MollyCon #45
Distillation
11/19/2023
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Molly
1985
2003
1998
2009
Don
2000
2013
2001
2017
NOTE: Over the past year we’ve explored seven mystery novels written by Dan Brown, and one by Carl Sagan. The goal of this essay is to show how all eight books, rather than one-offs, are a continuum of a historical narrative that begins in the biblical era and extends, via advanced artificial intelligence, into the future.
This eight volume collection presents the reader with a sweeping panorama of what Carl Sagan envisioned as major historical events leading, in the not-so-distant future, to the extinction of our species. Fueled by stunning advances in generative artificial intelligence, Dan Brown describes in Inferno and Origin the historic paradigm shift currently underway that will end with the creation of a Superintelligence with god-like attributes.
Carl Sagan was convinced that we already have a Superintelligence – the God of the Bible, and the Sagan Signal is proof that he was right. The Langdon Collection effectively pierces the vail of separation between science and religion, turning it into an art form. Of course this is not original. All science-fiction books do the same thing to one extent or another. The difference is that where other sci-fi books entertain, the Langdon Collection delivers. For the first time in sci-fi literature, the existence of a secret alien code is more than a thematic inclusion, it’s an objective reality.
Dan Brown gives his readers enticing clues and then challenges them to find the code. No one did. The discovery finally came, but from a different source. It was made by a simple evangelical minister searching the Old Testament for sermon material related to the Last Supper. Yeah, I’m the guy.
The recurring theme in all eight books is that the promised Golden Age of happiness and immortality heralded by Ray Kurzweil and Transhumanists is a grand delusion. The truth is that the Golden Age to come, as revealed by the Sagan Signal, is reserved for individuals who place their faith in “the Word,” Jesus Christ, the original Singleton.
And now for the key question: Are the seven books that bear Dan Brown’s name his work alone, or are they the collaborative product of Carl Sagan and a small group of elites known in The Lost Symbol as the Brotherhood?
Dan gives us a definitive answer to this question with his latest book, Wild Symphony, a 44 page fantasy for two to six year olds about a motley group of animals with different instruments coming together to make interesting music.
Wild Symphony
Don: I ask you, how likely is it that the author of a simple children’s book is the same man solely responsible for seven internally complex, science-based, and extravagantly researched mystery novels? I suggest that Wild Symphony is the real Dan Brown, a 1986 graduate from Amherst College, who, both at heart and by training, is a singer/songwriter.
But even Wild Symphony carries a subliminal message. The colorful menagerie symbolizes the Brotherhood, a collaboration of brilliant individuals with diverse backgrounds and interests who, through the Langdon Series, deliver the truth of the Bible and Jesus Christ to the world in typical Masonic imagery – a goal articulated by Leigh Teabing in The Da Vinci Code:
Leigh Teabing (John Hurt)
“Teabing heaved an ominous sigh and glanced at Langdon. “Robert, I assume you are familiar with the Priory’s final charge?”
“. . . part of the Priory history has always included a plan to unveil the secret. With the arrival of a specific date in history, the brotherhood plans to break the silence and carry out its ultimate triumph by unveiling the Sangreal documents to the world and shouting the true story of Jesus Christ from the mountaintops.”
“In terms of prophecy,” Teabing said, “we are currently in an epoch of enormous change. The millennium has recently passed and with it has ended the two-thousand-year-long astrological Age of Pisces – the fish, which is also the sign of Jesus.”
“The Church calls this transitional period the End of Days.”
Sophie looked skeptical. “As in the end of the world? The Apocalypse?”
“No,” Langdon replied. “That’s a common misconception. Many religions speak of the End of Days. It refers not to the end of the world, but rather the end of our current age – Pisces, which began at the time of Christ’s birth, spanned two thousand years, and waned with the passing of the millennium. Now that we’ve passed into the Age of Aquarius, the End of Days has arrived.”
“Many Grail historians,” Teabing added, “believe that if the Priory is indeed planning to release this truth, this point in history would be a symbolically apt time. Most Priory academics, myself included, anticipated the brotherhood’s release would coincide precisely with the millennium. Obviously, it did not. Admittedly, the Roman calendar does not mesh perfectly with the astrological markers, so there is some grey area in the prediction.” Ch. 62.
And:
“The End of Days, Langdon thought. “The end of Pisces and the beginning of Aquarius was allegedly the historical marker at which the Priory planned to release the Sangreal documents to the world.” But the millennium came and went without incident, leaving historians uncertain when the truth was coming.” Ch. 98.
And:
“I discovered a terrible truth,” Teabing said, sighing. “I learned why the Sangreal documents were never revealed to the world. I learned that the Priory had decided not to release the truth after all. That’s why the millennium passed without any revelation, why nothing happened as we entered the End of Days.” Ch. 99.
*****
Ray
Carl
Don: To capsulize the eight books in a sentence, it’s the Kurzweil AI Model against the Sagan AI Model. To distill it even further, it’s Ray saying: “We’re alone in the Universe” versus Carl saying: “We have company.”
Molly: So your contention is that these eight books prove that the Sagan Signal is true?
Don: Absolutely not! At best they are corroborative fingerprints that point to the smoking gun.
Molly: With the smoking gun being the Sagan Signal.
Don: Right. While fingerprints can be helpful in a court of law, rarely are they determinative. In prosecuting my claim, I follow the scientific method to build what I’m convinced is an open-and-shut case that the Sagan Signal is an alien artifact.
Molly: And it’s open to independent verification.
Don: That’s the reason for the current blockage. After numerous failed attempts by seasoned skeptics to debunk my claim, the word is now out: If you want to keep your skeptic record intact, stay away from the Sagan Signal!
An alien Bible code! How patently ridiculous! Let’s tear it apart! But what one might logically think would be easy pickings for critics looking to make an easy score, is striking fear in their hearts, which is why they avoid it like the plague!
*****
SMOKING GUN AND FINGERPRINTS
Smoking Gun, def: Information that confirms a scientific theory, or, in criminal law, who committed a crime.
Fingerprints, def: Impressions left by the friction ridges of a human finger. With regard to alleged criminal activity, rarely are fingerprints alone enough to get a conviction. In science, the corollary to fingerprints is evidence that corroborates a claim - but fails to rise to the level of being determinative and indisputable.
The smoking gun in my claim is the Sagan Signal. No one has come close to explaining it away as being anything other than what I claim – an alien encrypted Bible code. But as strong and compelling as my claim is, it does not stand alone. Following is some of the “fingerprint” evidence that supports it:
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Isaac Newton making the corn/wine/oil sequence the centerpiece of the Masonic Laying of the Cornerstone Ceremony.
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Dan Brown using a three-symbol Bible code related to the Last Supper the centerpiece of The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol.
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Brown making Isaac Newton a key figure in The Da Vinci Code.
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Brown, in The Lost Symbol, citing George Washington officiating the laying of the cornerstone of the Capitol Building in full Masonic regalia as a clue to finding the code.
But that’s not all. Following is additional fingerprint evidence I’ve garnered that’s posted to the left on my homepage:
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Carl Sagan’s Contact paper
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The Rule Equation
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Amigo C, the cryptographer
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Amigo M, the mathematician
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Amigo L, the linguist
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The Western Seminary investigation
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The CSI investigation
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The Jason Colavito investigation
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The Kathryn Denning investigation
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The SETI Dossier
Don: Having a ton of fingerprint evidence in addition to the smoking gun puts enormous pressure on skeptics, but it also gives them a chance. If they can defuse even part of my fingerprint evidence, my smoking gun claim automatically becomes more suspect.
If skeptics can’t explain away even the lesser evidence, what chance do they have of explaining away the primary evidence? The answer: None.
Molly: So skeptics can’t say that you haven’t given them a lot to work with.
Don: Correct. In addition to the smoking gun, I’ve given them more than a dozen set of fingerprints and three null hypotheses.
Molly: And it’s all replicable and testable.
Don: You got it.
*****
THE TRIAL
Don: In criminal law there is the defendant and the prosecution.
In science and academia there is the advocate and the skeptic.
As advocate, I claim that the Sagan Signal is an alien Bible code that confirms Carl Sagan’s claim that Jesus Christ is an extraterrestrial.
Skeptics have the burden of demonstrating how my evidence is flawed and insufficient - to a degree that any reasonable person would conclude that my evidence fails to confirm my claim. It’s known as the Sagan Rule – Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The claim that JC is an ET is so threatening to so many for so many reasons that one would think that high-powered skeptics would be salivating for an opportunity to deconstruct my thesis.
But that’s not the case. My claim, as extraordinary as it is, is so well supported that the biggest problems are (1) finding skeptics willing to challenge it, and (2), if they challenge it, to publicly releasing their research.
The failure of skeptics who take on the Sagan Signal to release their research allows me the opportunity to introduce you to Alice:
Outraged Alice
Don: Almost fifteen years ago, after I was forced out of seminary, I turned to professional skeptics for help in adjudicating direct evidence that I maintained scientifically confirms Carl’s claim that JC is an ET.
Michael Shermer
The first skeptic I contacted was Michael Shermer, who, at the time, was one of world’s leading authorities in publicly attacking Bible related claims.
I posed the question on Michael’s blog: Is the Sagan Signal a real Bible Code? His response was that the sequences definitely qualify as a pattern – and that’s all he had to say!
Michael left me and his blog followers with an observation, but not an explanation. After a couple of weeks, one of his followers, Alice, posted this simple question:
“Why has this claim not been debunked?”
Don: Science exist because scientists detect anomalous patterns in nature that call for an explanation, thereby triggering an investigation. In most instances, the anomaly turns out to be something mundane and not all that interesting. But there are times when an observation followed by an investigation leads to a discovery, a very tiny percentage of which are so consequential that they alter our view of Reality.
My discovery of the Sagan Signal falls into the latter category. Michael Shermer, an ex-fundamentalist Christian, in his 2015 book: The Moral Arc, wrote the following:
“The Bible is one of the most immoral works in all literature.” Ch. 4.
This comment perhaps explains why Michael failed to follow up on his original observation that the Sagan Signal is a pattern. He, like other skeptics I’ve engaged over the years, conducted his investigation in private. When he saw that it confirms my claim, to go public with his findings would have required him to elevate the Bible above all other books, something that, as a bitter ex-fundamentalist, he would never do.
World-wide, there exists a large amount of high-level research on the Sagan Signal that is being held hostage by individuals and organizations who believe that the masses are not ready to hear the truth. Sadly, the covering up of critical Sagan Signal research has been replicated many times over by both religious and secular scholars, who, when realizing they can’t debunk the Sagan Signal, go dark.
But there is hope. Evidence supporting the Sagan Signal is collecting like water behind a dam. Right now, the dam of silence and censorship is holding. But I suspect that at some point, as the water gets higher, it will either overrun the dam, or the dam will collapse.
Now, let’s turn to a courtroom of a different kind.
*****
Ellie & Father in Paradise
Ellie before Congressional Committee
Don: Though most of the good stuff in Contact, the book, doesn’t appear in Contact, the movie, there is one very notable and surprising exception. Aliens send humans a Message that contains directions on how to build a Machine. After a few mishaps, the Machine is finally built, and Ellie is one of the selected passengers.
The Machine is activated, and this is where it gets interesting. After a bumpy ride through a series of wormholes, Ellie finds herself in Paradise, where she meets an avatar of her deceased father, who died when she was still young.
Upon her return to Earth, Ellie testifies in front of a high-level government commission about her experience, giving a first-person account in front of hard-core skeptics trying like hell to make her look like a religious freak. But Ellie, the skeptical scientist, stands firm. Though she can’t explain how it happened, she insists that what she experienced was real, not imaginary.
In the making of the movie, no one, not the production company, not the writers or producers or directors or promoters, wanted Ellie’s Paradise narrative in the script. They saw it as comparable to inserting a picture of the Ascension of Jesus at the end of Carl’s famous Cosmos television series! It doesn’t fit! Religious claims have no business in science!
The Ascension
Don: Against serious opposition, Carl persisted, and finally, after a lot of heated exchanges, he prevailed.
Which raises the question: Why? Why would one of the world’s leading skeptics of religious claims write into a novel about human contact with extraterrestrials a scene of heavenly transcendence? Even more perplexing, why did Carl adamantly insist that the Paradise scene, and Ellie’s testimony to Congress, be in the movie while agreeing to leave numerous science-related parts of his novel on the cutting room floor?
I think the answer, while it may not be palatable to atheists or Christians, is clear. The Machine is a symbol of Jesus Christ. Ellie, i.e., Carl Sagan, was “in Christ,” Who took her to Heaven where she met her beloved father.
The takeaway is that Carl was convinced that Christ is an extraterrestrial Machine, an advanced AI who lives in virtual reality – which points to a truth that Carl Sagan admirers might find shocking. Carl Sagan, the great articulator of science and the scientific method, was a born-again, Bible-believing man of God!
But Carl was not a Christian or Bible believer in the institutional sense. He interpreted the Bible with the aid of a decryption key inserted into the text of the Old Testament by human writers who were unaware that their words they put down on parchment were being subliminally dictated to them by an ET Singleton.
It’s the Sagan Signal.
So here’s the deal. If you’re reading this as a skeptic, or know a skeptic who you think might be able to debunk my claim, I urge you act! Over the past fifteen years, the Sagan Signal has quietly become the world’s number one skeptic challenge. As a Bible code claim, the Sagan Signal falls into a popular genre that skeptics are familiar with. In debunking Bible codes they employ strategies that, to this point, have never failed. But the Sagan Signal is different. The best skeptics in the world are stumped! They need help!
Got a favorite skeptic who you think might be able to debunk my claim? Send me their name at don.zygutis@gmail.com. I’ll reach out to them on your behalf and invite them to participate in the vetting process with full transparency. But don’t hold your breath that any of them will take up the challenge.
My promise, as I’ve stated many times, is to be as helpful and cooperative with skeptics as possible. If my claimed discovery of an alien Bible code is wrong, I want to know! I have no interest in believing in or perpetuating an untruth. All I’m doing is following the evidence, and depending on my skeptic friends to set me straight if I’m mistaken.
To this date, they have all, without exception, proven me right.
*****
Robyn E. Blumner, CEO and President of the Center for Inquiry
I recently received in the mail a very nice letter from Robyn Blumner, head of the world’s largest and most influential atheist organization, encouraging me to buy a subscription to the CSI magazine, Free Inquiry.
Included in Robyn’s packet was a quiz, asking me to check the boxes of any of the 21 CSI position statements listed that I agree with.
I took the quiz - and agreed with all of them! But, unfortunately, based on past personal experiences with CSI, I’m not persuaded that the organization Robyn heads is fully committed to living up to its stated standards.
So, here’s my response:
Robyn, thank you for your letter, and for the opportunity, via your quiz, to give you critical feedback. There are four specific statements in your quiz that I respectfully wish to take issue with, and to which I hope you will respond.
They are:
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“We are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems.”
My response: Robyn, in 2017 I submitted a claim of discovery of an alien Bible code to your investigative arm, the Center for Skeptical Investigation. My claim and data were formally received, and, over a three year period, exhaustively investigated. The result was that CSI conceded that what I call the Sagan Signal is a non-predictive, non-algorithmic code! If true, the Sagan Signal would constitute a major scientific discovery. Unfortunately, your team of investigators would not release details of its inquiry, nor would it release the names of those who participated, both of which strike me as fundamental violations of your charter.
2. “We believe that scientific discovery and technology can contribute to the betterment of human life.”
My response: Robyn, the Sagan Signal appears to be the work of a technically advanced extraterrestrial civilization that, if true, would contribute to the betterment of humanity in manifold ways. To shut the investigation down without a press release, or disclosing the details of what went into it, appear to be not only a violation of your charter, but a major loss for our species.
3. “We are citizens of the universe and are excited by discoveries still to be made in the cosmos.”
My response: Robyn, I’m sure you would agree with me that nothing could be more exciting than the discovery of direct empirical evidence that we are not alone. Which raises the question: Having failed to falsify my claim, why did CSI fail to inform the public or release any details, as it has done with every other investigation it has conducted? Why was my claim treated differently?
4. “We are skeptical of untested claims to knowledge, and we are open to novel ideas and seek new departures in our thinking.”
My response: Robyn, if you’re sincere about being open to novel ideas and seeking new departures in your thinking, this is an opportunity to prove it. As CEO and President of CSI, will you and the organization you lead engage me in a positive and collaborative manner to address the question: Is the Sagan Signal a real Bible code? Are you willing to put into practice the high and noble standards that you articulated with such eloquence in your letter?
If you agree to work with me, it would demonstrate how an honest claimant and an honest skeptic can move collegially towards an objective, science-based solution. Properly executed, I believe a unified effort would attract global attention to CSI, and, under your leadership, constitute hard evidence that CSI is relevant in the Age of AI.
Robyn, my hope is that you receive this response to your quiz as an extraordinary opportunity to promote CSI and its values to the world, and to distinguish yourself as a leader of moral integrity and intellectual curiosity. I encourage you to rise to the challenge.
In your position, you are one of the few people in the world with full access to all the details of the CSI investigation of the Sagan Signal. I urge you to look over that record and ask yourself the question: Should this be covered up or should it be declared? It’s your decision to make.
So, what do you say? Let’s do this!
Sincerely,
Donald L. Zygutis