagories are
- Intrinsic IQ,
- Contextual IQ
- Representational IQ:
- Accessibility IQ:

Interpretability and Understandability fall under the "Representational" Category.
Most of the IDQ dimension have clear cut metrics and methods for deriving a score but Understandability and Interpretability are more subjective and require surveying people and analyzing their answers using weighted averages and whatever is common between them. For example if there are two witnesses to a crime.
Witness 1: It was a Black Car.
Witness 2: It was Blue Car.

Using a what is common between them, we can say it is a car. Using a weighted average, without further questioning, we can say that it was more likely a car than a truck so we can give more weight to the car.
1. Car
2. Truck

and we can say that the blue car from witness two was probably a darker shade of blue so we give more weight to darker colors.
1. Dark Blue
2. Light Blue

An example using Christianity is that they all believe in Jesus Christ.
How they define Jesus is another topic.

Quantifying The Understandability and Interpretability Score For Christianity
Since I don't have a survey prepared and don't have the time to randomly select 1000 Christians from random points around the world, It seems to me that one ROUGH way to quantify the IDQ dimensions of Understandability and Interpretability would be to assume that a Christian denomination represents an interpretation of Christianity and to take the total number of Christian denominations and use that as the denomenator, and use the number one to represent Christianity in the following manner.
Just to keep it simple, lets say that there are only two denominations of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant (but we really know there are more)

Christianity/Total Number of Denominations = some percent or score.

so plugging numbers into that, it would be

1/2 = .5 or 50%

So Protestants and Catholics each get a score of .5 out of 1.

Note, that if there were only one denomination of Christianity, the score would be 1. So one is the perfect score. Also note that this method can be used for other things besides Christianity to enable COMPARING the relative scores of Interpretability and Understanding in different fields. If we were a sociology class, we could do it with a newspaper article and survey students about it. Additionally and more importantly, this type of thing is done as part of the reading comprehension portion of some standardized tests.

To derive a score for each denomination of Catholicism and Protestants you could do the same thing, and the number would come out even smaller as you would then have a percentage of a percentage. For example, taking the score for Protestants, and plugging it back into the equation, and assuming a ridiculously small number of protestant denominations would give us a formula as follows

Protestant Score/Total Number of Protestant denominations = Protestant denomination score

so lets assume only two protestant denominations and plug that into the formula as follows

.5/2 = .25

So now each protestant denomination gets a score of .25 out of 1. The more denominations there are the lower the score becomes, justifiably.

As we can see, the scores for Understandability and Interpretability come out pretty low, and that is reflected by the fact that only ~33% of the world is christian and that ~33% is subdivided into smaller denominations.

Who has the right Understanding and Right Interpretation? Who Knows? How are any of them Justified in saying they know anything about "What is the Right Way To Live?".

They are NOT justified, yet they act as if they are, and make decisions that impact society as a whole.

The key problem with information that is not easily understood and interpreted is Ambiguity.
Ambiguity is derived from poor definitions of terms, leading to unreproduceable results. The information is not mapped properly to real world events and objects. The information does not accurately represent the real world.

There are plenty of examples in the real world that depend on non-ambiguous information to produce consistent results.
Mapping
Medicine
Safety
Logistics
Engineering
Recipes
Mathematical models
United nations
and I'm sure you can think up a lot more on your own.

So now, without further delay, I present to you.....

THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF POOR BIBLICAL IDQ
FURTHER READING AND REFERENCE
[Wikipedia should not be considered authoritative but it is a good place to start.]

Inhumane Treatment Of Others
- Anti-abortion violence

- Torture as means to a Justifiable End
-- Torture in the Past
-- Church Attendance And Torture Approval, Valerie Tarico

- Witch hunts
-- Children Are Targets Of Nigerian Witch Hunt, Lee Randolph
-- Causes and Sociology of Witch Hunts, Wikipedia
-- The Terrible Christian Legacy of the Witch Hunts, John Loftus

- Exorcism
-- Exorcism, Wikipedia
-- A Call For The Scientific Investigation of Exorcism, Lee Randolph

- Mental Illness in the Middle Ages
--History Of Mental Disorders, Wikipedia

- Slavery
-- Christianity And Slavery, Wikipedia
-- Slavery And Religion, Wikipedia
- Address To The Colored People, Robert Ingersoll
- Slavery? NO WAY...NONE!

- Manifest Destiny, Exploration and Conquering
-- Manifest Destiny, Wikipedia
-- The Protestant Atrocities: Manifest Destiny and Slavery, John Loftus

- Heresy, Blaming the victim, Wrong Interpretation, "Not Real Christians" when obviously, if they don't get it, its not their fault. The information is of poor quality.
-- Christian Heresy, Wikipedia
-- List Of People Burned As Heretics, Wikipedia
-- Arianism, Wikipedia
--- Inquisition
--- Inquisition, Wikipedia
--- Words From the Inquisition: "Convert or Die!, John Loftus

- Crusades
-- Crusades, Wikipedia

- Behavior, Sin, Biological Bases of Behavior.
-- Link to Many Articles on this topic by Lee Randolph

DENIAL OF ESTABLISHED KNOWLEDGE
- Human Origins and or Evolution
-- Twenty Reasons Why Genesis and Evolution Do Not Mix, Answers in Genesis
-- Answers in Creation, Christian site that generally refutes Answers In Genesis
-- Debunking Creationism

- Faith Healing
-- Court Rules Faith In God And Prayer As Child Abuse, Harry McCall

UNHEALTHY PSYCHOLOGY
Self-Esteem
-- Is Self-Esteem Contrary to Christianity, Christian Article

- Martyr Syndrome
-- Overcome Martyr-Syndrome, WikiHow

- Co-Opts Humans Natural Flawed Reasoning Algorithms
-- List Of Cognitive Biases

MORE ABOUT THE IDQ DIMENSIONS
In the Total Data Quality Management literature the IDQ dimensions are categorized as follows. Interpretability and Understandability fall under the "Representational" Category.
Intrinsic IQ:
Accuracy (Free-from-error), Objectivity, Believability, Reputation

Contextual IQ:
Relevancy, Value-added, Timeliness, Completeness, Amount of Information

Representational IQ:
Interpretability, Understandability, Concise Representation, Consistent Representation

Accessibility IQ:
Access, Security

"Quality and Information and Knowledge", page 43. Huang, Lee, Wang. Prentis Hall PTR

IDQ REFERENCES AND RECOMMENDED READING
Information and Data Quality (IDQ), Newest to oldest
* Journey to Data Quality, 2006, from Amazon
* Data Quality Assessment, 2002
* Information Quality Benchmarks: Product and Service Performance, 2002
* Quality Information and Knowledge, 1999, from Amazon
* AIMQ: A Methodology For Information Quality Assessment, 1997,
Direct Download, may not work
Download from link on the site
* Beyond Accuracy: What Data Quality Means To Consumers, 1996
* Anchoring Data Quality Dimensions in Ontological Foundations, 1996

//////////////////////////////////////
IDQ Applied To The Bible
1. How Accurate is the Bible?
2. Applying Data and Information Quality Principles To The Bible
3. Applying IDQ Principles of Research To The Bible
4. Overview of IDQ Deficiencies Which Are Evident In Scripture
5. Jesus As God From IDQ Design Deficincies
6. "Son of Man" As Jesus From IDQ Deficiencies
7. IDQ Flaw of Meaningless Representation In The Bible

///////////////////////////////////
Triangulation
* "Triangulation", University of California, San Francisco, Global health Sciences
* "Triangulation", Wikipedia

///////////////////////////////////
IDQ Applied
* National Transportation Safety Board information quality standards
* Thank Sully!

//////////////////////////////////
Rebuttals to Criticism of its application to assessing the Bible
* IDQ Flaws Relevant To The Holy Spirit
* Cooking The Books To Avoid IDQ Principles
* Accuracy In Detecting The Spiritual Realm Using "Triangulation"
* Christians Must Be Agnostic

As You Celebrate The Horror of Easter

-=A Human Sacrifice=-

and flaunt your little dead men on a stick, check your facts, most things that Easter depends on don't cross-check. [edited 4/15/2009. added links]

- Biblical scripture is no more accurate than other writings that cover the same period of time. Not what you'd expect from the revealed word of God.

- The story of passover, Jesus, and a dying and rising god all are of a type of theme of folklore that pervaded the Near East during that period of time.

- Moses, existence hasn't been verified yet. He may never have existed, and may be a version of Sargon of Akkad. If he didn't exist, then all the things that depend on him in the Bible need to have their accuracy and reliability re-assessed.

- The exodus hasn't been verified yet, but it is clear that if it did happen, it didn't happen as it is described in the Bible.

- The author of Genesis or authors of Genesis cannot be identified, therefore neither can their credentials or if they were in a position to know. Therefore the information is of low quality.

- Adam obviously never existed, and if he did the scripture is so inaccurate so as to make the story more dubious than not. There was never a time when he and Eve would have been alone, and his first son went out and founded a town or a city. Towns and Cities started popping up after 10,000 BC.

- Jesus never clearly stated he was God. The phrase used to support the claim of Jesus as God are of the type that are used by Jews to express their belief that God lives in all of us and we influence the world through him by our actions that he approves of.

- The Jews never said he was the Messiah, he never qualified. The Messiah was supposed to be a politician and engineer. Jesus wasn't even close to being an engineer, if he was he could have showed them how to make the world a better place by speeding up the invention of quite a few things, likewise if he were God.

- The principle that all of us have done things so egregious to warrant the death penalty is itself egregious. Name one thing that you have done that you should be put to death for.

- The principle that someone else can suffer the death penalty for us to resolve the problem is similarly egregious. Should anyone be punished not to mention given the death penalty for things that you do? Is the death penalty Just?

- The principle that a Sacrifice can appease a God has been shown to be flawed because all the other Gods that required a sacrifice have been shown to be folklore. What makes Yahweh any different?

- The principle that a Human Sacrifice can appease a God has been shown to be flawed because all the other Gods that required a Human Sacrifice have been shown to be folklore. Are you okay with the Human Sacrifice to absolve you of Sin?

- The principle that a perfect God WANTS a sacrifice is highly doubtful. You can't say he's perfect if he's not in a perfect state, and if wants something then he's missing something.

- If we are flawed, God is responsible because he made us this way.

- It is possible to be compelled to unacceptable behavior by biological factors, and unacceptable behavior, is in the eye of the beholder, even if we all agree that killing children is bad. God ordered children to be ripped from their mothers wombs and William Lane Craig defended it in one of his forums if you can believe that.

- The authors of the Gospels cannot be identified, therefore neither can their credentials or if they were in a position to know. Therefore the information is of low quality.

- The Gospels themselves don't agree, making them unreliable by definition of criteria that determines if information is unreliable.

- The Gospels depend on one of the most unreliable forms of evidence, Eye Witness Testimony.

- Theology behind Easter depends on Paul. He set it up. But he wasn't in a position to know, because he wasn't there at the beginning. The story of his conversion is unreliable because there are two slightly different versions of it and if you go to bible gateway.com and look up both of them, using multiple Bible versions and analyze them, you can have even more versions depending on which translation they used. I know because I've done it to prepare for a forthcoming article.

- Paul, like Jesus referenced a non-existent Adam, therefore the source of the information in both cases was not divine, but from scripture, which is of demonstrably low quality because the authors, the authors credentials and the authors position to know are all unverifiable.

- Its simple, since there was no Adam, and Jesus didn't qualify to be the Messiah, and Jesus was not God because he referenced Adam which demonstrates that he had no supernatural knowledge, then he was just one of the people that got caught for rabble rousing around the passover and put on the cross for six hours. The Koran says he didn't die, and the fact that there is no body, and the fact that many people survived crucifixion, especially for such a short period of time supports that theory

Now please get rid of all those disgusting dead men on a stick that are displayed everywhere and hanging around your necks.

FURTHER READING
A LIST OF PREMISES AS ARTICLES REFUTING GENESIS 1-11 AND ROMANS 5 SO FAR
P1. The Interconnectedness of The Ancients - Demonstrates the robust ancient civilizations at the time and that Canaan, Israel and Judah were central to them. Discusses trade routes, seafaring, the link between whales and the Leviathans of Mythology and how long it would take to get from one civilization to another by sea.

P2. Genesis 1:1-25 Is An Amalgam of Near Eastern Creation Myths. Demonstrates the prior existence of key elements of the story of the creation of the Universe that appears in Genesis.

P3.Genesis 1:26-1:27, Creation of Humans in Near Eastern Myths And The Paleolithic Era. Demonstrates that the physical evidence contradicts the story of the making of the first humans in Genesis.

P4.GENESIS 1:28-2:4a, Be Fruitful And Multiply, Founder Effect and Genetic Diversity. This Article shows that even if the physical evidence didn't refute the special creation of the first humans, Adam and Eve, in Genesis 1:27, the problem of Genetic Diversity known as the "Founder Effect" would eventually lead to crippling genetic mutations or extinction.

P5.Genesis 2:4b-20 Man Made From Earth Is Folklore, Conflated River Elements and the Myth of Adapa. This Article shows that the concept of man made from earth spans cultures and geographical boundaries, the rivers are confused between geographical areas and has many elements from pre-existing Near Eastern Myths such as "The Myth of Adapa.

P6. Genesis 2:21-25: Woman From Rib and Mother Goddesses of Near Eastern Myths. This Article shows that in the second creation story in genesis the concept of woman made from bone, earth and antler pre-existed the writing of Genesis, spanned cultures and geographical boundaries and that Eve shares aspects of Goddesses in Ancient Near Eastern Mythology.