Michael Drosnin

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Michael Drosnin (born January 31, 1946) is an American journalist and author, best known for his writings on the Bible code.

Drosnin was born in New York City. He worked as a journalist for the Washington Post (1966-1968) and the Wall Street Journal (1969-1970). His first book, "Citizen Hughes", a biography of the American billionaire Howard Hughes based on stolen documents, was published in 1985. Drosnin began researching the Bible Code in 1992 after meeting the mathematician Eliyahu Rips in Israel, and with Rip's associate Alexander Rotenberg. At the time Drosnin was not a religious person and was very skeptical about the Bible Code at first. He became convinced that it was important in 1994 when he found a code relating to the future assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in the Bible. Drosnin warned Rabin, and became even more convinced of the ability of the code to predict the future when Rabin was assassinated in 1995. In 1997 Drosnin published his most famous book, Bible Code, which asserts that the Bible Code predicts the future and that events can be affected by our actions. The book also states that many famous assassinations -- both past and future -- were foretold in the Bible, and that the code can be interpreted with the help of a computer program. The book also implies that extraterrestrials delivered the message of the Bible encoded with these prophesies^[1], and that the code contains predictions of disasters and an apocalypse to occur between 1998 and 2006. Drosnin wrote a second book in 2002 named The Bible Code II:The Countdown.

[edit] Criticisms

Drosnin has been criticized by some who believe that the Bible Code is real but that it cannot predict the future ^[2]. Some accuse him of factual errors, claiming that he has much support in the scientific community ^[3], mistranslating Hebrew words^[4] to make his point more convincing, and using the Bible without proving that other books do not have similar codes ^[5]. Drosnin challenged his critics to find a code similar to the Bible Code in the notable novel Moby-Dick. An article published in the "teaching aids" section of the Dartmouth College math department's "Chance" program, claims that Brendan McKay has found ELS' in the Moby Dick which approximate the alleged prediction of the assassination of Rabin.^[6] Drosnin has responded to these claims, saying that Moby Dick code results are simply "nonsense'; he said codes found in the Bible Code were "truth" and contained real predictions.^[7].

[edit] Notes