Je 18:15

[ErgoProxy]

Some say Evangelion is like a puzzle everyone should solve alone. If this holds true, than in my opinion sharing and discussing personal solutions is what Eva community should do, instead of pursuing perfection in some self-proclaimed orthodoxy. However strict allignment to cannon appears to be high-valued here. Let me examine part of this canon now.

There's sort of agreement that inscription in blood from Avant 1 is French and sais Je vous laisse. And I trusted this reading, unfortunately, until I took a screenshot, loaded it to GIMP, selected the inscription, rotated it and applied sharpen filter. Here's result:

SPOILER: Show

- which in my opinion falsifies the "canon lore". No vous can be read from first line and first letter of second line is actually broken-pipe character.

What would it mean? Broken-pipe is a common notation of filter-a-string operation; whatever follows it, denotes function used to do the filter job on preceding string. After closer examination of supposed vous, its second glyph can be clearly read as digit 8 and third one as blurred colon. This allows to resolve the first line of inscription as Je 18:15, which is reference to a verse from the Bible.

This is where mission impossible begins: either to guess the Anno-approved version of the Bible or to ask him that directly, with language barrier being so damn high.

Okay; I'll share my own, non-canon solution, found using The Millenium Bible (Biblia Tysiąclecia):

Yet My nation has forgotten Me,
They burn incense to mere nothing.
I shall make them to stumble in their ways
On ancient paths,
So they shall walk the errant paths,
The road not marked.

As of filter function, I broke it into three parts and resolved as follows (perhaps characters flips are meaningful):

(1) ai - love (Japanese);
(2) てて - brains (French);
(3) Э' - dignity (time derivative from honor).

Sorry for not discussing my own hacks; I've heard this is a bad practice. But if someone out there wonders: in my case this code filters out second sentence from verse, leaving first one mostly intact. Yet my nation has forgotten me, they burn incense to mere nothing. I'll hold back from discussing the meaning here, as it fits more the FML thread; perhaps I'll do that there later.

So... that's it.

よろしくお願いします。

[cyharding]

Looking at it, I think this is a case of those words being romanized Japanese. I remember the prelude from Nadia, the "Are You Adventurers?" Sequence, having similar writing in it.

[ErgoProxy]

Okay: I can't see such solution, but maybe I'm biased. Can you resolve that your way? If so, what is the reading?

I reluctantly raise this argument, but Anno was criticised by one of his colleagues directors for building NTE as mere compilation of concepts borrowed from elsewhere (or something like that; I can't find that quote at the moment). Using a Bible verse would fit such modus operandi, as it would be borrowed from the first Tom Cruise Mission Impossible movie. I don't quite remember the plot details, but they used there a verse from Job to report "mission accomplished" on a public internet forum.

I mean, this is my voice in the discussion; it would be a shame to get it wasted.

[dzzthink]

It's rare that Bible verses get used in Evangelion, despite the religious symbolism so it would be nice to see that more often. I think this piece of scripture about blasphemy to God is quite enigmatic in the context of what is going on in the scene unless you are suggesting something else where the quote is maybe used as social commentary?

[ErgoProxy]

Well, in my case it works, but kinda inside-out way: I consider The Almighty a scam, mere nothing, and that's why I'm on the road away from Catholic religion. But in the Japanese context...? I don't know. All I can think of is reading it as a message for the weebs worldwide: please stop immitating us in your nonchalant manner. You were born and raised into traditions other ours, so respect them and keep them, as you already know how to practice them. But if you really want to join us, then take some effort and study harder. Look at Mari, compare her to Maya and make your choice carefully, because we reserve right to laugh at you.

[dzzthink]

I do think it is a call to higher truths, of which the Bible has plenty of similar evocative sayings. The world these days is full of distractions that can lead to the 'road not marked'.

[ErgoProxy]

Seems that I should precise my standpoint, as it's more nuanced than all prophets are reptillians.

As far as now I accept the possibility that some Creator(s) of reality may exist somehow, somewhere, despite all claims of the wisemen of our epoch. I've just never met one. Even if some of the Patriarchs was more lucky, my opinion is that the lineage was lost long ago and replaced with useful mystifications and false philosophies. That's why I think Christian religion in general is a set of false testimonies on God and His work; and though I don't negate the wisdom scattered in the Bible, I still consider it a human wisdom.

I might be wrong of course, but I haven't yet faced any good argument contra. On the contrary, Catholic teachings did harm to me as a kid, especially to my social skills which I still lack out of the interwebz. Thus I used term "The Allmighty" in the meaning of "God as taught by the Catholics".

As of myself, I can only feel some mood of sacrum in the nature itself - especially trees, mountain creeks and the sky above evoke that mood. I suspect that human species evolved to experience such states of mind; that they increase(d) our fitness. Does that bring me closer to Shinto, which is sometimes described as veneration of nature? Sadly I'm still pretty much ignorant in this matter.

[UrsusArctos]

About the initial post, that is curious. I have no idea what to make of it.

Regarding the stuff about religion, there's also the Pyrrhonian argument from the Greek philosopher/sage Pyrrho - in a nutshell, that the world is essentially unstable and unsatisfactory, it is ever changing and impermanent, and that nothing has its own fixed essential nature. The last element is essentially the same as the core Buddhist idea of "anatman" - "no soul" as it is imperfectly translated. Pyrrho's argument, taken to its logical ends, would suggest that a perfect, absolute being or idea of any sort would be incapable of comprehending an imperfect world because of its very perfection, and implies that an imperfect system of induction is necessary in order to understand anything of the essentially imperfect world as we know it.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume followed the Pyrrhonian argument and this led to his study of the Problem of Induction, a problem that underlies all science as we know it. Hume in general is quite good for this, not just because he takes a look at religion and other things concerning both reason and value through a Pyrrhonian perspective (e.g. " Reason is, and ought only to be, a slave of the passions ") but because of how he deconstructs every question related to the philosophies of religion and belief.