Slashdot Mirror

43 You have heard that it was said, âYou shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.â(TM) 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you

By the way, he's not quoting the Old Testament there--just some kind of folk saying, or something.

So, he does the same thing with adultery.

27 You have heard that it was said, âYou shall not commit adultery.â(TM) 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

It's not about seeing naked people--it's about lust.

You probably don't accept that he's right about this principle. But yes, it's from the Bible.

There really isn't anything rational in Christianity.

The power of your reasoning overwhelms me.

I'd like to see some solid premises and reason that applies to an act of blind faith.

Pop-culture assumptions aside, "faith" does not mean "acceptance of something as true without adequate evidence". I have faith in a modern airline's ability to give me a flight that will land safely. (I don't have faith that they'll get me there on time, mind you.) That faith is a trust in something I regard as reliable. My faith may be more or less well-grounded--the more that I've researched a given airline's reliability, the more well-grounded my faith will be.

Keep in mind that in the Bible, the disciples of Jesus are said to have "faith". The disciples, who were ostensibly first-hand witnesses of quite a lot. (And the Faith Hall of Fame in Hebrews 11 includes multiple Old Testament people who were first-hand witnesses of spectacular demonstrations of God. And you might check out the evidenciary-style appeals of the apostle Paul in his letter to the church in Corinth, 1 Cor. 15.) In the worldview presented by the Bible, faith does not mean confidence that ignores evidence & reason.

There really isn't anything rational in Christianity.

The power of your reasoning overwhelms me.

I'd like to see some solid premises and reason that applies to an act of blind faith.

Pop-culture assumptions aside, "faith" does not mean "acceptance of something as true without adequate evidence". I have faith in a modern airline's ability to give me a flight that will land safely. (I don't have faith that they'll get me there on time, mind you.) That faith is a trust in something I regard as reliable. My faith may be more or less well-grounded--the more that I've researched a given airline's reliability, the more well-grounded my faith will be.

Keep in mind that in the Bible, the disciples of Jesus are said to have "faith". The disciples, who were ostensibly first-hand witnesses of quite a lot. (And the Faith Hall of Fame in Hebrews 11 includes multiple Old Testament people who were first-hand witnesses of spectacular demonstrations of God. And you might check out the evidenciary-style appeals of the apostle Paul in his letter to the church in Corinth, 1 Cor. 15.) In the worldview presented by the Bible, faith does not mean confidence that ignores evidence & reason.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

The bar isn't lower than Jesus--the story of Christ is the story of God reaching down to people who consistently reject his way, taking their penalty on himself, and accepting them on the basis of trusting in him. It's about repentance: Saying--and meaning--"I don't want to do this anymore, I want your way." [1] It's about God stooping down below the bar to save us.

Christians have sometimes summarized all this in terms of "Law" and "Gospel/good news". The Law shows us how we ought to live--and it's good law--but that condemns us, because we won't live up to it. The good news is that because of what Christ did, we don't have to in order to be accepted. [2] (Paul talks in these terms in the book of Romans.)



[1] By the way, suppose someone actually thinks this way: "if you know you're not going to meet the minimum, you might as well be as evil and depraved as you feel like, because you're going to end up in hell anyway."

Yeah, if you think that way, you will go to hell--because it shows that you really don't care about goodness, love, God, etc. For that matter, if you're trying to be good enough to get just above "the bar"--well, that's the kind of religion that Jesus chewed out on multiple occasions.

[2] You might reply to that by saying, "If it's on the basis of faith, then we can sin all we want!" If so, careful there. Paul also talked about that in Romans 6--after discussing the amazing grace of God in saving sinners through faith, he addresses the thought, "What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?" Also, James talked about the kind of faith that saves--if you say that you have faith, but that faith doesn't motivate you to act, well... "I will show you my faith by my works." There's an empty, dead kind of faith--an opportunistic, "Sure, I'll believe, give me my ticket to heaven--just don't bother me to actually follow you."

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

The bar isn't lower than Jesus--the story of Christ is the story of God reaching down to people who consistently reject his way, taking their penalty on himself, and accepting them on the basis of trusting in him. It's about repentance: Saying--and meaning--"I don't want to do this anymore, I want your way." [1] It's about God stooping down below the bar to save us.

Christians have sometimes summarized all this in terms of "Law" and "Gospel/good news". The Law shows us how we ought to live--and it's good law--but that condemns us, because we won't live up to it. The good news is that because of what Christ did, we don't have to in order to be accepted. [2] (Paul talks in these terms in the book of Romans.)



[1] By the way, suppose someone actually thinks this way: "if you know you're not going to meet the minimum, you might as well be as evil and depraved as you feel like, because you're going to end up in hell anyway."

Yeah, if you think that way, you will go to hell--because it shows that you really don't care about goodness, love, God, etc. For that matter, if you're trying to be good enough to get just above "the bar"--well, that's the kind of religion that Jesus chewed out on multiple occasions.

[2] You might reply to that by saying, "If it's on the basis of faith, then we can sin all we want!" If so, careful there. Paul also talked about that in Romans 6--after discussing the amazing grace of God in saving sinners through faith, he addresses the thought, "What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?" Also, James talked about the kind of faith that saves--if you say that you have faith, but that faith doesn't motivate you to act, well... "I will show you my faith by my works." There's an empty, dead kind of faith--an opportunistic, "Sure, I'll believe, give me my ticket to heaven--just don't bother me to actually follow you."

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

The bar isn't lower than Jesus--the story of Christ is the story of God reaching down to people who consistently reject his way, taking their penalty on himself, and accepting them on the basis of trusting in him. It's about repentance: Saying--and meaning--"I don't want to do this anymore, I want your way." [1] It's about God stooping down below the bar to save us.

Christians have sometimes summarized all this in terms of "Law" and "Gospel/good news". The Law shows us how we ought to live--and it's good law--but that condemns us, because we won't live up to it. The good news is that because of what Christ did, we don't have to in order to be accepted. [2] (Paul talks in these terms in the book of Romans.)



[1] By the way, suppose someone actually thinks this way: "if you know you're not going to meet the minimum, you might as well be as evil and depraved as you feel like, because you're going to end up in hell anyway."

Yeah, if you think that way, you will go to hell--because it shows that you really don't care about goodness, love, God, etc. For that matter, if you're trying to be good enough to get just above "the bar"--well, that's the kind of religion that Jesus chewed out on multiple occasions.

[2] You might reply to that by saying, "If it's on the basis of faith, then we can sin all we want!" If so, careful there. Paul also talked about that in Romans 6--after discussing the amazing grace of God in saving sinners through faith, he addresses the thought, "What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?" Also, James talked about the kind of faith that saves--if you say that you have faith, but that faith doesn't motivate you to act, well... "I will show you my faith by my works." There's an empty, dead kind of faith--an opportunistic, "Sure, I'll believe, give me my ticket to heaven--just don't bother me to actually follow you."

Your critique of pharisaical religion is good, and there's certainly a lot of that around among professing Christians. But two cautions for you:

1.) Make sure you stay humble as you critique "Pharisees", or you'll be acting holier-than-thou. I think those tendencies are present in everyone. I hate that, and pray that God will be changing my heart. But it's important not to forget that it's there.

2.) When you say that "Christianity is about self-sacrifice, living as Christ lived, and loving as Christ loved," make sure you maintain the difference between (1) walking in the Spirit, being transformed to be more like Christ, and (2) the good news. If you walk up to someone and tell them, "Look at Jesus! Live like he lived!", then you haven't given them good news. Because, as you said, we can't measure up to that standard.

The life of a Christian is about what you said. But the gospel is forgiveness, salvation, adoption, and the receipt of the Holy Spirit--by faith, not by working to be like Christ.

those 10 commandmenty thingies are pretty much the fundamental building blocks of the religion

Actually, according to Jesus those are just expressions of the greatest command.

Preaching: "God exists! Jesus exists! Accept Jesus and you will go to heaven!"

Teaching: "Some people believe in God and they believe that Jesus is the son of God. Other people instead believe ..."

If you say you should censor religion too

I don't wish to censor religion for adults. I'm just pointing out the inconsistency that people want to ban or make things harder for adults "in case a child might see it", whilst thinking it fine to actively preach and expose religion to children.

Lets take the 10 commandments for example...

That's completely beside the point. Your claim was that irreligion implies amorality. Just because religion teaches morality does not imply that you need religion to teach morality. Perhaps they need to teach logic at school, too :)

I am also amused at the way that you have to misinterpret some of them. So, I am completely fulfilling commandment one if I stick to believing that "Christianity is a load of rubbish, I believe in and worship these other gods instead"? Blasphemy is not the same as swearing, and laws against blasphemy are of dubious ethics (we only recently repealed that law in the UK; shortly before then, the BBC had to defend a blasphemy, at great expense to them).

The sabbath means exactly that. In fact, it could mean exactly the opposite to what you claim - if my obligations involve work, then the commandment says that I should not do those on the sabbath.

As for the remaining points:

Saying that murder is wrong is a tautology, because murder is defined as immoral or unlawful killing - the difficult ethical question is what counts as murder? Saying adultery is unethical is fine, but note that that doesn't mean it should be illegal like it was and still is in some places; it also ignores the possibility of things like open marriages where it's consensual, but it often still gets counted as adultery.

And the rest of the Bible is mostly about Jesus and a few other commandments. There really is nothing morally messed up about it.

I was referring to things like stoning someone to death for working on the sabbath. Or in your case, stoning someone to death for not "fulfilling their obligations", which is still just as messed up (what if gathering sticks was his "obligation"? Looks like the almighty Lord doesn't agree with your interpretation). But given how you've misinterpretted the commandments, you probably read that in a completely different way too.

Look at Jesus, he asks you to sell everything you have in order to gain entrance to heaven.

You have to hate your family and only love God. (No really, you can even quote the bible on that)

Look at Jesus, he asks you to sell everything you have in order to gain entrance to heaven.

You have to hate your family and only love God. (No really, you can even quote the bible on that)

Despite what your bible says...

Im pretty sure it doesn't say anything about the nation of Israel building any pyramids.

Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. And he said to his people, "Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land." Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens. They built for Pharaoh store cities, Pithom and Raamses. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad. And the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel. So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves and made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field. In all their work they ruthlessly made them work as slaves./blockquote.

Actually, faith does not require belief without proof. That is not what your Bible says.

"Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed."
--John 20:29

Um...Where do you get the idea that the devil is a deity? Most people think that the devil is a fallen angel, though I don't think the passages they get that from actually teach it. Myself, I think the Bible doesn't clearly address the nature of Satan, but calling him a god just isn't in the running.

As for "other gods"...Well, you're right that "You shall have no other gods before me" does not imply that there are no other gods, and does seem to imply that there are some. So if all we had were the 10 commandments, we couldn't conclude monotheism from the Bible. But other passages expand on it, like Jer. 2:11, "Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit." Paul said something similar in Gal. 4:8. Or check out the confrontation between the prophet Elijah and the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18, where Elijah taunts them because the "god" is merely a mute idol, powerless. Or read Isaiah 46, where God compares himself to idols.

In other words, in the 10 commandments God talks about other gods the way I sometimes do--he doesn't explicitly add, "and they are not really anyway" after every single mention.

Um...Where do you get the idea that the devil is a deity? Most people think that the devil is a fallen angel, though I don't think the passages they get that from actually teach it. Myself, I think the Bible doesn't clearly address the nature of Satan, but calling him a god just isn't in the running.

As for "other gods"...Well, you're right that "You shall have no other gods before me" does not imply that there are no other gods, and does seem to imply that there are some. So if all we had were the 10 commandments, we couldn't conclude monotheism from the Bible. But other passages expand on it, like Jer. 2:11, "Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit." Paul said something similar in Gal. 4:8. Or check out the confrontation between the prophet Elijah and the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18, where Elijah taunts them because the "god" is merely a mute idol, powerless. Or read Isaiah 46, where God compares himself to idols.

In other words, in the 10 commandments God talks about other gods the way I sometimes do--he doesn't explicitly add, "and they are not really anyway" after every single mention.

Um...Where do you get the idea that the devil is a deity? Most people think that the devil is a fallen angel, though I don't think the passages they get that from actually teach it. Myself, I think the Bible doesn't clearly address the nature of Satan, but calling him a god just isn't in the running.

As for "other gods"...Well, you're right that "You shall have no other gods before me" does not imply that there are no other gods, and does seem to imply that there are some. So if all we had were the 10 commandments, we couldn't conclude monotheism from the Bible. But other passages expand on it, like Jer. 2:11, "Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit." Paul said something similar in Gal. 4:8. Or check out the confrontation between the prophet Elijah and the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18, where Elijah taunts them because the "god" is merely a mute idol, powerless. Or read Isaiah 46, where God compares himself to idols.

In other words, in the 10 commandments God talks about other gods the way I sometimes do--he doesn't explicitly add, "and they are not really anyway" after every single mention.

> Too bad this is an anonymous posting. I hate replying to AC's.

Yeah; sorry. I'm not really keen on making a Slashdot account :)

> So, can you copyright a number?

It would seem so, since an mp3 is apparently a copyrighted expression.

> How about patent a number?

In so far as the DeCSS code implements a patent (if it does), then yes (recalling all the clever ways people would represent DeCSS several years ago (such as singing :), showing the absurdity of it being illegal; all of this really boiled down to a number when stored on disk). [DeCSS might not implement the patent, but other serializable code can implement patents, I would suspect.]

(I'm not saying the above 2 aren't absurd; but laws don't have to be reasonable apparently.)

> There reaches a point that the question becomes absurd to think about.

That doesn't stop lawyers :)

I agree that stating an SSN is a very poor way to prove that you are the person to whom that SSN is assigned.

I don't think identity theft will be fixed until the government implements something like a Mark of the Beast (Revelation 13:16-18, 14:9-11, 16:2, 19:20, 20:4) public+private key pair system for everyone.

If there was a public database of public keys, and everyone had a private key in a little chip, then your bank could send you a challenge with random data, you would process it with your private key and send back the result, and they could verify, using your public key, that it really came from you with your private key (assuming a way is made to make it unreasonable to assume that a private key chip could be separable from a person). [Or they could first encrypt it with your public key and ask you to decrypt it with your private key. There are different options.]

(More would need to be built into this, of course, and banks should have to authenticate to users to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.)

A system similar to this is, in my view, a much better way to authenticate than sending a static number* (be it representative of my SSN, mother's maiden name, or DNA).

[I haven't been in my Computer Algorithms class in a while, so my statements about secret keys might be misleading. Wikipedia would surely have a better description of the process.]

[* Though biometric information doesn't have to be a static number, but could be a number representative of what was just measured which could be compared against a database for a close-enough match. The sender could hash the number before sending to prevent the submission from revealing details about their biometrics to 3rd parties, and the database could reject identical hashes being sumbitted more than once. This assumes a variance in biometric reading each time; I admit I have not educated myself on biometrics.]

Wait, let me get this straight... You are quoting a work of fiction as your basis to argue that this woman's case is wrong? That's about as shakey as the people who point to the bible as their argument against masturbation

Well, we'll let the courts decide then, but I would assume that her attorneys will bring more than works of fiction to the table.

What I base my opinion on is what I've observed. In my observation, a lot of the people I know who have used Kazaa are not computer professionals or copyright experts but they also would be considered intelligent, educated citizens. They assume that they pay for tangible items, and that digital copies aren't stealing because there is no physical DVD or CD. I am not making a point that they are right or wrong, I am simply pointing out what these people think. In an earlier post, I point out something someone asked me, "If listening to a song on my computer for free is stealing, then is listening to the same song on the radio stealing too?"

To people like the /. crowd this is a ridiculous argument, but to many people they don't understand that stealing information is just as much stealing as the theft of physical items. Do I think it is Kazaa's job to tell people that? I don't, but the courts may. The courts have harshly judged companies in the past (think tobacco industry and prescription drug companies) for not warning people about their products.

You have failed. Context is always important. Without context, one could prove nearly anything from the proclamations of Scripture, just as you have done.

The book of Leviticus was written instruction to the nation of Isreal concerning their own behavior. The Levitical law had no bearing on outsiders. Therefore, a "non-believer" in this context was not subject to these rules nor the consequences of breaking them.

Specifically, this verse is from a section discussing blasphemy. Non-believers are not really capable of blasphemy unless they invoke the Name of God themselves, which means that the presumed outsider has attemted to boost his own integrity by claiming God as his witness. This idea would be closely related to "taking the name of the Lord in vain," as in Exodus 20:7.

Now, some might object based on the "as well the stranger" part. But as I have said, random sojourners don't commit blasphemy. To do so would require that they proclaim to be from God. If someone invokes the Name of God, they have implicitly placed themselves under the authority of God, and therefore, the Levitical law.

Yeah, like Romans 12:18. Something simply must be done about people who hold to such radical philosophies...

Some have translated "Behemoth" to be a hippopotamus. Give me a break... go look at a picture of a hippo. They're fat tubs of lard with puny tails. The description here is much closer to a dinosaur (who eats grass). Chapter 41 goes on to talk about the Leviathan, a great dinosaur-like sea creature. Before you say I'm crazy for claiming that dinosaurs and humans once lived together, your question might be answered here or here.

Satan was testing Jesus, and he resisted; that's the major theme of that entire section. The message in that particular temptation is that you shouldn't test God. Jesus even replies with that answer.

Trusting in God to provide for your needs is a different story. The comparison with lillies was made to point out that God provides beautiful "clothing" for these plants that don't work and have a short lifespan, so why should you be worried about what to wear? you're worth much more than a plant.

check out the passage here near the bottom of the page

one of the ways that i believe God provides for us is by giving us talents and abilities that we can use to (for example) get a job and buy clothes, but we shouldn't get caught up in material possesions.

Whoops, you were wrong.
("I AM" = YHWH, the Tetragrammaton, God's name.)