A paradox known as an antinomy, is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite valid reasoning from true premises, leads to a self-contradictory or a logically unacceptable conclusion. A paradox involves contradictory-yet-interrelated elements—that exist and persist over time. In logic, many paradoxes exist which are known to be invalid arguments, but which are valuable in promoting critical thinking, while other paradoxes have revealed errors in definitions which were assumed to be rigorous, have caused axioms of mathematics and logic to be re-examined. One example is Russell's paradox, which questions whether a "list of all lists that do not contain themselves" would include itself, showed that attempts to found set theory on the identification of sets with properties or predicates were flawed. Others, such as Curry's paradox, cannot be resolved by making foundational changes in a logical system. Examples outside logic include the ship of Theseus from philosophy, a paradox which questions whether a ship repaired over time by replacing each and all of its wooden parts, one at a time, would remain the same ship.

Paradoxes can take the form of images or other media. For example, M. C. Escher featured perspective-based paradoxes in many of his drawings, with walls that are regarded as floors from other points of view, staircases that appear to climb endlessly. In common usage, the word "paradox" refers to statements that are ironic or unexpected, such as "the paradox that standing is more tiring than walking". Common themes in paradoxes include self-reference, infinite regress, circular definitions, confusion or equivocation between different levels of abstraction. Patrick Hughes outlines three laws of the paradox: Self-reference An example is the statement "This statement is false", a form of the liar paradox; the statement is referring to itself. Another example of self-reference is the question of whether the barber shaves himself in the barber paradox, yet another example involves the question "Is the answer to this question'No'?" Contradiction "This statement is false". Another example of contradiction is if a man talking to a genie wishes that wishes couldn't come true.

This contradicts itself because if the genie grants his wish, he did not grant his wish, if he refuses to grant his wish he did indeed grant his wish, therefore making it impossible either to grant or not grant his wish without leading to a contradiction. Vicious circularity, or infinite regress "This statement is false". Another example of vicious circularity is the following group of statements: "The following sentence is true." "The previous sentence is false."Other paradoxes involve false statements or half-truths and the resulting biased assumptions. This form is common in howlers; as an example, consider a situation in which a father and his son are driving down the road. The car crashes into a tree and the father is killed; the boy is rushed to the nearest hospital. Upon entering the surgery-suite, the surgeon says, "I can't operate on this boy. He's my son." The apparent paradox is caused by a hasty generalization, for if the surgeon is the boy's father, the statement cannot be true. On the other hand, the paradox is resolved if it is revealed that the surgeon is a woman—the boy's mother.

Paradoxes which are not based on a hidden error occur at the fringes of context or language, require extending the context or language in order to lose their paradoxical quality. Paradoxes that arise from intelligible uses of language are of interest to logicians and philosophers. "This sentence is false" is an example of the well-known liar paradox: it is a sentence which cannot be interpreted as either true or false, because if it is known to be false it can be inferred that it must be true, if it is known to be true it can be inferred that it must be false. Russell's paradox, which shows that the notion of the set of all those sets that do not contain themselves leads to a contradiction, was instrumental in the development of modern logic and set theory. Thought-experiments can yield interesting paradoxes; the grandfather paradox, for example, would arise if a time-traveler were to kill his own grandfather before his mother or father had been conceived, thereby preventing his own birth. This is a specific example of the more general observation of the butterfly effect, or that a time-traveller's interaction with the past—however slight—would entail making changes that would, in turn, change the future in which the time-travel was yet to occur, would thus change the circumstances of the time-travel itself.

A paradoxical conclusion arises from an inconsistent or inherently contradictory definition of the initial premise. In the case of that apparent paradox of a time-traveler killing his own grandfather, it is the inconsistency of defining the past to which he returns as being somehow different from the one which leads up to the future from which he begins his trip, but insisting that he must have come to that past from the same future as the one that it leads up to. W. V. Quine distinguished between three classes of paradoxes: A veridical paradox produces a result that appears absurd, but is demonstrated to be true nonetheless, thus the paradox of Frederic's birthday in The Pirates of Penzance establishes the surprising fact that a twenty-one-year-old would have had only five bir

In the Tenrikyo religion, the Osashizu is a written record of oral revelations given by Izo Iburi. It is one of the three scriptures of Tenrikyo, along with the Mikagura-uta; the full scripture is published in seven volumes and contains around 20,000 "divine directions" delivered between January 4, 1887 and June 9, 1907. O is an honorific prefix, while sashizu may refer to “instruction” or “direction.” In Tenrikyo parlance, the term Osashizu technically has a broader and a narrower one. In its broader sense, the Osashizu includes all of the oral revelations given by Miki Nakayama, Izo Iburi. In its narrower sense, the Osashizu denotes the transcriptions of those revelations. In the first few years after 1887, the main scribe of the Osashizu was Shobei Masuno; the directions from 1887-1888, the earliest records of the Osashizu, are difficult to understand because the scribe was unable to write down all of the words that were said. A system developed where Iburi's directions would be transcribed by three ministers who were on duty at Iburi's residence.

While a direction was being delivered, each of them would write a transcription of the direction on rough rice paper with a writing brush. After the direction was completed, the ministers would read over what they had transcribed and locate any mistakes, misheard words, or missing phrases and prepare a clean copy. Masajin Iburi was the main scribe of the Osashizu in the fourth decade of the Meiji era and by his time, the transcriptions were consistent in intelligibility; when a inquirer wanted to request a divine revelation from Izo Iburi, the procedure was to approach an intermediary, who would relay the inquiry to the Shinbashira, who in turn would relay it to Iburi. The directions in response to the inquiry would be written down while they were being delivered, the transcriptions would be given to the inquirers; the Osashizu was released in series of thirty-two volumes, with the first volume published on 26 October 1927. A seminar on the Osashizu known as Tenrikyo's "2nd Doctrinal Seminar," was held in the summer of 1929.

This seminar consisted of lectures on volumes one through fourteen, published at that time, covering the divine directions recorded from 1887 to 1895. On October 1930, the thirty-second volume was published, in June 1931 an Osashizu supplement was published. A few years the Osashizu was consolidated into a set of eight volumes from 1936 to 1937, honoring two important anniversaries – the 50th anniversary of Nakayama Miki's death and the 100th anniversary of the founding of Tenrikyo; the scripture was issued to all Tenrikyo churches as a commemorative gift. In 1939, the Osashizu was recalled by Tenrikyo Church Headquarters due to tightening government policy regarding religious activities. After the end of the Second World War, the second Shinbashira Nakayama Shozen announced a restoration of Tenrikyo's scriptures and doctrines, including the reprinting and reissuing of the Osashizu; because the printing mold from the 1930s could no longer be used, the decision was made to make a number of revisions to the scripture and republish it.

This revised and republished edition appeared between October 1963 and January 1966. The preparation of the current edition involved, among other efforts, revising punctuation, which made use of only commas and no periods, applying Chinese characters wherever possible since the original transcriptions were written entirely in the Japanese syllabary. A pocket sized version of this edition was published in 1976, on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of Nakayama Miki's death. Tenrikyo Church Headquarters has not published an English translation of the entire Osashizu. Selected translations of the Osashizu have been published under the titles, Selections from the Osashizu and An Anthology of Osashizu Translations; the directions in the Osashizu have been classified into two types, "Timely Talks," which were unprompted revelations, "Directions in Response to Inquiries," which were revelations provided in response to an inquiry. Individuals or groups would make inquiries about illness, natural disasters, personal issues, church affairs.

The scripture makes use of expressions in the local Yamato dialect as well as metaphorical language. Azano, H.. Tenrikyō shiryō kenkyū. Hiraki, K.. Osashizu no o-kotoba kaisetsu. Tenri, Japan: Tenrikyo Doyusha. Ihashi, Yukie. "The doctrinal expression: regarding the word "Parent"/"parent" in the Osashizu". Tenri Journal of Religion. 24. Nakajima, Hideo. "Osashizu". Tenri Journal of Religion. 4. Tsujii, Masakazu. "A perspective on the use of "brothers and sisters" in the Osashizu: all humankind as brothers and sisters, spiritual brothers and sisters". Tenri Journal of Religion. 29. Yamamoto, K. & Nakajima, H.. Osashizu kenkyū. Tenri, Japan: Tenrikyo Doyusha. Sawai, Yuichi. "The origin of Tenrikyo – with reference to the Osashizu, the Divine Directions –". Tenri Journal of Religion. 20. Yamanaka, Shugo. "The truth of the everliving Oyasama and the Osashizu, the Divine Directions". Tenri Journal of Religion. 38

Daniel Bellemare is a Canadian prosecutor. After retiring from a long career in the Canadian legal system, Bellemare was named as a prosecutor for the United Nations Special Tribunal for Lebanon, until 2012. Bellemare holds a Law degree from the University of Ottawa and completed a Masters of Law at the University of Montreal, he was called to the bar in the province of Quebec in 1976. He has served in various Canadian government positions, including Deputy Attorney General and Special Adviser to the Deputy Minister of Justice, he is the longest-serving head of the Federal Prosecution Service in Canadian history. Bellemare was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal by the Governor General in 2003. Bellemare was assigned by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon as the commissioner for the United Nations International Independent Investigation Commission on November 19, 2007, replacing Serge Brammertz of Belgium. In November 2008, he was named chief prosecutor of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, mandated with solving the 14 February 2005 murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Bellemare's performance with the S. T. L. was criticized by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in a November 2010 report. The prosecutor was quoted in the 2010 WikiLeaks United States diplomatic cables leak scandal, where he expressed reservations with the U. S. Governments' approach to the Hariri investigation in a 2008 cable, saying "if the US doesn't help me, who will?" Bellemare has published several law-related works in French. How to Testify in Court: The Police Officer's Testimony has been translated to English