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Moshe Bar on Programming, Society, and Religion
1) As a device-driver writer...
by Marx_Mrvelous
It seems like such a chore to write drivers that work on all distros since they all use different kernels. It seems to me that businesses only develop for windows because they are guaranteed that their drivers will work on all windows machines for X (4,5,6) years without any more work. Having experience writing Linux device drivers, do you think that a cross-distribution effort to standardize on kernel versions and guarantee major hardware manufacturers this compatibility would promote driver development in Linux?
Moshe:
I don't think a standardized kernel version across distributions is a) feasible business-wise b) necessary c) going to make driver writing any easier. Not that it is that difficult now. I also don't think that the various kernel versions among distributions is to be blamed for bigger (if really so) number of driver developers under Windows. Most drivers do not really create problems across the different kernel versions of the distributions, in most cases a simple recompile of the kernel module with the modified kernel headers is different.
On top of that, I really suspect that writing drivers across the many Windoze versions is far more difficult because each different Windows type (95, 98, ME, 2000, XP and what have you not) is really a different OS.
2) I have only one question:
by Baldric Dominus
Does Moshe have a son/daughter named "foo"?
Moshe:
Moshe does not have children yet. We do plan to fork() some children eventually, but have not yet made plans about their names. :-)
3) Different social groups
by CAIMLAS
As someone involved in many different activities, do you have cohesive social groups? That is, do the people from, say, your motorcycle-riding friends develop/use linux as well? I'm interested in knowing what your social ties are, being as it seems you are a fairly active individual.
Moshe:
The social groups of which I am a member of vary wildly, in part due to the fact that me and Ms. Bar have effectively two homes, one in Israel and one in Europe. Since Europe and the Middle East (ie Asia) differ quite substantially culturally and ethnically, I find the biggest differences lie therein. As to what concerns the various other groups (motorbikers, lawyers, business people, etc.) they do differ somewhat if on the same continent, but the diversity is actually something that attracts and intrigues me. A very typical motor-biker is not going to be a very typical kernel hacker, mostly. A very typical lawyer is not going to be a very typical Talmud student (although both study essentially just law and its practice), usually. However, I am not a typical member of any of these stereotypes (not sure if anyone really is). What unites them all is that they all do whatever they do with passion if they are good at it.
4) BitKeeper
by AirLace
Despite staunch opposition from certain developers, Linus has recently started to maintain the kernel using the non-free BitKeeper SCM product, which is not only proprietary but also uses undocumented file formats, making interoperability difficult or impossible. Do you think it's fair to encourage developers who would otherwise keep to Free Software to turn to a proprietary solution and what is in effect, shareware?
Moshe:
Nobody has to use bk to create patches or to send them to Linus. It is true that Linus is more likely to include them if they come through bk, but by far not all have adopted bk (Alan Cox being one famous such exception). I personally have switched to bk for my personal stuff, but I still don't much like the bk business model. The question is: would Larry lose money in any way if he was to open up bk completely? I don't think so. The other question is: would it be so difficult to produce a bk-compatible openBK? Don't think so either. If the community continues to adopt bk at this rate, sooner or alter, someone will come out with an openBK for sure. Welcome to the wonderful world of OpenSource!
5) As a device driver writer...
by dalutong
do you think that the Linux kernel should follow the same route as the Mozilla project. That being that when Mozilla reaches 1.0 the API will freeze and any plugins, applications that use gecko, etc. will be compatible until version 1.2 is out. Should the Linux kernel make some sort of standardized API for drivers so a driver that works with 2.4.0 will work for 2.4.20?
Moshe:
No, I dont' think so. The Mozilla API model is based on an old and mean-while superseded assumption: that writing software is expensive. In the OpenSource world having to modify a driver because something changed in the kernel, is an advantage not a disadvange, both economically and techically. Proprietary software goes at the tariff of US$ 50-200 per line of debugged code. No such price applies to OpenSource software. Additionlly, if the API changes it is for a good reason. Then why not letting your driver benefit from it?
6) Database Clusters
by emil
As a cluster guru, I am curious about your take on database server clustering in both the commercial and the open-source space.
First, it appears that IBM DB2 has been wiping the floor with Oracle on the TPC benchmarks lately, and Oracle "RAC" has been a flop. However, IBM is not using any hardware from its proprietary server lines, but instead relies on clusters of "federated" databases running on 32 standard PCs running either Linux or Windows. It does appear that Oracle still generally beats IBM in raw performance on a single system (as IBM refuses to post any non-clustered benchmarks AFAIK).
Do you think that any of the hype over either of these vendors cluster packages is worth attention? Do you agree with Sun's claim that TPC(-C) no longer has any practical relevance? It all seems to be getting rather silly.
Second, is there any push to make any of the ACID-leaning open databases (Postgres, SAP-DB, etc.) fault-tolerant, perhaps using Mosix? I assume this would require modifications to Postgres enabling it to access raw partitions. Have you had any talks with the Red Hat Database people about cluster modifications to Postgres, just out of curiousity?
Moshe:
There have been talks with the DB2, Postgres, SAP DB and various other DB technologies. All their proprietary clustering technologies (in particular DB2's and Oracle RAC's) are bound to show very poor scalability and TOC. In the openMosix model, you install *one* DB2 or *one* Oracle 9i on one machine and - assuming we have finished implementing Distributed Shared Memory, something which we plan to do - then the processes making up an instance can migrate away to other nodes and make more room for a larger DB block caching area. All that happens transparently to the RDBMS under openMosix because we implement the clustering layer within the kernel and therefore all applications, whatever they might be, benefit from it.
Under Oracle RAC, for example, you need to install the RDMBS on everynode being part of the RAC cluster. If you need to apply a patch and that process takes, say, 2 hours, then the whole patching downtime to the DB will be 2 hours x n nodes. Also, in openMosix we are soon goin to implement Dolphin support, allowing us to copy a full 4KB page from node to node within 14.4 microseconds. Something like Oracle will immediately benefit from the cluster-wide ultra-low latency. If not in kernel space, then every application vendor would have to write his own driver, possibly conflicting with other applications trying to do the same on the same machine. In short, doing clustering at the DB application level is essentially flawed.
openMosix does not handle High Availability, so I am not answering that part of the question.
7) Not about Linux at all...
by Dimwit
...but the article said pick anything. Since there are quite a few philosophers on Slashdot (and since I'm Jewish and this question gets a lot of thought from me, and when will I ever be able to ask again?) here's my question:
Do you see any reconciliation between science and the G-d of the Torah? What about between Science and any sort of Creationism at all? Do you see the possibility that science, as it approaches the moment of Creation itself, becomes more in tune with religion? I guess a big part of what I'm asking - do you see a place for (or proof of) G-d in science?
Moshe:
No, as much as I am firm believer in our G-d, I do not believe the two things can ever go together in harmony. We know the world created itself a few billion years ago and not 5762 years ago (according to the Jewish counting). We know that evolution is the culprit for that inexplicably destructive and increasingly contradictory thing called the human, the human was not made directly by G-d. Yet, the religious teachings really do make for a more peaceful and quality living if followed the same way by all people. In my view, religious belief and science do not negate one another on the philosophic level, but on the at-face-value level. The more you try to negate G-d the more you end up having to believe in something in its stead. Kierkegaard for all his trying to disprove G-d always came back to G-d. Camus' attempt to show that there is no G-d only shows how divine the emptiness is that is left behind once you eliminate G-d. Staunch atheism is ultimately only an active attempt at ignoring the question what is the divine if it is not G-d, not at answering it.
8) What area of law are you studying?
by gosand
According to the FAQ on your website, you are currently studying for your first law degree. With such a heavy technical background, especially in CS, I am curious as to what area of the law you are planning on going into. Is it a technology-related area? It would be nice to have some more technically-capable people in the law profession, especially those who are Linux friendly. Or is going into law just your way of making money for that early retirement?
Moshe:
I am studying law because at my age I already see how much faster younger programmers are than me. Back when I was in my early twenties nobody could beat me at programming. Nowadays, when I sit next to people like Andrea Arcangeli, I realize that programming, too, (even considering the advantage of experience) is for the young. Perhapes extreme programming, ie good quality, high speed programming, should be considered a sport and not an art or science or a skill. Since, I do not see myself being a programmer at 60 years (which is more than years from now), I deduced that I have to find a new job between then and now. Law is something that really goes well with progressing age. My area of law will be mergers/aquisitions, something that mainly bases on a wide-spread social network rather than talent or very intimate knowledge of the law. I do not actually intend to be a very good lawyer, just to be one.
9) Single Memory Space for openMosix
by Bytenik
Right now, as you've mentioned in the documentation, programs that access databases or shared memory do not derive any particular benefit from using openMosix.
Is there any work planned to enhance openMosix to support a single memory space among all nodes or to otherwise allow implicit sharing of memory? Is this what the "network RAM" research is attempting?
Implementing something along these lines in an efficient manner would hugely expand the range of problems that openMosix could be used to tackle.
Imagine being able to split a database transaction into hundreds of parts and run it in parallel on hundreds of openMosix nodes with a terabyte or more of combined RAM. The processes that share data would automatically migrate to the same node. Mmmmm good!
Moshe:
Network RAM is simply allowing mallocs or swap-outs to be done to the RAM of neighboring cluster node rather than to physical swap space on disk. In order to run databases under openMosix we will need to implement distributed shared memory. Due to the exceptional complexity of this project, I do not assume to have a valid implementation before the end of 2004.
10) IBM and Hercules?
by Jay Maynard
(I'm the maintainer of Hercules, an open source emulator for IBM mainframes that runs on Linux and Windows.)
You've mentioned Hercules in your column a couple of times, both quite favorably. Thanks!
One industry analyst from Germany has claimed repeatedly that IBM is getting ready to slap down Hercules with its lawyers, on the basis of some unspecified violations of their intellectual property rights. He's said that it's not just patent infringement, but refuses to go into exactly what else.
What effect would you think that taking such an action would have on IBM once the open source community finds out?
Moshe:
Hi Jay, long time no hear! I have heard similar rumours. If IBM is reading this: going against Hercules would be an extremely stupid move (not unlike the one by the asinine Adobe legal counsels against Sklyarov). Hercules only helps to sell more mainframes because as people familiarize with the Linux on the S/390 architecture, they will ultimately end up buying a mainframe to run their production workload. If you - as a vendor - want a particular computing platform to succeed, then you do everything possible to spread the gospel according to that platform. You don't go and destroy evangelists doing that for you. I use Hercules very often, and actually have an instance of Hercules running under Linux, with VM/ESA inside running Linux S/390 under it for about 3 months now. openMosix nicely balances the load across my 5 nodes cluster at home and I get very decent speed.
If IBM truly embraces Linux as just one of the members of the OpenSource family (rather than just Linux alone because it saves them billions in proprietary OS development) than it will not go against Hercules. If it does, then we all know that IBM is not serious about OpenSource and only taking advantage of it without really behaving like a good OpenSource citizen.
We do plan to fork() some children eventually...
... a cannibal?
That's just not right. He was a devout Christian, and the highest category of human existence for him, above the Aesthetic and the Moral, was the Spiritual.
:wq
Moshe, thanks for your comments on religion, I found them most fascinating, and I hope I can add just a bit to what you said about atheism. I am an agnostic atheist myself, which means that I do not believe in any gods because I have no reason to.
I believe that your comments were referring to what is called "strong atheism" which is an active disbelief in any god whatsoever, something distinct from agnosticism.
But, I think you're incorrect that atheists of any stripe ignore the question of what is divine, and fail to answer it. A strong atheist says that NOTHING is divine, and an agnostic atheist like myself says that nobody can show that anything is divine, so there's no reason to hypothesize it. That's a pretty direct answer to the question.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
i'm gonna have to remember that line...good programmer/pro-creating humor is hard to come by..
Expect that particular joke has been used by every single co-worker of any Unix programmer that has overcome the odds and managed to have a child in the past 30 years.
But then you can add on jokes about how the new process has too high a priority, and how it will take you 18 years to apply the preempt patch. (But avoid the potentially dangerous clone() jokes).
Just don't forget - spawning the process is fun, the tough part is when the process actually starts running.
Do you have Linux and a DotPal? Click here now!
..especially Mr. Bar.
I think he is very skilled (whether he admits it or not), and for my money the ability to create new, useful things is soooo much more valuable to society than deciding how to distribute existing resources.
In any event, I have to thank him for his past contributions. Thanks!
Cheers,
-b
I can hammer out about a thousand lines of code in an average productive coding day at my job. My employer pays about $55 an hour to keep my ass in the seat when all taxes and environmental (office, air conditioning, etc) is paid for. I know they make about $40 an hour on my work.
So then, if the client pays $760 to keep my ass in place a day, they are $49,240 short using your lowest estimate. Jeez.
I should also mention that those costs are canadian.
As a Christian, I believe that the entire Bible is true.
That said, I reconcile creationism and evolution through a very simple statement.
It took God 7 days to create the universe. No one can presume to know how long one of God's days lasted. Plenty of time in one of God's days for evolution to occur.
No contradiction at all.
What is G-d? (as opposed to just writing "God")
One of the greatest leaders of the jewish people (no matter how controversial, especialy after his death) in recent years was Menachem Mendel Schnereson (and you thought it was hard to pronounce Moshe?) was once aproached by a man who came to him and said "Thankyour Rebbi, but I have to admit, I don't believe in god." to which he replied "The same god you don't believe in I don't beleive in either."
The moral of the story? Contrary to popular beliefe most of the world does not bleive that Jeasus has any devine nature. Nor does most of the world believe that G_d is an old man with a beard. Those who do believe that are free to do so, that's what makes the world great.
But you need to remember that to the majority of the world your idea of the god, and the reasons you don't believe, do not apply in any way to the rest of the world's faiths.
I would rather be ashes than dust!
It's a jewish tradition to show reverence to God. According to some interpretations of the bible, you are not to speak God's name, so in writing, this is expressed as G-d. It also corresponds to the vowel-lessness of the Hebrew language.
See, you learn something new every day!
BBK
And the world is full of green cheese too, just because I believe it!
:)
Seriously, I have to agree with you on that. Nobody running around today was around 4.6 billion years ago, or 5762 years ago, and any human who was around at that time didn't think to record the event. So the only resources we can depend on are religious scholars interpreting human writings from a Divine source, or scientific scholars interpreting a physical world from a Divine source. Either way, I think it is a perfectly fine way to do things.
And yes, I know I inserted my own "my belief is truth"ism in there, but too bad! I can be as pig-headed as I want, because I am writing on Slashdot!
Posted from the wireless couch.
On top of that, I really suspect that writing drivers across the many Windoze versions is far more difficult because each different Windows type (95, 98, ME, 2000, XP and what have you not) is really a different OS.
The point is, you don't need to recompile under Windows. The same driver works under Windows 95, 98, ME (ok, sometimes not under 95), and often works under NT, 2000 and XP too. I can understand a driver not running under both kernels 2.2 and 2.4, but within the same major kernel version number, surely that should be possible and desirable? Recompiling isn't a thing you ask ordinary users to do, and distributing the source is often not something companies want to do, this should be simplified. I thought the kernel module versioning information was meant for this, but apparently it didn't quite work.
My bad.
Are you mocking me? I wrote Mosix. Maybe next I will write Mo-dot, which is like Slashdot except your IP address is blocked. You are silly. Mr. Malda, please ban this silly man's account.
You can believe the world was created 5762 years ago, but then we will all think you are truly ignorant.:P
"Agree with them now, it will save so much time."
I think Larry stated his opinion about this here
The other question is: would it be so difficult to produce a bk-compatible openBK? Don't think so either. If the community continues to adopt bk at this rate, sooner or alter, someone will come out with an openBK for sure. Welcome to the wonderful world of OpenSource!
If "the community" had produced anything better than CVS, bit keeper wouldn't exist, and Linus/Linux would be using it. Welcome to the wonderful world of OpenSource!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
No offense but this statement is scientifically untrue
;) ) and were wrong.
"We know the world created itself a few billion years ago and not 5762 years ago (according to the Jewish counting). We know that evolution is the culprit for that inexplicably destructive and increasingly contradictory thing called the human, the human was not made directly by G-d"
Actually, we scientifically don't know. because we have not actually witnessed it. We had a hypothesis which has become a theory. But we don't know. Remember, they knew scientifically that the Earth was the center of the galaxy for the longest time ( astronomically proved it with science too
Note Dictionary.com's definition of Theory. Especially items 4 & 6
Item 6: An assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture
Also note that science ( in the past and somewhat now ) doesn't wish to say anything is absolutely certain unless an experiment can reproduce the behaviour, event or action. Creationism vs. Big Bang vs. ??? is a debate and no particular side is right as far as science is concerned. Personally, I believe in Creationism, others do not. Please Please Please people, before you must say that we all evolved or that the earth is millions of years old and that those who say otherwise are incorrect remember that you are no more correct than they as far as science is concerned ( and it's you using science to make the claims )
I am ready to receive the flames I'm certain I will get for my statement but I felt it necessary and felt it to be on topic
suck!
Thanks.
-b
Moshe Bar: We know the world created itself a few billion years ago and not 5762 years ago (according to the Jewish counting). We know that evolution is the culprit for that inexplicably destructive and increasingly contradictory thing called the human, the human was not made directly by G-d.
:-)
shawnmelliot: Actually, we scientifically don't know. because we have not actually witnessed it. We had a hypothesis which has become a theory. But we don't know.
Mr. Bar is a wise man, since he can apparently accept both science and religion without compromising either. We may not "know" these things in the sense of having visually witnessed it ourselves, but there is a VAST collection of indirect evidence which leads us to accept that this is what happened. Science is the business of using (often indirect) evidence to determine what is happening in the universe around us. This is why we are quite confident that we understand the fusion processes which cause the sun to shine, for instance. There may be subtleties which we do not know of yet, or we may be radically wrong, but so far, all evidence collected by many different researchers using different methods, suggests the current model is correct, EVEN THOUGH WE CANNOT DIRECTLY OBSERVE THE INTERIOR OF THE SUN. None of this has any bearing on wheither there is a G_d or not.
Please Please Please people, before you must say that we all evolved or that the earth is millions of years old and that those who say otherwise are incorrect remember that you are no more correct than they as far as science is concerned
You, however, are not a wise man. Like most Creationists who claim that the earth is "young" and evolution is an incorrect theory, you have no genuine, rigorous scientific basis for your claims. As far as science is concerned, your only "proof" for your beliefs is... The Bible. A book written by people, supposedly divinely inspired. On the other side, we have years of experiments and observations in the fields of astronomy, physics, evolutionary and molecular biology, and paleontology. See the talk.origins website for a detailed explanation of why Creationism is NOT science. Personally, I'm sick of futilely explaining it to people who really just want to impose their Christian origin myths on the rest of the world, using the word "Science" as a bludgeon.
I am ready to receive the flames I'm certain I will get for my statement but I felt it necessary and felt it to be on topic
On topic, yes.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Science is merely man coming to understand how the universe was created by God. End of story. Athiests/agnostics/non-believers/etc just remove the last two words in the above sentence. I find the whole thing easier to swallow with the last two words included. If you leave them off, you end up with a unanswerable question of "created by whom/what". My opinion of people who try to play science as something totally opposite of God are merely making science their god. Since science is an evolving understanding, it would seem to be a harder god to follow. Just my $0.02 (I'll put my asbestos underpants on now :)
Its is impossible to prove something does not exist.
In formal logic and mathematics, it is very easy to prove that something does not exist. Proof by contradiction is probably the easiest example. IIRC from lectures I attended, it is more difficult to prove the existance of something than it is to prove that something does not exist.
You cannot logically put an impossible burden on someone
My PHB does it all the time! Mind you logic and PHB's do not go hand-in-hand...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
He's right! Read the whole thread.
Creationism vs. Big Bang vs. ??? is a debate and no particular side is right as far as science is concerned.
Incorrect. While it is true that science does not consider the Big Bang theory to be undebatably "proven", the creationist thesis is universally held to have been disproven by the available evidence, specifically carbon dating and a number of other repeatable tests that indicate that the universe is substantially older than 6000 years.
Believe what you want, but don't pretend that science supports it in any way, 'cause it most certainly does not.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
As the maintainer of a (very small but useful) piece of the Linux kernel, I disagree with the assertion that driver maintenance (keeping up with an unstable API) is cheap. I am very annoyed at the steady stream of patches I have to apply to keep up with even the 2.4 kernel. The worst part is when someone sends a patch directly to Linus or Marcelo - bypassing me and the other guys who maintain our kernel subsystem - so that the mainline kernel ends up out of sync with our own development code repository. We spend too much of our limited kernel-development time chasing API mismatches when we could be fixing real bugs or adding features. (fortunately most API-change problems are caught at compile-time, but there was one recent instance where an unexpected kernel change led to a HUGE but silent memory leak in my code)
I would very, very much prefer if the driver API were frozen at least for the "stable" kernel series. I don't really mind what happens in 2.5.x.
I understand and agree with Linus' philosophy that large-scale code breakages are sometimes required to force reluctant stragglers to adapt to a new, improved API. Just don't do this in a "stable" kernel series!
IMHO the world would also be a better place if binary-only driver vendors (read NVIDIA) had to target only one, stable kernel API. But feel free to disagree...
From the Jargon File:
Source: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/UNX.h tml
Fight for your right to read books!
"On top of that, I really suspect that writing drivers across the many Windoze versions is far more difficult because each different Windows type (95, 98, ME, 2000, XP and what have you not) is really a different OS. "
I completely disagree with the above statement. As a device driver writer with experience being involved in Windows, Mac, Linux, SCO Unix, AIX device drivers let me say that although Linux drivers are the easiest to write, they are the most difficult to support. A device driver that works for Windows 2000 can often work on Windows Me or Windows XP with no changes at all or at most fairly minimal changes. Under Windows you can have a single binary that runs on Win 98/Me, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Under Linux you need a different binary for practically every different kernel. I have had Linux drivers break from kernel 2.4.x to 2.4.x+1 on more than one occasion.
There are lots of things to dislike about Windows or Mac device driver development but unstable API's is not one of them. There are lots of things to like about Linux driver development but API stability/driver compatibility is not one of them.
I don't study theology formally, but I certainly haven't lacked for having people trying to teach me to accept The Lord. But broad "you can't explain it (now) so it must be God" explanations don't convince me, and the circular logic frequently vetted with all sincerity by those sorts of people (over and over again) does little for my opionion of them as reasonable individuals.
I've yet to hear of ANY definitive or even semi-suggestive evidence for God, despite plenty of opportunities for believers to enlighten me. Of course, from what I hear you're not supposed to believe in God based on evidence, you're supposed to believe based on faith, even if confronted with evidence contrary to His existence. Which frankly isn't good enough for me.
But of course, science has produced no empirical evidence to prove or disprove the existence of God Himself, though it is explaining most everything previously attributed to His divine will. Ironically enough, to me the most convincing evidence against God is religion itself. Despite attempts like Vedaism or Baha'i to reconcile the great religions (as if the number of a religion's adherents could be an accurate measure of it's validity), common ground is reduced to a few humanist principles (mainly, "don't kill people"). Amongst all known cultures, the only universal seems to be the incest taboo - a practical matter which biology explains quite well. Religion encompasses a broad scope of mythologies characterized by the presence - and abscence - of the supernatural, gods, demigods, sprits, primal forces, prophets, and culture heroes. It encompasses laws, rules, principles, and taboos both divine and mundane of astonishing and contradictory variety.
Against all these myriad options and explanations, I am somehow expected to believe that the religious tradition I grew up in - the large but clearly tribe-rooted Judeo-Christian tradion - is the only correct one, whilst the rest are all lies and myth. That there is indeed a God who was inordinately fond of a tiny tribe in the desert, and these billions of other people in the world who don't think so are misled or worse. I don't buy it. I think beyond their moral, ethical, and cultural relevance, religion - including the one most common in this part of the world - is nothing more than stories, and frequently fictious ones for a limited audience. Mythos laced with morality.
In other words, I've as much reason to believe in God as I do in the Force. Although of course, science has found no evidence for midichlorians either.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Actually, the hard part is when the children hit their teenage years. It's like they become zombies or something.
I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
2. There IS NO HISTORICAL EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF JESUS. The writings of Christian theologians are not acceptable because of the conflict of interest, we need secular evidence as well. However, the only evidence Christians have provided is the writings of the secular historian Josephus -- and the parts of Josephus' writings which directly refer to Jesus or Christianity were discovered to be forgeries committed by theologians. Pick up a modern translation of Josephus from a secular source...it does not contain that passage anymore because scholars agree on its fraudulent nature. Other than that there is nothing.
3. There are all kinds of philosophies that do not depend on God for morality or ethics. Don't believe me? Read from the following authors:
David Hume
Frederich Nietsche
Immanuel Kant
Baruch Spinoza
John Adams
Thomas Jefferson
Mark Twain
Ayn Rand
Robert Pirsig
It's pretty clear that the existence of a supernatural entity which rewards or punishes people cannot be the basis for morality, actually. That's just coersion. Morality is when you do good because there's a logical reason for it, not because you've been threatened.
4. There is a terrific website at this location that can address your questions and concerns about freedom from religion. While you're at it, I suggest you check out this one as well. May prove to be informative.
"Thank you, God, for your healing gift of religion."
Er, it still costs time and effort to write and debug code, open source or not.
In the mean-time, your constantly changing API's prevent third party code interoperating with your own; you end up with alpha and beta Apache 2 for the rest of eternity, where mod_* only works once in a blue moon when the API versions happen to co-include. You end up with every browser release breaking all your plugins until the maintainers can catch up.
Am I missing something, or am I mistaken in the thought that modern software development has tought us to design well, abstract away details, and decrease coupling?
"It has been suggested that..." --> "I just pulled this out of my ass and thought it was clever to say that..."
Don't get me wrong. He should try to answer you. It's just that he needs more parameters [correct word?] as to how to answer.
testing out my trending skills
Exactly. There really isn't much of a market for low-end M&A lawyers. You're more likely to get stuck revising contracts, which is the legal equivalent of maintenance programming.
Good emulation of a standard Judaic argument. Shall I emulate Isaiah 63 in response? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Actually, they aren't going to suffer unendingly; Sodom and Gomorrha's smoke rose `for ever' too... but that's beside the point. Human nature won't submit to any restraint if it can be avoided.
When they blind themselves to God, atheists blind themselves to the need to obey Him. So-called Christians who see no particular need for obedience are simply taking one less step out of the process. In the end, of course, every knee shall bow, even knees worn by God-haters.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
You believe in electricity (-: I presume
For a God to be any use, He cannot fulfil your expectations of Him, cannot be reliably controlled by you.
I didn't bother getting bogged down in philosophy at first, I just looked for things (mainly prophecy and miracles, both `mundane' and spectacular) and added them up.
Materialism requires billions upon billions of miracles to explain life as we see it, miracles of the water-flowing-uphill variety, Creationist Christianity can get by on a few hundred or thousand, which means that Occam's Razor picks it as the winner every time. There are other things to explain besides life, too! (-:
I'd been personally involved in some supernatural stuff before I did my comparisons, which I suppose helped make my transition gentler, but it was still not an easy thing.
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Respect, rather than terror. FWIW, a sensible God would arrange things that way, but when the rubber meets the road `sensible' is only our opinion. Until you find a way of refining your picture of God (eg, RTFM instead of relying on opinion) you have no way of knowing that your opinion has value.
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ROFL! Thanks, made my day... (-:
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Agree. However, it is possible to know enough states to get a meaningful answer. The answer is `God exists'.
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Their remains will be destroyed, their punishment will be forever. As it was with Sodom and Gomorrha, so with the unrepentant,
Not so much a difference between denominations, as a difference between schools of thought. Once Luther himself exited stage left, the wind went out of Lutheranism's theological sails, and the remaining leadership, however well intended, stalled theologically and are now in caretaker mode. So much so that they're willing to sell the farm to the fox in order to be able to afford to feed the chickens (ie slowly merge with the Roman Catholic Church).
The church is wrong. Given the state of the world, you can say that with some degree of confidence about any church (or individual). But unless the church believes that it is wrong, it won't repent, it won't accept change, it cannot progress - but natural attrition ensures that it will backslide. And watch the RCC doctrines be slid in, slowly but surely, as has happened to the Anglicans.
Back at the theology: the `second death' - the price of which Christ has paid for every single individual on the planet, whether they refuse it or not - is permanent and final. How could the Universe be holy, all peace and righteousness, with an oasis of perpetually tortured sinners somewhere in it?
Email me for chapter and verse, 99% of this audience don't want to know.
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It's all around you. You are proof, too. Every feature of you, but for the existence of God, is at the end of a very long chain of water-flowing-uphill-style materialistic miracles. Occam's Razor says: the simplest explanation wins. The God Hypothesis requires many orders of magnitude fewer miracles than the No God Hypothesis, so it is much more reasonable to accept it.
Alternatively, take the opposite approach, and simply disprove the No God Hypothesis. Conventional science is just plain wrong in many areas. All of the `proofs' for long ages and slow development suffer each one of the following fatal flaws:
- based on a priori commitment to (and so contextual assumptions based on) one side of the point in question
- unrepeatable
- mutually contradictory with other such `proofs'
- contradicted by what we can observe
For an example of those latter two, Dendrochronolgy as a device to establish long ages has been called into question within the feild, yet has been able to establish that the many layers of the Yellowstone Fossil Forests were all laid down together, or at least in very quick succession (a matter of a few decades at the very most). Spirit Lake is demonstrating a suitable mechanism for us now. Similar examples abound.Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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Are you trying to pull my chain, or just plain dumb? I didn't say that, and nor was it my argument. Go back and read it again. Oh... hang on, there's a third realistic option: if you have a previous commitment to agnosticism (`God cannot be known' or `God is separate from the material world') that would just about do it. If so, reboot and reinstall. Let's get this show on the road...
The forests weren't flattened, that's the whole point, and the surrounding rock is alluvial, not metamorphic, which rules out lava flows. The dendrochronology shows that the trees pertaining to hundreds of feet of rock were related, ergo, grew at the same time, ergo, the whole lot was laid down before the trees could significantly rot.
This is not an isolated datum, there are many things which have to have happened very quickly. And if these things which have been upheld as taking aeons took minutes or months, what of other measures? (Follow the links, there are deeper explanations and you get to read about eagles with 25-foot wingspans, ancient engineering done with 2000-tonne blocks of stone, and all manner of other spectacular stuff)
That's exactly how it's supposed to be. The Commandments are for us, not for jellyfish or leopards. You'll also find that the decayed and decaying state of life on earth is as predicted. God is not nature, nature is not God. Uh, surprise, that means they work differently? The Bible specifically mentions nature obeying God's rules for it.
OK, let me tell you about my friend Dave Hatch.
Dave was born with a split face; he'd be about 70 now, so as you can imagine the surgical techniques of the day were pretty shoddy. In fact, what they did was crush up some of the bones of his face, push them around like plasticene into a `better' shape, splint them, wait for them to heal, and repeat. Naturally enough, one day that stopped working, and as Dave put it `all I knew was that they were suddenly buying me lots of toys and being really nice to me' - they were preparing for Dave to die.
A miracle-working evangelist came to town, and having little to lose, his parents took him along, presented his case, brought him him, followed the directions, and nothing happened.
Very early the following morning, Dave's face started to feel `funny' so he went in and woke up his parents. They were petrified because they thought it meant he was about to die on the spot or something like that. They grabbed a torch and watched, gobsmacked, as Dave's face healed and grew out to where it was supposed to have been, over the course of about two hours.
Perhaps understandably, their MD got very angry and confused and refused to deal with the situation when they went in to see him. Now exactly what you attribute that healing to is another question, but it certainly wasn't natural. Not even a salamander can do that.
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This is not what is happening in practice. Now that 1.0 is out, add-ons are coming out like crazy. This is because developers frustrated with all the API changes up to now finally have an API that isn't a moving target to write against.
mozilla.org knew exactly what they were doing with an API freeze.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Interesting that you should use relative terms like `unlikely' when referring to the observations - but absolute, unreasonable terms when referring to the conclusions. In practice it's the other way around.
It is literally impossible to get from goo to you gradually. Each of gazillions of gradual steps along the way has to be independently viable, and the prospective evolvee often faces paradoxes like: if a change is large enough to be selected for and not against, it requires a stupendous number of very specific helpful things to have happened at once, and no bad ones, to a single organism's genes - and be genetically dominant each time - and to drive competing genes from the race each time..
Often the helpful things are mutually exclusive. For a simple example, water is essential to life, but quickly destroys most precursors. For a more complex example, the entire blood-clotting cascade has to have been emplaced in one go, because if any part is missing or defective, the organism either bleeds to death on the first cut, or solidifies. Half-done structures are ecologically expensive, so are selected aganst fairly swiftly.
Many otherwise sober scientists go on imaginitive hypothetical romps when faced with problems like this, but I presume that fairy tales are not the stuff of which rational conclusions are made.
Each impossibility, each miracle, has to have happened in different ways many millions of times on the path from rocks to rambutans. One impossibility is impossible, so what is a million of them?
Now we turn to evidence of a creator. Sensible but otherwise impossible arrangements are exactly the situation which creatorship would be expected to produce.
We can be more specific than this. Since many biological systems are imperfect, we can deduce that their creator was either imperfect, or has let them be damaged.
It so happens that the God of scripture is recorded as having cursed his creation, so if this candidate was the right one, we would expect to find damaged biosystems in his world.
And so on. How much detail do you want to go into? I invokes Occam because this is in principle and practice the most straightforward explanation, sans a requirement for strict materialism.
BTW, if
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P'raps I'd better describe some more, then. The trees are based on a number of levels, and have had their roots and branches stripped. Presumably before they were emplaced. Most are vertical.
Don't have that to hand, but some Googling on "yellowstone dendrochronology" shows a few likely candied dates.
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I agree so much, and we're probably also agreed that extrapolation in general is a risky business?
The reason that agreement here is important is because the original assignments of dates to indicator fossils and rock types was entirely arbitrary, and the methods used to `cross-check' these assignments - extrapolatory in nature - have repeatedly been demonstrated to be unreliable, often producing bizarre dates (by anyone's standards) or conflicting with each other.
What this means is that on one hand we have many events/processes known to have been rapid and/or recent, and on the other hand many similar events/processes assumed to be slow and/or ancient. While the burden of convention lies with the known-rapid instances, the burden of actual proof still rests with the assumed-gradual instances. In many cases the rapidity/recency is even derived from direct observation, rather than deduced.
Good. (-:
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