Sunday, April 28, 2013

Entry #6

     I had no experience with blogging when I entered into Eng-102. I had no idea what to aspect and what to write in my blog, but I figured that ideas started coming as I started writing. Now that I am at the end of this semester and I see everything that went just the way I it was supposed to go, I can definitely say that I had a growth in my knowledge in some aspects of blogs by reading other students blogs, and understanding other voices and tones. I understand the Rhetoric aspect of blogs much more than I ever did. I did not like blogging, but after a couple of weeks I started liking it more and more, and now I find it useful. I took the aspect of blogs seriously because I thought about my grade and my surroundings that are going to read or watch what I post. I find blogging useful in some aspect, because I have learned many new things through this aspect of Media. I can make one suggestion to Chris about the blogs: keep on doing the same thing you did until now, I find it good and nice. Thank you Chris for teaching us how to create blogs and I am really happy that I had you as my ENG-102 teacher.    

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Assigned Entry #5

        As we have all been discussing the power of media in class and doing research about it I began to realize an interesting fact that the more information you absorb about the world, the more capable you are of understanding its complexities. Knowledge you have acquired provides a foundation for more complicated thinking later. I started being more critical by asking myself many questions that I believe help people understand critical thinking way better. The questions that we should all ask ourselves in order to criticize media in an open minded thinking are:
-What are the issues and the conclusions?
-What are the reasons?
-Which words or phrases are ambiguous?
-What are the value and descriptive assumptions?
-Are there any fallacies in the reasoning?
- If they give you evidence, ask how good is the evidence?
-Are there rival causes?
-If you see statistics ask yourself if the statistics are deceptive.
-Ask yourself if there is any information that is omitted.
-What reasonable conclusions are possible?

Critical thinking relies heavily on being able to listen with respect to what others have to say.
 Those questions are questions that I personally ask myself when ever I view or hear the news. Mass Media has a huge impact in our lives, it modulates the way we view our surroundings if we are not selective in our hearing and viewing it will impact you thinking. I am a logically person, and any information that makes sense it will have some kind of impact on the way I look at it.

Friday, April 12, 2013

Entry #4

How Does The Bible Compare to Other Ancient Books?

With regards to the Old testament, the Jewish copyists of the Hebrew Scriptures had to follow strict rules:
- Each copy had to be written in a certain number of columns of 30 letters width and with a certain number of lines to each column. Each copy had to be made from a certified original.
- Every letter was copied one at a time from the original. They could not even write one letter from memory.
- The distance between each letter was measured by a single hair or thread.
- Every letter on every page and book was counted against the original. The number of times each letter occurred in the book was counted and compared against the original.
- If one of these rules (and many others) were broken, the entire copy was destroyed.

What about the New Testament you ask? There are two important factors involved in determining the reliability of a historical document:   The number of manuscript copies still around and, the time between when it was first written and the oldest copy still in existence.

Let's compare the New Testament with some other writings of olden days. The New Testament was written over a time period of 60 years. We have over 24,000 copies and some of the copies we have are only 25 years removed from the originals! Caesar's work, The Gallic Wars, was written over a 56 year period. We have 10 copies, the closest to the original is 1,000 years removed. We have 643 copies of Homer's Iliad and there is a 500 year span between the original and oldest existing copy.

This proves how credible the Bible is as a historical document.