Hope.
And do you know the history of the game's name? It has nothing to do with 'the unreliability of oral transmission even in a small group in one room over a very short period of time'. Rather it has to do with the unreliability of oral tradition between people of different mother tongues - originally the interaction between Europeans and the Chinese in the 1600s.
Historians trace Westerners' use of the word Chinese to denote "confusion" and "incomprehensibility" to the earliest contacts between Europeans and Chinese people in the 1600s, and attribute it to Europeans' inability to understand China's culture and worldview. Using the phrase "Chinese whispers" suggested a belief that the Chinese language itself is not understandable. The more fundamental metonymic use of the name of a foreign language to represent a broader class of situations involving foreign languages or difficulty of understanding a language is also captured in older idioms such as It's all Greek to me!.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers
Historically, it has absolutely no connection to an out of context message, passed down by a group of individuals (often young children with little or no experience of life) brought up in a literate society in a game situation - and therefore largely devoid of the knowledge of oral devices used to retain the structure and word order of a far longer piece of transmitted information. Read Walter Ong's 'Orality and Literacy' 1982. See here for a summary - http://bit.ly/1Mr8bQi
Wow! Just wow. Do you think perhaps that we should have a prize for the post that most spectacularly, utterly and hilariously misses the point? I’d say we should, only I think you’ve so claimed it for your own with this effort that no-one could ever wrest it from you.
Genius. Just genius.
The point of course is that the origins of the name of the party game
have nothing whatever to do with the phenomenon being described. Put a dozen or so people in a room. Have person A whisper a sentence to person B, B to C etc until the end. The last person then says out loud the message. Much hilarity ensues.
The point is that even people of the
same language in the
same place and at the
same time will get messages (which by the way do not rely on Person A’s accurate interpretation of an event he thinks he saw but that may well have a cause entirely other than the one he attributed to it) utterly wrong after just a few re-tellings.
It gets worse. There’s a cascade of inaccuracy effect that happens (the name for which escapes me just now*) whereby minor mistakes amplify the distortion such that a small change of word or nuance then becomes the baseline for the listener, which in turn has an exaggerated effect on the next re-telling etc. That’s why the Chinese whispers game
works – huge differences occur over very short chains of recounting.
Then it gets worse again. People tend to be
selective in their re-tellings. They decide which bits to emphasise and which to leave out – sometimes just because they want to make it more interesting, sometimes because they’re working to an agenda: if you want to persuade your audience, you’ll embellish when it suits and leave out inconvenient parts when it doesn’t.
Result? The oral tradition is notoriously the
least reliable method of all for the passing on of factual detail. Watching you decide on your faith position
a priori and then twisting and bending reality to reach its opposite is fun and all, but really Hope…
…just really.
I am perfectly happy to accept said oral transmissons as valid transmissions. That is very different to believing that they are true since there is absolutely no historical evidence for the majority of said stories. I choose to accept the Judeo-Christian ones because there is sufficient historical evidence to corroborate large chunks of the underlying information, even if some of the details are - by definition - unlikely to leave archeological footprints.
It’s like watching someone dive head first into a black hole of daftness and emerge into the far side of bonkersism. There’s “absolutely no historical evidence” for
your preferred miracle story either. All you have is the oral tradition, at least for the first 160 years or so and as we both know that’s the least reliable method of all.
Look, if you really want to set the evidence bar for your own faith so low that it’s practically underground but to insist that it be higher for everyone else’s miracle stories that’s up to you, but you’ll understand I hope why the rest of us just shake our heads in bewilderment at the self-deception it must take to carry it off with a straight face.
* Coda: it's called "cumulative error".
