Larry Wall On Perl, Religion, and...

Not only did Larry Wall answer your questions, but he said they were excellent questions. You've got to love Larry Wall, not just because he's a nice guy and created Perl, but also because he is the first Slashdot interview guest ever to send his answers preformatted in squeaky-clean HTML. We appreciate this like you wouldn't believe. They're great answers, too -- straightforward, heartfelt, and entertaining. Enjoy! 1) Perl as a "scripting" or a "programming" language
by Marx_Mrvelous

I've been using perl for a very long time, but primarily as a scripting language. I indeed mostly use it for extraction and reporting. With the recent developments in perl, however, there seems to be the trend that perl is able to do much, much more (while retaining compatibility to be "just" a scripting language).

What do you think about how people are using Perl today? Are you satisfied that most people use it for simple tasks like log parsing? Would you like to see more advanced applications being built with Perl verses a compiled language?

A:

I am perfectly happy for Perl to continue parsing logfiles. Perl has always been, and always will be (I hope), a humble language. When I am 80 years old, even if everyone in the whole world puts me on a pedestal and thinks I'm the renaissanciest man that ever lived, I still intend to take out the trash when my wife asks me to. Just because I'm learning Japanese doesn't mean I have to stop speaking English.

But just as people grow (and are stretched), Perl continues to grow (and be stretched). Perl has acquired new skills over the years, and people have been using Perl to do all sorts of things that are arguably at the limits of its capabiliites. The solution to that is not to stop people from doing that, but to increase Perl's dynamic range.

The thing is, people are already building more advanced applications with Perl. But there are some aspects of that process that aren't as easy as they could be. They're hard. In times past we were proud of the fact that the hard things were even possible with Perl5. We often chant the slogan: "Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible."

But as with any slogan, there are some qustionable assumptions hidden behind the sentiment. We assume that it's obvious which things should be easy or hard, and that the things that are currently easy are the things that ought to be easy. We assume that making the hard things easy will necessarily cause the easy things to become hard. But sometimes it's not obvious what should be easy or hard. Sometimes the wrong things are easy. And sometimes there are ways to make the hard things easier without making the easy things harder.

Some of the complexity in a Perl5 program is necessary to the solution, and some of it isn't. We can't eliminate the necessary complexity, but we can hope to get rid of some of the needless complexity. That will make everything easier. Well, most everything...

I'm really under no illusions that we can make everything easier at once. There's no such thing as a perfect language. Merely making a more expressive language means it's in some sense more difficult to learn to express yourself responsibly. That's the price of power. Manhattan will always be more difficult to understand than a set of beads.

But in any event, let me assure you that Perl6 will not be as difficult to learn as Japanese. :-)

2) Perl Beginners
by KoopaTroopa

I'm a CS student who's recently become very interested in Perl along with other languages. However, I don't really have too much everyday (or even occasional) need to actually USE much Perl. I am big into learning as much as I can about it for its own sake.

Now, for the question: Given this approach to learning Perl (just for a general working knowledge, maybe light usage,) is it really worth spending a lot of my time learning Perl now, or should I wait for the big Perl6 revision?

A:

I don't think you would be damaged by learning Perl5, though I'm sure there are those who would disagree--or at least choose to be disagreeable.

It really depends on your curiosity level, I think. Some people would learn both Perl5 and Perl6 merely to see how a language design evolves over time. Those folks are pretty hardcore. Count yourself lucky if you're not one of them. But despite appearances, Perl5 isn't a totally horrible language, and we're hoping to save all the good bits of it in Perl6. People moving from Perl5 to Perl6 shouldn't find it too difficult to unlearn the naughty bits, especially since it's the naughty bits that tend to be frustrating. And if you're ever in a situation where you need to use Perl6 for real, it's likely you'll have to deal with legacy Perl5 code anyway. So as usual the answer is: "It depends..."

Gildor was silent for a moment. 'I do not like this news,' he said at last. 'That Gandalf should be late, does not bode well. But it is said: Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger. The choice is yours: to go or wait.'

'And it is also said,' answered Frodo: 'Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.'

'Is it indeed?' laughed Gildor. 'Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill. But what would you? You have not told me all concerning yourself; and how then shall I choose better than you? But if you demand advice, I will for friendship's sake give it. I think you should now go at once, without delay; and if Gandalf does not come before you set out, then I also advise this: do not go alone. Take such friends as are trusty and willing. Now you should be grateful, for I do not give this counsel gladly.'

3) Structured programming and perl
by slashnot007

The reason I like perl is it is not a structured programming language. In my work I find it is 50% a get the job done parsing language and 25% sequencer of programs and deamons and 25% major ojbect oriented programming effort often a cgi.

Thus I worry that perl has Python-envy. I've tried to use python several times but always go back to perl. The reason is my daily need for a parser dominates my choice of language and maintains my fluency, since I dont want to have to be fluent in both, perl becomes my language of choice for advanced tasks too, even though python might be better for strcutrued programming.

So my question is, is perl6 making make perl a structued language like python? Would it be a good idea if perl did not develop any further for fear of becoming too complicated and thus disorganized? (witness the evolution of java from clean slate to giant mess with intricate redundant libraries half of which are deprecated).

A:

Er, what do you mean by "structured"? 25 years ago all of these languages would have been considered "structured", in the sense that a block generally has only one entrance point. (There were also people who thought that a block should only have one exit. Thankfully these folks did not prevail, since functions representing decision trees often have one entry but multiple exit points.)

But you obviously mean "structured" in a different sense, or perhaps several different senses. Syntax is structure, and different languages have different syntax, but I don't think that's what you mean.

I'll assume you mean "structured" the way a grade school teacher means it, as in "structured play time", as opposed to "free play time". Python's slogan is "There's only one obvious way to do it." That's fine from the computer's viewpoint, but kinda sucks from the human viewpoint. "You can play any game you like, as long as it was organized by the teacher."

Java was, in that sense, much less structured than Python, I think. That's part of the reason for Java's success, but it came at a price. One of the problems with Java is that they swept a bit too much of the innate complexity of life under the carpet of the libraries. And so now they've had to replace the carpets several times.

So, yes, Java started with a "clean slate", but it was a rather undersized slate, methinks. But as for "structured play time" in Java, the structure has been imposed more by cultural norms than by the language itself.

As for Perl, it has never been "structured" in that sense, though it has always been structured in the sense that you can create as much structure as you like. The whole point is that the structure is optional, not imposed externally. If you're playing with your schoolmates at recess, you can always choose to organize a football game, but the teacher isn't making you do that.

Playing football is like programming in the large. You have to agree on a lot of rules to do it with other people. Perl5 doesn't make it terribly easy to agree on a set of rules, and we hope to make that easier in Perl6. You have to have discipline to do programming in the large, but you'll choose the discipline by turning up the big discipline knob yourself, not by having someone else turn it up for you. Perl6 will give you the big knob.

I am philosophically opposed to turning up the knob for you, because I don't know how fast you want it turned up. (Perl6 will turn it up for you a little by default--if you write a module or class, it'll automatically default to a stricter mode than it uses for your main program.) But the reason I don't like doing it for you is that you know how fast you want to learn, and I don't. As Gildor says, you haven't told me enough about yourself for me to give you advice. If I don't know how hard you can paddle, I can't tell you how big of a wave to try to catch. We all have to start with the small waves.

We find the same problem in teaching reading to kids. Some people shout "Whole language!" while others shout "Phonics!" Well, guess what, they're both oversimplifying. You have to learn some phonics, and then you learn some larger bits based on that, and some larger bits based on that, and eventually you find that you're intuiting whole language. The whole language folks fall into what I call the "Expert Fallacy". You look at how experts do something, and assume that's how everyone should do it. There are some people who are natural readers. They naturally figure out the bits and pieces themselves. But if you try and teach everyone that way, half your kids never figure out the phonics.

Programming is the same way. Language designers tend to look at how experts program and then think that everyone ought to learn to program that way from the start. That's a bit like expecting a new surfer to do well on 40 foot waves. Some will make it, but most will wipe out.

Perl is designed to help people learn the bits of programming they need right now without forcing them to learn the techniques they aren't ready for. But when they are ready for them, Perl tries to be there too. We just don't tell the beginners that the speedometer on their golf cart wraps around several times.

4) What will you *not* put into Perl 6?
by TreyHarris

What would you say has been the number one requested feature that you will not put into Perl6, and why not?

A:

That depends on what you call a feature, and what you call a request. If you look at all the RFCs at dev.perl.org, you'll find that most of the feature requests are bogus on some level or other because they tend to suggest bandaid solutions. Nevertheless, I think it's best to treat them all as a "cry for help". With computer languages, about 75% of the bandaids have a bullet hole underneath.

So, for instance, I officially rejected the RFC asking for multiline comments, while actually accepting the underlying premise that it was too difficult to do block comments. But the better solution is not to introduce more syntax, but to fix the POD syntax to do what people want.

But this is Perl, after all, so there has to be more than one solution. The other solution is to make the Perl grammar malleable enough that the user can install their own multiline comment mechanism anyway via a pragma, so there! That's fine by me, as long as the syntactic warpage is lexically scoped. "All is fair if you predeclare."

Another often-requested feature that's not going into Perl6 is implicit lexical declarations. That's one of those features that seems like a good idea when you're looking at small snippets of code, but it breaks down when the scopes get larger than you can see in a glance. Scoping by indentation has the same problem, but nobody has seriously requested that for Perl6, for some strange reason...

Now you might think that getting rid of the $, @, and % sigils would be the number one requested feature, but typically that is suggested only by people who don't know Perl and probably wouldn't use Perl even if we did get rid of them. The folks who know Perl tend to like the sigils.

5) perl vs other languages
by larry bagina

Whenever perl pops up in slashdot, there are plenty of language zealots claiming perl is obsolete and you should really be using php or ruby or python instead.

What are your thoughts on these other scripting languages? What do you like about them, what do you dislike?

A:

Well, in general, the thing I don't like about other computer languages is that they're not Perl. :-)

Seriously, Perl matches the way I think pretty well, because what I mostly want in a computer language is a wide dynamic range. I want a language in which you can say both dirty, low-level stuff and fancy, high-level stuff. I want a language where both baby-talk and fluency are acceptable. Other computer languages tend to try to level those distinctions.

As for specifics, I must say that the example of Ruby is the main reason I decided against implicit lexical scoping for Perl6. We'll be sticking with explicit my declarations. But I have to like the majority of Ruby simply because that's the part that was borrowed straight out of Perl. :-)

I also liked Ruby's unary splat operator, so I borrowed it for Perl6.

The main problem I see with Ruby is that the Principle of Least Surprise can lead you astray, as it did with implicit lexical scoping. The question is, whose surprise are you pessimizing? Experts are surprised by different things than beginners. People who are trying to grow small programs into large programs are surprised by different things than people who design their programs large to begin with.

For instance, I think it's a violation of the Beginner's Principle of Least Surprise to make everything an object. To a beginner, a number is just a number. A string is a string. They may well be objects as far as the computer is concerned, and it's even fine for experts to treat them as objects. But premature OO is a speed bump in the novice's onramp.

I confess, I have a soft spot in my heart for inside-out languages like PHP. The first real compiler I ever wrote was for a sort of text-processing macro language in which the commands were embedded in the data. This is part of a more general class of programming languages in which a peculiar form of processing is assumed by default, such as the pattern/action syntax of awk that assumes an invisible outer loop.

Perl can do that, but it's not the default. I think languages like awk and PHP hobble themselves in the long run by attaching themselves to a particular ecological niche, particularly when a generalist like Perl can effectively occupy the same niche. So I've never felt tempted to even try PHP. I'd only be speaking second-hand if I said that PHP has some serious namespace and extension mechanism issues. So I won't say that. :-)

Python is cool to look at small bits of, but I think the "outline" syntax breaks down with larger chunks of code. I'm with Aristotle on the structure of discourse--a story should have a beginning, and middle, and an end. So should blocks.

There's something to be said for forcing everyone to code in the same style, but that's not the Perl Way. At least, it's not the default Perl Way. But all is fair if you predeclare. It's perfectly fine for you to import a pragmatic module that enforces a certain style policy. It's even fine if your company forces you to import that pragma. Of course, if you want real programming discipline, I'd suggest you use Damian's Klingon module...

6) Perl and .NET
by prostoalex

What is your opinion of .NET in general and Perl's role in it? Given that .NET supports Perl as one of the languages would you recommend actually using it for any projects? Do you see good future for this tandem?

A:

As far as I'm concerned, .NET is just another architecture that we need to port Perl to run on natively. The current approach to .NET interoperability is a bit of a hack, I think. That is partly Perl's fault for not having a sufficiently powerful type declaration system, but it's also a problem that .NET doesn't really support dynamically typed languages very well. I foresee that we'll have something like a Parrot interface that functions as a (hopefully thin) layer of glue over other VMs such as .NET or Java machines. The less impedence mismatch there is, the thinner the layer can be.

I recommend that you use Perl where it makes sense to use Perl, and avoid using it where it doesn't make sense. I am not the judge of whether it makes sense to use Perl on .NET, simply because I'm way too ignorant and stupid to be making those kinds of decisions for you. Sorry.

As for the future, I really don't know. Long, long ago (when our galaxy was far away) I shoehorned Perl and Java into the same process, and it never aroused much excitement. Certainly the Java folks tend to turn up their noses at non-100% Java solutions, but it got a pretty chilly reception from the other end as well. By and large, Perl programmers don't seem to have much appreciation for Java. I think the language architects who aren't living in reality tend to like multi-language solutions a lot more than ordinary folks do.

Which is, of course, why we're doing exactly the same thing with Parrot. Go figure. :-)

6.5) From a project managers prospective
by mustangdavis

What are your thoughts on the comments made by people that Perl is not designed for projects that require more than one programmer? Many people have stated over and over again that Perl code can not be managed by more than one person ... what are your thoughts on that statement? How would you manage a large Perl project? Do you think Perl should be used for large projects? (or should it be used strictly as a "quick and dirty" programming language?) BTW: I love your work (someone had to say it)

A:

I do not manage any large projects, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. I haven't an executive bone in my body. All my managerial skills are delegated. Ask anyone I've delegated to...

However, those who claim that Perl code cannot be managed by more than one person are obviously smoking something worse than crack. They're simply ignoring the many examples of people who have done just that. But you wouldn't expect to hire random people off the street to come in and collaborate on writing a novel. You can do it by hiring a few good novelists who already know how to figure out how to work together, or at least how to fight with each other productively. In the absence of that level of expertise, you can also do it by setting up policies under which random people can work, rather like the rules for writing about the world of Liavek, in which, for instance, every story has to mention a camel.

That being said, there are things we can do to make Perl6 better at helping managers and architects set up such policies for programming in the large. Having a standardized opaque object type will help there as well. Nobody is going to claim that Perl6's OO is "bolted on". Well, except maybe for certain Slashdotters who don't know the difference between rational discussion and cheerleading...

7) Role of Religion?
by Anonymous Cowdog

I remember reading at some point that you are a Christian, and there have been suggestions that some of your early missionary impulses (a desire to do good, help others) are perhaps part of the zeal you have put into Perl over the years.

Preferring a scientific view, I am not religious, and have no desire to be. Perhaps there is a God, but if there is, I think he/she has no opposable thumbs; in other words, has no power to change anything; reality is just playing out according to the laws of physics (whatever those are).

Please tell us how in the world a scientific or at least technical mind can believe in God, and what role religion has played in your work on Perl.

A:

Well, hmm, that's a topic for an entire essay, or a book, or a life. But I'll try to keep it short.

When you say "how in the world", I take it to mean that you find it more or less inconceivable that someone with a scientific mind (or at least technical mind, hah!) could chooose to believe in God. I'd like to at least get you to the point where you find it conceivable. I expect a good deal of the problem is that you are busy disbelieving a different God than the one I am busy believing in. In theological discussions more than any other kind, it's easy to talk at right angles and never even realize it.

So let me try to clarify what I mean, and reduce it to as few information bits as possible. A lot of people have a vested interest in making this a lot tougher to swallow than it needs to be, but it's supposed to be simple enough that a child can understand it. It doesn't take great energetic gobs of faith on your part--after all, Jesus said you only have to have faith the size of a mustard seed. So just how big is that, in information theory terms? I think it's just two bits big. Please allow me to qoute a couple "bits" from Hebrews, slightly paraphrased:

You can't please God the way Enoch did without some faith, because those who come to God must (minimally) believe that:
A) God exists, and
B) God is good to people who really look for him.

That's it. The "good news" is so simple that a child can understand it, and so deep that a philosopher can't.

Now, it appears that you're willing to admit the possibility of bit A being a 1, so you're almost halfway there. Or maybe you're a quarter way there on average, if it's a qubit that's still flopping around like Shoedinger's Cat. You're the observer there, not me--unless of course you're dead. :-)

A lot of folks get hung up at point B for various reasons, some logical and some moral, but mostly because of Shroedinger again. People are almost afraid to observe the B qubit because they don't want the wave function to collapse either to a 0 or a 1, since both choices are deemed unpalatable. A lot of people who claim to be agnostics don't take the position so much because they don't know, but because they don't want to know, sometimes desperately so.

Because if it turns out to be a 0, then we really are the slaves of our selfish genes, and there's no basis for morality other than various forms of tribalism.

And because if it turns out to be a 1, then you have swallow a whole bunch of flim-flam that goes with it. Or do you?

Let me admit to you that I came at this from the opposite direction. I grew up in a religious culture, and I had to learn to "unswallow" an awful lot of stuff in order to strip my faith down to these two bits.

I tried to strip it down further, but I couldn't, because God told me: "That's far enough. I already flipped your faith bits to 1, because I'm a better Observer than you are. You are Shroedinger's cat in reverse--you were dead spiritually, but I've already examined the qubits for you, and I think they're both 1. Who are you to disagree with me?"

So, who am I to disagree with God? :-) If he really is the Author of the universe, he's allowed to observe the qubits, and he's probably even allowed to cheat occasionally and force a few bit flips to make it a better story. That's how Authors work. Whether or not they have thumbs...

Once you see the universe from that point of view, many arguments fade into unimportance, such as Hawking's argument that the universe fuzzed into existence at the beginning, and therefore there was no creator. But it's also true that the Lord of the Rings fuzzed into existence, and that doesn't mean it doesn't have a creator. It just means that the creator doesn't create on the same schedule as the creature's.

If God is creating the universe sideways like an Author, then the proper place to look for the effects of that is not at the fuzzy edges, but at the heart of the story. And I am personally convinced that Jesus stands at the heart of the story. The evidence is there if you care to look, and if you don't get distracted by the claims of various people who have various agendas to lead you in every possible direction, and if you don't fall into the trap of looking for a formula rather than looking for God as a person. All human institutions are fallible, and will create a formula for you to determine whether you belong to the tribe or not. Very often these formulas are called doctrines and traditions and such, and there is some value in them, as there is some value in any human culture. But they all kind of miss the point.

"Systematic theology" is an oxymoron. God is not a system. Christians are fond of asking: "What would Jesus do in this situation?" Unfortunately, they very rarely come up with the correct answer, which is: "Something unexpected!" If the Creator really did write himself into his own story, that's what we ought to expect to see. Creative solutions.

And this creativity is intended to be transitive. We are expected to be creative. And we're expected to help others be creative.

And that leads us back (finally) to the last part of your question, how all this relates to Perl.

Perl is obviously my attempt to help other people be creative. In my little way, I'm sneakily helping people understand a bit more about the sort of people God likes.

Going further, we have the notion that a narrative should be defined by its heart and not by its borders. That ties in with my linguistic notions that things ought to be defined by prototype rather than by formula. It ties in to my refusal to define who is or is not a "good" Perl programmer, or who exactly is or isn't a member of the "Perl community". These things are all defined by their centers, not by their peripheries.

The philosophy of TMTOWTDI ("There's more than one way to do it.") is a direct result of observing that the Author of the universe is humble, and chooses to exercise control in subtle rather than in heavy-handed ways. The universe doesn't come with enforced style guidelines. Creative people will develop style on their own. Those are the sort of people that will make heaven a nice place.

And finally, there is the underlying conviction that, if you define both science and religion from their true centers, they cannot be in confict. So despite all the "religiosity" of Perl culture, we also believe in the benefits of computer science. I didn't put lexicals and closures into Perl5 just because I thought people would start jumping up and down and shouting "Hallelujah!" (Which happens, but that's not why I did it.)

And now let's all sing hymn #42...

8) Thanks Larry
by wdr1

Like many others, I love Perl. I use it both professionally and personally. You've not only helped make my career, but also given me a very pleasent past-time. I was wondering what I can do to say thank-you? Can we give you money? Dontate something to someone, etc.?

When the new Programming Perl came out, I didn't really need anymoe (viva perldoc!), but wanted to make sure I was putting a few bucks in the pockets of those who made Perl great. What else can I do to say thanks?

A:

Hmm, what timing! You must be from one of those churches where they pass the offering plate right after the sermon... :-)

Even just saying thanks is much appreciated. But if you want to help out more, there are lots of places to donate time or money. Unfortunately, it takes time to figure out how to donate time, since you have to hang out with various interest groups until you get, er, interested in one of them. But it's part of Perl culture to value contributions to Perl culture, so don't hold back just because your contribution is not somehow technical. That's not how we work.

Donating money is easy (except, of course, for the money part). Tax-deductible contributions can be made to the Perl Foundation. Much of my support for this year has come through the Perl Foundation--my full-time work on the Apocalypses would have been impossible without it. If you can persuade the companies you work for to make donations or to match your donations, that's also a worthwhile investment of time (and in some cases, agony). Please allow me to express my sincere gratitude here for everyone who has contributed already. This program is made possible by viewers like you.

9) perl 6 niche
by maraist

perl 1-5 have been great UNIX configuration/management languages. This includes small-scale webserver platforms. It's very difficult to find any other language that is as versitile in this respect where it reigns in it's niche. It is the perfect combination of speed, power, simplicity and huffman encoding (especially given the co-UNIX-tools look-and-feel).

Perl6 on the other hand, changes this formula around; favoring a more general solution that potentially reduces performance (due to abstractions), and deviates substantially from the UNIX-family-syntax - Namely: c-ish-syntax ( colon, question mark, select, exception-handling, etc), awk/sedish reg-ex's, raw c-libray-wrappers, etc. It was these very similarities that made learning and accepting perl so trivial since learning CIS and UNIX administration was sufficient to master perl in 2 days.

My question is: does perl6 have a niche in mind? Or is it spreading itself too thinly; competing more and more against Java/python/C# and thus losing it's identifiable niche?

A:

Excellent question. I love the evolutionary biologists' way of talking about organisms as if they're evolving on purpose: "I think I'll develop feathers now and become a bird...", though in Perl's case, of course, there is some amount of purpose in my head (some would say "not enough"), not to mention the heads of other Perl developers (some would say "too much" (or is it the other way around?)), but it's still great fun to talk about Perl as if it were its own beastie, or as if it were a character in a novel that runs away with the plot despite the intentions of the author, kinda like this sentence has.

Anyway, from the start, Perl has never really been satisfied with staying in any one particular ecological niche. That's not terribly healthy approach in evolutionary terms, especially when your niche goes away. Perl's been pretty lucky so far to land in stable niches, but if some of its current niches dry up someday, that's really only to be expected, and indeed almost hoped for. It's probably the fault of closing ecological niches that we aren't all still swinging from trees, after all. (Of course, some of us still are, but that portion of us isn't heavily represented on Slashdot. Er...appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.)

Perl started out as just a text processing language--a better awk and sed--but it very rapidly spread to the ecological niche of system administration. On Unix, at least, a lot of system administration is text processing. With version3, however, Perl very intentionally escaped the text-processing-only niche by adding the capability to process binary data. Perl4 UNintentionally spread from the sysadmin niche into the CGI/Web niche. Perl5 accellerated that trend by intentionally occupying the extensible-glue-language niche, which had the unforeseen (by me) but predictable result of enabling Web sites to hook all their backend databases to the various textual Internet protocols.

But if you're worried about Perl trying to inhabit the "good for everything" niche, that's actually been Perl's intention since Perl5 came out. After all, you can't add OO to any language without making it perfect. ;-)

Seriously, I think that, for many of the people who use Perl today, the ecological niche they're thinking of is already labeled "everything", even if it isn't quite. For those folks, trying to make Perl better for the "everything" niche is not really an issue--they're already panting for it. These are the people who will actually carry Perl over to the next ecological niche it spills into, and the ones after that. I just made Perl a glue language, and other people applied it to bootstrapping the Web. Making Perl the best tool for growing programs from small to large is actually one of the underlying design goals of Perl6. But other people will use that to inhabit, or even create, other ecological niches. I hope to be surprised again as I was with the Web. I could, of course, be completely wrong.

10) How to get people to take Perl seriously
by kin_korn_karn

I'm a perl programmer who uses it daily. The push is on from the C?O types to get rid of Perl, even though a bunch of us here know it and are very proficient and fast with it. The new standard is Java with web services and all that other BS. This sickens me, because a) I'm biased towards Perl and b) I know Java is simply a fad language and the overhead/infrastructure only serves to give do-nothing architect types jobs.

The high-level technical people in my company don't take Perl seriously. They see it as some kind of super-Awk or an artifact of the early days of the web. Smart people know better, but we're not in charge.

What do you think it would take to get people to take Perl seriously as a programming language [again]? Is widespread use of Perl a goal of yours, or do you not care?

A:

Well, if Java really is a "fad" language, we don't have to do anything to beat it, now do we? :-)

Leaving that aside, my goal is (and has always been) for Perl to be as useful as possible. It naturally follows that if people are avoiding Perl for artificial reasons, Perl is not being as useful as possible. So there's a place for advocacy. It is an unfortunate fact that, human nature being what it is, an ounce of cheerleading often beats a pound of rational discussion.

However, my job is not to lead cheers, but to make sure that Perl is designed to be maximally useful. It has never been a direct goal of mine to be "taken seriously". For good or ill, I am composed of far more levity than gravity. And I'm afraid some of that rubs off on Perl, too. But if Perl is everything it ought to be, it will naturally attract serious attention over the long term. If ecological niches are natural, and if nature abhors a vacuum, it follows that ecological niches abhor vacuums too. I expect to hear some great sucking sounds over the next ten or twenty years.

Comments

It is hardly easy...

[arglesnaf]

...to understandly what Larry said, would it be hard to restate it more easily? Or is it easily understood that Larry should be hard to understand?

Re:It is hardly easy...

[nucal]

Once you become the renaissanciest man that ever lived you will understand.

Re:It is hardly easy...

[twoshortplanks]

Normally Damian Conway does a set of code examples based on what Larry's been saying. Maybe we could get him to do one for slashdot...

Seriously, if you want some explanation of what's been said then I can recommend:

• Programming Perl

  Larry and friends explaining about Perl 5. Big book, but nice and easy with lots of explanation about why things are done the way they are

• The Perl 6 list

  People asking questions about how Perl 6 will work, what's the changes are going to be, what's been written so far. There's a good summary on perl.com that's written once a week

• The Apocalypses and Exegsis

  How Perl 6 is changing from Perl 5 written by Larry and Damian. Also on perl.com.

• The Perl Beginners list

  High traffic, but good. From the lists page: http://lists.perl.org/

(side note: Why doesn't slashcode let me do definition lists in HTML?)

Re:It is hardly easy...

[jamieo]

Understanding what Larry says is as easy as understanding perl...

I'm sure everyone can understand that statement. ;)

Jamie

Re:It is hardly easy...

[spiro_killglance]

What the point spend years studying linguistics, if he can't use it to make new words up. I'm
sure Samurel Johnson is spinning in grave, but
i like that word, it is most interfrastaticly
omnidescribulous.

Re:It is hardly easy...

[twoshortplanks]

Ignoring it is really too strong a word here. I was using the joke as a platform to make a lame joke about damian normally explaining everything that Larry says, and I thought I might as well dump some quick links in there for anyone who actually wants to know more.

Heaven forbid I try and be useful and share information on Slashdot. If that's karma whoring, then dammit I'm a karma whore.

HTML formatting

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet he wrote a nice perl script to do it for him.

odd

[glwtta]

I found the first question to be rather strange, maybe because of where it is to be found:

http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/0 9/06/1343222&mode=nocomment&tid=145

Re:odd

[Flamerule]

Uh, all deep /. links look like that. Slashdot uses Perl.

Re:odd

[glwtta]

No kidding? Slashdot uses perl... Slashdot being a relatively complex application (arguably), and the post being about perl being used for nothing but scripting... is a certain sense of irony starting to settle in? If so, we have arrived to the point of my original post.

Larry sure knows how to coin a phrase...

[stu_ajh]

"Perl 6 will give you the big knob."

Re:Larry sure knows how to coin a phrase...

[Captain Large Face]

I guess all the female Perl developers will be sticking to version 5 then.

Re:Larry sure knows how to coin a phrase...

[Pig Hogger]

Or they'll flock to Perl 6 dudes...

Re:Larry sure knows how to coin a phrase...

[Casca]

What makes you think the female Perl developers out there don't like getting "the big knob"?

Re:Larry sure knows how to coin a phrase...

[Captain Large Face]

I read "getting" as "developing".

Naturally, I couldn't possibly comment on the sexual preferences of each and every perl developer. :-)

Hmmm...

[Dirtside]

Larry Wall on Perl, Religion, and...

So, basically, he's talking about the same thing twice? ;)

Re:Hmmm...

[dystrophy]

From the Christian perspective...

God is Omnipotent, Omnipresent, but NOT Omni-controlling. Bad stuff happens to good people because we're not preprogrammed to a set of only good behaviors. We have free will that affects us and others. That doesn't stop the fact that He (God) loves us, and is willing to forgive us in the case where we make life changing decision(s) and turn away from that (and other) wrong.

I thought Larry did a wonderful job of distilling the Bible into two bits. If more pastors, priests, and normal Christians had as simple and life changing a belief, a lot of the ugliness between each other (inter-Church), and other belief systems (Christian vs. neo-paganism or atheism) would be resolved. Agreeing with others outside of your personal views is definitely not required in Christianity, but loving them is.

Given the condition that the two bits that Larry proposed are set, I believe that two more bits are in order. Whereas the previous two bits relied on God to view and set them, these two are set by your response to God:

A) Love God with everying you are
B) Love the people around you like you love yourself

These two bits, when set, change your life.

-darren

Re:Hmmm...

[Erore]

If you want to combine this discussion of free will and the writings of JRR Tolkien, read chapter 2 of the Silmarillion.

You'll see that it is a story about free will. Free will for the dwarves, free will for Aule. Parallels to the Bible as explanations of why God created us and gave us free will, as well as the free will choice of Abraham to "begat" Ishmael, to "begat" Islam, to "begat" future conflict between the Jewish and Islamic people. (I'm not trying to start any flame wars here about the Jewish and Islamic faiths, I'm trying to show how the choice of one man led to some pretty big things years later.)

Free will "begat" an awful lot of future strife in both the Silmarillion and the Bible-real life. But, that free will never altered God's perfect plans for his creation. Which is exactly what the opening sequence, called Ainulindale, of the Silmarillion is all about.

"...and often strife will arise between thine and mine; the children of my adoption and the children of my choice."

Re:Hmmm...

[madprof]

And this is not a mild form of psychosis how?

Where is the evidence that Larry talks about? It's there if I care to look, but surely that's all in history?

If my life changes I want it to be for a reason other than I felt like believing in something that was nice, and no I don't accuse you or any other person of being theist for that reason.
Merely stating the hurdle which this postulation has to overcome in order to become a belief.

Re:Hmmm...

[Drachemorder]

"How can God be omnipotent if human free will is more powerful than God's will? Does God not have a free will himself?"

Yes. He could certainly overrule mankind's free will if He so chose. The whole point is that He chose not to do so.

"Anyway, if God wanted us to be "saved" he could make his existence known to the world without compromising anybody's free will. (How difficult can it be for a supposedly omnipotent being to leave *hard* evidence of his existence around in a world he supposedly created?)"

Some people would say that the complexity and nature of the universe demands the existence of God. To me, this is hard evidence.
I'd also note that the Bible contains numerous examples of God acting directly and obviously, and people disobeyed Him anyway. Read the book of Exodus for an example --- after the plagues on Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea, the Hebrews still built themselves an idol at the first opportunity.
Perhaps God no longer acts in obvious ways like this because they simply don't work.

Re:Hmmm...

[Jason Earl]

I have a three-year-old daughter. Now, I could duct-tape her to a wall in her bedroom and guarantee that she never did anything that I didn't want her to do. However, that isn't my goal as a parent. Instead I allow her to use her free agency to learn and grow.

In other words, your problem is that you misunderstand God's purpose. We aren't here because God was bored and wanted a really fancy electric train set. We are here because God loves us, and he wants us to learn and grow. God could, if he wanted to, control our actions, and even our thoughts, but instead he has given us the ability to make choices for ourselves. What you do with that ability is up to you.

Re:Hmmm...

[taeric]

God could, if he wanted to, control our actions, and even our thoughts, but instead he has given us the ability to make choices for ourselves. What you do with that ability is up to you.

I find it amusing that we have spent so much of our time recently trying to do just the opposite. Life is becoming increasingly about control. If we do continue to limit our choices, how long before we have none left to make?

Re:Hmmm...

[Callamon]

Being a logical thinker, I've often thought about the role God has played in my life. I like the way you describe it here, but I think you leave one thing out.

Every time my life has gotten really confused and difficult enough for me to ask God for help I have received it. This isn't to say I ask for money and He gives it to me... But when I've prayed for guidance, strength, or simply for help out of a very difficult situation, things have always worked out soon thereafter.

Now you could say this is just coincidence, or that I answered my own plea for help.. But I believe that God does hear our prayers and that he will help in small (but meaningful) ways.

Think of it as going to your father to ask for help with a problem you're having. He will likely give you advice but won't solve the problem for you. If you take his advice you may solve it yourself however. I think God will help us to make the right choice if we ask for help, but he won't make the choice for us.

Re:Hmmm...

[J. J. Ramsey]

"Where is the evidence that Larry talks about? It's there if I care to look, but surely that's all in history?"

My guess is that the evidence that Larry Wall is referring to assorted evidence of the historicity of the New Testament (NT), such as having a lot of early manuscripts, or archaeological evidence showing that certain people mentioned in the NT actually existed, etc. If you really want to look, there are several books on the topic.

And yes, it is "all in history," but it's still evidence, for good or for bad.

"If my life changes I want it to be for a reason other than I felt like believing in something that was nice"

Fair enough.

Re:Hmmm...

[Jason Earl]

If we weren't free to do horrible things, then we likewise wouldn't be free to do wonderful ones. The problem is that you are looking at this from much too close a perspective. If you believe that our earth life is the end all and be all of existence then of course you can't help but look at the plan as screwed up. Bad things happen to good people, innocents often suffer, etc. etc. However, if you consider this earth life as merely a small blink in an eternal existence then you see that what happens to us here is of no more consequence than getting a blister or skinning a knee. Who cares what happens to us here on this earth if the life after death lasts forever?

The purpose of this life is to give us a chance to choose for ourselves what we want to do with the eternities that follow. And just like my daughter tends to be very obedient when I am watching over her, we also would be very obedient if God was more obvious in his control of this world.

Re:Hmmm...

[doggo]

"Perhaps God no longer acts in obvious ways like this because they simply don't work. "

Or perhaps God no longer acts in obvious ways like that is BECAUSE IT'S A BOOK! It's fiction. Parable. Written by men. Men interested in controlling the behavior of other men in order to maintain power over them.

I am so sick and tired of Christians pointing to the Bible as though it provides incontrovertible evidence of the existence of God, the will of God, and the godhead of Jesus. It's no more proof of God than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is.

And another thing! Jesus is the messenger, not the message. Why do so many Christians insist on worshipping Jesus? Isn't that putting Man before God (If Jesus ever really existed).

Re:Hmmm...

[Jason Earl]

I just didn't want to write a treaty on the subject. Of course God answers our prayers. He wants us to succeed just like I want my children to succeed. I am actually glad I didn't write more, because what you had to say was well said.

Re:Hmmm...

[EthSoma]

Yes, but this isn't a perfect analogy. God is supposed to be both omnipotent and omnibenevolent. You have no such constraints.

We are capable of commiting "evil" acts, and God isn't. Thus, the simple observation that there is evil in the world commited by humans implies that humans are more powerful than God. It's not simply that god chooses not commit evil acts, omnibenevolence requires that he does not commit evil acts.

Re:Hmmm...

[elmegil]

The problem with this argument is that every time I prayed to God (and I tried very hard for a very long time to be a good Xtian) I got nothing back. Nada.

And "friends" of mine who were also supposedly on the same wavelength and also talking with God for advice stabbed me in the back, ridiculed me, etc.

I have found, however, that if I just stop expecting God to fix things for me or give me advice that never comes, I am always able to make may way through my own hard times on my own, or with the help of other HUMANS who have been through similar things. Which, coincidentally, is just the same way I was making my way through them when I was trying to get God to help me.

And when I stopped expecting people to actually live up to the meaningless rhetoric they've learned from the Church to recite as rote while they're really being assholes ("God doesn't make junk...but elmegil sure is a fucking geek ain't he? And don't get me started on faggots!"), I've found that I can find the people who aren't really assholes a lot easier. And surprise surprise, not even a majority of them are Xtian (though there are some who are, and I give them their due props--Larry fits well among that group).

Re:Hmmm...

[Jason Earl]

Personally I doubt that any honest, good-hearted person will end up in "Hell" regardless of their beliefs. Not all Christians believe the same way I do, but then again it isn't what Christians believe (or what anyone believs, for that matter) that makes a difference, it's what God decides :).

Re:Hmmm...

[Micah]

This book is a VERY good start!

If my life changes I want it to be for a reason other than I felt like believing in something that was nice

Very wise. Faith MUST be reasonable, not just feelings based. And I believe it IS reasonable. That book presents a lot of evidence, but there is plenty of other evidence as well.

Re:Hmmm...

[Jason Earl]

Havn't studied much child psychology eh? Young children view their parents as God, it is clear that you have now, as an adult, transferred this parental nature onto your belief of a supernatural God.

I am fairly sure that Jesus' quote "Our Father which art in Heaven" came long before there was such a field as Child Psychology. In other words, Christians have been thinking of God as a "Heavenly Father" for a very long time. Personally I believe that Jesus used that analogy simply because it was very apt. God is very much like an extremely competent Father.

Besides, what kind of sick fuck tapes his kid to the wall.

That's precisely my point. Just like it would be evil to duct-tape my daughter to the wall it would be wrong for God to control us like so many automatons. In other words, you can't blame the actions of humans on God, he isn't responsible for them.

Re:Hmmm...

[xtremex]

Don't you see that OUR transgressions have done this? God made the world perfectly, however WE have chosen not to follow him and do things our OWN way. God says love one another. But we choose war. How can you possiby blame this on God?

Re:Hmmm...

[Micah]

Personally I doubt that any honest, good-hearted person will end up in "Hell" regardless of their beliefs.

From which Scripture do you get THAT belief?

Re:Hmmm...

[Dirtside]

I have a hard time looking at the Smoky Mountains, the Pacific Ocean, the Rain Forests, the creek running through my back yard, a beautiful sunset every evening, a tropical island, the Big Dipper, Rainbow Falls, the Redwood Forests, a snowcovered hillside, ... and not believing that IS "hard evidence" of a creative force much greater than myself or any writer/painter/craftsman/slashdotter could ever dream of possessing.

Really? And when you look at the fifty million people killed during World War II, the twenty million or so who died during the influenza plague of the 1910s, the millions of people today who are still starving and suffering from diseases abolished in the West decades ago, the murders, the rapes, the kidnappings, the cruelty, and the general chaos of human interaction, do you also see that as "hard evidence" of a "creative force"?

Let's even ignore humans, because the usual response is, "humans have free will, they can do what they want, it's not God's fault if they kill each other." How about all the animals that have died horribly over the ages, and suffered pain? Or those that are born deformed, unable to survive more than a few days, hours, or minutes? Those that are attacked by carnivores, torn to shreds while still alive, and eaten? Did you know there's a kind of lizard in the American Southwest that, in order to discourage attackers, actually bursts a vein and shoots a stream of blood out of its eye? Does God get the creative credit for those things, too?

This isn't meant as a troll, or a flame. It's a serious question. I so often hear people talking about the beauty and grandness of nature, and how it makes them feel like there must have been some creative force that made it all, as if there's nothing unpleasant in the world that the creative force must also get credit -- or take responsibility -- for.

Re:Hmmm...

[Micah]

uh, no.

I'll try to explain the concept of evil from its Biblical perspective. You probably won't believe this (yet) but try to bear with me and see if it makes sense.

God first created all His angels, including Lucifer, the "guardian cherub," who had a very high position right at the throne of God. He, in his free will, decided to try to overtake God. THAT is how evil started. He, and a third of the angels who rebelled with him, were thrown out of heaven and became demons.

Lucifer (now Satan) convinced Adam and Even to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Now that they knew of evil, God decided that they could NOT be allowed to eat of the Tree of Life. If they ate of BOTH trees, it would guarantee that man would live forever in a fallen world. The horror! That's why He banished them from the Garden of Eden. That's what caused bad things to start happening in the world (see Genesis 3.

So, he DID put things in the world that would allow death, yes. That includes giving men (now prideful as Lucifer was) the ability to kill people, and it allows natural disasters to kill people as well. It is a shame that some people die at young ages, but that just happens. The world has fallen. Again, the alternative to allowing people to die would be allowing them to live forever in an imperfect world! That would NOT be fun!

I hope that answers your question. It may not cause you to believe in God, but just know that bad things in the world don't prove that a good God doesn't exist!

Re:Hmmm...

[Micah]

Perhaps you should just look to the fact that you exist for evidence.

I'm not going to get into a debate about evolution here, but do you really think that beings as complex as humans could really evolve by pure chance? (I won't get into a debate on evolution vs. creationism because God could have used evolution to create. Even if He did that, what counts is that you see the hand of God in it.)

Seriously. We have extremely complex organs, especially our brains. But beyond that, we have emotions and feelings and consciences. How could all that come about by pure unguided chance?

but Ok, there's more evidence.

Did you know that a core belief in monotheism (God) is very prevelant among "primitive" peoples? I'm currently reading an absolutely amazing book called Eternity In Their Hearts, which documents many examples of that. There are many cases where God revealed to the people that they would soon meet someone who has His written word, and those people received the Gospel message joyfully (even after spending centuries fending off other religions).

Want more? Jesus Christ did many healings in Bible times to prove that He was Who He said He was. Guess what -- He still does the same thing today! This site has quite a bit of useful information on that topic. And I know it's true. I have heard of many supernatural, instantaneous healings from friends and church people, and have even witnessed a college friend being healed from Attention Deficit Disorder. It really happens. The name of Jesus is powerful!

Or perhaps the fact that the Bible presented a perfect picture of what the world looks like today is good evidence. 2 Timothy 3 sums up men's attitudes these days very well. Jesus talked in Matthew 24 about earthquakes, famines, etc, but "the end is still to come". There have been significantly more earthquakes and famines in the last century or two than previously. Note in verse 24:7 "Nation will rise up against nation." The Hebrew phrase "x against x" means a TOTAL conflict, where every "x" in the set was involved. Jesus basically predicted World War 2 here. Then there's the fact that Israel is a nation again, with their own "king", which was prophesied repeatedly in the Old Testament. Do you have any idea how unlikely that seemed, even in the early 1940s? Then the prophet Daniel said that "many will go here and there to increase knowledge" in the last days. Airplanes anyone? Travel is far, FAR more common now than it ever was before. And all this is happening at the SAME TIME! And there's quite a bit more, this is just a brief sample from my memory. Oh what the heck, here's a link to a pretty good list of them.

Here's an article that gives some interesting evidence that the Torah (first five books of the Bible, which contain the creation story and the Law of Moses) could ONLY have been given by God. Hint: there are codes embedded in the Torah that predict future events.

This is just a few examples of why faith in God, and specifically in the Bible, is entirely reasonable!

Re:Hmmm...

[Dirtside]

I'll apologize up front, but this post is going to be pretty harsh. I'm not trying to be rude or mean, but few issues of this magnitude are resolved when everyone tries not to hurt each others' feelings.

Following the story of Genesis, death/decay entered the world through human sin.

So, before Adam and Eve got ejected from Eden, animals never suffered or died? Well, that's an interesting contention... except that the only evidence that anything in the Eden story ever happened, is the text in the Bible. Contrary to that is an Everest-sized pile of evidence indicating that animals existed for billions of years before the first humans ever showed up, and that those animals ate, killed, and slaughtered each other with the same abandon they do today.

One also wonders, if animals never hurt each other pre-sin, then how did they survive? Lions certainly didn't eat plants, and it seems a bit unlikely that the gazelles of the savanna simply walked up to the lions, lay down, and expired, conveniently turning into a nice, pleasant-looking pile of meat in the process.

I certainly don't claim to be a Bible scholar and don't have a good understanding of why God allows so many of the unpleasant things to continue without judgement.

Here's something you apparently don't know: The "Bible scholars" who you seem to respect and trust, don't know either. The only arguments they have to offer are, "God works in mysterious ways," "It's not our place to question God," "The Devil did it," (thus introducing another mythical superbeing into the equation), and so on. No actual explanations come forth. All we get is a usually politened form of, "Don't ask questions." Why? Because, given the world around us, there is no logical explanation for the existence of God. The only way to explain it is to do an end-run around the entire issue, and say that it's beyond our understanding. It's not like they're working on an *actual* explanation to show; there isn't one.

Naturally, this doesn't preclude one from taking God on faith -- that does seem to be the entire point, according to most of Christianity. Faith and logic are pretty much mutually exclusive. If you accept the explanation that "God works in mysterious ways," i.e. whatever it is that God's doing or thinking, he's not going to explain it to us and we wouldn't understand it if he did, then you don't need logic. If I were you, and valued my faith, I wouldn't look too closely into logical explanations. (However, since I'm not you, I strongly encourage you to look into logical explanations of God's existence, since I think the majority of people who have faith would benefit from changing their worldview to one based on logic and reason.)

As far as the lizard shooting blood out it's eye... I'm not sure where that fits into the picture at all. I'd have to say that's pretty creative myself. :)

Yeah, but it's disgusting. I've actually seen film of this lizard doing its thing, and it isn't anything remotely like the majestic beauty of $RANDOM_NATURE_SCENE, which is why I brought it up. The point was that the usual evocations of pleasant, majestic nature scenes are entirely intended to evoke mushy emotions that try to make you feel like there's someone up there. If you actually bother to include *everything* that God supposedly "created," you're a lot less likely to get those mushy feelings.

Re:Hmmm...

[Lemmy Caution]

But most parents don't lock their kids in the garage for the rest of their lives if the kids say "I don't think you're really my parents."

Re:Hmmm...

[Dirtside]

An even better example of a man dying in his prime, is a baby dying shortly after birth. The baby didn't even have time to do anything, but apparently (according to Christianity), God had a good reason to kill it, even if it was a months-long, excruciatingly painful process that the baby did not understand because it wasn't old enough for its brain to comprehend the difference between pain and lack-of-pain.

Just a suggestion, next time you need to smack down some fundie who claims that "God has a plan." Just ask why the plan includes torturing and killing infants.

Re:Hmmm...

[Dirtside]

Oddly enough, I've gone through good and bad times in my life, without invoking God at all. So what you're saying is that because you asked God for help in the bad times, he helped you get through them. I didn't ask God for help, yet I got through them anyway. Apparently, God's help isn't all that great, if I can get through bad things as well as you can, without his help.

In fact, I managed to get a great job right out of college, followed by two more with pay raises over the next four years, meet a wonderful woman, and get married. All without once invoking God. There have been bad times in there, naturally, but I never asked God for help (mostly because I don't think asking fictional entities for help will accomplish much). And guess what? The bad times passed, and gave way to good times. These are all natural, normal fluctuations that don't need a mythical deity to explain them. Maybe next time something goes wrong, you should try and see if you can handle it without God. I'm reasonably certain that you'll make your way through just as well without God's "help".

Re:Hmmm...

[Dirtside]

and more to the point, how can we? just grit your teeth and believe it even if you don't? how?

Heh, I like the way you phrase that. It's an example of the circular logic of how we're supposed to come to having faith in Christ. Let's see... I don't believe in God. So they tell me that I should accept Christ into my heart, and then I'll believe. So in order to believe in God, first I need to believe in Christ. Okay, how do I do that? Well, you just have to DO it. Basically, you can't get there from here. :)

Re:Hmmm...

[An Onerous Coward]

"Havn't studied much child psychology eh? Young children view their parents as God, it is clear that you have now, as an adult, transferred this parental nature onto your belief of a supernatural God."

I am fairly sure that Jesus' quote "Our Father which art in Heaven" came long before there was such a field as Child Psychology. In other words, Christians have been thinking of God as a "Heavenly Father" for a very long time. Personally I believe that Jesus used that analogy simply because it was very apt. God is very much like an extremely competent Father.

I'm not going to defend the first poster's claims of understanding child psychology. But it's silly to imply that children didn't start behaving psychologically until the field was invented.

Sorry for being the incorrigible skeptic, but I just don't see any evidence for God's competence as a father figure. Despite having complete power to protect His children from harm, people continue to suffer and die in random ways and for no apparent purpose. You could argue that the suffering serves some deep purpose, but that doesn't explain why suffering is so inequitably distributed. One person lives a generally happy and untroubled life, another lurches from one disaster to the next, a third dies of some debilitating disease before the age of six.

Feel free to respond by claiming God knows exactly what we need in our lives and how to best give it to us. But the fact is, that's not evidence; it's a desperate attempt to explain away the evidence of mindless randomness.

"Besides, what kind of sick fuck tapes his kid to the wall."

"That's precisely my point. Just like it would be evil to duct-tape my daughter to the wall it would be wrong for God to control us like so many automatons. In other words, you can't blame the actions of humans on God, he isn't responsible for them."

God created us. He did so knowing precisely how we would behave. He set the system up in such a way that Adam's fall caused his descendants to have a "tendency towards evil," a violation of free will by itself. Yet I and I alone bear full responsibility for my actions?

Would it be wrong for God to control our actions? Probably. But would it be wrong to do so if the end result was an elimination of suffering? Certainly less so. But then, of course, it was within God's power to give us free will without the tendency towards sin. According to my understanding of Christian theology--which is uncomplimentary and therefore wrong--it is possible to rid ourselves of the desire to sin by relying on God. In other words, God deliberately designed us with flaws so that we would have to be dependent on Him.

In the words of Cook, "God is powerful, but insecure."

This is why I hate religion. Not mistrust, not dislike. Hate. All the arguing over what God wants, what God intends, what God plans--when He is either non-existent or powerful enough to just break out and tell us--distracts us from what really matters: the alleviaton of suffering in the here and now.

Re:Hmmm...

[An Onerous Coward]

Look, citing the flowchart does absolutely nothing to deflect the criticism. The post you replied to wasn't making the blanket statement that Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worshipped exactly the same being. He was making the much more modest--and relevant--claim that they all claimed that omnibenevolence is one of the defining characteristics of their respective Gods.

Who worships God the Father versus God the Son is completely irrelevant here.

Re:Hmmm...

[bnenning]

archaeological evidence showing that certain people mentioned in the NT actually existed

Ok, but that's hardly conclusive. After all, L. Ron Hubbard existed.

Re:Hmmm...

[An Onerous Coward]

'But most parents don't lock their kids in the garage for the rest of their lives if the kids say "I don't think you're really my parents."

Well, if they'd ever bothered to read Onerous Coward's Guide to Child Rearing, they would. It's the same method I've used to rear up thirty-nine children into an elite fighting force that will soon be taking over Madegascar. Little Suzie, my youngest, just got back from Afghanistan, where she was teaching other seven-year-olds to disarm land mines.

OC's method really works, and will work for you.

Re:Hmmm...

[mlong]

Or perhaps God no longer acts in obvious ways like that is BECAUSE IT'S A BOOK! It's fiction. Parable. Written by men. Men interested in controlling the behavior of other men in order to maintain power over them.

Hmm if the New Testament were fiction why did so many people fall for it when the very people mentioned in the book were still alive? I mean, they could have gone and seen the stuff for theirselves. They could have pulled out Jesus' body and said "Look, here it is. He is no God." You might read "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel...it goes over all of this much better than I ever could

Re:Hmmm...

[mlong]

The problem with this argument is that every time I prayed to God (and I tried very hard for a very long time to be a good Xtian) I got nothing back. Nada.

Maybe you were only expecting "yes" rather than "no" or "not yet" or "yes, but do this...". God does what is best for us, not necessarily what our heart desires. I have yet to receive the billion dollars I asked for.

And "friends" of mine who were also supposedly on the same wavelength and also talking with God for advice stabbed me in the back, ridiculed me, etc.

Fellow fallable humans. Don't put your trust in them, put it in the Lord. Your compliant is what they did against you, not what he did.

Re:Hmmm...

[mlong]

We are capable of commiting "evil" acts, and God isn't. Thus, the simple observation that there is evil in the world commited by humans implies that humans are more powerful than God. It's not simply that god chooses not commit evil acts, omnibenevolence requires that he does not commit evil acts.

How can God be omnipotent and not have free will? I believe it would be more accurate to say God could commit evil, but he chooses not to because its not his nature. Otherwise you are putting limits on a limitless God.

Re:Hmmm...

[mlong]

Personally I doubt that any honest, good-hearted person will end up in "Hell" regardless of their beliefs.

From which Scripture do you get THAT belief?

Indeed, that sounds an awful lot like "good works earn your way into heaven" which the Bibles speaks against.

Re:Hmmm...

[mlong]

Let's even ignore humans, because the usual response is, "humans have free will, they can do what they want, it's not God's fault if they kill each other." How about all the animals that have died horribly over the ages, and suffered pain? Or those that are born deformed, unable to survive more than a few days, hours, or minutes? Those that are attacked by carnivores, torn to shreds while still alive, and eaten? Did you know there's a kind of lizard in the American Southwest that, in order to discourage attackers, actually bursts a vein and shoots a stream of blood out of its eye? Does God get the creative credit for those things, too?

Two reasons:

-Humans have free will and can screw things up (you heard this one)

-The world is fallen and cursed and thus our being independent of God messed everything else up too (as God created it all for us). See Genesis

Re:Hmmm...

[elmegil]

Did you keep a Prayer diary? Or something like it. Setup a MS Projects of your life... Its funny though, but sometimes you need to really step back far to see how the pieces fell into place.

The point is, without prayer, those things are still falling into place. Therefore, the prayer part appears to be superfluous. I make my own destiny by taking the hand dealt to me and doing the best I can with it. Did God deal that hand? Perhaps. Do I need to ask his advice on how to play it? Apparently not, because I seem to be doing well on many levels without it. Is the game over? Might I change my mind before then? Who knows; certainly not I.

Re:Hmmm...

[Dirtside]

So, what about people who HAVE accepted Christ, and God, and do everything exactly the way God wants? Why do THEY get cancer?

Re:Hmmm...

[mlong]

One also wonders, if animals never hurt each other pre-sin, then how did they survive? Lions certainly didn't eat plants, and it seems a bit unlikely that the gazelles of the savanna

That's exactly what the Bible says...all animals were vegetarians. So why do they have fangs? Because they are different now...everything is. If the world was created and sustained by God, why would it be so hard for it to reflect the curse Adam and Eve's sin brought about?

Re:Hmmm...

[Dirtside]

One thing to avoid is the trap of thinking that just because people mentioned in the Bible existed, that therefore the supernatural events described in the Bible actually happened. There's a good amount of evidence that most of the main characters in the New Testament were real people who actually existed, but whether Jeshua ben Joseph of Nazareth was actually doing miracles, receiving offers from Lucifer, rising from the dead, etc. is entirely debatable, and unsupported by any evidence.

Re:Hmmm...

[Dirtside]

By the way, if you believe God is talking to you, there is another explanation, which is that you are mildly schizophrenic. Which is O.K., alot of people are, and they have drugs that can help.

I always looked at this from the point of view of simple probability. We KNOW that lots of people can lie, or be mistaken, or simply be crazy. We don't KNOW for sure that God has ever spoken to anyone. So when someone says God spoke to them, what's more likely: that an all-powerful superbeing did communicate with them, or that they're insane/lying/mistaken?

Re:Hmmm...

[Dirtside]

If it was sustained by God, then why is Adam and Eve's curse so much more powerful than him? Certainly God must be powerful enough to mold the world into whatever shape he desires. However, humanity now suffers for the sins of two people, so either God let it happen, or God was powerless to prevent it. If he was powerless to prevent it, then he's not all-powerful, and isn't much of a god. If he let it happen, then he's just a bastard.

Once again, why am I punished for another's crimes? Yes, I've certainly done things that Christians would call sins, but I never did anything that would require I be put in a fallen world like this. Presumably my actions since birth have been my fault, but why was I put here in the first place, which is apparently a punishment all its own?

Re:Hmmm...

[mlong]

If it was sustained by God, then why is Adam and Eve's curse so much more powerful than him? Certainly God must be powerful enough to mold the world into whatever shape he desires. However, humanity now suffers for the sins of two people, so either God let it happen, or God was powerless to prevent it. If he was powerless to prevent it, then he's not all-powerful, and isn't much of a god. If he let it happen, then he's just a bastard.

I think its less about punishing us and more about molding us and helping us grow, so we don't turn into a bunch of spoiled selfish brats. Once we are perfected then we spend eternity in paradise. I think I can suffer a few years for that.

Re:Hmmm...

[mlong]

You trivialize the concept of omnipotence if you say this. I can say that i am omnipotent and can do god-like things if i choose to, but i choose not to because those things are not in my nature. Surely something else is meant by the word "omnipotent".

Here's what the dictionary says: "Having unlimited or universal power, authority, or force; all-powerful.". Now in that definition, to say an omnipotent God can't do something seems like making him impotent :)

Re:Hmmm...

[johnnyb]

My son _had_ a permanent heart disorder. Yes, that was past tense - had.

Jesus is alive and well and active.

Re:Hmmm...

[elmegil]

Maybe you were only expecting "yes" rather than "no" or "not yet" or "yes, but do this...". God does what is best for us, not necessarily what our heart desires. I have yet to receive the billion dollars I asked for.

Oh please. This is the most lame excuse known to man, and it's the one most commonly trotted out. It can be applied any and every instance where things just don't seem to go your way (and by the way requires no God either). Again: I play my hand just fine without God's advice, and have never received any "advice through circumstance" that I couldn't have inferred on my own without deluding myself that I had supernatural support of any kind.

Fellow fallable humans. Don't put your trust in them, put it in the Lord. Your compliant is what they did against you, not what he did.

Don't give me that BS either. Everything ANY of us knows about God we know either from 1) other fallable humans or 2) our own fallible insights. Someday, if there is a God, perhaps we will know. On this earth, none of us knows, and anyone who claims to know anything about God and what S/He wants is selling snake oil. That includes you. Your particular brand of snake oil is the evangelist brand, "I want everyone to believe like me", usually justified with "for their own good".

I trusted the Lord and all I got was a severe case of allergy to Organized Religion of any stripe (Yah, I know "this lousy T-shirt" has a better ring, but it's not strictly accurate). My trust only made me a patsy for every asshole under the sun, along with helping me justify my own self-righteousness to the detriment of anyone around me.

Re:Hmmm...

[mlong]

Ah, but this still doesn't prove anything. I mean, you can find the same thing in a lot of religions, such as the Romans, Mayan, Islamic and quite a bit of others.
If all of these religions, including Christianity, point to a book as fact simply because people believed in it there and then, why is Christianity the religion I should believe in?

After all, the Egyptians thought that the Pharaoh was the son of the hawk god Horus, and they believed this while the Pharaoh was still alive. And guess what, they wrote this down in Holy Writings(TM)! So, should I believe in their religion as much as Christianity?

Well one thing I would point to is the miracles of Jesus, but another one would be the personal experiences of believers. Also note that Christianity is a volunteer religion. You choose to believe it. You don't have pharaoh threatening to cut off your head if you don't believe he is God, etc.

Re:Hmmm...

[johnnyb]

dogo:

Or perhaps God no longer acts in obvious ways like that is BECAUSE IT'S A BOOK! It's fiction. Parable. Written by men.

***

Actually, a great number of the things written in the Bible have been shown by multiple nonbiblical sources to have happened. It's one thing to disagree with the interpretation of those events, but to argue that the facts portrayed in the Bible is on the same level of fiction is ludicrous.

***

dogo:

And another thing! Jesus is the messenger, not the message.

***

Jesus would disagree. He did not stop people from worshipping Him in the New Testament. The book of John puts Him on the same level as God. Immanuel, one of His titles, means "God with Us". That's who Jesus is.

Re:Hmmm...

[johnnyb]

Very wise. Faith MUST be reasonable, not just feelings based.

***

I understand the sentiment behind this, but Paul would disagree with you. Paul said that he came knowing nothing but Christ Crucified and the power of the Cross. He intentionally avoided rational analysis simply because God's power in the lives of individuals is a much better testimony. Any argument for any position I come up with is flawed, but the power that God places in the hands of His people is what He uses to show Himself.

Re:Hmmm...

[Scrameustache]

Some people would say that the complexity and nature of the universe demands the existence of God. To me, this is hard evidence.

Observation: The world/universe is very complex.
Conclusion: An anthropomorphic super being created it all! And its a He! And He doesn't want me to eat bat meat!

I'd also note that the Bible contains numerous examples of God acting directly and obviously, and people disobeyed Him anyway.

Yeah, like when he told Frodo to not draw attention to himself and he goes and puts the Ring on in the middle of a crowded tavern...
Oh wait, we were talking about actual hard evidence, not something written in some thick book...my mistake.

Would it be so hard to show up once in a while in giant beard in the sky flaming glory and use his booming voice to tell everyone "90d wuz h3r3"? You know, actual hard evidence, not the smile of a newborn baby or some book, real actual stuff you can look at and say "Whoa, there's god, would you look at that! All glorious and everything".

Re:Hmmm...

[Scrameustache]

Hmm if the New Testament were fiction why did so many people fall for it when the very people mentioned in the book were still alive?

For the same reason people buy penis enlargment cream...

Re:Hmmm...

[Scrameustache]

I have a hard time looking at [...(lots of good looking bits of nature and scenery)..] and not believing that IS "hard evidence" of a creative force much greater than myself or any writer/painter/craftsman/slashdotter could ever dream of possessing.

"Wow! That's some big mountain...I bet a man-shaped super creature created it, in 7 days, and wants me to stone lesbians to death."

So nature is great, how can you take THAT as proof that your religion is true? How is that not proof that hindus are right? Or that the ancient greeks were right?
All religion capitalize on the awe we feel when looking at cool nature stuff, they all have different explanations of all it all started, and they all want you to obey their rules "or else". What makes your religion more true than the next? Where's the hard evidence that God think its wrong to wear a 50% coton shirt?

Re:Hmmm...

[Micah]

> Evolution is a probablistic algorithm. It performs better than pure chance.

Why would it, though, without some kind of Guide? It's proven that mutations are pretty much always DESTRUCTIVE, not beneficial. No, I don't have a great deal of biology knowledge, so my debate on this stops here. There are far more reasons to believe in God.

> Sigh. If i don't accept the bible why should i accept an argument based on the bible.

I just said to look at what the Bible says the world will be like just before the "Last Days", or "The Day of the Lord". It's a perfect fit for what we're seeing in the world today.

This kind of argument is not the same kind of circular argument that says you should believe the Bible because it claims it is what God said. Of course you can't make that case. I'm telling you to compare what the Bible says to the reality of the world. Remember that it was written 2000+ years ago.

> This says it all. It's faith, not evidence or fact, that supports one's belief in God. IMO, faith does not justify belief, but you're free to believe whatever you want.

Faith *must* be reasonable, and I believe I have a solid case that it is. If it's not reasonable, it's just flat out ridiculous. Yes, it does require a little faith, "the size of a mustard seed" according to Jesus. In Hebrews it says "without faith we cannot please God".

Re:Hmmm...

[Micah]

yeah, praise God! Keep that testimony coming! Anyone else?

Re:Hmmm...

[Scrameustache]

so we don't turn into a bunch of spoiled selfish brats.
So, how do you explain all the spoiled selfish brats out there? ;- )

And that means that god is giving people rectal cancer to help them grow. Jeez...pretty harsh.

Re:Hmmm...

[Micah]

> So when an avalanche buries a village in the alps, thats Satan's doing or Man's or whose? and god is powerless to fix this problem because...why?

We don't know who's "doing" it was. Nature is there and that stuff happens. Again, death MUST happen so we don't live in an imperfect world forever. That's just an example of why you need to be right with God. You don't know when you're almost finished here on earth!

> And eating from the tree corrupted the world....why?

Because they specifically chose to disobey God.

> Where did Satan's evil come from, who created Satan?

It's hard to fathom how Satan got the idea he could overthrow God. But God *has* given all his created beings choice, including Satan. Of course, Satan *did* get quite a bit of power in the deal. The Bible calls him "the god of this age". So maybe it was worth it to him... guess he didn't know about hell when he made that choice!

Re:Hmmm...

[Scrameustache]

God made the world perfectly, however WE have chosen not to follow him and do things our OWN way.

So if people stoned people more often no one would ever get bitten by tarantulas?

WE created deadly e-coli bacterias? Its Adam's fault if poison ivy exists?

Re:Hmmm...

[Micah]

> You can't take vague, generic statements from 2000 years ago, claim that they correspond to specific events today

Unless, of course, they really DO. :-)

If you take all the prophesies together, they really aren't all that vague.

Re:Hmmm...

[Callamon]

I'm not claiming that every time things get rocky I pray and everything becomes ok again. I'm talking about when everything in my life has on the absolute verge of collapse. When I had nowhere to turn for help, and nobody to lean on. When I felt as if I couldn't go on anymore and where everything I did seemed to make it worse. This has happened a handful of times in my life (3-4), and things may have worked out eventually, but I honestly feel that they may not have.

You can believe that this was just coincidence or natural fluctuations. Or you may think that it was just my own belief that calmed me enough to make the right choices... I personally believe that there is more to the universe than happenstance. I can't prove it, that's why it's called faith...

For the record (and I know you didn't claim otherwise), I do believe in science, evolution, quantum physics, the laws of nature, and such.. These are not in conflict with my religious beliefs at all though. I think that God set everything in motion and set the laws of the universe. I also think he could change them or tweak them (as Larry said, flipping a bit here or there). I don't believe everything the bible says (and I've never read a lot of it for that reason) because it was written by men. I think it's a collection of metaphorical stories meant to convey the moral principles that God would like us to live by, but not the actual literal word of God.

I was raised catholic, but have moved away from it or any other formal religious practice. I don't go to a church, don't read the bible, and never push my beliefs on others (you can take or leave what I'm writing here). I don't think that a church that is run by men can put me more in touch with God than I can by myself.

Men are falible, and I'd rather speak directly to God than to a priest or minister. If God does exist, I don't think he'd need proxy servers for us to communicate with him.

Re:Hmmm...

[Scrameustache]

God has written to humankind a book that explains all these things away...

No, people wrote that book, claiming to have been inspired by angels or talking shruberries to do it.

Check your facts, swine.
(And no, claiming "god created everything and so he created the people who wrote and edited it and so he created it" doesn't count as checking your facts.)

Re:Hmmm...

[madprof]

How can I trust the book?
It will not answer all my sceptical questions - it can't. I know a little bit about the history of when the NT was written and so on, and I can always ask "so what if these guys were really fooled or behaved in a similar way to modern day cult followers?"
The argument that they died for what they believed is weakened by watching people in our age die for cult religions we know are just plain wrong.

I don't intend to give up wondering or reading (and thank you for the book tip), but I don't intend to lower my standards either.

Re:Hmmm...

[madprof]

I can think of more plausible (in the face of a lack of evidence other than personal testimony) and simpler explanations for people's strong feelings about God and his influence on their lives.
I utterly discount "but I felt something" as there are millions across the world who say this about their religion. Even if only 5% of these millions from each religion are really really genuine and 100% convinced they cannot all be right.
Therefore I take this as reasonable evidence for people's ability to fool themselves.

A consistent argument is not in itself evidence for anything.

Re:Hmmm...

[madprof]

Faith is a tricky word often - I can get into all manner of semantic arguments here.
I have reasonable evidence for getting off my sofa and making breakfast and eating it because past evidence shows it'll make me feel better. The experiment is repeatable too. I'm pretty confident if I continue to eat breakfast each morning I'll feel less hungry.
How may I apply the same rigour to something even *more* fundemental than that?
It goes deeper than everything, and subsequently requires far greater amounts of evidence than personal testimony, historical evidence from 2000 years ago or whatever.
I am not sitting on my couch - I am living and experiencing a world I am constantly wondering about, and often testing.
If there is a God involved in this world then I've yet to see evidence as good as that which I have seen for a lot else.

Re:Hmmm...

[Micah]

not to get into a pointless argument, but you're not getting it. That phraseology "nation against nation" predicted a whole lot more than "normal" war. It means that pretty much every nation would get involved, which didn't happen until world wars.

Yes, people have always traveled to increase knowledge, but Daniel says that many will in the last days.

The point is that these and quite a few other Bible prophesies are being fulfilled very literally for the first time ever! AT THE SAME TIME!

I obviously can't convince you, but I know without a doubt that the evidence of the existence of the God of the Bible is absolutely overwhelming. I hope you'll see that at some point.

Re:Hmmm...

[Micah]

Hi,

How you can trust the book... well, no book is perfect (except the Bible :-) ) but The Case for Christ starts with a skeptical viewpoint and interviews people about various logical aspects of Jesus' life, and how they correspond to the reality of the Roman world. It shows how it is indeed very possible that everything recorded in the Gospels could have happened, and it answers quite a few skeptics questions, including "what if the disciples were duped?" The author himself used to be a skeptic, and he went on a search similar to this and became a believer.

And thank you for NOT lowering your standards! If the God of the Bible really is the true one, there will be plenty of evidence to support that. And I believe there is.

Here's an interesting article that talks about hidden codes in the first five books of the Bible that really could have only been put there by God. There's a book called Genesis Codes by Yacov Ramsel that describes this more thoroughly. I haven't read the book yet (I just found it while searching for things last night) but I'm definitely hoping to read it soon.

Another book I'm currently reading, called Eternity in their Hearts by Don Richardson, gives the account of a bunch of anthropologists trying to disprove God by studying the religions of "primitive" people, expecting to find no real belief in a monotheistic God. Boy were they ever wrong -- not only did they find hundreds or thousands of examples in such belief, but some tribes (who would have not had any contact with Jewish or Christian witness) had legends that were strikingly similar to the Genesis account -- including the Flood!

Of course, far more important than all this is that God really does answer prayers today. Those that seek Him find Him. He comforts, guides, and even heals.

If you have any serious questions about any of this, feel free to drop me an e-mail. micah AT JesusIsLife DOT net

Re:Hmmm...

[johnnyb]

Therefore I take this as reasonable evidence for people's ability to fool themselves.

****

I'd have to disagree. Experience is the only tool that we actually count on. Everything we do relies on experience. All experimental data - everything - it all comes from experience. People's interpretation of their experience may be incorrect, but an experience itself is always true. That's what makes experience so powerful.

Experience corrects theory, not vice-versa.

Re:Hmmm...

[madprof]

That someone goes looking for evidence a skeptic and becomes a believer means nothing to me.
Someone else's personal dividing line between atheism and theism is their business.
Praying to someone who I don't believe exists is a little silly. I don't tal to imaginry friends for teh same reason as I don't believe they exist to listen to me.
I'm afraid the hidden codes are interesting but without the full original manuscripts exactly how did God place these there? Or was he workign through the translators in the various interpretations and reinterpretations of the Bible?
In which case explain inconsistencies betwen them?
I can honestly say I do have better things to look at in my attempts to work out the world right now but maybe some day I will read about those.

Re:Hmmm...

[madprof]

If I have an experiment in a lab that gets a measurement for the charge on an electron to test a theory of mine and a researcher friend gets a reading, I would, should I consider it important enough, want to see this for myself.
So I can conduct the experiment again to see. The experiment is useful (and the result of worth) because it is repeatable.
I can't perform any experiment here with discovering God, at least not in any scientifically rigorous way.
So just taking people's experience on face value is akin to me listening to someone say they once saw a lemming jump off a cliff, therefore lemmings must be suicidal, and going "Wow they really are".
I am afraid the scientific analogy doesn't hold up when you can't be scientific in seeking.

Re:Hmmm...

[Yunzil]

Argument from Incredulity.

In other words, your inability to conceive of any other way those things could have come about is not evidence for a creator.

Re:Hmmm...

[Yunzil]

The length of time that Person Q was without a father because of that car accident that was "nobody's fault" has approximately ZERO weight compared to the length of time after Person Q buys the farm and is no longer in pain.

Prove that we have an eternal soul.

1. Look for Jesus (who IS God, made flesh).

God is smarter than I am. Let Him try to find me.

2. When you find Him, trust Him that he knows what to do.

Trust has to be earned.

Re:Hmmm...

[johnnyb]

So just taking people's experience on face value is akin to me listening to someone say they once saw a lemming jump off a cliff, therefore lemmings must be suicidal, and going "Wow they really are".

****

You're right, that is a bad idea. Which is why you should use your own experience, not someone else's.

Re:Hmmm...

[Yunzil]

When we both have died, I will try and send you a message enscribed, "Well?"

You will only be able to try if you have an immortal soul, which is what you were trying to prove. You can't prove the existence of something by assuming it's existence.

Hypothesis: People have immortal souls
Proof:
a) Assume people have immortal souls
b) QED

Doesn't work.

You are reading it.

Reading what? Slashdot? Slashdot is proof of God? ;)

What more do you want than haven taken a ton of lashes while tied to a post in full view of crowds, hands and feet NAILED to a wooden post (have you ever taken a nail and pounded it into your foot? Not pleasant.), being stabbed in the gut with a spear while hanging there, worn a mockingly-gestured "crown" of thorns tearing into the flesh of your scalp, and finally dying?

You haven't shown that these things actually happened. Why do you believe they did? The Bible says so? How do you know the Bible is accurate?

Re:Hmmm...

[jejones]

We are here because God loves us, and he wants us to learn and grow.

That's rather hard to reconcile with condemning the vast majority of us to eternal torment.

Re:Hmmm...

[jejones]

Ah...so for our own good, we are denied knowledge that would prevent us from eternal torment? I'm sorry, but any deity who thinks that's for my good is a monstrous, sadistic beast in comparison with which all the mass murderers, child abusers, and other criminals of earth pale to insignificance.

scientists' belief in gods

[Ravagin]

Please tell us how in the world a scientific or at least technical mind can believe in God, and what role religion has played in your work on Perl.

I missed the original discussion in which all these questions were collected, but yowza, that's a dense question (no offense to the inquirer!).

I am not religious either - faith is simply not in me, I cannot believe in something I cannot see - so I see where the inquirer is coming from, but as Larry puts it, the question is talking at right angles.

To say "you're a scientist, how can you believe in God?" makes the automatic and ignorant assumption that said scientist believes said god created the world in thirty days, wrought man from the testicles of a gopher, and causes the sun to rise every day by means of ropes and pulleys (or something of the like - you get my point).

Larry may be a Christian, but though there may be many irrational/ignorant/intolerant Christians in the world, not all Christians are like that. As a friend of mine says, the attitude that they are "puts the asshole in atheist."

Being religious does not preclude being a smart and talented scientist. Sorry if this is a bit OT, but I'm kind of fed up with the attitude that "belief in god(s)" == "irrational and stupid." And though he has in no way convinced me, I'm quite impressed with Larry's defense of his faith.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[billstr78]

I am an athiest as well for many similar reasons. I used to wonder how anyone who questioned anything could ever believe in the traditional Catholic or Christian view of God. Now and especially after reading this article, it apears to me that one does not have to believe in thier God to believe in the teachings of the bible as a collection of stories passed on from generation to generation that help us mortal humans make sence of a world we cannot ultimatley control.

So if control is in the hands of the laws of Physics (as the question posed), God, Buhdda, the Dali Lamma or who/what/ever, it does not really matter as long as you know that you are not it. It is feasibly scientific to believe that Perl is God! I mean it is what is conrolling SlashCode after all.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[totallygeek]

Remember, too, that scientists have been ridiculed by other scientists throughout history. Germs? Something you cannot see that makes you ill? Have anti-septic surgery?

The atom looks like pudding? The atom cannot be made of any smaller particles. Splitting an atom wouldn't make much energy.

Fly?

Go to the moon?

More examples? And, as far as having to see something to believe -- have you travelled to every continent or just taken someone's word that those places exist? Are you sure there are other galaxies? Have you even seen Pluto? Can you "see" microwave radiation or a single atom?

I am not faithful either, but cut the faithful some slack. Their beliefs are just as strong as our non-belief. Let's at least be good-hearted athiests.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[J. J. Ramsey]

"I cannot believe in something I cannot see"

I'd be a little careful about that statement. I'm sure that you believe that atoms exist, even though you cannot see them. Of course, it is absolutely silly to say that because you believe atoms exist that you should also believe that God exists. However, you might wish to reexamine what you really mean when you say "cannot see."

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[mmaddox]

I must agree. This is one of the most intelligent, enlightened defenses of faith that I have ever seen. And without the taint of superficial holiness that so many Christians add to the mix.

As an atheist, I must say, "Bravo."

Of some additional interest, you might like the following books, by an acquaintance of mine (one of the most intelligent men I have ever met):

• The Reluctant Prophets: Has Science Found God?
• COSMOS AND CONSCIOUSNESS: Quantum Computers, SuperStrings, Mysticism, C++ Programming, Egypt, Quarks, Mind-Body Problem, Aliens, Linguistics, and Turing Machines

Both by Stephen Blaha, Ph.D. and available at 1st Books.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[Soko]

Stop being pendantic and splitting hairs.

The existance of atoms and quanta can be proven with mathematics (besides scientific observation) - they can be "seen" when you use the language of science. I know of no mathematical formula or scientific experimant that _proves_ the exisitance of God - so He truly is "un-seeable" (in the context of the physical world, anyway).

Belief in a Higher Power is (or should be, anyhow) a matter of faith and personal choice, nothing else, IMHO.

Soko

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[bcboy]

> This is one of the most intelligent, enlightened defenses of faith that I have ever seen.

Really? I couldn't find any concrete statement in the entire thing -- a rambling, meaningless reply that said nothing beyond "I believe because I want to". He dismissively claims there's evidence if you look -- the most substantive thing he says -- but he brushes by it as though it weren't that important, probably because it's patently false.

From this reply it appears his belief is, as usual, based on nothing more than his desire for it to be true.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[disappear]

The difference is, Scientists will eventually admit they were wrong and their "beliefs" will morph and change over time based on evidence.

This happens surprisingly infrequently with individual scientists. What tends to happen is that the scientists who don't believe the new, well-supported evidence (or its interpretation) retire or die.

This is one of Kuhn's basic points.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[PyromanFO]

" The difference is, Scientists will eventually admit they were wrong and their "beliefs" will morph and change over time based on evidence. Religion will not."
Are you suggesting that Catholics from the Middle Ages hold all the same beliefs as modern day Baptists?
All religions change, because they are made up of people. People change, thier beliefs and ideas change because the world around them changes. Religon, in many cases, is similar to science in that it is just a collection of people who are trying to understand a basic common problem.
Yes there are religons who think they have never changed and never will. There are also scientists who thought that the world was always flat and it could never be anything different. Some people think they are the only ones who are right, and all others are wrong. But this is not exclusive to religion or any other group for that matter.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[J. J. Ramsey]

"Stop being pendantic and splitting hairs."

I'm not being pedantic. "Cannot see" can mean "cannot prove" or "cannot experience" or "cannot find evidence for".

"I know of no mathematical formula or scientific experimant that _proves_ the exisitance of God - so He truly is 'un-seeable'"

This is *exactly* why I questioned what was meant by "cannot see." I can't prove that Napoleon existed on the basis of a formula or scientific experiment either, yet I'd be chided by historians for presuming that Napoleon didn't exist on that basis. Sometimes math and experiment are the wrong tools for "seeing" or finding things.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[mjh]

Ok... well prove that OJ killed Nicole. It's certainly not anything that anyone other than Ron & Nicole saw, but the vast majority of people simply believe it to be true. Or maybe you don't. Fine, then prove that you looked at your clock this morning at whatever time you looked at your clock.

The reality is that somethings are true, but can't be proven. (This was formalized, for mathmatics, by Goedel.) Proving an experience can be *very* difficult to do.

I do believe in God. I believe that Jesus is the person of God written into the history of the universe. And I believe that God did this as the ultimate proof that good will win over evil. I believe these things because I've had certain experiences that make it difficult, if not impossible, for me to compose a credible rejection. Can I prove it? No, but so what? I can't prove to you that my 20 month old son woke up at 6:17 am this morning, either. But I'm completely certain that both are true.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[revscat]

Are you suggesting that Catholics from the Middle Ages hold all the same beliefs as modern day Baptists?

Fundamentally, Catholicism has changed very little over the centuries. The same can be said of most religions. Catholicism, for instance, has always believed that it is the true and holy Church spoken of in the scriptures, that priests are emissaries of god, and that the Pope is God's voice on earth. Even more fundamentally, they believe that Jesus is the son of God and that He will one day return to Earth. Things such as this have not changed and probably never will, because they are what define the religion and make it what it is.

No one is claiming that superficial changes have not occured. But core beliefs have been known to change in the realm of science, and certainly more frequently than such beliefs change in religion.

Some people think they are the only ones who are right, and all others are wrong. But this is not exclusive to religion or any other group for that matter.

Absolutely right. Everyone believes that their way is the One True Way, and that if everyone else just believed like they do then the world would be perfect. Science, done properly, recognizes this inherent desire in man and takes it into account. "You might believe it," the voice of Science says, "but you must prove using a certain set of criteria for it to be accepted in our community."

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[tshak]

The existance of atoms and quanta can be proven with mathematics (besides scientific observation). I know of know mathematical formula or scientific experimant that _proves_ the big bang theory, or that proves the age of the earth, or that even comes close to proving that our scientific means are not fallable in the first place.

It's still faith. It's not blind faith, but it's still a matter of faith.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[Arandir]

Try studying the history of religion. You'll find that religion also morphs and changes over time in the same way science does. Otherwise Christians would still be going to the synagogue on Saturdays.

But I think you're confusing faith with organized religion. Religious orthodoxy, like any orthodoxy, is extremely resistant to change. But faith (not orthodoxy) does change. This is because faith has a tiny kernel of core beliefs which do not change, surrounded by layer after layer of tradition and trappings and wrappers that do.

p.s. Science also has core tenets that have not changed. For example, even though evolutionary theory has morphed from Darwinianism gradualism to Gouldian punctuated equilibrium, the core tenet that the past can be observed through the fossil record has not changed.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[revscat]

I'm not being pedantic. "Cannot see" can mean "cannot prove" or "cannot experience" or "cannot find evidence for".

Pedantic, adj. - Characterized by a narrow, often ostentatious concern for formal rules

Your refusal to generalize the phrase "cannot see" to the more general case implied by the author was, indeed, pedantic.

I can't prove that Napoleon existed on the basis of a formula or scientific experiment either, yet I'd be chided by historians for presuming that Napoleon didn't exist on that basis. Sometimes math and experiment are the wrong tools for "seeing" or finding things.

Really? I beg to differ. My God man, have you never read anything about how detectives work? They use scientific methods to determine what happened in the past. Historians (certain kinds, anyway) are detectives who look further into the past. But they still seek clues, look at corresponding or contrasting evidence, and so forth. Yes, there is a foruma applied. Yes, it could be expressed mathematically. You would indeed be chided by historians, but for the exact opposite reasons for which you suppose.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[shoppa]

To me, the most amazing scientific mind-change is continental drift. In the 60's the concept was regarded by serious geologists as completely wacko and off the wall; by the time I took my first science classes in the 70's it had gone to the point of being "obvious even to kids - look at the way the continents fit together if you slide them about". Of course, accurate range-finding was what convinced even the most stuck-in-the-mud geologists.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[Scottie-Z]

He dismissively claims there's evidence if you look -- the most substantive thing he says -- but he brushes by it as though it weren't that important, probably because it's patently false.

Reference, for example, "The Case for Christ," by Lee Strobel, for a summary of said evidence, and an analysis of its validity. I believe Larry's off-handed comment was intended to be nuetral rather than dismissive, and to avoid the impression that he was trying to preach to anyone.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[Scottie-Z]

The difference is between the 'Scientific Method' characterized by experiment and measurement, and the 'Investigative Method', characterized by careful study of historical evidence. Your detectives would be using the latter. I'm sure the author was alluding to the fact that there is indeed a great wealth of historical evidence regarding the person of Jesus that is able to be analyzed investigatively, rather than scientifically.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[J. J. Ramsey]

"The difference is between the 'Scientific Method' characterized by experiment and measurement, and the 'Investigative Method'"

Yes, that was my point.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[einhverfr]

The difference is, Scientists will eventually admit they were wrong and their "beliefs" will morph and change over time based on evidence. Religion will not. Every contradictory religion is "THE" right one, and no matter how ludicrous the "beliefs" are, they will never be abandoned. One such example would be flying planes into buildings and receiving 100 virgins as payment from God.

Have you ever studied the history of religion? You really are ignorant of this topic. Sometime, you should look into the changes in Christian theology that occured in the 13th century with the realization that the Muslim world was so much more advanced than Christian Europe at the time or the changes in the symbolism of the sword which occured in Scandenavia with the development of the steel sword (which supplanted the superior but far more costly pattern-welded iron swords).

But I will grant you the point that this happens faster in the scientific communties, but I don't think that this is because scientists are somehow better than believers, but rather that the scientific community ends to be more democratic than the community of religious scholars. It doesn't have to be this way-- it religious scholars had this sort of community in the Moslim world until the 14th century or so, and in Europe during the renaisance (though dialog between faiths there did not occur much in Europe itself).

And science too is at least half philosophy. Read "Physics and Philosophy" by Werner Heisenberg for more ;) To paraphrase Heisenberg, a given set of data does not imply a given theory.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[Lemmy Caution]

How about they were thoughtful individuals, but he mistook a profound religious experience for a messianic mission? A sort of philosophical error springing from an authentic religious experience. It's something that happens often even today.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[beleg777]

But core beliefs have been known to change in the realm of science, and certainly more frequently than such beliefs change in religion.

Actually, I think you're using the concept of a core belief quite differently between science and religion. Science is a system, not a set of beliefs. Science is, by itself, impartial to the facts involved. The things that define science are more along the lines of the scientific method, and are much harder to nail down than a religious belief.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[Micah]

Scientists will eventually admit they were wrong

The good, real scientists will, sure.

But the scientists deeply rooted in atheists beliefs are every bit as religious as the most devout Pentecostal.

When they find evidence that seems to oppose the existence of God, they trumpet it, even before it's proven.

When they find evidence that seems to support God, they'll either quietly ignore it or try to downplay it -- even after it IS proven!

Can't have it both ways, guys.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[Lemmy Caution]

Not just in that epoch, but even today miracles are frequently reported and believed in many traditional societies, and ascribed to a number of religious or other supernatural origins. People aren't lying, they are percieving things imaginatively.

I don't agree with your implicit claim that a valuable moral and psychological perspective demands sound underlying physics and epistemology. While wildly deviant metaphysics can have moral/psychological implications, that's hardly the claim here.

Ultimately, in whatever religious and philosophical perspective you take, you are the ultimate authority for what you believe and what you claim to be true, even if the only action you take with your ultimate authority is to cede to a single text or doctrine.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[Micah]

That IS an excellent book, and it really just scratches the surface! It tells of why faith that Jesus is who He said He is is reasonable. It doesn't even scratch the surface of other things, like God's work in the world today (there's plenty of it), reason to believe in the Old Testament (there's plenty of archeological confirmation and mathematical codes to prove that the OT is true and from God, respectively), and the fact that the world today is PRECISELY how the Bible predicted it would be in the "end times".

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[Micah]

Search for the book "Eternity in their hearts" by Don Richardson. It has several examples from anthropology. Edward Tylor and other anthropologists were just sure that "primitive" cultures would have no consistant monotheistic belief. But when they tested it with field research... boy were they ever wrong! The book does tell some specific stories about how scientists and "intellectuals" ignored clear evidence.

Re:scientists' belief in gods

[Lemmy Caution]

Everything is highly questionable, except tautologies. If you haven't learned that, you aren't paying attention.

And I'm not sure about the tautologies.

Good point on PHP

[Ars-Fartsica]

Larry is correct to point out that anything PHP can do...you can do with perl (mod_perl)...often better, and still keep the language you use for everything else. In this sense the rise of PHP has mystified me.

Why the need for a novel language to do web scripting? The only argument I can see is ease of installation and learning, but those aren't good reasons for serious developers.

Re:Good point on PHP

[Ravagin]

I don't know - if I all I need to do is check some cookies and output a stylesheet based on those cookies, or dip into a database and sort and output some data, why do I need perl? I can do it quickly and painlessly in my page with PHP. No need to go around insulting those of us who use it as "unserious."

I see perl's coolness, but just to play contrary deity's advocate with you... why not PHP? :)

Re:Good point on PHP

[twoshortplanks]

Domain specific languages are really good. They allow you to think more about the task at hand than the task of getting the language you are using to do the task.

Of course, one such example of a domain language is the Template Toolkit which is a language that's inside out and designed to be used in places like webpages and config scripts. It's used in Slashdot, and written in Perl (and can call perl routines really easily called.) There's a good justification why not to use pure Perl in the template in the manual

Of course, come Perl 6 we'll be able to redefine our own grammers. By using a module (technically a grammer) we'll be able to dynamically switch in anohter rule (er, perl 6 regex able to match grammers) in the current scope to parse the current section - essentially our own little mini langauge.

Re:Good point on PHP

[jeorgen]

Ars-Fartsica writes:

In this sense the rise of PHP has mystified me. Why the need for a novel language to do web scripting

mod_php is installed at most Apache based web hosting services, mod_perl practically never.

(The mod_p(erl|hp) makes the scripts run as long running processes instead of short lived processes incurring a lot of overhead).

Besides, there is no standard template language for perl, and that fragments the knowledge in the field in the perl community.

/jeorgen
perl and Zope coder

Re:Good point on PHP

[twoshortplanks]

Personally? Because I find that PHP is too powerful for an embedded language. You end up with this large chunks of code in the middle of your HTML making it really hard to maintain.

Give me a simple language like the Template Toolkit that can connect to a more powerful language (er, Perl) to do the difficult stuff any day.

Of course, you may disagree, and you're not stupid or evil for doing it. You just have a different point of view...I'm certainly not going to start bashing PHP.

Of course, wat I'm really waiting for is Parrot to be completed, both with the ability to run Perl 6 and PHP generated bytecode, so we can both use whatever we want, call each other's code all over the place, and play nice together...

Re:Good point on PHP

[Jester99]

Why the need for a novel language to do web scripting? The only argument I can see is ease of installation and learning, but those aren't good reasons for serious developers.

When all you have is a hammer... everything looks like a nail.

Perl is a really, really, honkin' big hammer. It can smash just about any nail into anything. But sometimes, a wrench or a screwdriver would do the job better.

A master carpenter doesn't say "I can do anything with this hammer, given enough effort." He's got a giant toolbox filled with a dozen wrenches, a few hammers, screwdrivers... you get the point.

If you want to consider yourself a "serious developer", you should really consider broadening your skill set. There's a lot of things that I can do very fast in perl, but sometimes I need to come up with a quick database enabled website on Windows 2000. I immediately think, "Cold Fusion." Sure, I could install ActiveState perl, but I can do the job twice as quickly in CFML.

Likewise, PHP has it's job creating webpage templates in a UNIX environment. PHP has great database hooks and CGI handling. I can do some things in PHP in fewer lines than in Perl. The converse is also true -- in which case, I use Perl, and not PHP.

So, if you're handy enough with the Perl hammer, you could probably use it for everything. But you might dent up the walls a bit on the way.

Re:Good point on PHP

[lamz]

Personally? Because I find that PHP is too powerful for an embedded language. You end up with this large chunks of code in the middle of your HTML making it really hard to maintain.

So don't put large chunks of code in the middle of your HTML. Sock the code away in another file and just call it where you want it.

Or, even better, do it up right and build code that generates html. A similar line is crossed in Perl when you move from providing teeny little CGIs that get called with EXEC CGI tags in html, to full-blown applications with a .cgi on the end.

Re:Good point on PHP

[Telastyn]

Oddly enough, I use php for most of the stuff people use perl for: log parsing, process handling, and general scripting use. Mainly I've not had the need or time to learn perl, despite the fact it's generally nicer; more stable; and a hell of alot faster.

Re:Good point on PHP

[hey!]

I agree. If you can quickly imagine a working solution to a simple problem into existence using a language, it has a use. I even still use awk for some things, although there's nothing awk can do that perl can't do, in a sense, better.

Re:Good point on PHP

[Kaz Riprock]

Using both perl and PHP for my various needs, I find that they have equally valid uses for me. I am much happier programming my PHP for WWW-to-DBI applications. If I have my postgresql DB up and running, then I find it more intuitive to use PHP commands that I've learned to access that data and then use its scripting to do any data manipulation (rather than pass it off to another language, etc).

When I'm not accessing my database and just need to parse output or setup other sorts of webpages and things, I find perl to be exceptionally talented as well. It all depends on the entire context of my problem and the involvement of databases and DBIs for me. I know that perl has DBI capability, but I find PHP's DBI commands and things to be a bit more intuitive to the way I think.

This is very similar to Larry's reason for Perl in the first place: Anything to make the user happier about programming the way they want to program...

Re:Good point on PHP

[dark_panda]

Re: great database hooks: while the individual database extensions for PHP are dandy, the fact that there's no real database abstraction layer (yet) for PHP is a bit of a pain in the arse. Yes, there is the dbx extension, it isn't terribly roboust, and yes, there is the PEAR DB abstraction classes, but I would much rather see a true compiled extension. I have written a fairly decent abstraction layer which essentially mimics Perl's DBI (hasn't everybody), but it's just a stepping stone.

Hopefully in PHP 5 we'll see some sort of DBI-like interface for PHP, as I see no indiction of it happening in 4.x, and unfortunately I have no time to even attempt it myself. (Hell, I still need to look into writing a generic crypto interface for PHP 5...)

J

Re:Good point on PHP

[cbowland]

I agree with the part of PHP being proud of the wrong thing and embedding business logic within the presentation logic.
Of course, you could use The Smarty Template Engine to do some of the work that the Template Toolkit does.

Re:Good point on PHP

[Tablizer]

(* Larry is correct to point out that anything PHP can do...you can do with perl (mod_perl)...often better, and still keep the language you use for everything else. In this sense the rise of PHP has mystified me. *)

But the learning curve of Perl is much larger. PHP you can get into and get out of relatively quickly.

Also, it is harder for other programmers to munge PHP. Perl has "high potential for job security", meaning that if there is no incentive for somebody to write readable code, it won't happen. Just because I may be careful does not mean others will also.

Perl is a career language, PHP is not. Career languages take a long time to learn all the odds and ends, especially if you want to read other people's code.

PHP assumes that people will be using many languages, Perl's philosophy tends to be that Perl is best for everything, so the longer learning curve is worth it.

They both just have different assumptions behind them.

Re:Good point on PHP

[tweek]

While it's not a part of PHP core yet, I suggest you check out ADODB. I've used it and find it just as easy as DBI. I've not used perl in a while but don't you still have to declare what db you're using? You would still have to CPAN the mysql support to DBI.

Quite honestly if uniformity in accessing a database is that important, shouldn't you be using ODBC?

Re:Good point on PHP

[tweek]

But this is really the fault of the developer no?

I take great pain to separate each layer but some of the stuff I've seen does not.

Until a language FORCES (which would be perfect for people who like python *duck*!) you to do that, anyone can fuck up a perfectly good piece of code.

Re:Good point on PHP

[Second_Derivative]

Because in my humble experience, PHP makes easy things a cinch but complex things impossible and extremely insecure. The fact that most large PHP projects eschew the entire concept entirely in favour of a home cooked template system and also a home cooked db abstraction library bears this out nicely. (I wrote a much longer schpiel on this in the original question thread but that sums it up nicely).

In short, I use PHP as SSI+. As a db-savvy preprocessor (the first P in PHP you'll notice) it's brilliant. But anything more than that, doubt it.

Re:Good point on PHP

[glwtta]

why not PHP?

Do not even tempt me :)
Though personal experience usually comes up as a good reason against it.

Re:Good point on PHP

[Bald Wookie]

why not PHP?

because PHP tends mixes content / presentation and control

It's the programmers that tend to mix the layers, not the language itself. You might think PHP's ability to mix logic and presentation is a fault. I disagree. Let's take a look at some of the things that Larry said about Perl, and apply them to PHP:

As for Perl, it has never been "structured" in that sense, though it has always been structured in the sense that you can create as much structure as you like. The whole point is that the structure is optional, not imposed externally.

This describes the PHP situation fairly accurately. As the programmer, you get to determine the level of structure. This week I've worked on two applications in PHP. One of them is a very unstructured little script so that my brother can get my dynamic IP address. The other is an OO content management system that uses templates for everything. If I had to use highly structured techniques for the first script, it would have been too much of a hassle to bother. If I'd written the second application in unstructured blender mode, I might as well not have bothered.

Now I'm not going to say that I haven't written big projects in an unstructured manner. I've also over-structured small projects. When you wield flexibility, sometimes the gun gets pointed at your foot.

Back to Larry:
You have to have discipline to do programming in the large, but you'll choose the discipline by turning up the big discipline knob yourself, not by having someone else turn it up for you.

This is a philosophical decision, but it's one that I tend to agree with. Having the structures available lets you work on large projects. Not forcing you to use them lets you scratch the little itches. There is a ton of bad PHP out there, but that is the programmer's fault, not the language's.

Re:Good point on PHP

[Ars-Fartsica]

Except that PEAR is a joke - it has maybe 5% of the packages CPAN does...unless you like rewriting all of this yourself.

PHP outside of the webserving context makes almost no sense.

Re:Good point on PHP

[Ars-Fartsica]

You can prototype as rapidly with mod_perl - a layer like Apache::ASP creates a PHP-like model, except it uses perl. If you have years of pervious perl experience, this is helpful, otherwise, probably not.

I still stick by my point that I don't see the point per se to a new language and runtime that is already so similar to perl, just to do web scripting. If PHP brought something new to the table, fine, but in my opinion it is just a crippled perl. PEAR is certainly a crippled CPAN.

Re:Good point on PHP

[dark_panda]

With Perl's DBI, you'd say something like

my $dbi = DBI->connect("DBI:Pg:dbname=mydb...");

Then you just go ahead and set up your statement handle and go nuts...

my $sth = $dbi->prepare("select * from mytable");
$sth->execute;

etc. To change database drivers, you just replace DBI:Pg: to DBI:MySQL or whatever. One little change, barring any SQL changes, which would be less of a problem if you use SQL92-compliant SQL.

In PHP, everything changes with each database: functions have different naming conventions, take different parameters, etc. (which is being cleaned up, actually). For instance, with the MySQL extension, you have a function called mysql_db_name(), the Postgres extension has a function called pg_dbname(), without the extra underscore. Somewhat annoying.

Anyway, with PHP, you do something like...

$pg = pg_connect(...);
$pgQuery = pg_query($, "select...");
$mysql = mysql_connect(...);
$mysqlQuery = mysql_query($mysql, "select...");

With PHP, multiple changes would be needed. I suppose you could use variable functions and such and just change them once and be done with it, but in the end, Perl's DBI is easier to work with than PHP's multiple database extensions.

ODBC would be nice, but after having many issues with it while working with it through Postgres and Access, it's more trouble than it's worth.

Not that I'm harping on PHP. I like PHP and I stick to Postgres almost exclusively, but in the end, there's a part of me that wants platform neutrality that Perl's DBI sort of has. DBI isn't perfect, but it's easier to remember and use it's unified interface than 15 separate PHP interfaces. Naturally, there's more to keeping your code easily portable across multiple database platforms than the language's interface, but it's a step in the right direction.

J

Re:Good point on PHP

[sbeitzel]

My own reason for moving to PHP for web development (having done several apps in mod_perl first) is simply that I hate having to restart apache every time I want to test some code.
:w
and then clicking a browser refresh button is a lot easier than
:w
:!apachectl graceful

And what the heck, PHP does everything I need a web application to do -- so I maintain web pages in PHP and I do back end processing in Perl.

Re:Good point on PHP

[kubrick]

I hate having to restart apache every time I want to test some code.

Did you check out Apache::Reload?

Re:Good point on PHP

[j3110]

Oh, get your facts straight... man perl told me it was a "swiss army chainsaw" not a hammer :)

Re:Good point on PHP

[twoshortplanks]

Thanks for the link...I'll have a look at it.

Re:Good point on PHP

[twoshortplanks]

To be honest, embedding html in your PHP is pretty much the same problem. It's about seperating out the content from the buisness logic. Essentially what you want is template files (containing just the html and a few 'stick this here' type statements) and code files (containing the stuff that does the heavy lifting and creates the data that will be stuck there.)

Of course, you can force yourself to do that with PHP, by limiting what you do in the actual HTML. Most people don't, but that's not the fault of the language.

Re:Good point on PHP

[m_ilya]

But mod_php is installed so often, because PHP is so popular

mod_php is installed so often because it is easier and cheaper for ISPs. The problem with mod_perl is that it is too powerfull and it lets programmer to have nearly full control over Apache server. In ISP environment such power is bad thing as it becomes impossible to share one Apache server between several independant hosters. In short to provide mod_perl hosting ISP have to give each its customer dedicated Apache server. Obviously for ISP it means that they spend more time/money on system administration and that resource requirements (mostly RAM) are higher.

Donating to the Perl Foundation

[dpt]

Perhaps that's something for companies to consider. Every place I've worked, large and small, has had some Perl working away in the background in some capacity - from humble one-off tasks like formatting the odd bit of text through to being the driver for the automated test framework or managing the corporate web infrastructure.

We seem all too willing to throw money at licenses for Office, but my team uses Perl in many interesting, fun and labour saving ways every single day - even though ostensibly we're coding in C. I think I might make a case to my manager on Monday that a small donation has *already* paid for itself ...

Excellent

[totallygeek]

Always great to read something from Larry Wall. I chuckled a bit recently when I saw the "Wall Nut House".

Excellent interview; would like to see more with him in the future. My dream list right now would be:

• Steven Hawking
• Bill Joy
• Bill Gates
• Steve Jobs
• Mark Horton
• Eric Allman

Re:Excellent

[nwetters]

• ...
• Bill Joy
• ...

Interviewed today by the Financial Times. His solution for building elegant software seems a bit extreme ;)

Software written before Java emerged on the scene - software pre-1995 - was all pretty much a hack. Much of the software that is still being written is a hack. People change slowly. Programmers have to die, almost, for this to change. - Bill Joy

Re:Excellent

[Flamerule]

• Steven Hawking

Stephen Hawking would probably get annoyed if we asked him to do an interview and misspelled his name.

Re:Excellent

[Consul]

As a musician, I would love to add to this list:

• Jean-Michele Jarre
  

His earlier albums were some electronic works of art. :o)

Re:Excellent

[JimR]

Software written before Java emerged on the scene - software pre-1995 - was all pretty much a hack. Much of the software that is still being written is a hack. People change slowly. Programmers have to die, almost, for this to change. - Bill Joy

Wow! For this to be true Java must have changed a hell of a lot since I stopped using it in 1999 (when I took up Perl).

Of all the languages I have used extensively (including C, C++, Smalltalk, Java, Tcl, Lisp, Prolog, Modula2, ML - a few that spring to mind immediately - I have dabbled in many others), I have found Perl to be the least annoying. With all the others you always run up against some brick wall that requires you admit that you can't get where you want to be from where you are. In Perl it always seems to be possible to get yourself out (even when completely recoding is the right thing to do).

Re:Excellent

[pne]

• Mark Horton

I think you'll find she goes by Mary Ann Horton these days, if I understand correctly.

Removing the % $ and @

[phorm]

I was somewhat wondering who might actually have suggested this, probably not anyone who has made a serious use of Perl.

When I first used Perl, I found the $%@ symbols confusing as all heck, and wished it was more like PHP.

Now that I've used a lot of Perl, I wish PHP would make more use of the $%@ symbols for clarity sakes. Actually, it would be a lot nicer in many languages to use symbol-defined clarifiers, I certainly get tired of "Dim Somevar as sometype" and "sometype somevar" when somebody makes an extremely ambiguous name which doesn't differentiate an array from a scalar or reference variable.

Ignorant people keep educated people employed! - phorm

Re:Removing the % $ and @

[Jerf]

Some of us would say that you should choose variable names to mean what they say, so it's reasonably obvious what the type is. Plural in particular is a big help, and hash/list distinctions can often be made obvious. In dynamic languages, this is usually sufficient.

But while I believe in that, what I *really* want to see in perl is the sigil labelling the named object, not the final value of the expression, i.e., %hashvar{THING_IN_HASH} instead of $hashvar{THING_IN_HASH}. Fortunately, Perl 6 is supposed to do it this way.

Re:Removing the % $ and @

[Angst Badger]

Hmm... I learned C, C++, Perl, and PHP in that order. (Actually, before that, I learned BASIC, FORTRAN, RPG, and COBOL, but I don't like to think about that.)

My first impression on learning Perl was wondering why the heck Larry hadn't bothered to learn how to use lex, yacc, and maintain a proper symbol table. Then, of course, I realized Larry does know all that and had reasons of his own. But I still disagree with them.

When I learned PHP, I thought it was wonderful to A) only have one generic variable 'sigil', and B) to have real multidimensional arrays that didn't require Perl's horrid reference syntax. (I know they're not really multidimensional arrays behind the curtain in either language, but that's beside the point.)

For the record, I think Perl is a much more powerful language than PHP, but that PHP makes building web interfaces (usually to Perl and C backends in my case) than mod_perl or (God help me) Mason.

In the end, I still wish Larry would reconsider the type sigils on the grounds that they violated the TMTOWTDI principle and force the programmer into what may be, for any given developer or development team, a suboptimal notational system. It's as if Microsoft's Hungarian Notation were enforced by the compiler. Thanks, but if I need to include type information in my variable names, I'll put it there myself.

Re:Removing the % $ and @

[jhines0042]

I certainly get tired of "Dim Somevar as sometype" and "sometype somevar" when somebody makes an extremely ambiguous name which doesn't differentiate an array from a scalar or reference variable.

This is why good coding styles arise.

And no, I'm not talking about Hungarian Notation.

I'm talking about variable names that are meaningful and method names that are meaningful. Some people take pride in Obfuscating their code. Me, I take pride in knowing that I can come back to a set of code a year later and still know what it does either by documentation (rarely) or good coding style and good variable names (less rarely :-) ).

Whole language v phonics?

[rw2]

Larry said "We find the same problem in teaching reading to kids. Some people shout "Whole language!" while others shout "Phonics!" Well, guess what, they're both oversimplifying. You have to learn some phonics, and then you learn some larger bits based on that, and some larger bits based on that, and eventually you find that you're intuiting whole language. "

Whole language incoporates phonics as one of it's several learning approaches.

Whole language is, in fact, exactly what you go on to say is the 'right' solution.

(I'm not a teacher by training, but my mum is a reading specialist (with her graduate work focusing on the subject) and I did confirm this with her)

Re:Whole language v phonics?

[sethg]

Whole language incoporates phonics as one of it's several learning approaches.

Diligent and well-read teachers understand that whole language is supposed to encompass phonics, rather than supplant it.

Lazy teachers use "whole language is better than phonics" as an excuse for not knowing when a phonics-based lesson is appropriate.

Re:Whole language v phonics?

[rw2]

Lazy teachers use "whole language is better than phonics" as an excuse for not knowing when a phonics-based lesson is appropriate.

I'm sure there are teachers like that somewhere, but I've certainly not met them.

IMHO the only reason this is whole language v phonics thing is a national debate is because of large group of lazy parents who listen to the right wingers rant about the evils of public education too much.

It's been a very weird deal. Seems like someone influential in that community must have had a kid that responded very well to phonics (and there are, of course, kids who only learn, or learn especially well, using solely that mode) and they extrapolated from their experience that every child would respond that way. Intellectual lazyness at nearly its worst. Of course, those who haven't bothered to run the experiment themselves and are instead just showing up for board of education meetings demanding phonics be taught (despite it being part of whole language!) are worse because they don't have even empirical evidence that their child would benefit.

I mentioned my mom before. I think her school has the right approach. Parents come in and bitch because Pat Robertson said that phonics was the right way to teach. They explain that whole language uses phonics. If that isn't enough the school has purchased a couple copies of 'hooked on phonics' that they lend out so parents can try before they buy (it's very expensive considering the content of the product). They haven't had a *single* parent (sample size in the dozens) that didn't return the school copy, thank them for the chance to try it and then decide to save the cash rather than themselves a copy.

So while I resent that the 700 club thinks they are in a good position to dictate national education standards, I think the local schools could do a far better job in many cases in educating the parents as to why right wing education schemes are often built on a crumbly, narrow foundation.

Amen!

[flyneye]

Thats the best explaination of the Christian faith I have ever seen applied to geek speak.
Now if someone will just translate "The Book of Subgenius " into python........

Re:Amen!

[Jerf]

import subgenious

bob = subgenious.Subgenious()
bob.aquireSlack() # loops forever...

artistic expression

[wiredog]

I dunno, some (well, actually, most) of the women I know are, imho, proof that God is an artist.

Sunsets too.

Re:artistic expression

[Tablizer]

I dunno, some (well, actually, most) of the women I know are, imho, proof that God is an artist.

Experiment: Hack your nuts off and see if that "art" diminishes in intensity.

that's my new .sig

[Don Negro]

Perl 6 will give you the big knob.

That's as funny as it gets.

Re:that's my new .sig

[WinterSolstice]

I guess that depends on how it is used...

Sort of like the a fire, afire bit :)

Perhaps he means that Perl 6 will really stick it to you!

-WS

Re:"because God told me"

[Etcetera]

If God told me to do something, I'd sure as hell do it.

Interesting point about Christianity

[Jeppe Salvesen]

You can't please God the way Enoch did without some faith, because those who come to God must (minimally) believe that:
A) God exists, and
B) God is good to people who really look for him.

That's it. The "good news" is so simple that a child can understand it, and so deep that a philosopher can't.

As much as I respect Larry, I have one thing to say : "The Devil is in the details". "God exists" sounds so simple. It's not. Ethics are fundamentally different in the presence or absence of a God. In the absence, ethics are based around pragmatism and as such adaptible. In the presence, ethics are given to us. Look at history. Which case has proven the better approach? I'd rather God not existed, but if he does, I hope he has foregivness for me since I do in fact live by many of his rules - only out of pragmatism. I expect to burn in hell if there is such a thing, though.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[mlong]

As much as I respect Larry, I have one thing to say : "The Devil is in the details". "God exists" sounds so simple. It's not. Ethics are fundamentally different in the presence or absence of a God. In the absence, ethics are based around pragmatism and as such adaptible. In the presence, ethics are given to us. Look at history. Which case has proven the better approach? I'd rather God not existed, but if he does, I hope he has foregivness for me since I do in fact live by many of his rules - only out of pragmatism. I expect to burn in hell if there is such a thing, though.

Being a Christian myself this post is no doubt biased but since you brought up some points and questions I thought I would address them...

You might be interested in studying up on Christian theology since it addresses many of your points. It says God does indeed exist, and he will forgive you regardless of what you have done in the past. Morals (ethics) come from him but living by his rules is not a requirement as you could never "earn your way to heaven" like you would in other religions (Islam, Judaism). Once you are a Christian (and not just in title) you accept the holy spirit which guides you and helps you to avoid evil things. That is a lifelong process which is why many (true) Christians are not perfect...nobody is! And of course, many call theirselves Christians when they really aren't...giving all Christians a bad name. Also many non-Christians think Christianity is a rule(law)-based religion and God just wants to ruin your fun. In reality, it is nothing like that and God simply wants the best for you...nothing less.

Many times agnostics think that God should come down and fix everything, etc. but that doesn't happen. Christian theology states that we are in a fallen world, and due to the fact that we are given free will (ie freedom) God is not going to sit here and be a puppet master. When we die we are judged and that is it. If we believed and trusted in him we will live with him forever, and if we don't, we go to hell. It's not a hard theology to grasp. Furthermore we are told he is just and he will fix all things at the end of the age. So while the world may suck today, it will not be like that for all time.

Also just as an aside... If God exists, he will exist regardless of whether you believe in him or not. But whether you live in paradise or hell does directly depend on whether you believe in him or not. Really, what do you have to lose?

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[Dr. Manhattan]

Many times agnostics think that God should come down and fix everything, etc. but that doesn't happen... due to the fact that we are given free will

Generally people say, "God couldn't create a being that both had free will and yet would never choose evil, that's a contradiction in terms."

I then ask, "Okay, God is perfect and we're told It will never choose to do evil. So, does God have free will?"

If yes, then there's no contradiction, and God would have created beings like that instead of us humans. If no, then how could such a robot be deserving of worship? It might be wise to kowtow to It, but how could it be moral?

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[Anthony Boyd]

Ethics are fundamentally different in the presence or absence of a God. In the absence, ethics are based around pragmatism and as such adaptible. In the presence, ethics are given to us.

Well, it also depends upon whether you're an Old Testament or New Testament believer. In the New Testament, Jesus created a new meta-rule that supercedes all others: act out of love. Actually, he said it a few times a few ways (do unto others, love your neighbor, the greatest of these is love). But what's great about the one meta-rule is that it allows for malleability. The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, talks a lot about slavery and homosexuality. But people who believe in Jesus got over slavery and they'll get over homosexuality. It just takes time for them the understand that love takes precedence over a million little rules and requires them to (gasp!) use their own judgement.

One of my biggest difficulties with faith was the conflict between the commandment "thou shall not kill" and the passage, "there is a time to kill." For the longest time I couldn't reconcile them. Once I learned the meta rule, I realized both can exist. Killing is not normally an act of love. But acting out of love for millions of Jews might include putting a gun to Hitler's head and pulling the trigger. Maybe. In any case, I think Jesus had ethics that were adaptable.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[joshki]

It's not about ethics. If you read the New Testament, you'll see that it says the same things about homosexuality that the Old Testament says (Romans 1). Slavery was a horrible mis-interpretation of the Bible by clergy in the 1700-1800's -- the "slavery" that is discussed in the Old Testament was something completely different from what was practiced in the US in that time, and the clergy who condoned it were just as guilty as the people who did it.

The point is, there is a standard -- "The wages of sin are death." In the Old Testament, that was the way it had to be -- in the New Testament to the present day, Jesus fulfilled that law by dying to pay for the sins of the world. There is no "adaptation of ethics", no change in what is right and what is wrong. The Old Testament says "thou shalt not kill" but the word is murder. It means unjustified killing. God recognizes the right of the people/state to punish some crimes with death, but this certainly does not allow for murder(and never did).

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[Kiwi]

When we die we are judged and that is it. If we believed and trusted in him we will live with him forever, and if we don't, we go to hell.

As a Christian, this is the part of Fundamentalism that I find most objectionable. This idea of eternal damnation comes from the Greek mythos (the ancient Isreleis did not belive in an afterlife per se). This can be seen in the gospel of Luke, where the only time the Greek word hades is used is in the parable of the rich man and Lazardus (5 cent summary: Selfish rich man is tortured by fire in Hades, poor suffering man is in heaven).

Over the years, this idea developed in to a place to punish the sinners. Of course, we are all sinners. In the dark ages, people belived that everyone was going to go to hell, except for a few saints. In fact, Fundamentalism was a step up from this, because it revised the theolgy from "Jesus forgives all sins, but any sin done after accepting Jesus is a black mark on your record" to "Jesus forgives all sins you do for the rest of your life". It is still a flawed theology, because it still has the baggage that we are so sinful that we all deserve to be tortured in the most horrible way for ever and ever.

People like to feel that they are somehow special, that they are part of the inside clique. Fundamentalism, which tells the people that they are very special with God, and that everyone else is not, meets this human desire very nicely. And, it goes with the writings of Saint John, who was trying to strengthen Christianity in a time when the church was undergoing some very difficult struggles, right after the Christians were expelled from the synagogues, which made them lose the right to not worship the emperor as a god under Roman law. And so they started feeding Christians to the lions.

This is why a number of Christians, such as the Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, and 7th Day Adventists, do not belive in eternal punishment for all non-believers (they still belive only they are going to heaven, but it is still a step upward).

To say "you are going to hell because you belive differently than me" is the ultimate arrogance; I belive in a God which brings out the good things in myself, not the bad things like my arrogance.

- Sam

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[sysadmn]

Of course, in Catholic doctrine, there is no literal fire-and-brimstone. Hell is the absence of God. So maybe you're already there!

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[tshak]

Based on Larry's faith (and mine) living by the God's moral law has nothing to do with burning in hell or not. Salvation is based on faith alone - thank God!

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[jafac]

Jeppe wrote:
Ethics are fundamentally different in the presence or absence of a God

- - -
I don't see why that is so. Ethics are fundamentally different in the presence or absence of Hell. Some Christian sects - even "Bible-believing" sects, do not believe in Hell or eternal punishment. (it takes a LOT of rationalization and "creative" interpretation of scripture to buy into this though).

These sects believe that when you die, if you've accepted Jesus, and repent your sins - you go to Heaven. Otherwise, your soul is effectively destroyed forever. This has profoundly less impact on the ethics a person demonstrates in one's lifetime than the whole "roasting in the eternal flames of hell getting assraped by demons" deal.

Boiling it down to those two points doesn't necessitate a belief in eternal damnation either. It's almost a moot point.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[jafac]

mlong wrote:
Also many non-Christians think Christianity is a rule(law)-based religion and God just wants to ruin your fun.

I replied:
In my experience, the overwhelming majority of Christians, particularly the high-profile ones who are in positions of leadership *DO* believe this as well, and try very hard to make sure everyone else believes this.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[mjh]

Yet I'm pragmatically moral, considerably moreso than many of those that do "believe and trust" in him. Yet, according to this doctrine, I'm going to hell.

Being pragmatically moral is not the issue. The issue is how God who is pure can possibly interract with someone who is not pure. When you mix pure water with pure water, the result is still pure water. But when you mix contaminated water, no matter how small, with pure water, the result is contaminated water.

So the question is this: are you pure? It doesn't matter if you're a little or a lot contaminated. When you mix with the pure, the result is contamination. And above all things God will not allow himself to be contaminated. He will remain pure.

And the heart of your contamination, in this case, is not whether you lied to your parents, or participated in pre-marital sex (although those are not insignificant). The heart of your contamination is that you reject God, which allows you to ... (list violations of 10 commandments here).

Your eternal death is not as a consequence of God's sending you to hell. It's as a consequence of God accepting your decision to reject Him. It's up to you. You're allowed to choose, and God will not interfere with that choice. That may look to you like God is standing at a distance. It's more that he's not interested in forcing your hand.

Rejecting God is entirely your choice. The consequence of rejecting God is that existance w/out God is horrible. It's awful. It's the worst possible thing that can be imagined. You've never experienced it because the world is filled, from head to toe, with God. The classic image of hell is only a description of what the consequence of that rejecting God is like. For another description try reading "The Great Divorce" by CS Lewis.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[Dr. Manhattan]

Most religious people tend to define evil as opposing the will of God.

But then you run smack into the Euthyphro Problem. Is something good just because God says so, or does God say so because it's good?

If the former, then we just have the ultimate case of "might makes right"; if there was anything other then the arbitrary whim of God driving the choices, then we'd be in the latter case.

So God just happens to be the biggest bully around. Doing what It wants may be wise, but not inherently moral. You're 'just following orders', like lots of perpetrators of war crimes. They just picked the wrong bully to pander to, assuming God didn't want them to do that.

And if it is the latter case, then you can't use this as a defense for the free will problem, because God conforms to good, and doesn't define it; so if God is perfectly good and has free will, then It could create beings that would do so as well... and didn't.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[mlong]

Generally people say, "God couldn't create a being that both had free will and yet would never choose evil, that's a contradiction in terms."

Yep

I then ask, "Okay, God is perfect and we're told It will never choose to do evil. So, does God have free will?"

Yes, God can do whatever He wants. He could be an evil God if he wanted. But He doesn't want to do that, because his very nature is good. I mean, I could get on all fours and act like a dog if I wanted, but why would I want to?

If yes, then there's no contradiction, and God would have created beings like that instead of us humans. If no, then how could such a robot be deserving of worship? It might be wise to kowtow to It, but how could it be moral?

No we are created like God but He didn't clone himself. He created us with a blank slate.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[beleg777]

"If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows...then we must starve eternally."
--The Problem of Pain

I think the Church does itself and it's message a disservice by presenting Hell wrong. Hell is the inevitable result of denying God. If you refuse to accept God then you cannot happily be with Him for eternity. I don't pretend to know exactly what Hell is, but from my study of the Bible I do know that it's not somewhere God wants people, and I know that it's not tourture for the sake of tourture.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[mlong]

Ya know, I was sitting here nodding my head at what you were saying . . . all until this last sentence.

I've known some excellent christians in my life, and many of them have tried to convert me over the years. In the end, when their logic fails to persuade me, they all seem to offer this Pascal's Wager argument as a last-ditch effort.

Well I wouldn't call it a last ditch effort, bur rather a sincere concern for your eternal well being and one to get you to think about something other than the immediate and present.

If the only way to convert someone is through fear, then the rest of your message must not be terribly compelling to the person with whom you're speaking. Now, maybe fear wasn't necessary to win your faith, but that's just an example of how religion and faith in God is such a personal decision.

Well perhaps some mean it in fear but I do not. I simply mean, look at what you could be missing out on! If Christianity is right, then the afterlife will be super. But you'll be missing the party.

All I'm saying is that I would be much happier if Christians would just admit that it's possible for someone to read the Bible and honestly not believe it, to think that maybe all the answers don't lie in their holy book.

I think many already feel this way. The Bible is great for believers and helps to strengten the faith, but for non-believers its just another book...albeit a book that may shed some light on Christian beliefs but not really something that will instantly convert someone. Really those life-changing experiences come from God and you'll have to be receptive to them in order to feel them. Statistically, most conversions come from conversations with Christians or attending a Christian event, not from reading literature.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[Dr. Manhattan]

Yes, God can do whatever He wants. He could be an evil God if he wanted. But He doesn't want to do that, because his very nature is good. I mean, I could get on all fours and act like a dog if I wanted, but why would I want to?

But that's the whole point! Why didn't God create more beings whose 'very nature' was good, who didn't want to do evil? Why not make an Adam and Eve that didn't want to break rules?

The normal anser to this question is, "because they wouldn't have free will". But you yourself just said that God could choose to do evil, but doesn't want to. So either:

• A: God has free will, in which case there is no problem with a being both having free will and yet never wanting to do evil. Therefore, God would have created free beings that didn't want to evil. After all, God dislikes evil and doesn't want it around. But It didn't, so we have a contradiction.
• or B: God doesn't have free will. Like I said, a robot.

How can I make this any clearer?

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[mlong]

It may not be a hard theology to grasp, but it's hard to grasp how people can find that anything but absurd and contradictory. I don't belive in God. Yet I'm pragmatically moral, considerably moreso than many of those that do "believe and trust" in him. Yet, according to this doctrine, I'm going to hell.

And yet in the very next sentance you claim that he's just? Does that REALLY make any sense to you?

Exactly! Its not contradictory. Look, you're saying this "I'm a good person, I do good things, why would I go to hell?"

The answer is...because you did not believe. Christianity is not a "good works" religion. You can't earn your way to heaven. It doesn't matter what you do. The only way to get into heaven is to believe in God. You don't have to do anything else. You can help little old ladies across the street all day long but its not going to earn you a ticket to heaven. But if you pray and believe in him, that will.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[mlong]

As a Christian, this is the part of Fundamentalism that I find most objectionable. This idea of eternal damnation comes from the Greek mythos (the ancient Isreleis did not belive in an afterlife per se). This can be seen in the gospel of Luke, where the only time the Greek word hades is used is in the parable of the rich man and Lazardus (5 cent summary: Selfish rich man is tortured by fire in Hades, poor suffering man is in heaven).

No that is what you read into my sentence. I said if you don't believe you're going to hell. I didn't add "for everlasting punishment due to your sins". As I've stated elsewhere on this board, nobody will go to hell who did not choose it. The Lord doesn't want anyone to go there or be punished, but the fact is many will reject him and thus will end up there. I don't know what it will be like but I suspect their own misery and separation from God will worse than any flames and heat. But the fact remains that someone who does not believe in God surely cannot (maybe even would not want to) spent eternity in the Lord's presence. And someone who is not pure cannot either (remember when Christ forgives us he cleanses us).

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[mlong]

In my experience, the overwhelming majority of Christians, particularly the high-profile ones who are in positions of leadership *DO* believe this as well, and try very hard to make sure everyone else believes this.

Ah but that doesn't mean its true to Christianity anymore than those september 11th hijackers were being true to Islam. I am a devout Christian but do you think I put any value in what TV evangelists and the like have to say in between their constant pleas for money so they can build theirselves a new mansion?

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[mlong]

I stand to lose any possibility of appeasing any of the hundreds of other alleged gods with different sets of rules and requirements; I stand to lose my freedom to a system, managed and manipulated by powerful people, that is evolutionarily optimized not for my benefit but only for the continued survival and control of the system; and most of all I stand to reduce my ability to freely make reasoned ethical judgements.

All this for a miniscule chance at turning into an immortal couch potato after I die? Somehow, that just doesn't seem worth it.

My god requires that you not believe in god in order to achieve paradise. He wants you to make decisions on your own, independent of religious influence. He's a tough god, because he wants you to do all the work; you have to figure out the answers yourself. If you believe in god, he sends you to hell for cheating.

Better not believe in god, then. You'd better stop, or you'll be in big trouble!

Well now this is a challenge people have faced for millenia. How do you know which of the hundreds of religions (if any) are right? Well first off, you have to look at their beliefs. Which seems easier to believe, that there is one God, or 10,000 (and counting every year)? And also, which one makes more sense...a God of love and freedom, or one who will send you to hell if you don't bow down and worship him 5 times a day (and you better face a certain direction while you do it too!). And furthermore, maybe you could look into alledged evidence. The people of the day who were around Jesus never called him a magician or a sham when they saw him doing miracles. They usually used some religious law technicality (he can't heal people on the sabbath...thats a day of rest!). I've read hundreds of books on every religion and I chose Christianity and haven't regretted it. One of the best books out there is "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel in which he lays it all out exactly what evidence there is that Jesus was the real thing.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[mlong]

But that's the whole point! Why didn't God create more beings whose 'very nature' was good, who didn't want to do evil? Why not make an Adam and Eve that didn't want to break rules?

Well apparently that comes with the territory and is just part of the nature of a free will free thinking being is that they could choose to do what God considers moral or they may do something God considers immoral. But if you create a being with a blank slate, then it could go either way could it not?

God has free will, in which case there is no problem with a being both having free will and yet never wanting to do evil. Therefore, God would have created free beings that didn't want to evil. After all, God dislikes evil and doesn't want it around. But It didn't, so we have a contradiction.

Well this is hard to answer since we know little about God. But I would say if God has always existed and always will (out of time) then he came with both free will and goodness. He didn't have to choose it. He didn't have to develop like we have to. He came as the final end package. But...

God doesn't have free will. Like I said, a robot.

God is omnipotent and anything is possible if he desired it. I've heard people say "Well God could never do this as he is Love, etc.". Nope...that's putting a chain around God. The correct answer is "God WOULD never do this as jhe is Love".

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[mlong]

I'm betting that the folks that you call Christians who call themselves Christians but really aren't, are the folks that don't agree with *your* interpretation of Christs teachings.

Well actually I was referring to people who come to my church, sit on the pews every Sunday and are only Christian for about an hour every week. Their actions, their morals, etc. don't reflect Christ's teachings.

I'm a Mormon (who *are* Christian, contrary to what your preacher told you) and routinely hear this silliness from born-agains and other myopic new testament believers, and frankly, I am sick and tired of hearing it. May I ask, what do you think the word means?

Well I was never thinking of Mormans but since you bring the issue up I do have some questions. As I understand it Mormanism directly contracts the Bible. For instance, Mormans do not believe in the trinity (one God in three persons) but rather that the father and son are seperate beings. They also believe God was once flesh, that Jesus was his literal son, and that we will all day become just like (read: equal) to God. Now perhaps some of this is misunderstanding but many "anti-Morman" books and websites state this as official Morman teachings. I cannot say for myself since I have not looked into it first hand.

Where do you think it comes from? If we ignore doctrine altogether, then all it means is someone who follows Christ in some fashion. That's it. No more is required. You don't have to believe most of what he said, or even believe that he existed. You just have to follow his teachings in some way. Just because I don't follow your interpretation of things, doesn't mean that I am not a Christian.

Potentially. But if your beliefs directly contradict the Bible then how can they be true christianity? I'm not talking whether you will be saved or not (as you probably will) but rather what it means to be christian.

And saying that I give Christians a bad name because of it is so insulting and rude, as to be a non-Christian act in itself.

Like I said, many people give Christianity a bad name. Just watch some of these evangelists sometime.

Christ himself said, take my name upon you. That is what I've done, and I am Christian, no matter what you say.

Yes but He also said beware of false teachings and to follow him. And for me, that means looking primarily to what He said and what his disciples said. If something disagrees with what they said, then its wrong.

And maybe you missed something in the Old Testament (which is part of the Bible, and not just Psalms and Proverbs, the whole thing), but Judaism is true in many ways. Jesus came and corrected some people who were nitpicking too much, but they weren't wrong in every way. The Old Testament is as much a part of the Bible as the New.

This is true but if you understand it from a Christian viewpoint then it is this... Christ came to fulfill Judaism and not to abolish it. The laws given to Moses were meant to show man that he can never earn his way to heaven and that if you break even one law you're in trouble. It's supposed to show the need for the messiah and ultimately Christ's sacrifice and forgiveness. Thus Jews aren't necessarily wrong if they follow the law to a T, but they sure are missing the point.

Although you may think that the "faith" side of the faith vs works debate is the obvious and correct side, many folks around the world don't agree with you, but that doesn't make them non-Christian.

Well actually it does. Just go read what Jesus, the disciples, and Paul said.

When we die we are judged and this is it.

True, and Jesus will throw out our sentence if we believe in him. He will say "not guilty."

Judged based on what? I thought there weren't any rules? How can we be judged if everything is okay? In a court, when there is no law, the judge cannot make a decision.

See above.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[mjh]

No you missed my point. I was not trying to say that someone is unpure independant of their deeds. Your deeds and thoughts do make you unpure. However, the heart of that impurity is an unspoken belief. The belief that we can do things on our own, apart from God. The belief that we can be self sufficient. This is essentially the act of making yourself into your own god.

IMHO, the belief that we can be self sufficient just does not jibe with reality. I don't regulate the beat of my own heart, or the release of hormones into my own blood stream. Much less do I control the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, or the sun that provides almost all of the energy that fuels all of the life on our planet. Simply put, I can't possibly be self sufficient and live.

And setting ourselves up as our own god is something, so far as I've encoutered, that we are all guilty of. We all seem to believe that we are capable of depending on no one but ourselves. It is this unbelievable worship of ourselves that allows us to justify murdering someone who is getting in the way of our plans. It is the thing that causes us to think that it's ok for us to exert power through rape. It's the thing that justifies lieing, and cheating, and stealing. We think we're owed something by virtue of who we are.

If we stop and recognize that we're not all that, and that we simply are NOT self sufficient and that we absolutely and completely depend on something outside ourselves, then it becomes very difficult to murder, rape, cheat, steal, etc.

As far as all those people before Christ being in hell, all I can say is that it is not for me to judge anyone. CS Lewis describes this very problem in "Mere Christianity". He suggests that the deal is this: acknowledge that you're screwed up, and accept God's plan for your life. For you and me today, that means accepting the realities of Christ's life. For someone who was born before Christ, it may have meant something different. But the whole deal comes down to recognizing that you are not god and that you depend completely on something outside of yourself.

This process, by the way, is called "repenting". That word tends to generate a lot of negative reactions, but it simply means acknowledging yourself as screwed up, and relying on God's plan for your life. The problem is this: I can't ever know whether or not you (or anyone) has repented. I can't ever know if anyone has really done the job of acknowledging their own screwed up selves and accepted God's plan instead. The reason is that it may be much harder for one person, due to his genetics, upbringing, etc, to show one single other person an act of kindness than it is for me to give away all of my money to the poor. Only God knows whether or not anyone has repented, so only God can judge the value of anyone's actions.

God judges justly whether or not those who came before Christ have repented. Just has he judges justly whether or not those who came after have repented. The good news for you is that you don't have to worry about anyone other than yourself and your relationship with God. It's not until you have made yourself right with God that it matters if someone else has.

But, of course, you're completely free to totally reject this if you like. And you're free to consign this to nonsense. My hope is that you might at least be somewhat interested in understanding the Christian point of view, whether or not you decide to agree with it.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[Da Schmiz]

But that's the whole point! Why didn't God create more beings whose 'very nature' was good, who didn't want to do evil? Why not make an Adam and Eve that didn't want to break rules?

They didn't want to break the rules; they wanted to make their own rules.

This is a subtle point that I think most (professed) Christians don't grasp... the original sin was not eating the apple (or whatever fruit it was... the Bible doesn't actually say) or sex (as some people try to claim) but rebellion.

Perhaps I can explain this a little clearer:

God created humans with free will. That means that we can make our own choices as to whether we want to do good or do evil. Adam and Eve were created perfect, meaning that their inclination was toward good and, if they chose, they could have lived their entire lives without ever doing anything evil.

Eve was deceived. The devil told her that, if she did what God had prohibited, she could "become like God, knowing good and bad" -- in essence, this meant that she could either accept the morality and ethics she had been given by God, or she could reject them and choose for herself what was good and what was evil. She made the decision to reject God and make her own choices. Adam was not deceived, but he made the conscious choice to join Eve's side and decide for himself, rather than depending on God for answers.

This left an interesting dilemma: How could anyone know, anyway, what was good and what was evil? Sure, God said this was right and that wasn't, but how could it be proven? This is the most important question in the universe, something we call the issue of universal soverignty: the question of whether God has the right to be soverign, to make the rules, or whether we have the right to make our own rules.

The only way to prove which set of beliefs (or rules) was correct would be to allow each to be tested, and then to compare the results. So God set up an experiment (in which he already knew the outcome, but the purpose is to convince Satan, all the other spirit beings, and us):

He set a limit of time in which we could all make our own decisions. He would make sure that, at any given time, there would always be at least some small group of people who would be doing things according to His will (the control group, if you would), but he did not mandate which ones; everyone would be free to either decide for themselves or else align themselves with God. By the end of the set period of time, the evidence would be clear as to which choice was correct.

This is the only way that the issue could be settled once and for all, and this explains why God does not prevent bad things from happening, even to good people: if he were to prevent people from experiencing the consequences of their (and even others') mistakes, the experiment would be void.

After the experiment is complete, God has the power to restore everything that was lost: renew the earth and the physical universe, heal the physical, emotional, and mental damage among humans, and even bring back to life those that died innocent.

Now, I understand that not everyone will agree with me. You have the right to make your own choice, and I won't (and can't!) abridge that. But I didn't just make this up off the top of my head: this is the result of a lot of deep and careful Bible study. If you want to know why I believe what I do, or want to know how I can reconcile these beliefs with science, history, etc. (and I can, quite to my satisfaction) I'd be happy to explain, to the best of my ability.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[Malcontent]

It's not free will if you will be punished for choosing wrong.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[mlong]

It's not free will if you will be punished for choosing wrong.

Of course it is. I have free will right now. I could go out and murder someone, and I'll be punished. I might get life in prison, or maybe execution. Free will is simply defined as the ability to choose...free choice. Or by the ability to make free choices without them being constrained by external circumstances (like fate).

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[mlong]

These sects believe that when you die, if you've accepted Jesus, and repent your sins - you go to Heaven. Otherwise, your soul is effectively destroyed forever. This has profoundly less impact on the ethics a person demonstrates in one's lifetime than the whole "roasting in the eternal flames of hell getting assraped by demons" deal.

Of course true Christian theology states that those who don't believe do go to hell and live eternity apart from God. The reason for this is God values us so much he will not destroy us. You'll either be in heaven or hell but never destroyed. Now what hell is - that is open to interpretation. We know for sure though that it is eternity apart from God. Whether there is flames and brimstone...I doubt it will make much of a difference.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[Micah]

whoa. Please read this article, which is the most comprehensive Bible study I've seen on whether sinners will actually suffer forever. Unfortunately, there's quite a bit of evidence that they will.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[Micah]

wait... doesn't Mormonism teach that Jesus and Satan were brothers and that we will all become gods? That seems to pretty clearly contradict the Bible to me.

Not that all Mormons believe that (they probably don't), and I'm not saying that a Mormon can't be a saved Christian (there are almost certainly some that are). But from what I've heard of the official teachings of the Mormon church, I can't possibly call it Christian.

Trinity: sure it's an interpretation, but a VERY safe one. Jesus and the Holy Spirit are definitely from God. John 3:16 of course states that Jesus is a unique "son" of God -- not created, like all other beings were. He is literally irreplaceable to God. They are all 3 parts of God with different missions. The Bible clearly speaks of all 3.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[Micah]

> I also wonder how scripture literalists handle the "vaporware" problem of Christianity; people have been believing since the days when Jesus walked on this earth that their generation was the one that would see Jesus come back in glory.

I assume you're talking about Matthew 24:34 -- "I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened."

well the NIV's footnote for 'generation' says 'or race'. I'm not sure whether or not that's accurate.

But it can be argued that the 'this generation' does not refer to the one Jesus was speaking TO. There's some evidence that He was talking about the generation that saw some of the previously mentioned things happen -- like the generation that sees "nation will rise up against nation" (which is probably predicting World War 2).

But yeah, I've kind of wondered the same thing. These are possible answers though. :-)

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[Kiwi]

Christianity is not a "good works" religion.

Mlong,

This particular heresy was invented by Martin Luther; and developed by American fundamentalists. It was, in many ways, a step up from the belif system we had at the time (as I explain in another post in this thread).

I know that you believe in solo scripture. Even so, the Bible does not support your argument:

• Matthew 25:31-46
• James 2:19, 26

Christianity is a relgigion that believes in the importance of good works.

A lot of fundamentalists based their beliefs on a flawed translation of John 3:16, which really should be translated as:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who belives in him might not perish but might have eternal life.

Christianity is not a clique, and it annoys me that the agnostics/atheists here are receiving a gospel that becoming a Christian makes one an arrogant prick.

Well, I guess Matthew 7:13-14,21 come in to play here.

- Sam

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[Kiwi]

God is a God of surprises, obviously. When Jesus returns, I know it will surprise a lot of peoeple, including most Christians.

As I just posted in another article, I think it is kinda sad that the internet causes Christians to get in to these nasty flame wars with each other on places like Slashdot.

One place where I have seen some really mature discussions about God and Jesus is on the Orson Scott Card mailing list. I don't know what got in to me to get so passionate about the (relatively minor) points on which we disagree; I think we have a lot more in common with our faiths than what we disagree on.

My main objection when I was an atheist was the creationists. I am a Christian who belives in Evolution and an old universe still; I don't have to be like an ostrich when it comes to modern science to accept Christ in to my life.

- Sam

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[Micah]

> When Jesus returns, I know it will surprise a lot of peoeple, including most Christians.

No doubt... :/ At least if the pre-trib rapture turns out to be the truth. Seems like it is, but I can't say for sure on that one. There is some reasonable evidence for the mid-post-trib position (i.e. after the Mark of the Beast but before the wrath).

> As I just posted in another article, I think it is kinda sad that the internet causes Christians to get in to these nasty flame wars with each other on places like Slashdot.

well I don't think this was a flamewar. I've certainly seen far worse! Agreed, the Bible says that people will know we are Christians by our love for each other. That is SO key. If we can't show some respect for each other on Slashdot, we're screwed!

My favorite place to discuss Christian issues is Crosswalk.com Forums. There's a great bunch of people there and they chat on everything from the silly to the serious. I'm 'yodermk' on that board.

re: evolution

I'm not going to say I'm 100% certain here, but I *do* lean towards the regular 6-day creation account as recorded in Genesis. I think there are a number of reasonable explanations for how that could be possible. One thing I read just this week that really bolstered my faith in the Genesis account is a book called Eternity in their Hearts by Don Richardson. It talks about how "primitive" folk religions actually point toward Christianity in some amazing ways. There are some tribes that have been isolated and never would have had any contact with Jewish or Christian witness, but they have beliefs that parallel the Fall of Man and the Flood in absolutely astonishing detail! (Not everything in their legend matches the Bible perfectly, but it's surprisingly close.)

But like you implied, this kind of stuff is far less important than the basics of the Gospel. Not to mention getting actively involved in the Great Commission. The more I think about it, the more pumped I am about missions. There is simply no other reason for our existance on this earth!

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[Micah]

oh, and a couple other points about the whole hell thing...

Although it's not a salvation issue, I think it's fairly important to know the truth on this. If sinners really will be tortured eternally, that should give us extra motivation to tell people about Jesus. If they will just be annihilated, well, they still miss out on the joys of heaven, but the absolute urgency isn't there. The biggest possible tragedy is if the truth is that they suffer eternally but we believe they will be annihilated and therefore we are not as motivated to witness to them!

There is a book out, called Divine Revelation of Hell. In it, a lady claims to have been revealed visions of hell for 40 days. Jesus led her in there and showed her around. I haven't read the whole thing, but what I *have* read is FREEEEEAKY. I guess you can possibly write it off as being a hoax, but I *do* believe God can reveal that kind of thing, and why shouldn't He? If this was indeed a revelation from God and it describes the actual hell, and somehow we could make the world sure of that, people would be running to Jesus faster than you can say "First post!"

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[Dr. Manhattan]

> God has free will,

OK

> in which case there is no problem with a being both having free will and yet never wanting to do evil.

OK

... If they were created hardwired to "not want evil", then they have no choice in the matter of decisions between one or the other.

I assume you see the problem there. If God can be both free and never want to do evil, then it isn't a logical contradiction to have "free beings that didn't want to [do] evil".

This God doesn't sound like an automaton to me. It doesn't sound like one incabable of doing things some might consider evil, either.

Like 1 Samuel 15:3 and Joshua 10:40, I agree. Note that if you agree with this, then your professed agreement with the "experiment" hypothesis in the next response is puzzling, since there would definitely be a possibility for God to, at least once in a while, be wrong on a question of ethics and morals.

> After all, God dislikes evil and doesn't want it around.

Perhaps... but more likely it's because God is probably a little stronger in matters of philosophy than you are.

"I know God exists, and He's smarter than you, so there must be something wrong with what you said, even though I personally can't think of it or point it out." Sorry, but that's how that comes across.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[Dr. Manhattan]

...the issue of universal soverignty: the question of whether God has the right to be soverign, to make the rules, or whether we have the right to make our own rules.

I don't think that's phrased well. The notion of God "making" the rules runs smack into the Euthyphro Problem I alluded to in another post. If God's rules are arbitrary, then we simply have the case of "might makes right", the biggest bully on the block gets to make the rules.

On the other hand, if there's something about the rules that are inherently good, then that's something that's not under God's control (otherwise we'd be smack dab in the middle of the former case). God recognizes what's good, It doesn't make the good good.

So, which is it? The Golden Rule ("He who has the gold [power] makes the rules"); or, the rules are just out there, independent of God, and "soverignty" doesn't enter into it?

Now, there's still the possibility that God acts as an oracle, perfectly recognizing what's good and relaying it to us, but as I said, "soverignty" isn't relevant. And in the case of your experiment hypothesis, why not create beings that share the same perfect recognition of, and apparently approval for, good? Why wouldn't that be the best course of action?

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[Malcontent]

This is different.

First of all you are not being punished for doing something only thinking a particular way or simply because you choose not to believe something. TO top it all off there is no evidence for the xistance of god.

So this is not like a murder but more like a contract. God says "if you believe that I exist then I will reward you for eternity but if you don't believe that I exist then I will burn you in hell for eternity.

This is like signing a contract under duress or confessing to murder under torture. It's coerced and the terms are dictated by god.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[Da Schmiz]

If God's rules are arbitrary, then we simply have the case of "might makes right", the biggest bully on the block gets to make the rules.

On the other hand, if there's something about the rules that are inherently good, then that's something that's not under God's control.

I think you miss the point. By definition, God's rules would be good, not arbitrary. There are two reasons: First, since he made the universe, he clearly knows the best way for it to work. Second, since God is an all-wise being (okay, some may diagree, but that's pretty much a given if you believe in a God with the ability to create the universe as we know it) then any rule he makes would be the epitome of wisdom.

To put it another way: God recognizes what's good because he created the underlying structure of everything in the universe -- and the rules are a function of that.

why not create beings that share the same perfect recognition of, and apparently approval for, good? Why wouldn't that be the best course of action?

Two reasons: first, see above. God is the creator; by definition, his creations could not be equal to him, and this means that we could never have as complete a grasp of the complex interrelationships that make up the universe. Second (in a way this is a corollary of the first point), to know completely what choice is best in all instances would imply a way to foreknow the future. God can do this, since he created the space-time fabric of the universe and is therefore obviously not bound by it; we cannot.

Your question then becomes: why did God create the universe in such a way that his creations within it could never be able to make perfect decisions without him? I would argue that the answer is that there was no other way. At this point, however, we have reached a level of such hypothetical esotericism that I don't there's any way we can, as humans, completely understand why.

In a rather roundabout way, that brings us back again to the subject of faith. At some point, you will always reach a gap between the two mountains of evidence, and you will have to jump. In some cases the gap is small, and you can stand with one foot on either side, but such vantages are unstable and often in time collapse either to one side or the other. In the end, it simply comes down to choice... and as someone once said, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[Dr. Manhattan]

By definition, God's rules would be good, not arbitrary. There are two reasons: First, since he made the universe, he clearly knows the best way for it to work.

What about a God that creates a universe and then perversely gives rules to the inhabitants that are ill-suited for that universe, for Its own amusement? I don't think you can get away with that "by definition".

God is an all-wise being... any rule he makes would be the epitome of wisdom.

A theist friend of mine wants to write an evolutionary ethics simulator that he thinks would arrive at things like the Golden Rule and such. Why couldn't a creator of our universe have similar goals in mind - for us to derive our own ethics? More generally, why would a creator necessarily be perfectly wise? Why not just finitely but greatly wise?

Moreover, if such a creator is so greatly superior to us, how could we know anything about It? I mean, even if It told us about Itself, how could we trust that information? It could be fooling us, or not giving us a complete picture. I'm sure a lot of sheep have a pretty worshipful view of their shepherd, and lots of evidence that they are well cared for... until they get to the slaughterhouse.

God is the creator; by definition, his creations could not be equal to him

Creations surpass their creators in specific capacities all the time. That's why we make the class of creations called "tools". None of the creators of Deep Blue could have beat Kasparov at chess, but their creation did. Again I think you'll need to justfity that "by definition".

God recognizes what's good because he created the underlying structure of everything in the universe -- and the rules are a function of that.

Now this is interesting - I haven't run into too many theists who've realized this way of deriving ethics. Like a chessboard has certain rules of operation, and our desire to win means that certain strategies are better than others. Sacrificing your queen early on is almost never a wise move, for example.

There are physical rules that govern how our universe operates, and from our desires we can derive what strategies are best for achieving them.

Of course, this means that we don't need God as a law-giver (soverignty and authority don't matter to what's ethical or not), only perhaps as a law-relayer. And that has yet to be established.

...to know completely what choice is best in all instances would imply a way to foreknow the future.

Why couldn't we be created so that we could see the full four-dimensional structure of space-time? Again, justification is needed.

I would argue that the answer is that there was no other way. At this point, however, we have reached a level of such hypothetical esotericism that I don't there's any way we can, as humans, completely understand why...that brings us back again to the subject of faith

Well, as C.S. Lewis said, faith is having the courage of your convictions, being able to stick to what you've determined is right in the face of adversity (like not panicking when the anaesthesiologist drops the mask on your face; you've already decided that the surgery is the best course of action).

Faith is not believing in something depsite what your judgement tells you. And my best judgement is that no theist point of view that I've come across holds up.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[naasking]

> then ask, "Okay, God is perfect and we're told It will never choose to do evil. So, does God have free will?"

Yes, God can do whatever He wants. He could be an evil God if he wanted. But He doesn't want to do that, because his very nature is good. I mean, I could get on all fours and act like a dog if I wanted, but why would I want to?

By saying God is all good, and thus would only perform good acts, you are essentially saying that He has no free will. He cannot choose from a selection of possibilities, he must always choose the good choice, otherwise He is not all good. One or the other.

Re:Interesting point about Christianity

[naasking]

I am not assuming it. There are many situations which have multiple "evil/bad" choices, and only one good choice. I need only provide a counter-example to disprove the assertion that God has free will and is all-good.

Re:Obligatory religious quibble

[bravehamster]

Hmmm. Seems to me that could equally be the basis for an argument against an "Author". If you look at life on earth, there is basically only one way to do it. It's all genes and DNA and every complex living thing shares something in common with the others. There is no "artistic expression" that shows up at all.

It's hard to see the diverse creative gifts of an author when you're only looking at a single page of a novel.

Re:"because God told me"

[jonabbey]

And why not? Faith is meant to transcend the scientifically knowable. As long as one doesn't cling to one's faith to the extent of shutting out scientifically demonstrable and materially important facts, what's the harm in feeling positive, or even joyful, about the universe?

I'm glad that Larry is loved by the universe, even though I myself tend to believe we're all just a fascinating lot of wondrous complexity arising out of a bunch of initially unordered bits. Sort of like Perl. ;-)

Re:"because God told me"

[Lemmy Caution]

The truest part of his statement is his honesty in admitting that he was raised in a very religious environment, and that his own personal religiousity was a way of trying to consolidate and preserve as much of that as he can (which is often part and parcel of preserving a relationship with one's family of origin) while still maintaining some logical consistency.

For any truly intelligent, open-minded evangelical Christian, the hard question is "so, you really believe that all the Buddhists, Jews, Hindus and secularists are all damned to hell, and that only people in the Born-Again Club get in?" Because this is such a counter-intuitive notion to anyone who would attribute any compassion to God, that salvation hinge not on the stance of your spirit but on your doctrinal commitments, that many cannot really bring themselves to say it.

For me, the saddest bit of it is that a true authentic sense of spiritual feeling, compassion, and expansiveness becomes burdened with exclusionary and sanctimonious doctrines and attitudes. Larry Wall seems like a truly wonderful person, almost despite his creeds as much as because of them.

Re:Obligatory religious quibble

[mlong]

Hmmm. Seems to me that could equally be the basis for an argument against an "Author". If you look at life on earth, there is basically only one way to do it. It's all genes and DNA and every complex living thing shares something in common with the others. There is no "artistic expression" that shows up at all.

I think you're quite wrong there. What you're saying is like me saying there is no artistic expression in anything I write since they all use Perl and run under UNIX? Personally I see a lot of expression and differences when I look at all of the types of animals.

Why to keep perl / why not to use domain spec lang

[Ars-Fartsica]

In short - to reuse the packages you may have already written to do offline work. mod_perl lets you reuse your existing logic.

What I am basically saying is that I don't see the value in a domain-specific language for web scripting. Even outside of perl, java and C# provide good tools for reusing the language you already use elsewhere in your web apps.

And the winner of the ultimate oxymoron prize is..

[Anonymous Coward]

> truly intelligent, open-minded evangelical Christian

Sorry Larry

[Reality Master 101]

God is good to people who really look for him.

This is actually a premise we can test, and it's simply false. Many studies have been done comparing religious and non-religious people, and it's never been found that religious people end up with "better luck" (better health, better livelyhood, better children, etc) that non-religious people.

Now, you could argue that perhaps these studies aren't correcting properly for whether someone is "really" looking for God, but at the very least we can assume that if God is "good" to those people, then the effect is pretty subtle.

Re:Sorry Larry

[tweek]

Depends on what you consider "good".

Was God good to Job, his most faithful of servants?

Good is a relative term. Many health and wealth preachers will try and tell you otherwise but it's simply not the case.

I would consider God being good to me if I wake up in the morning or if I don't die on the way to work because of some jackass who doesn't understand the concept of a loop exit.

The Bible never promised riches to those who were faithful. Well not unless you count the ones that we store up in heaven. Hell, Jesus himself said that.

Re:Sorry Larry

[mlong]

This is actually a premise we can test, and it's simply false. Many studies have been done comparing religious and non-religious people, and it's never been found that religious people end up with "better luck" (better health, better livelyhood, better children, etc) that non-religious people.

Um try asking a true Christian...and I mean one who believes and is born again, not just someone in title who attends church every Sunday because they want to socialize. Also God does what is in our best interests, not what we want. I'd love to be a billionaire, but God hasn't reigned down any money on me yet. I guess he must be evil then.

Re:Sorry Larry

[TheHulk]

If you use dissimilar measurement systems, your math will never compute... What I mean is what do you define as "better livelyhood" or "better children"? To a non-believer a better kid may be a kid that grows up to play in the NFL, looks like Brittney Spears, or has the IQ of 200. To a Christian, non of this matters, and a kid that's physically handicapped and loves their family may seem like the best gift anyone could ask for. To some, making a six-figure salary may seem like a good livelihood, to others, just making a salary may seem "lucky".... To some, living to 100 years old may seem like a healthy life, and to a other, being able to live at all may seem like good health. My point is you cannot affix a value to certain life situations, because not everyone values these earthly situations the same way.... Whether your Christian or not, this holds true.

Re:Sorry Larry

[aborchers]

Your reply is presumptuous. He did not specify any particular way in which this "good" manifests. You assumed one. Perhaps by "good", he simply means that people who seek God are given a peace of mind that relieves them from the agitating impulse to troll others for their world views.

I anticipate and appreciate the retort that evangelicals are often (OK, generally more often) pricks of similar magniture to atheists. I'm not defending either here, just the right of all God's creatures (so to speak) to seek or ignore him/her/it/null in their own way and spend their time on better enterprises than rattling each other's cages.

Re:Sorry Larry

[Reality Master 101]

The Bible never promised riches to those who were faithful.

The point is not riches or whatever, the point is that statistically it's never been shown that religious people have ANY difference in life over non-religious people. If God is really "good to the believers" in SOME way, it should measurable in SOME way.

Re:Sorry Larry

[Boing]

Larry: "God is good to people who really look for him."

"This is actually a premise we can test, and it's simply false. Many studies have been done comparing religious and non-religious people, and it's never been found that religious people end up with 'better luck'"

That doesn't sound like "simply false" to me. Sounds more like "not necessarily true", which is a far cry.

I think anyone with a basic understanding of the way religions tend to work would tell you that the perks of being religious occur when you die, not while you're alive. Many evil people have great lives, many (some of the best) good people have crap lives. The premise of the whole thing is that everyone gets their just desserts in the end.

I'm not saying that premise is correct. But you did not satisfactorily refute Larry's statement with your argument.

Re:Sorry Larry

[Reality Master 101]

You're trying to test a different premise: God is good -- here on this earth in material ways we can detect -- to people who really look for him. Jesus said not to expect that.

That was seemingly Larry's premise: That God is "good" to people in the here and now. If it's not in a material way, then that contradicts Larry's premise, unless you're going to count "peace of mind at not having to think about the issue of God's existence anymore" as God being good to someone.

Re:Sorry Larry

[tweek]

That's simply not the case. Can you REALLY measure happiness? Some things are immeasurable. You're getting hung up in the tangible. Wind is not tangible. You can't touch it. You can feel it's effects and see it's effects but is it tangible in the same sense as a glass of water?

I'm alot like you in that I think too much about things. It's a blessing AND a curse.

Take something like love. Is my love for my girlfriend measurable? Sure I can buy her gifts and tell her I love her but there is no true measure of love because by nature it is intangible. It's this ethereal concept.

Something interesting that the Bible talks about is faith vs. works. Meaning are we given salvation because of our faith or the "good" deeds we do.

Paul says that your faith in God is enough to save you but that the end result of TRUE faith is good works. A TRUE faith is evidenced by the works of the person who has that faith. It's a natural by-product.

And now here's another twist to the whole thing. Not only are good works the offspring of your faith but you yourself aren't even doing the good works. God is doing them THROUGH you. Pretty neat.

In the end, if you don't honestly WANT to believe in God, you aren't. Nothing can change your mind about that. But if you are a true seeker of truth, I feel that WHATEVER the real truth is (Jesus, Buddah, Allah) will reveal itself to you.

Re:Sorry Larry

[rutledjw]

Except for one thing. In multiple places in the Bible, particularly from Christ, it's stated that there are no physical rewards in this world as a reward for faith.

God doesn't provide physical comfort, the promise is for everlasting life after death, in this world, it's a spiritual "comfort". I use quotes because even then, as Christians we are tested. God will test and push us that we may grown in our relationship with him. As Paul stated, we'll not be tested beyond what we can endure, but we WILL be tested.

In short, you'll not find measure in the way you wrote. I don't know of any way to measure "spiritual gifts"...

Re:Sorry Larry

[MAXOMENOS]

Um try asking a true Christian...and I mean one who believes and is born again, not just someone in title who attends church every Sunday because they want to socialize.

Eventually, someone needs to invent a True-Chrstian-Detector device so that we can sort out the "real believers" from everyone else. Until then, I've only got one way to tell whether someone is a Christian, and that is to ask them:

Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?

If they answer in the affirmative, then I have to take them at their word. Every other standard I've heard of or seen is simply too arbitrary, along the lines of, "whatever I believe is the Christian belief."

Re:Sorry Larry

[Zathrus]

So, I suppose that you're going to ignore the numerous studies that show that "people of faith" have a higher survival rate for cancer and other long term illnesses? Or, at the very least, suffer less depression? (Yes, unsurprisingly, different studies have had different results).

Yes, I'm an atheist. And I raise an eyebrow at these studies as well, but to some extent I'm unsurprised. There's a great deal of psychology when it comes to survival of a long term illness, and people who believe in a "higher power" may very well have a better attitude toward all of it, believing that God will pull them through, or that if they die then they're at least going to a better place. Ask any Oncology doctor -- they'll tell you that a good attitude is essential to surviving, and as such believers may be more likely to have that attitude.

And, of course, others have made commentary regarding how you measure "better", and that some measurements may not be accurate. I know that I'd rather be poor and happy rather than rich and miserable. (Of course, I can say this having never really been poor... shrug... but I've been deeply unhappy before in my life and I know I don't like that, and that money doesn't solve it).

Re:Sorry Larry

[ArthurDent]

How about this:

It is measurable, it's just that we as the created can't do it. How do ya like them apples? :-)

Seriously though, the Bible says (Romans 8:28) "And we know that God works all things out for the good of those who love Him."

Now, the question is, who defines what "the good of those who love him" looks like. Obviously, it's God who is working it out, so God gets to pick. Now, the One Thing that God wants from us once we believe is for us to love each other in the same way that God loves us, that He gave His life up to save us. Therefore, the good that he's working out is for us to learn to love each other better. (If it didn't have the wrong connotation you could say that God wants us to be better lovers! :-D)

Ben

Re:Sorry Larry

[Reality Master 101]

You're woefully inadequate at disproving God's existence.

I made no claims about the existence of God. In fact, that was Larry's first premise. I was testing his second premise.

But since you bring it up, it's impossible to prove that God does not exist. However, Occam's Razor would indicate that the probability of God is very low.

Re:Sorry Larry

[tshak]

Material good is a very narrow way to seek God's goodness. The bottom line is that there is evil in the world: "Shit Happens". Also, following Christ and "being religious" are two different things (although there is a relation). Remember that many people are religious for the sake of religion (religiosity) and they are very judgmental and bitter people. I think those who are "non-religious" are probably much happier with thier lives.

Re:Sorry Larry

[gwernol]

So, I suppose that you're going to ignore the numerous studies that show that "people of faith" have a higher survival rate for cancer and other long term illnesses? Or, at the very least, suffer less depression? (Yes, unsurprisingly, different studies have had different results).

These studies do indeed exist and are indeed true. As you go on to say, its not terribly surprising that "people of faith" have a psychology that can help them in some situations. Sometimes its good to be fatalistic.

However that's not what Larry was talking about. He quite explicitly is talking about God. Singular and in his case Christian. If "good things" truly did happen to those who were looking for Larry's God, then they by definition wouldn't happen to people how believed in other, contradictory gods. This would be measurable. The fact that this effect happens to all "people of faith" tells us that it is faith, not what you have faith in that is the critical factor.

Wiccans, Muslims, Satanists, Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Scientologists. They all have this "faith factor". From this we can either conclude that all these religions are equally true and all approach the same God. Or we can conclude that it is not as Larry (and many others) claim the nearness to God that is the cause, but blind faith in anything at all.

So faith is useful in some circumstances. You can equally believe in a stick of wood or Joe Pescapo (with apologies to George Carlin) as in a God and it works just as well. And in many cases having faith is a huge impediment to you.

On balance I'd rather not believe in a lie on the off-chance it will help me out a little in some circumstances at a known and definate cost.

Re:Sorry Larry

[mlong]

Eventually, someone needs to invent a True-Chrstian-Detector device so that we can sort out the "real believers" from everyone else. Until then, I've only got one way to tell whether someone is a Christian, and that is to ask them:

Another good way is to look at their actions and personality as in "fruits of the spirit". I don't know the exact verse off hand but Paul discusses traits that show when someone is in touch with the holy spirit.

Re:Sorry Larry

[Zathrus]

However that's not what Larry was talking about. He quite explicitly is talking about God. Singular and in his case Christian.

No, now you're adding your own layer on top of it.

Larry stated a requirement for two things - that you acknowledge the existence of God, and that Good Things Happen to Those Who Believe in God.

Ok, so if you go strictly by that then yes, polytheistic religions are right out. If, however, you do a s/God/Higher Power/g then what God(s) you believe in are irrelevant. Larry stated that he believes in Jesus, but the rest was vaguely enough stated that it didn't necessarily tie it to Judeo-Christianity.

Another poster said it very well - if there is a God (or higher power, or whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it), then all the various religions may very well be akin to the blind men describing an elephant. They're all basing their beliefs on an inadequate picture of the whole, and yet they're all touching upon some of the truths incorporated by that whole.

When you strip off a lot of the crap that humans have added to religion (as opposed to faith/belief), most of them do come down to similar cores. There's something that created everything and would you quit screwing over everyone else for your own personal gains?

My personal standpoint is that part A isn't true, but I'll admit that a lot of that is predjudice against a lot of the bullshit that religious extremists spew. I deeply believe in part B, and often wish that more people would stop trying to screw each other over (often because the aforementioned extremists exhort them to do so).

Re:Sorry Larry

[MAXOMENOS]

Another good way is to look at their actions and personality as in "fruits of the spirit". I don't know the exact verse off hand but Paul discusses traits that show when someone is in touch with the holy spirit.

Well, I don't know. The problem here is that different sects of Christianity have very different ideas of what constitutes "fruits of the spirit." Admittedly I'm an outsider formerly on the inside, but to my eyes, none of these sects have an adequate claim to the best set of criteria. (OTOH, I suspect that the people who scream the loudest about having the best criteria, are the same people whose own spiritual fruits have grown rotten.)

Re:Sorry Larry

[mlong]

Well, I don't know. The problem here is that different sects of Christianity have very different ideas of what constitutes "fruits of the spirit." Admittedly I'm an outsider formerly on the inside, but to my eyes, none of these sects have an adequate claim to the best set of criteria. (OTOH, I suspect that the people who scream the loudest about having the best criteria, are the same people whose own spiritual fruits have grown rotten.)

It is actually quite interesting to read what the bible says about this. For example, it says if you speak in tounges you better have someone sitting beside you translating it, otherwise shut up. Likewise, if you do a prophecy it better come true or you're a liar and not speaking for God (too bad some sects predicting the end of the world don't get this). Personally I don't care for these churches where people convulse, scream, pass out, etc. The Lord isn't putting on a circus...much of this these people do theirselves and is not "gifts"

Re:Sorry Larry

[Dirtside]

Wind is not tangible. You can't touch it. You can feel it's effects and see it's effects but is it tangible in the same sense as a glass of water?

You're not serious? You think that one particular state of matter (gas) qualifies as "intangible"? What do you think you're TOUCHING when you "feel" wind? That's the wind STRIKING YOU.

Take something like love. Is my love for my girlfriend measurable? Sure I can buy her gifts and tell her I love her but there is no true measure of love because by nature it is intangible. It's this ethereal concept.

Actually, it is measurable. What we call "love" is simply a set of biochemical/biophysical states in (mostly) the brain. I'm not scientist enough to enumerate them, but they can be measured, as can any other physical quantity of the body.

And now here's another twist to the whole thing. Not only are good works the offspring of your faith but you yourself aren't even doing the good works. God is doing them THROUGH you. Pretty neat.

Not neat at all. Massively inefficient. If God really wants good works done, he'd do them himself. How many "good works" have gone wrong because God chose incompetent morons to do his work for him?

Re:Sorry Larry

[naasking]

Many studies have been done comparing religious and non-religious people, and it's never been found that religious people end up with "better luck" (better health, better livelyhood, better children, etc) that non-religious people.

Some things that are good for you, are not what you had in mind. Not an argument for God, just a point to keep in mind (ie. study was looking for good luck, but good luck may not be what a person needs for "development" or "salvation").

Re:Sorry Larry

[seebs]

God is very good to me. You and I would see the same sunset... but would we appreciate it the same way?

Damian's Klingon module

[Rupert]

Does anyone know where this is? I can't find it on CPAN.

Re:Damian's Klingon module

[Anonymous DWord]

use Lingua::tlhIngan::SeHmeH;

$mI'wiJ = 10;

teHtaHvIS ($mI'wiJ > 0 ) {
tIqel (1..$mI'wiJ) {
yItaH teHchugh $mI'wiJ % 2;
print '*'x$mI'wiJ, "\n";
}
$mI'wiJ--;
}

The question wasn't about ethics

[Ted V]

With all due respect, the initial question was "How can you believe in God?" and not "Which of the huge litany of Christian, Catholic, and pseudo-Christian ethical laws do you think actually apply, and how do you reconcile the ones that seem to conflict with scientific evidence?"

Larry really was right-- a lot of people's perceptions make the question more complicated than it needs to be.

wall and morality

[Anonymous Coward]

Larry Wall ses: "Because if it turns out to be 0, then we really are the slaves of our selfish genes, and there's no basis for morality other than various forms of tribalism"

there it is again! Religionists, including christians, believe they have a monopoly on morality! this is ignorant and insulting, and you should be ashamed of yourself. Here's a couple of alternatives upon which to base a morality:
1) The Golden Rule: Treat others as you would like to be treated.
2) Homo Sapiens is a social animal, but it is not possible to put any number of animals together in a society without establishing rules of engagement; i.e. a moral code. Call it tribalism if you wish, but since every religious cult seems to have its own moral code, i don't see how religious tribalism is in any way superior to secular tribalism. If there really is an omniscient, all-powerful creator, he/she has done a really shi--y job of getting across a consistent message.

Re:wall and morality

[frank_adrian314159]

If man is but a clever piece of meat, give me a compelling reason I should bother treating him as anything else.

Because you would not want to live in a society that normally applied that rule to you. It's called self interest...

Re:wall and morality

[Marasmus]

Very good pick. I don't think many people saw that snuck-in presumption in Wall's statement. It's hard to blame Wall for it, as it's so commonly entrenched in the dialogue of the religious.

Okay. So let's say that 'morality', 'ethics', and 'good' exist in 'individuals', 'societies', and 'religions', inclusively, simultaneously... Would it be sensible to say that morality/ethics/good exists higher on the philosophical food chain than individuals, societies, and religion? After all, it's present in all of them, inclusively. This sort of behavior normally happens when the included concept sits above its subject on the totem pole.

At least that's the road I take. I have no qualms with religion, atheism, etc... They all are pretty accurate, given their point of view. I just have a hunch that there's a larger point of view available that can encompass them all. And perhaps it goes by the name 'good'. :)

Re:wall and morality

[spiro_killglance]

Because they are clever a vengeful, and on the
whole tend to return how they are treated.

Re:wall and morality

[seebs]

I think you're mistaking a subtle point. Yes, there are lots of other moral systems.

However, *YOU CANNOT SHOW ANY OF THEM TO BE TRUE OR RELEVANT*.

By accepting a moral system - any moral system - you are doing exactly what all the religious people do; you are making a blind assertion that can never be shown except in terms of other assertions.

I would argue that people have a pretty good inbuilt sense of morality. I don't care whether you call it an evolved set of rules, or God's law written on your heart. However, I think it's important to be intellectually honest and admit that we accept it because it feels right, not because of proofs.

Re:"because God told me"

[anomaly]

If we take at face value your assertion that we're a lot "of...complexity arising out of a bunch of...unordered bits" how can we who have arisen from randomness have any hope that the logic, reason, and thought processes we have exist with any semblance of order at all?

Are we not then randomly "reasoning" our way through the randomness of the universe? If that's the case, how can we have any faith in the conclusions we draw from that kind of reasoning?

I prefer to believe that there is a measure of order that is objective.

Anomaly
PS - God loves you and longs for relationship with you. If you want to know more about this, please email me.

Only Larry Wall

[The Pim]

could get away with using the word "renaissanciest".

Lately, I've seen more and more uptight types[1] skewer Larry as a half-assed linguist, a half-assed language designer, a half-assed art historian, and a half-assed philosopher. What they don't realize is that Larry sees things from so many perspectives--some entirely original--and incorporates them so fluidly, that analyzing him in any narrow way is laughably short-sighted. Yes, he is educated in these fields, but expecting him to come off sounding like an orthodox linguist, language designer, art historian, or philosopher entirely misses his true gifts.

Set aside your judgement for a moment, and simply savor the output of one of the most creative, wittiest, and just plain renaissanciest minds with which we have the pleasure to associate. (Oh, he's also a nice guy and never said anything mean about you. :-) )

[1] Yes, they're mostly Python advocates

Re:Only Larry Wall

[Da VinMan]

Please mod up the parent; if for no other reason than because it's true. Perl is a lot of things, but inherently "readable" is not one of them. Hell, my wife was able to read Python when I walked her through a small sample (she's not a programmer at all). I showed her some Perl and she didn't even want to hear. She said something about "why would anyone want to use that?".

BTW - QuaintRcky - I'm not able to imagine Python being able to do anything that Java can't also do. Python may make it more elegant (especially if you get into some fancy lambda stuff), but that's about it. No???

Re:Only Larry Wall

[The Pim]

He does indeed seem like a nice guy, but also one who has a tendency to put words into mouths.

Larry said,

Python's slogan is "There's only one obvious way to do it."

That's right there in The Zen of Python.

One thing I have never heard a real python programmer say is that there is only one way to do it.

Larry didn't say that. Nobody said that. That would be ridiculous. Even the "one obvious way" mantra is a point of contention among Python programmers (as the other respondant pointed out, check the comp.lang.python discussions).

By the way, I don't mean to criticize people who prefer Python. I like Python too, especially compared to writing Java. I merely decry the trend to cast Perl and Larry as a dilettanti and a bad hack (in some order). Most of it is mean-spirited and has little merit.

Re:Only Larry Wall

[PhilHibbs]

skewer Larry as a half-assed linguist, a half-assed language designer, a half-assed art historian, and a half-assed philosopher.

That gives him a sum of two asses, no wonder he produces so much crap. ;^)

Science dosn't nessarly conflect with God.

[jellomizer]

Part of science is to prove that it exists. Just because you cant find evidence that prove that God exisits, dosent mean that God dosent exisit. I have not heard of any sciencetific method of Proving that God dosent exist. If you cant prove that something exisit then you have to prove that it dosent exist to be scientifically proven that God dosent exist. So if a Scienctist beleaves in God that dosent conflect with his science because God hasent been proven or Disproven. At best science seems to show that parts of the religious text are not nessarly word for word. Witch most religous people (including priest and bishops, etc) dont take the entire text literal.

Re:Science dosn't nessarly conflect with God.

[jellomizer]

The point is not to say that God does or Does not exist. But to point out that Beleaving in God dosent conflect with the sciencetific mind. For a scienctist who beleaves is God wil work to understand how God created everything in better detail. If one dosent beleave in God he is looking to see how thing are. Relgion Is Not Science. and to say that if a person is religious then they cant be a good scienetist is a foolish statement.

WWJD??

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Larry said what I've been thinking for a long time - this whole "What Would Jesus Do?" business.

I'm a Christian, been that way for a long time (in the Protestant Evangelical sense of the word). Frankly, the answer to WWJD?? is "Probably not what I'm going to do." It may be morally motivational for some, but frankly for me it's very hard to imagine "What would (the Son of) God do here??" when you consider both a macro (in addition to micro) view of God.

Anyway, great interview.

Re:Obligatory religious quibble

[blamanj]

You miss the point. It's not the reuse of the same four genetic letters that's at issue (though it would be interesting to see some non-carbon-based life forms). It's that they are in identical sequences.

Is your writing artistic expression if you share the exact same sentences 97% of the time with a previous work?

You might want to discuss this theory with a publisher, if you're correct that you can publish the same novel over, and over again you can make a ton of money.

Wait, isn't that what Tom Clancy does? Oh, it's OK, we were talking about art.

Re:"because God told me"

[mlong]

For any truly intelligent, open-minded evangelical Christian, the hard question is "so, you really believe that all the Buddhists, Jews, Hindus and secularists are all damned to hell, and that only people in the Born-Again Club get in?" Because this is such a counter-intuitive notion to anyone who would attribute any compassion to God, that salvation hinge not on the stance of your spirit but on your doctrinal commitments, that many cannot really bring themselves to say it.

So here you are thinking for God. If God says you must believe in him to be saved, why is that so hard to follow? And how can you say a Hindu believes in the one true God? Because a Hindu doesn't. It's not most people on this planet haven't been exposed to Christianity and can say "Well I never knew!". It's not like its a hard religion. You don't have to follow hundreds of laws, you don't have to bow down 5 times a day...you just have to believe. He's made the path fairly easy and if people don't follow it then its because they chose to not follow it and miss the train. It's silly for people to keep arguing how evil God is because he'll send everyone to hell who refuses to believe in him.

Re:Obligatory religious quibble

[Chris Pimlott]

If you look at life on earth, there is basically only one way to do it. It's all genes and DNA and every complex living thing shares something in common with the others. There is no "artistic expression" that shows up at all.

That's just one level. You could say "all x86 operating systems are the same" since they all run on the same instruction set. For life on earth, 'it' (as in TMTOWTDI) means staying alive and managing to procreate. And there's an amazing variety of interesting and 'artistic' ways.

I guess I'm a bit confused...

[Ted V]

I guess I'm a bit confused... Since when was the whole point of Christianity getting into Heaven and avoiding Hell? If your view of religion is just about what happens "after death", then I submit that perhaps you're missing the point. Do you really think God made this whole world just to throw it away in a few thousand years after it starts getting interesting?

Not that there isn't any room for discussions of an afterlife, but my impression of Christianity from the Bible reading I've done seems to imply that Christianity is far more about the present world.

My theory is that most Christians look for God to do stuff in the real world and don't see it, so they assume that's because religion only matters for the afterlife. It's a defense mechanism that avoids admitting, "I must have misunderstood something about what God wants."

Re:I guess I'm a bit confused...

[joshki]

It's not. The point of Christianity is to accept Jesus as your personal saviour and Lord. This is the most important part -- Jesus will save you, and in doing so He's going to change the way you live your life. If you don't change, you don't believe -- it's that simple. Many people understand the saviour part -- but most forget the part that you have to accept His control over your life.

The point the original poster was trying to make is that your salvation is not dependant on performing good works -- it's dependant on accepting Jesus, and allowing Him to change your life.

Christianity is about a life change -- not a fire insurance policy.

Re:I guess I'm a bit confused...

[jafac]

joshki wrote:
It's not. The point of Christianity is to accept Jesus as your personal saviour and Lord. This is the most important part -- Jesus will save you, and in doing so He's going to change the way you live your life. If you don't change, you don't believe -- it's that simple. Many people understand the saviour part -- but most forget the part that you have to accept His control over your life.

The point the original poster was trying to make is that your salvation is not dependant on performing good works -- it's dependant on accepting Jesus, and allowing Him to change your life.

- - - -
That's YOUR sect's interpretation of scripture.

Re:I guess I'm a bit confused...

[mlong]

I guess I'm a bit confused... Since when was the whole point of Christianity getting into Heaven and avoiding Hell? If your view of religion is just about what happens "after death", then I submit that perhaps you're missing the point. Do you really think God made this whole world just to throw it away in a few thousand years after it starts getting interesting?

No that was just the point I decided to discuss. Christianity is an entire package. That is why I said elsewhere on thsi topic that if you believe in the Lord and accept the holy spirit then He will slowly change you from the inside out. Thus its not that you aren't allowed to do stuff, but rather you do not desire to do stuff (ie immoral stuff).

Not that there isn't any room for discussions of an afterlife, but my impression of Christianity from the Bible reading I've done seems to imply that Christianity is far more about the present world.

Yes it is about both but more importantly what happens in the next world/life. This is why being a martyr in Christianity is not such a bad thing. Jesus spends a great deal of time talking about such things such as he is preparing a mansion for us and he will return and make all things new, etc. Of course being a Christian is all about living a livestyle pleasing to God. So you don't just sit around twidling your thumbs waiting to die...you live life to its fullest, but more importantly, live it as God intended (morally and spiritually).

My theory is that most Christians look for God to do stuff in the real world and don't see it, so they assume that's because religion only matters for the afterlife. It's a defense mechanism that avoids admitting, "I must have misunderstood something about what God wants."

This is very true. God always answers prayers, but sometime his answer is "no" or "not yet" and thats something that is hard for some Christians to accept. God is looking out for what is in our best interests, not our desires.

Re:"because God told me"

[Lemmy Caution]

If I shot everyone who doesn't believe that I'm the smartest kid on my block - even if I *am* the smartest kid on my block - I'm an asshole. If God damns to eternal punishment everyone who doesn't believe that he incarnated as a carpenter 2000 years ago, and not as a blue shephard 3000 years ago, then he's a far, far bigger asshole. What one believes is fairly arbitrary - belief is just that, a suspicion that a claim is true.

Again, a God who behaves like that is an infantile jerk.

Re:"because God told me"

[jonabbey]

If we take at face value your assertion that we're a lot "of...complexity arising out of a bunch of...unordered bits" how can we who have arisen from randomness have any hope that the logic, reason, and thought processes we have exist with any semblance of order at all?

Are we not then randomly "reasoning" our way through the randomness of the universe? If that's the case, how can we have any faith in the conclusions we draw from that kind of reasoning?

I think it were better not to engage in a long religious discussion here. I'd just say that evolution is not a purely random process.. selection is a tremendous force for order in biological evolution, and has built great structure and order in us, even as our existence dances on the edge of chaos. That's what makes life magical.

If you want or need greater certainty than that affords, then by all means you should seek such out. I don't feel a need for absolute standards of truth, because I don't believe I can ever have omniscience, and I'm basically ok with that.

Did Larry Ever Work for the Government?

[daviskw]

Larry wrote: But as with any slogan, there are some qustionable assumptions hidden behind the sentiment. We assume that it's obvious which things should be easy or hard, and that the things that are currently easy are the things that ought to be easy. We assume that making the hard things easy will necessarily cause the easy things to become hard. But sometimes it's not obvious what should be easy or hard. Sometimes the wrong things are easy. And sometimes there are ways to make the hard things easier without making the easy things harder.
This paragraph should be taken out and shot. ;)

Re:"because God told me"

[mlong]

If I shot everyone who doesn't believe that I'm the smartest kid on my block - even if I *am* the smartest kid on my block - I'm an asshole. If God damns to eternal punishment everyone who doesn't believe that he incarnated as a carpenter 2000 years ago, and not as a blue shephard 3000 years ago, then he's a far, far bigger asshole. What one believes is fairly arbitrary - belief is just that, a suspicion that a claim is true.
Again, a God who behaves like that is an infantile jerk.

No God would be a far bigger jerk if he was not just. Who is the bigger jerk, a God who punishes those who don't believe, or one who doesn't? If someone robbed and killed me, and they never believed/asked for forgiveness, then God owes it to me to punish them. Also all you have to do is believe...he's made the path easy. I don't think anyone will go to hell who did not choose it. There are scriptures which say God is patient because he doesn't want anyone to perish. So you think he's lying and he really enjoys destroying and punishing those he created? The bible says God is a god of Love.

Re:"because God told me"

[Lemmy Caution]

It's a good thing? What could be more arbitrary than what one happens to believe? Like Larry himself noted, that's far more a function of your background and environment than of anything else.

The Catholic doctrine of salvation is far more inclusive than the evangelical one. The Catholics believe in "baptism by desire" - meaning that if you simply have an attitude that would be open to salvation if you knew it existed, you would be saved (i.e., your spiritual stance, which is distinct from your spiritual health) - then you are saved. (Yes, they believe that the sacrifice and resurrection is the mechanism of salvation, but that the salvific force of the resurrection doesn't require explicit belief.)

I really can't understand how anyone could sustain the cognitive dissonance of the evangelical doctrine of redemption. It's like Bible literalism - so infantile, so pathetic.

Re:Obligatory religious quibble

[mlong]

Is your writing artistic expression if you share the exact same sentences 97% of the time with a previous work?

Many artists build upon their previous work. And it shows you that the works all came from the same artist. If DNA works so well, why do something radically different? I don't think I missed the point at all. You're saying, "all of your programs are in Perl so that just aren't artistic. If you had created your own programming language for every script you wrote, THAT would be artistic."

Awesome.

[sootman]

Great interview, Larry, and let me be another to say "Thanks!" for Perl. My favorite line from the piece: 'Christians are fond of asking: "What would Jesus do in this situation?" Unfortunately, they very rarely come up with the correct answer, which is: "Something unexpected!"'

could that *be* more perfect?

(btw, I'm sure you've seen the .sig here on slashdot-- "WWJD? JWRTFM!")

Re:"because God told me"

[anomaly]

I promise that I'll not engage in a long religious discussion here, but there seems to be a cognitive dissonance in your reasoning -
What *is* order if there's no absolute truth?

How can you say that structure exists outside an objective standard?

BTW - I hold no hope for omniscience, either.

Respectfully,
Anomaly

WWJD?

[Bilbo]

Larry, I like your answer to this. The WWJD craze always bothered me. I suppose it has some merit, but it comes across as trite. Chances are, He would do the last thing we would expect, mostly because He's, "writing the story from the middle."

Re:WWJD?

[GypC]

Yes I've always prefered WWWD , myself.

Re:WWJD?

[kindbud]

For a Klondike bar?

Re:"because God told me"

[Lemmy Caution]

I don't care about the Bible. You already have to be a believing Christian to care about the Bible, and even many believing Christians don't put the Bible first. It's just a book with a complex, human, politicized history. And it's been questionably translated several times over. I'm an agnostic/athiest, albeit one who recieved substantial theological training from Jesuits and Dominicans, and read his share of Barth, Tillich and the like.

What is "just" about making assent to a single doctrine the basis of eternal damnation? If "the law of God is writ in the heart of Man", could such a morally counter-intuitive stance really be the law of God?

religious debate

[circletimessquare]

before i jump in and join the debate about religion, how will my comments here affect my karma? no, i mean my Karma? wait, i mean... oh, nevermind ;-P

"Hymn #42"?

[Mendax Veritas]

That would be the Jethro Tull song of that name, right?

Oh, Father high in Heaven,
Smile down upon your Son,
Who's busy with his money games,
His women, and his gun.
(Oh, Jesus, save me!)

And the unsung Western hero
Killed an Indian or three,
And then he made his name in Hollywood
To set the white man free.
(Oh, Jesus, save me!)

If Jesus saves,
Well, he'd better save Himself
From the gory glory seekers
Who use His name in death.

Well, I saw him in the city
And on the mountains of the Moon;
His Cross was rather bloody
And he could hardly roll his stone.

Re:"Hymn #42"?

[Mendax Veritas]

Okay, so Larry had an off-by-one error...

God GT OOP?

[Tablizer]

Several people were curious about Larry's opinion on OOP in general.

I am surprised that questions about his religion were (allegedly[1]) higher ranked than something more on-topic like OOP.

(Then again, OOP is a religion of sorts it appears to me.)

[1] Although no OOP question may have had the highest rank, there were at least 2 that scored fairly high. Are 2 four's less weight than one 5?

Then again, based on his other responses, he would probably say something like, "Perl allows you do use OOP if you like it, but skip it if you don't. It gives you more choices than almost any language, and choices are good and I don't want to dictate to you what to use".

Re:"because God told me"

[deesvito]

From any truly intelligent, open-minded evangelical Christian (I'm not evangelical though) :-), the good answer is to relate the good samaritan parable.

Most people, Christian or not, know about this one. It is part of Jesus' response to the question "What shall I do to inherit eternal life". He answered to love God, and your neighbor. To the question "Who is my neighbor", he answered with the parable.

Basically a bunch of good, God loving people (even a priest!) pass a badly hurt man on the street without helping him, even going out of their way to avoid them (some of them thought he must be drunk). Then a nonbeliever (a Samaritan) had compassion for him, took him to an inn, patched his wounds, and asked the innkeeper to take care of him for as long as he needed and he would reimburse him.

This story is great, because it has two points. First, that we are not supposed to be judging other people over whether they are "Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, or secularists". We're in fact not supposed to judge at all - that's up to Him for later.

The second, and most important, point is that even these "Buddhists, Jews, Hindus and secularists" (you forgot Muslims) can be deserving because of their acts of love and kindness, since love is something you feel and do, not something you talk and thump your Bible about. Their acts can make them even more so deserving than a born and raised Christian.

The question you are posing is not easy, and has been addressed on Christian theological discussion throughout the years. The particular question "are you saved by your faith or by your acts?" has always been a difficult thing to ponder for Christians. In my opinion, why not do both, ignore the naysayers, don't judge the ones who "won't convert" and keep the question unimportant anyway. :-)

The other part of your post, about the exclusionary doctrines, nothing I've ever read about Larry Wall has ever made me think that he hates non-christian folken. That reveals a possible prejudice against religion on yourself.

But again, who am I to judge? :-)

Just my 2c.

Re:"because God told me"

[barawn]

So here you are thinking for God. If God says you must believe in him to be saved, why is that so hard to follow? And how can you say a Hindu believes in the one true God? Because a Hindu doesn't. It's not most people on this planet haven't been exposed to Christianity and can say "Well I never knew!". It's not like its a hard religion. You don't have to follow hundreds of laws, you don't have to bow down 5 times a day...you just have to believe. He's made the path fairly easy and if people don't follow it then its because they chose to not follow it and miss the train. It's silly for people to keep arguing how evil God is because he'll send everyone to hell who refuses to believe in him.

Wow. That's really bizarre. Where to start...

The first question to ask is "what/who is God?" Without that, your question doesn't mean anything. Note that God, in the Bible, didn't even give himself a name - just "I am" (which is about as fundamental as you can get). Who are you to say that what a Hindu, or a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Wiccan believe in isn't God as well? If you haven't heard the elephant parable, you should - basically, if a bunch of blind men are trying to describe an elephant by touch, you'll get a ton of completely disparate answers, which, when looked at from a higher stance, all make sense. It's much the same way with religion. All religions have the same kernel of truth to them - it's up to the people to figure them out.

I find it amazingly hard to believe that people put such huge restrictions on God, that he can't present himself to billions upon billions of people in billions upon billions of ways.

Your argument is just weak - what about all of the people who were born before Christ? What about all of the Native Americans, who were geographically distinct? What about infants? God presents himself in many different ways to many different people, and the truth is that they're all true. Just because you can't handle many seemingly contradictory things being true doesn't make them not true.

Re:"because God told me"

[jonabbey]

I promise that I'll not engage in a long religious discussion here, but there seems to be a cognitive dissonance in your reasoning - What *is* order if there's no absolute truth?

Order is a property of the universe. The universe is completely able to match consequence with cause, and to do so in a consistent fashion. Science is based on the observation and analysis of this fact, and only extends to that point which can be observed or reliably inferred.

When christians speak of absolute truth, they tend to mean 'absolute judgement', or 'absolute morality', or 'absolute meaning', none of which I believe has any universal grounding to be found in the natural world. Morality and ethics and meaning do arise from the order of the universe by way of both biological and social evolution, and so can be said to connect back to the universe's wellsprings of order.

That's not enough meaning for a lot of people, surely, but that too is okay. We're not all the same.

Misinterpretation of Wall's Words

[knodi]

I think he meant "from the point of view of people who really look for him, God is good".

You are all refuting and arguing the OTHER interpretation, "God gives good benefits and preferential treatment to those who really look for him."

Kinda ironic, people accuse PERL of being impossible to parse without an author to consult.

Awesome

[tswinzig]

I don't know about all this god stuff, but at least I got a new sig out of the whole affair!

The problem with your logic...

[jaaron]

The first mistake most people make (religious, athiest, or whatever) is incorrectly defining the problem and its scope. Your being too closed minded with your analysis.

Okay, so if there is a God and he/she/it/them/... and if the premise is that "God is good to people who really look for him" then that cannot be properly tested in any way. Why? Because how is God good to them? How many subtle ways might God have saved a person's life or changed it? Perhaps some hardship one faces is, in the long run, "better" for them. And what's more, if there is a God, then the it's quite likely that the "goodness" God will give to those who "really look for him" won't come until some sort of afterlife. And how could you measure that?

So the logic doesn't stand -- as most "logic" people use to claim existance or non-existance of God. Too often people limit the scope of possiblities and come to incorrect and inconsistant conclusions.

Re:The problem with your logic...

[tswinzig]

Prayer has no place in the public schools, just like facts have no place in organized religion. ~School superintendent on The Simpsons

Re:The problem with your logic...

[jaaron]

Of course the only reason an afterlife is posited is to answer the question "Why do bad things happen to good people?"

Or there actually could be an afterlife.

Re:"because God told me"

[Lemmy Caution]

I don't attribute hate to Wall or any evangelical Christian per se, I just hold that the evangelical version of the doctrine of redemption is screwed up. I think Wall's Christianity is fairly humanistic except for that element. The doctrine of redemption is too central to most all forms of Christianity to be hand-waved around, yet that is exactly what most thinking evangelicals do: they hand-wave around the issue.

A modern Catholic perspective (what I was trained/taught, although I'm a non-theist now) is the whole "salvation by faith or acts" question is distorted by the fact that belief, especially the evangelist's version of belief, *is* an act. The theological correct answer is that salvation occurs by grace alone - neither belief nor action "merits" salvation, but it is by the sacrifice of Christ that salvation is dispensed to all. That actions will reveal and witness to the stance of the soul and its openess to grace, but that those actions aren't ever enough to merit salvation themselves. The doctrine of purgatory does, however, indicated that the nature of purgatory is determined by the number and character of your unconfessed sins, so you can be "damned" (or at least punished relative to their severity) for your actions, if not saved by them.

I don't think it's an accident that Catholic theology has become more flexible and more progressive over the centuries - they learned from the Inquisition, the Counter-Reformation, from Galileo and their other mistakes. It's sad that their lessons have been largely lost on other Christians.

Re:"because God told me"

[barawn]

Well put. Very well put. The other question you need to address is the "believe in God" part. For that, the best I've heard is the elephant parable. I don't know where it's from first - I heard it a long time ago in a sermon by one of the best priests I've ever heard (there have to be a few each generation, right?).

Three blind men stood around an elephant. None of them had ever encountered an elephant before, and none of them could see, so they all had to rely on their sense of touch to examine the elephant.

One of them felt the trunk of the elephant, feeling it long and round, like a large snake. "Ah," he said. "An elephant is like a very large snake. Yes, I understand."

One of them felt the skin of the elephant, noting how cracked and wrinkly it was, like the skin of a lizard. "Ah," he said. "An elephant is like a very large lizard. Yes, I understand."

And one of them felt the tusk of the elephant, and noted how sharp and hard it was, like the blade of a sword. "Ah," he said. "An elephant is like a sword. Yes, I understand."

And then the blind men talked to each other, and each of them was adamant about their observations, and they left completely confused about what an elephant was. How could something be like a lizard, a snake, and a sword all at the same time? It didn't make any sense to them.

(note that there are many more examples than the three above)

We're all blind men trying to figure out what God is. It makes perfect sense that the vast majority of the answers we have are junk and contradictory. Just because we can't make sense of them doesn't mean they aren't all true. And so you can't judge how other religions practice their faith, because you really don't know - if you look very closely, you may see elements that resemble your own, just ... from a different angle. The fact that certain things seem to contradict is a distinct limitation of being human. Best not to put those limitations on God.

the beauty of religion...

[FreeUser]

God is good to people who really look for him.

This is actually a premise we can test, and it's simply false. Many studies have been done comparing religious and non-religious people, and it's never been found that religious people end up with "better luck" (better health, better livelyhood, better children, etc) that non-religious people.

You are absolutely correct.

The beauty of religion, and why it can persist in the face of reason, and even seduce intelligent people like Larry Wall, is that the parameters of every definition are endlessly malleable.

Remember that mustard-seed sized bit of "faith?" That provides all the wiggle room required for any religious premise, no matter how prima facia absurd, to withstand argument, provided you argue on their terms (which is almost always what is expected and demanded). "Faith" means acccepting something which defies logic, so the theologens are correct when they say a tiny bit of faith is all that is required. A tiny bit of willingness to defy logic and accept the absurd is all that is required to promote, and buy into, any belief system at all, no matter how absurd, how self-destructive (remember the now-extinct Shakers? How about the People's Temple?), or how simply plain wrong it is when illuminated by the cold light of reality.

In this particular case, the non-religious people end up being burned 'alive' for all time, while the religious people enjoy a profoundly boring existence playing harps in the presence of the universes most stodgy old man (which of course, makes one wonder what happens to those whose harp-playing skills aren't up to snuff).

Or some variation thereupon, the key ingredients being "the faithful" (there's that word again) get to live well, while the "non-believes" (that would be you and I) are tormented forever.

Given that, god really is good to those who look for him, at least in comparison to his treatment of those who do not.

Re:the beauty of religion...

[Phroggy]

"Faith" means acccepting something which defies logic,

Absolutely wrong. Faith means beliving something you haven't proven. I believe, on faith, that Cleveland exists. I don't know that I've ever met anyone from there, and I've never been there myself. Sure, it's logical to believe it - but I don't have proof, so I MUST believe it on faith, if I am to believe it at all.

Yes, this is a silly example, but I hope it demonstrates my point.

Re:the beauty of religion...

[sweet reason]

Faith means beliving something you haven't proven. I believe, on faith, that Cleveland exists.

no. you believe on evidence that cleveland exists. the evidence isn't as strong as having been there, but neither is it as vacuous as the evidence on which the religious believe in their gods.

belief based on evidence has a probablity value attached. if youv'e been to clevelan then the probability is 1. if not, it is, say, 0.99999; you would be very surprised to discover that it is a myth. the probability you attach to the existance of a town mentioned by an aquaintance telling a "true" story may be 0.3; you would not be very surprised to discover that he invented it.

you need not, and should not, require all belief to be at either 0 or 1.

Re:Obligatory religious quibble

[glwtta]

though you often can.

Obligatory existential quibble

[UberQwerty]

Once you look at the level your brain is most comfortable with, you can see the art and creativity.

First of all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and beauty is relative. Everything is beautiful; some things are simply not very beautiful (or maybe negatively beautiful; whatever), just like very cold things simply have very little heat. Of course something is beautiful if you look at it on the level your brain likes most. What if I look at a rotten, brown banana peel soaking in a mixture of used motor oil and fly-infested human feces? Not beautiful. But what if I look at it through a microscope? I might find the microscopic structure beautiful. I have not, however, changed what I'm looking at; only how I'm looking at it. Remember, beauty is not just in the beholder, it is also in his or her "eye."

As for artistic expression, an object is art if and only if two conditions are met: someone created it, and that creator claims/intends that the creature is art. I don't want to get into the argument of whether humans are the creatures of some more powerful entity; the point is that unless you manage to convince the entire rest of the world that humans are creatures and not accidents, you cannot expect people to agree with you when you say that humans are works of art. A rock formation may be beautiful, but it is not art unless someone put it that way on purpose.

Re:"because God told me"

[Lemmy Caution]

Well, I am not only not a Bible literalist, I'm not a Christian. You know that the history of the Bible is part of the history of the Church - it's a human history. But let's go back to the original Aramaic for Mark, and tell me what the word that the KJV is translating as "belief" is.

Erm...

[Balinares]

I'm about as atheist as it goes, so don't take me wrong, but I think that Larry's point still stands.

Be it only because when shit happens (and sooner or later, shit does happen), it's much easier to live through it if you've got a blind belief that there's a benevolent, powerful being up there who is looking after you personally, and all the more so that you're in need for it.

That's actually a religion's major selling point, when you think of it.

Re:"because God told me"

[Golias]

I constantly hear that you must have faith that God exists. Therefore, God does not exist without faith.

You should not lecture on logic if your own logic is broken.

You have been told that you must have faith that God exists.

It does not follow that God's existence depends on your faith.

The notion that God can not exist without people believing him is not, and never has been a claim of of Christianity.

There are Christians who insist that God, by nature, can not be completely understood or known to mortals, but that would be a shortcoming of our existance, not his.

So you code everything twice?

[Ars-Fartsica]

To the carpentry analogy I can claim the kitchen analogy - any master chef will tell you that you only need three or four knives. There simply isn't a practical reason for the twelve knife set.

Likewise with Perl and PHP. As your organization matures, you will find that your offline and online processing reuses techniques and tools. Why not reuse packages themselves? Using your approach I would more or less end up coding everything twice, once to support perl users doing offline work, and once to support PHP people doing the same/similar thing online.

The converse also holds - if you are already using PHP online it makes sense to use it for offline work as well. These languages are so similar in capabilties that I don't buy the domain-specific arguments.

Re:Give me a break, Mr. Logic

[Rick_T]

> At one time, every observation thought of proved
> that the world was flat. To state that science
> today is infallable is absolutely retarded.

This is a strawman argument.

Nobody - let me repeat, NOBODY - who knows anything about science will say that it is infallible. The whole POINT of the scientific method is that humands *do* make mistakes. If all our observations and conjectures were perfect, we wouldn't need the scentific method at all.

(Does it surprise anyone that *religions* have claimed "infallibility"? :) )

The difference between science now and science then is that we have a *lot* more observations under our belts and new tools for observations. The scientific method is the same.

> Saying that "scientific studies prove atoms
> exist but the Bible doesn't prove squat" is a
> fallacy, plain and simple.

What, exactly, does the Bible prove? This is a pretty reasonable question to ask, I think.

> Theologists study the Bible, trying to find
> coheasion. When they find something that
> doesn't make sense, they try and come up with
> an explaination for it. Many "scientists"
> call this proof that God does not exist.

That's a little strong, but it does tend to give fundamentalists the shivers. After all, the argument goes, why is an infallible, perfect, omniscient god's word so darned hard to read? For that matter, why are his products (us) so defective?

> The same goes for science. Theories arise to
> explain things that we're not sure about.
> They're not always right.
> Pot. Kettle. Black.

Not quite. Scientists *know* that most new hypothesis are, if not flat-out wrong, in need of improvement. That's what the scientific method is all about.

Religion and science approach the problem from two different directions. The scientific approach is to observe, then try to come up with an explanation that fits the facts. If the facts go against the explanations, the facts must change.

The more "fundamentalist" religions work a different way: An explanation is presupposed. The "facts" are manipulated so they fit the explanation - or the explanation is so vague that any "fact" would fit. (Okay, that's a bit uncharitable - some religions DO change their dogma - but it's not far off from fundamentalist Christianity.)

Back to Larry Wall ... his argument for his religion, quantum mechanics metaphors aside, basically boils down to "I believe because I believe". And that's perfectly all right. It's not *logical*, but then again that's the whole POINT of faith. :)

Re:"because God told me"

[Drachemorder]

"Therefore, God does not exist without faith."

That is not a claim of Christianity. It's a claim of Douglas Adams.

What the Bible actually says is, "without faith it is impossible to please Him".

God is like pr0n!

[Pig Hogger]

The existance of atoms and quanta can be proven with mathematics (besides scientific observation) - they can be "seen" when you use the language of science. I know of no mathematical formula or scientific experimant that _proves_ the exisitance of God - so He truly is "un-seeable" (in the context of the physical world, anyway).

God is like pr0n. I cannot define it precisely, but I sure know when I see some!

I saw the whole thing

[Hotsphink]

I don't need to scratch my head and search my soul to figure out whether God created the universe. I was there. I saw the whole thing.

God didn't create the universe. Well, He did, but not intentionally. God just wanted a beer. But you can't just create a beer floating in the middle of the void -- there's nothing satisfying about it. It would be like a book written by an illiterate person -- sure, he could put lots of black squiggles onto a bundle of pages that would vaguely look like a book, but it wouldn't mean anything.

So for a proper beer, God pretty much had to make up physics. I'm not just talking about the refinements needed to get it to foam just right -- I'm talking about the whole deal. After you drink some, there should be less left over, not more. Drinking a beer should not make you turn into beer yourself. Beers should not be smarter than the drinker. Well, not the first few, at least. The state of drinking beer needs to contrast with something, so the state of not drinking beer must also exist. In fact, that's where most of the world came from, because having the world exist in only two states (currently drinking beer/currently not drinking beer) just seemed too lame to a clever guy like God. Same idea for water and other liquids -- if He can drink beer, He really ought to be able to drink not-beer, just so He can say He chose the beer instead.

And then there's the whole question of origins. A beer is so much less interesting if it creates itself or just spontaneously comes into existence. A truly full-bodied beer needs a background, a character, a story. God went a little crazy with that, inventing those 'human' things with enough cleverness to invent stuff, curiousity to try things out, and a desperate need to get sloshed, smashed, trashed, and basically totally drucking funk. And all that cleverness and curiousity necessitated science. And dinosaur fossils. And religion. (God got a real kick when he realized he'd have to invent religion, I remember. Of course, he wasn't exactly sober by that time...)

Oh, and you know that bit about "...and on the 7th day He rested?" Purely an excuse to keep us from bothering Him during His hangover. We're still on the 7th day, see. I'm not even sure if He thought far enough ahead to make an 8th day. He was having some trouble with the notion of Time, and I recall Him saying something like "aw, screw it. Nobody's going to be drinking any beer at the speed of light anyway. I'll see you later -- I'm gonna go get wasted."

GOD can be pragmatic!

[jaaron]

Who's to say that God isn't pragmatic?

Okay, just for a second, lets throw out the human aspect and forget about organized religion and look just at the existance of God and any set of ethics by which he/she/it/they exists and enforces. Now, let's start with a couple axioms. Suppose God exists and has this set of ethics. Also suppose that there is some other set of ethics/laws which are defined not by God, but my "pragmatism." For the sake of arguement I'll say these "pragmatic" ethics are universal truths of the same nature as the laws of physics and chemistry. They are self-evidant and any "pragmatic" person using reason and time would be able to discover them. This is what I believe you to mean by "ethics .. based around pragmatism." If I misunderstand, please let me know.

Okay, so we have God and his/her/its/their ethics and we have the pragmatic ethics. Now, it may be possible that these two set of ethics are disjoint, or there could be some overlapping or one could be a subset of the other. Regardless, I think the fundamental question is this: Is something right because God says it is, or does God say something is right because it is right? Think about it.

If the answer is the first, then there is no guarentee that there is any correlation between pragmatic ethics and God's ethics. It would be competely up to God's whim (if there is such a thing).

If the second is true, then by definition, God's ethics are the pragmatic ethics. They would be the same set.

Now, the existance of God is a question one is not going to be able to solve or prove rigoriously. However, it is my feeling that if there were such a being(s) that in order to be such a being(s), that being(s) would have to have an understanding of mathematics and the physical laws of nature (this to me seems reasonable considering the universe we are able to observe. It could be wrong, true, but I think the alternative is significantly less probable). So if this supreme being(s) had such an understanding, then it would be most likely that the set of ethics adopted by that being(s) would be the most "true", ie- pragmatic. Therefore, my feeling is that the existance of such a being(s) would imply that any ethics or judgements passed by such a being would be pragmatic/objective/true.

Now, that doesn't mean that should such a being(s) decide to communicate with the human species that the instructions given would be implemented properly. In fact, human experience would suggest otherwise. So I am willing to "see past" the efforts of most individuals (and religious organizations) in their implementation of such instruction and ethics and recognize that perhaps there is something underlying their actions which is more "correct."

The point of this rant is that in your arguement, like most others, you failed to be properly open minded and look at all the possibilities of the solution set. Should there be a God(s), I seriously doubt that he/she/it/they are contrained by the limits our unenlightened minds place on him/she/it/them. Is is possible that if there is a God(s) that his/her/its/their ethics are competely arbitrary? Yes. However, is it possible such ethics are in fact what you consider pragmatic? Yes. Therefore, one could reasonably believe in God, follow God's ethics, and also live pragmatically without any hypocracy. I just wanted to point this out.

Oh and if you have issues with my he/she/it/they thing, I'm just trying to further point out that we often have preconceved notions and we should learn to consider all alternatives until otherwise agreed upon.

Re:"because God told me"

[tshak]

His argument is not just as weak, you just haven't searched for the answers. There are many places in the Old Testament that eludes to Christ or a saviour. The radical difference is that salvation was through Christ after Christ because Christ fullfilled the Law (religious Law). Before hand there were tons of religious laws that one had to follow for salvation. This poses a lot of good questions like "Why not Christ in the first place?", but already we are getting into subjects that entire books have been written on. As far as infants ore Native Americans, we are trivialzing God's grace when we ask these questions. God claims in his word that EVERYONE will have the chance to acknolwedge him, regardless of our inability to define the logistics.

Re:"because God told me"

[Lemmy Caution]

I have studied the Bible and it didn't make me a believing Christian any more than studying the Upanishads made me a believing Hindu. Texts are simply texts - without an external reason to credit one as being distinct from others, there's no reason to attribute to it any special ontological status. Considering the variform and tortured history of that one text, it would take an almost acrobatic act of - ahem - faith to believe that somehow, after all the synods and councils and debates and purges, it was the Word of God.

It would be like reading Shakespeare and then believing that it was unfallable history, that Romeo and Juliet were exactly what they were described to be in the play, and that a man named Bottom was indeed turned into an ass.

You're looking in the wrong place.

[beleg777]

I'm glad you understood that so well, but then you missed one of the points that was central to his explanation. God is an individual, not a set of rules or formulae (that's wrong, isn't it?). Humans, made in the image of God, understand how to make an exception where one is due. The ever present "letter vs. intention of the law" isn't a problem, because he wrote the letter, and enforces it based on the intention. And that's why he's suggesting that the details aren't as important as the center. Because the legalese of the Bible isn't important if you get the theme.

Re:You're looking in the wrong place.

[sweet reason]

Because the legalese of the Bible isn't important if you get the theme.

the nice thing about biblical themes is that there are so many to choose from.

Re:"because God told me"

[Lemmy Caution]

While I respect your distinction between faith and belief, and consider it something of a good accomodation of the modern Catholic redemption doctrine with evangelical practice, it would be incorrect, I think, to describe your belief as the mainstream evangelical one, and many posters on this thread alone seem to agree.

scientist && believe in god is absurd

[jilles]

Exactly. There is no evidence and if someone claims there is you should indeed look closer to examine the evidence. Exact science is actually about proving hypothesis wrong, not proving them right. So far there is no evidence for the existence of a god that has not been dismissed decisively (other than eye witness reports by peasants, discovery channel and various other unreliable sources).

You can of course belief that there is proof of god anyway. However, you cannot prove it (which is why you need to believe). Between believing there is a god and accepting the contents of the bible/koran/lotr as 100% truth, there is a gliding scale of selectively believing stuff and not believing other stuff. However, all of this is fundamentally in conflict with a scientific point of view.

Believing there is a god in the absence of any proof is unscientific no matter what your point of view is (you can of course chose to believe science is bullshit). The contradiction in a relegious scientist must obviously be that on one hand he/she believes that all conclusions must be scientifically motivated and at the same time beliefs something holds true in the absence of such motivation.

Neither the existence nor absence of a god like entity can be proven. However there is no scientific evidence motivating the assumption that there is a god (quite the opposite actually).

As a scientist it is my position that there is absolutely no reason to jump to the absurd conclusion (and paraphrasing Sherlock Holmes that would be only warranted if you had explored all other options) that there is a god like entity. Apart from the difficulty in defining what that is exactly (a mandatory step of any scientific proof), I am not aware of any phenomena that require the presence of a god like entity to be explained. I am aware that there are phenomena that are not (yet) fully explained. However, that is because we haven't explored all options yet. Any conclusion that a god like entity would be at work is premature and unscientific.

Some of my (very smart) colleagues are religious and society tells me that is their right. However, society can't convince me that it is in any way consistent with a scientific point of view. It is either science or religion. There is no middle way. Anyone claiming there is takes two points of view that are in contradiction (hence either one or both assumptions are false). In addition, a possible third assumption would also be absurd so that leaves us no other rational choice but to accept that science is the right assumption until proven otherwise. However, once you decide to assume the absurd (which again is unscientific) it is entirely consistent to assume more absurd things, including that science is consistent with your other (absurd) assumptions. Claiming to be a scientist and to believe in god is absurd.

Re:scientist && believe in god is absurd

[mmaddox]

Look. He's stated his own case for belief in non-combative terms. He's given his reasons - the evidence he considers sufficient for his faith. This isn't a consideration of my belief, your belief, or the lack of both thereof; this is merely a commendation to an intelligent man for making an attempt at a semi-informed decision to hold out faith in an unprovable concept.

Again, I am an atheist. I am a Libertarian. I am a computer programmer. I have dealt with people who hold my positions as a personal affront, and I applaud Mr. Wall for expressing his differences in such a gentle, thoughtful way.

Re:scientist && believe in god is absurd

[Sinjun]

Instead of saying that it is not scientific to assume God exists, isn't it MORE scientific to say that we don't know whether He exists or not? Atheism is unscientific because it assumes something which has not be proved: that God does not exist. Agnosticism is much more reasonable because it simply states something that is true: we do not KNOW if God exists or not. By the very nature of what God would be (that is, outside of the observable universe) the science is not equipped to test for the existence of God. So you may say that you have no evidence that God exists, but you cannot say that you have evidence that he does not exist. We simply do not have any scientific reason for saying either way. Science can asess specific claims about the way God interacts with the world. One example being the fundamentalist claim of Creationism. But because science can show that a claim about God that can be tested is not true, does not mean that God does not exist.

So, as you claim to be a scientist, you might want to ask yourself what scientific evidence you have shows that God does not exist. Have you developed instrumentation to test the population of the spiritual realm? Have you performed the proper experimentation to show that such a spiritual realm exists? Of course, the answer to these questions are 'No.' The fact is, science can neither claim that God does not exist, nor that He does. It is a great shame that most scientists don't seem to recognize how their atheism violates the principles they supposedly hold dear.

Re:scientist && believe in god is absurd

[jilles]

It is really quite simple. To accept science as a truth is to adopt a certain line of reasoning. This line of reasoning contradicts with drawing absurd conclusions (e.g. there is a god, elvis lives, jesus rose from the grave).

Either you adopt a scientific line of reasoning in which there is no room for absurd conclusions or you chose to build your own sets of beliefs build on absurdities. You chose to do the latter and that doesn't exclude the first (i'll come to that later). I chose to do the first and that definitely excludes the latter.

The example you use actually works against you since the line of reasoning is that the only way jesus could have risen from the grave is by the hand of god. The scientific approach to proving this right would be trying to come up with an alternative theory (i.e. falsifying the thesis). Such theories are easy to formulate (given current knowledge of medicine) even when you assume the historical records to be correct (mostly consist of biblical texts written to convince people that they are).

You believe in jesus despite the fact that what you believe cannot be proven scientifically. Any scientific reasoning has to start from the assumption that there is no god. If we included such an absurdity as the first assumption in our proof, anything could be proven to be the work of god. Also any such proof would be negated by proving the assumption wrong (impossible). Therein lies the contradiction of science and religion.

You put religion first and then accept science as a part of that religion. By treating absurd conclusions such as "there is a god" as matters of fact this actually forms a consistent line of reasoning. The only problem is that science does not allow for doing so. Your sand castle, built on the assumption that there is a god, allows for the conclusion that some guy named jesus died and walked away. Kick that assumption aside and you have a nice heap of sand.

I haven't read the book you mentioned. However, the only thing it can convincingly prove to me after 2000 years is that it is likely that there was a person named Jesus who was brutally murdered by the romans and had a loyal following of various persons who wrote various things about this character. So what? I think the bible is a nice mix of fact and fiction. A mix that even today is popular among authors to communicate points of view and philisophical matters. As an intellectual I can actually appreciate much of its content.

Re:scientist && believe in god is absurd

[jilles]

We don't know whether there is a god or not so we cannot assume it to be true in a scientific proof. Atheism leaves room for the assumption to be true but at the same time improves the quality of scientific proof by removing that unnecessery assumption (which can neither be falsified nor proven correct). It turns out that so far there are no phenomena that require the presence of the assumption in order to be scientifically explained therefore it would be unscientific to assume it anyway.

So it is scientific to say that we have no proof for what is an absurd conclusion and that in addition we have not encountered phenomena that require the presence of such an absurd assumption either. This concludes the matter scientifically. Assuming the presence of a god is both unnecessary and absurd from a scientific point of view. You ask for the proof that a certain absurd assumption is false however that is indeed a request that cannot possibly be fulfilled. I do not need to test for the validity of something when I can fully explain something in the absence of that something.

My belief in science rests on one principle, namely that what I perceive, witness and see is correct. Disprove this and everything falls apart.

As a scientist assuming something that I cannot perceive, witness or see exists contradicts with my drive to base my conclusions on things scientifically proven and observable. Therefore I will not assume this. IMHO this makes any true scientist also an atheist. Atheism is the very core of science.

Re:scientist && believe in god is absurd

[mlong]

Exactly. There is no evidence and if someone claims there is you should indeed look closer to examine the evidence. Exact science is actually about proving hypothesis wrong, not proving them right. So far there is no evidence for the existence of a god that has not been dismissed decisively (other than eye witness reports by peasants, discovery channel and various other unreliable sources).

There may be little evidence of God but there is some evidence of Jesus Christ who spent his life claiming to be God and backing that up not only through his actions but via miracles that nobody else could do. You might read "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel. It's pretty good.

Re:scientist && believe in god is absurd

[mlong]

You believe in jesus despite the fact that what you believe cannot be proven scientifically. Any scientific reasoning has to start from the assumption that there is no god. If we included such an absurdity as the first assumption in our proof, anything could be proven to be the work of god. Also any such proof would be negated by proving the assumption wrong (impossible). Therein lies the contradiction of science and religion.

You do understand that many millions of people have lived throughout history and left no tangible proof that they existed?

Re:scientist && believe in god is absurd

[maxume]

I agree with you, but I have trouble dismissing agnosticism when I think about something like the big bang. Sure, we can explain it further and further back in time, as we understand higher and higher energy levels, but can we ever hit zero? I'm not sure a 'true scientist' can ever 'perceive, witness or see' anything real close to t=0, so I am forced into a 'belief' that there is something, somewhere, somewhen, which I cannot understand or comprehend. This to me, is what silly christians call, with a capital G, God. But they can't possibly have the right answer, because they think he is vindicitive and small minded. Anyway, I would love to hear your response, have you the time.

Max Erickson

Re:scientist && believe in god is absurd

[scrytch]

You might also want to read The Case Against The Case For Christ when you're finished. It's not quite as polished a rebuttal as it could be, but edifying reading nonetheless.

Re:scientist && believe in god is absurd

[jilles]

That is a matter of exploring options we haven't researched yet. Whether the number of options is finite or not cannot be determined now. That fact however does not in any way warrant drawing the absurd conclusion that there must be something like a god. There simply is not enough to support such a conclusion (in a scientific way).

Also you have to understand that the big bang is merely a theory that helps explain what we see. Theories can falsified, extended and replaced. Theories do not represent truth, they merely form an explanation for what we see. The big bang theory helps us explain certain observable phenomena but it has large holes in it and is far from complete.

You are zooming in on t=0, the start of the big bang. This is a moment we know virtually nothing about. So it is unscientific to even speculate about it.

Proof he is learning Japanese

[gosand]

Early on in the article, Larry mentions that he is learning Japanese. This is obvious in some of his later statements, where ends several of them with "I think", just like the panelists on Iron Chef. :-)

This could have used a little bit more salt, I think.
This is really good, I think.

It really depends on your curiosity level, I think.
Java was, in that sense, much less structured than Python, I think.
The current approach to .NET interoperability is a bit of a hack, I think.

Re:"because God told me"

[barawn]

...

That was my point. You're basically saying that yes, God has acknowledged that everyone has the chance to acknowledge him. What I'm adding is that God also never said that it would be crystal clear who had acknowledged him and who hadn't. In other words, we shouldn't necessarily believe that those who don't follow our specific doctrine aren't following the same God we are. To do so trivializes an omnipotent being. There are certain "common truths" between all religions that should be recognized as the hand of God. The Good Samaritan parable shows that extremely well.

As for "why not Christ in the first place?" the answer to that is simple - God's outside of time. It's not important when Christ came. It's important that Christ came. People might have believed that things were different before Christ, but they weren't. Human time to a being outside of time is meaningless.

Perl Crusade

[bsd-mon]

my little way, I'm sneakily helping people understand a bit more about the sort of people God likes.

Thus it is God's own will that thou shalt program perl. Let us strike down the heathens who worship at the altar of (PHP|Python|Ruby)!
or:
dear lord,
foreach $languser (@scriptinglanguages) {
kill 1, $languser;
}
amen

Me too

[fizbin]

Come on, someone stop commenting on the religion question and answer this one.

The closest thing I found was on http://outerbody.com/ruby/ruby-man-1.4/syntax.html #operator,
which seems to say that in Ruby one can do
foo(*[1,2,3])
instead of
foo(1,2,3)
From what I can tell, in Ruby [] is the standard make-a-list operator, and lists in Ruby seem to operate similarly to lists in Python and array references in perl.

However, this doesn't seem like anything new to perl; doing
foo(@array)
is the same as calling foo with each of the elements of @array as arguments. If $a is an array reference, this becomes:
foo(@$a)
So I don't think that this Ruby operator is what was meant.

Re:religion is NOT the basis for morality

[DEBEDb]

How can you just claim that YOU are
deciding what's right and wrong. How do
you know in what way and to what extent your conscience was influenced, from the moment
you were born, by parents and society at large - and they, in turn, were influenced by thousands
of years of cultural/religious tradition. Christian, if you live in the western world.

You may not like it, but you can't ignore this
fact.

Re:Shoedinger's Cat

[Fourier]

According to a google search, it is actually spelled "Schroedinger's Cat".

Either that or it's actually spelled in German, and any English version you see is just a bastardization of that.

Re:"because God told me"

[barawn]

Yes and no. The idea is that what an elephant looks like will completely and always elude blind men. They don't have the capability. They can only relate to the elephant in terms of other objects. Note that they do not say "an elephant looks like a snake" - because, well, they don't know what a snake looks like either. They say an elephant is like a snake.

They can gather all the sensory information they want (which they were doing) and then try to put it together. But without the visual information as well, they may never be able to do it. This is the situation humans are in.

As per your next statement, it's ridiculous, and it's what's been holding back theology for thousands of years, in my opinion. There is no reason that religion can't be studied in a scientific manner. We are not "presented" with several branches of bizarre math, but we can still study them easily. If nothing else, a belief system must be self-consistent, and that we can determine - the Catholic Church tried to do this when it tossed out the Apocrypha (unfortunately, it's possible a lot of fake stuff didn't get tossed out, and a lot of real stuff did, but at least they tried). There are several portions of major religions which fall apart just requiring self-consistency, and it's ludicrous for them to still be there - it doesn't collapse the entire belief structure, it just requires a rethinking. (Unfortunately I worry that I'm a rarity in having a rather flexible belief structure...) There's no reason "self-consistency" checks shouldn't be going on in religion, and approached in a scientific manner, giving alternate explanations and such. It's an extension of philosophy, which is to some extents, an extension of logic. It's straight forward.

And that's my point. If the blind men hadn't been so insistent that their answers weren't contradictory, they might've been able to realize more about the elephant, just in the same way that if you were presented with a 4D object, and instead of being put off by the inconsistencies, explored them, you'd figure out more as well. Take, for instance, the logical problem of free will vs. fate: how do you resolve those two? They seem mutually exclusive - either you can decide your future, or you can't. But if you try to resolve them, you can discover a whole host of new ideas - imagine the Universe as the sum total of everything that could happen, and everything that will happen, and your life is just a path through that multidimensional Universe. Then you would be choosing your own path, yes, but your future would be predetermined - because everything already has been determined.

Sorry, I'm rambling - one of my pet goals has always been to try to rationalize a lot of metaphysics with current physics, because I feel that the two have a lot to offer each other, and I think they're being sorely neglected by each other. :)

I can't understand how you're displeased with the elephant argument. It's basically saying "God is beyond us" - well, duh. You're talking about an atemporal being who sees the entire Universe - all stretch of time - as a whole, and also each individual life and being creeping its way through. Our minds are distinctly limited by the environment they're in - God can't reveal "parts" of himself. He can only reveal himself, and it is us that misperceive them as being distinct parts, not God's malevolence. The elephant parable could have been done with anything - it is the limitation of the men, not the elephant.

Re:"because God told me"

[Golias]

Most protestant views are accomodations of Catholic ones, as nearly all Western churches are splinter groups of Roman Catholicism. C.S. Lewis, perhaps the most well-known 20th Century apologist for evangelical Christianity, held a very similar view.

Don't mistake the majority of /. posters as a representative sample of any group. Half of them are probably don't even actually believe what they are writing anyway, and are just trolling to jerk people around.

Re:religion is NOT the basis for morality

[Fourier]

Morals are NOT based on the bad boy punishment hype of most modern religions.

Well, that's certainly a loaded statement.

1) *Your* morals are not based on... modern religions. Please don't say the same for me and many others.

2) From the point of view of Christianity, yes there is a set of laws that defines part of our moral system. (You shall not harm others, you shall not steal, etc.) But you have completely neglected the other part. Because Jesus has shown Christians love, we are motivated to show love to others. "Bad boy punishment hype" doesn't cover that at all.


I would normally leave religion well enough alone, but in this case, as in most cases where it comes up, it is the religious who brought up the discussion and hence warrant a response.

Actually, Larry was responding to a question. It's too bad that you viewed that as an assault on your personal belief system.


There is no afterlife, there is no reason to "be good" here to get some silly reward for eternity later.

You cannot possibly know that, just as I cannot possibly know that there is an afterlife.


When more people start to live in reality the world will be a better place.

I believe that "reality" is more than what we observe. Modern physics leans toward this opinion as well. Do disbelieve everything that cannot be seen is not defensible.

Re:"because God told me"

[mlong]

I don't care about the Bible. You already have to be a believing Christian to care about the Bible, and even many believing Christians don't put the Bible first.

No if you are trying to understand Christianity or learn more about what they believe about God, then the Bible is a good place to start. You don't have to accept the bible as truth to understand that others do.

It's just a book with a complex, human, politicized history. And it's been questionably translated several times over. I'm an agnostic/athiest, albeit one who recieved substantial theological training from Jesuits and Dominicans, and read his share of Barth, Tillich and the like.

Well now you really need to study up on your history then. For one thing, the discovery of many intact documents from the Dead Sea Scrolls shows that the majority of the Bible has been passed down through the generations with hardly any changes. As far as translations, there are two types...one that tries literal translation (like NIV) and one that tries meaning translation (like NLT). And they are fairly accurate...being reviewed by hundreds of scholars. Of course if this was a valid argument you could just pick of the greek, hebrew and aramatic texts.

What is "just" about making assent to a single doctrine the basis of eternal damnation? If "the law of God is writ in the heart of Man", could such a morally counter-intuitive stance really be the law of God?

It's not making one follow a single doctrine...its about the truth. Christianity says "this is how it is...no strings, no rules, just believe this...". The Lord is simply asking that you believe he exists and created you. And if you can't do that, then you have no need to be with him for eternity.

Re:"because God told me"

[jonabbey]

Evolution doesn't violate causality. The cause of a larger brain is that the dna strands in the germ line were imperfectly copied during meiosis. The resulting DNA code is a little bit different, usually to a neutral or negative result, but occasionally, over the enormous lengths of time and the enormous reproducing population size, a mutation occurs which gives the newly born critter an advantage.

A smart brain is not caused by the usefulness of that smart brain, it is caused by the usefulness of the slighty-less smart brain that last year's model had, in combination with a lucky change in the DNA.

At least, that's the simplified model. There are all kinds of secondary dynamics going on, like cultural and social evolution, changes in the environment from one season, year, or generation t to the next, smarter predators, new diseases, etc., etc., etc.

It's all Very complex, but evolution does not require and does not postulate any kind of time travel or reverse causality.

Re:Give me a break, Mr. Logic

[Rick_T]

> The reason I bring this up is because I'm hearing
> multiple arguments on Slashdot today that say
> something along the lines of, "Science is fact,
> religion is heresay."

The devout might rephrase that as "Religion is fact, science is heresy." ;)

A better argument for science (or to a degree, religion), might be based on what works. Science produces usable (though not always 100% accurate - darn those pesky fallible humans) predictions. I can generally rely on the noaa web site to give me a reasonable idea of tomorrow's weather and whether or not I have to worry about a tropical storm headed my way this week. These people are probably using scientific data rather than reading the last book of the Bible for the forecast.

Or at least I don't recall today's forecast being "Partly cloudy with a 75% chance of fire and brimstone late this evening.". ;)

Of course, you can say religion "works" if you believe the findings of those studies that say that devout folks tend to survive long-term illnesses longer than the non-devout.

> Aye, but new, more advanced theories require
> new, more advanced tools. Just because a CPU
> is faster doesn't mean that the average speed
> of computing goes up. Sorry if I'm putting
> words in your mouth, I thought that was worth
> pointing out.

I was merely pointing out that the basic notion of how to do science (reproducible observations, testing the predictionss of hypotheses, etc.) hasn't fundamentally changed - even though the actual hypotheses being tested have.

But then the old hypotheses aren't *that* bad - once you get past things like all matter being composed of earth, wind, fire, and water. Most of the stuff I teach in my chemistry classes is rather old knowledge - some of which I point out to my students isn't 100% accurate anymore - but it works in 95% of cases.

>>What, exactly, does the Bible prove? This is a
>>pretty reasonable question to ask, I think.
>Nothing. And that's my whole point. Neither side
>can prove anything.

"Proofs", of course, are for the mathematician. Scientists have to be content merely with lots and lots of supporting evidence. :)

It's a conceit of mine that scientists don't have to prove or disprove whether god(s) exist. If the god(s) care, they'll make their presence known without our help.

> "Pot. Kettle. Black." refers to the folks here
> on Slashdot who claim that science is vastly
> superior to religion.

That would, again, depend on what people mean by "superior" and what questions they're trying to answer.

All I know is that if I develop, say, the symptoms of appendicitis, I'd prefer to go to a hospital than a faith healer. ;)

> The scientists I know take a much more...
> intelligent point of view, that is, "I
> might be right, I might be wrong."

Any scientist worth his sodium chloride, er, salt, will say something like that. All we can work to do is minimize errors, since we will make them at some point.

> Interestingly enough, some religious folks
> I know say that, too.

Imagine someone like that as a TV preacher! I know I'd watch ...

> As far as facts being manipulated - I see
> where you are coming from, but I see it a
> little differently.

I come from the deep southern part of the USA, where you can't travel half a mile down the road without driving past one or two cheurches. These areas tend to fall more on the "distort the facts, but don't reinterpret your religion" side of the fence. There's probably a little bit of geographical bias in my views showing through here.

> Religions try and take their scriptures
> and apply it to the life they know in a
> way that makes sense to them. That's
> interpretation. They take what is given
> them (or what they "find") and apply
> it to what they know in ways they think
> are correct. I see the same in science.

I think it's important to emphasize the difference in approaches, though. In science, it's perfectly okay to change your "scripture" - though you'd better have a pretty good set of experimental data to back you up.

In religion - or at least in the brand of christianity that is dominant around here, the "scripture" is supposed to be divinely inspired Truth. We're not allowed to change much.

Sure, both religion and science apply their ideas to facts to see what their ideas explain. I wouldn't dispute that. Religion and science both attempt to explain the world around us in terms we can understand. But they take different roads to get where they're going...

Multiple exit points

[mccalli]

(There were also people who thought that a block should only have one exit. Thankfully these folks did not prevail, since functions representing decision trees often have one entry but multiple exit points.)

I have to profoundly disagree here. I am one of the 'non-prevailers' referred to, and I absolutely believe that a block should have only one exit.

If you've started to structure something in a certain way (a while loop, a function...whatever) then abide by the implications of that structure. It makes the code flow better - a coder coming in doesn't start staring at the bottom of the loop without realising you actually bailed out at the top. And if I call a function, it should return - return, not exit somewhere half-way through. The only exception being the function exit of course...

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Multiple exit points

[Tablizer]

(* a coder coming in doesn't start staring at the bottom of the loop without realising you actually bailed out at the top. And if I call a function, it should return - return, not exit somewhere half-way through. *)

I generally agree except for one part. Often times there is a kind of pre-condition stage where you check stuff and leave if it is not applicable. Example:

sub drawPoint(x, y) {
if outOfRange(x,y) {
return() // don't need to draw
}
big long code to draw point....
}

Now, we could use an Else, but that is kind of a big block, and there might be more such early exists, which "hog" nesting.

Re:"because God told me"

[mlong]

The first question to ask is "what/who is God?" Without that, your question doesn't mean anything. Note that God, in the Bible, didn't even give himself a name - just "I am" (which is about as fundamental as you can get). Who are you to say that what a Hindu, or a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Wiccan believe in isn't God as well?

Well first off, Hindus don't believe in God but rather thousands and a Wiccan worships nature not any God. So now using just the monotheistic religions like Judaism and Islam... Well Judaism is the same God as Christianity is based on Judaism (Christianity says it is the fullfilment of Judaism). Now Islam says the same thing. The main problem though is Islam's Allah doesn't have the same traits or personality as the Jewish God, and indeed the Muslims later start persecuting the Jews. Now if the Jews are following God, why would God direct one group to kill another group if they both follow him? Furthermore, if God is a god of love why is the Quaran filled with violent conquests, etc.? Sure the Bible is too but the bible usually shows stuff like that to show its wrong not to glorify it (the cannanites not withstanding).

If you haven't heard the elephant parable, you should - basically, if a bunch of blind men are trying to describe an elephant by touch, you'll get a ton of completely disparate answers, which, when looked at from a higher stance, all make sense. It's much the same way with religion. All religions have the same kernel of truth to them - it's up to the people to figure them out.

Indeed, how can we ever know God? The answer is we can only know what he reveals to us. And that is through Jesus Christ who spent quite a lot of time talking about God and his kingdom. God also spoke through many prophets. And how do we know these aren't just a bunch of liars? Well mainly because of their predictions and also their miracles, which the people of the time had no problem believing.

I find it amazingly hard to believe that people put such huge restrictions on God, that he can't present himself to billions upon billions of people in billions upon billions of ways.

Oh He can, and He does. But there is a problem with your opinion. Because you see not every religion says the same thing, nor do they follow the same rules, etc. Now why would God contradict himself so much? You're forgetting mankind's motives here. Just look at scientology for an example of a religion created by man that has no truth in it. So how do you know Christianity isn't a sham? Mostly by the evidence I stated in the first paragraph. There are tons of books on the subject. One good one is "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel.

Your argument is just weak - what about all of the people who were born before Christ?

They had Judaism then and will probably be judged by that. Although (somewhat debated) you will also find references in the bible to where Jesus went to Hades and opened the gates to allow those people into Heaven.

What about all of the Native Americans, who were geographically distinct? What about infants? God presents himself in many different ways to many different people, and the truth is that they're all true. Just because you can't handle many seemingly contradictory things being true doesn't make them not true.

Well thats up to God. But you're only talking about those people who never heard about Christianity. I'd say disqualifies quite a number of people from your argument. And I am sure God will deal appropriately with those who could not make the decision on their own (babies, mentally ill, etc.)

God in two bits

[The Wookie]

Talk about a sudden flash of enlightenment!

The existence of God is represented as the two-bit value 11. I *finally* understand what is meant by the holy trinity.

Thanks Larry!

Hidden elephant, crouching unicorn

[magi]

Who are you to say that what a Hindu, or a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Wiccan believe in isn't God as well? If you haven't heard the elephant parable, you should - basically, if a bunch of blind men are trying to describe an elephant by touch, you'll get a ton of completely disparate answers, which, when looked at from a higher stance, all make sense. It's much the same way with religion. All religions have the same kernel of truth to them - it's up to the people to figure them out.

The kernel of truth might also be that all religions display different aspects of human imagination. There isn't necessarily a real entity behind any of the myths and religious experiences. This would perhaps be sad, but no amount of wishing could change that reality.

You should also notice that many religions, especially Christianity, fundamentally exclude the reality of other religions. Christianity is totally atheistic regarding the gods of other religions -- except regarding its own god. It even goes as far as to deny the worship of other gods; why would the supreme God deny the existense of his other representations and actually threathen to send people to eternal damnation or death if they worship them?

Also other religious doctrines are totally contradictory between religions (you can consider each person's religious views a different religion in this sense). In most forms of Christianity, repetitive rebirth is simply impossible. In most forms of Hinduism, the Christian "eternal life" might be considered an abhorrence (they seek towards eternal death, not eternal life). One says that it has a trunk and big ears and another that it has a muzzle and small pointy and hairy ears.

Certainly you can always create your own religion that takes the convenient common and non-conflicting bits and pieces from an assortment of religions, but your new religion is not the same as the original religions, which might explicitly deny your heretical interpretation of the particular god.

It should also be clear to you that we humans have enough imagination to create myths that don't have real god-entities behind them. Even if you believe that many religions have an actual entity behind them, you would be naive saying that none are merely imagined. Now, if you start constructing your picture of the elephant by collecting the myths of different religions -- some imagined and some maybe not, you probably end up in a unicorn, not an elephant.

Since we seem to have trouble distigushing between imagined and "real" religious truths (if they exist), we can't really say if any of the religions have any truth.

Consequently, agnosticism and atheism (which are not exclusive, btw) are the only rational choises left, unless you happen to meet a god, a son of a god, or an angel who makes some convincing miracles such as creates a unicorn pet for you. I'm yet to see such miracles so I remain an atheist.

Re:Hidden elephant, crouching unicorn

[barawn]

You should also notice that many religions, especially Christianity, fundamentally exclude the reality of other religions. Christianity is totally atheistic regarding the gods of other religions -- except regarding its own god. It even goes as far as to deny the worship of other gods; why would the supreme God deny the existense of his other representations and actually threathen to send people to eternal damnation or death if they worship them?

What? Where do you get this conclusion from? Christianity certainly doesn't exclude other religions. What if their God is the same thing? As per what God would do, I wouldn't presume to question God. Perhaps those statements should be looked at in context, rather than in a broad sweeping generalization - maybe then they'll make more sense. "Love God above all others." "Love your neighbor as yourself." Done. If a person does that, then they're Christian in my book.

Also other religious doctrines are totally contradictory between religions (you can consider each person's religious views a different religion in this sense). In most forms of Christianity, repetitive rebirth is simply impossible. In most forms of Hinduism, the Christian "eternal life" might be considered an abhorrence (they seek towards eternal death, not eternal life).

There's nothing that says that repetetive rebirth isn't possible. That could be what heaven is. It's not like anyone knows. Ditto with the "eternal life/eternal death" thing. You don't know there's a difference, and I can easily believe that it's the same thing.

One says that it has a trunk and big ears and another that it has a muzzle and small pointy and hairy ears.

And no one ever thought it has two sets of ears and two noses? Remember that the blind men don't know what an elephant looks like. Just like we don't know what God is. I personally do not presume to place any limitations.

Re:Hidden elephant, crouching unicorn

[mlong]

What? Where do you get this conclusion from? Christianity certainly doesn't exclude other religions. What if their God is the same thing? As per what God would do, I wouldn't presume to question God. Perhaps those statements should be looked at in context, rather than in a broad sweeping generalization - maybe then they'll make more sense. "Love God above all others." "Love your neighbor as yourself." Done. If a person does that, then they're Christian in my book.

Christianity does exclude other religions. Check the Bible. Jesus says that he is the light and the truth and the only way to the father is through him. That's kindof specific don't you think?

There's nothing that says that repetetive rebirth isn't possible. That could be what heaven is. It's not like anyone knows. Ditto with the "eternal life/eternal death" thing. You don't know there's a difference, and I can easily believe that it's the same thing.

Christianity specifically teaches that there is an afterlife and a judgement and you get one chance at this life. It's scattered throughout the whole Bible, especially the new testament. Revelation has some good parts about people sleeping (dead) being raised and the like. Never anything about reincarnation, etc.

One says that it has a trunk and big ears and another that it has a muzzle and small pointy and hairy ears.

Yes, but what if the elephant says it has a trunk and two big ears, then it doesn't matter what the blind men say.

Re:Hidden elephant, crouching unicorn

[barawn]

Christianity does exclude other religions. Check the Bible. Jesus says that he is the light and the truth and the only way to the father is through him. That's kindof specific don't you think?

No. It's not. It's only specific if you think that Christ isn't present in many other religions as well. It's only specific if you read the letter of the text and not the meaning. "I am the light and the truth" - OK. So if the light and the truth is elsewhere as well, isn't Christ there as well? Transitive property of equality - if a=b, then b=a.

Christianity specifically teaches that there is an afterlife and a judgement and you get one chance at this life. It's scattered throughout the whole Bible, especially the new testament. Revelation has some good parts about people sleeping (dead) being raised and the like. Never anything about reincarnation, etc.

Christ also said forgive your neighbor seven times seventy times. Do you really think he meant 490 times? After 490 times, damn, you're screwed, and then you can pelt him with stones. Come on. Stop treating certain parts of the Bible as literal and others as figurative. It's all figurative, because we, as humans, don't have the capability to see otherwise.

I'll dissect this for you. "You get one chance at this life" - We're not talking about retrying your current life. That statement is there to stress that you cannot change what you choose - that your choices are permanent, they define this life for you. What reincarnation COULD mean is taking different choices along a totally different path. In a sense, a totally different "you".

"there is an afterlife" - What afterlife? What happens there? What do you do? What can you do? What can't you do? What's the daily schedule?

Yes, but what if the elephant says it has a trunk and two big ears, then it doesn't matter what the blind men say.

God's never been that specific - he can't be. We wouldn't understand. If you've read the Belgariad/Malloreon by David Eddings, you'll know kindof what I'm talking about - there, the two "Godlike" entities needed to talk through madmen, and the corresponding prophecies were garbled. Whisper down the line and all.

To God, all of mankind must be like madmen - and so even when things appear to be completely obvious, it's amazing how twisted humans can distort them. Even Christ - we know that the Gospels were written down long after Christ's time (because the religion was in hiding before then) so whisper-down-the-line had a long time to take effect. You have to look at the Bible and try to figure out exactly what was meant.

The worst thing that's happened to Christianity was the Catholic Church saying the Bible was immutable, when they themselves changed it over time, retranslated it, reinterpreted it. The Bible was written by men, and one cannot blindly read through it without working to try to see the hand of God behind it.

Re:religion is NOT the basis for morality

[bdowne01]

1) *Your* morals are not based on... modern religions. Please don't say the same for me and many others.

Bah. I say modern religions just took the obvious and were first to write them down.

I'm not going to go around killing everyone. Or stealing stuff. Unless i'm crazy. But then it wouldn't matter anyway.

And I'm not going around sleeping with my neighbor's wife. That commandment is my favorite. Canadian geese don't need Christianity to follow that one--and they're better at it! More Christians cheat on their mates than geese do.

Silly humans. And here we thought we were being creative.

You cannot possibly know that, just as I cannot possibly know that there is an afterlife.

Just as you cannot possibly disprove anything that's not based on fact. uhh...fact?


I believe that "reality" is more than what we observe. Modern physics leans toward this opinion as well. Do disbelieve everything that cannot be seen is not defensible.

I'm all for that one. But I don't think it's an excuse to get lazy stop looking.

A long time ago, people thought the world was flat. Birds knew otherwise, since they could fly and see from the horizon that the place was round. But people were so tied up believing it was flat they gave up without figuring out that building something real tall would prove them wrong, until some guy just sailed around the entire planet and didn't fall off.

Point being, no one could really prove the world was round until we got in space and saw it.

Now I'm just waiting for someone to get above God and do the same.

Re:I can't choose to believe

[mlong]

But I really have no control over whether I believe something or not. I either believe or I don't. I certainly can't choose to believe in God simply because there's a potential reward after dying.

Well actually you do. The first thing is to have a desire to believe. Ok so if you have that then you need help actually believing. Well one thing to do is to actually research it and learn about it. You can't believe in something unless you know about it. Secondly, you can try practicing the belief. By this I mean sitting down and praying to God to help reveal himself to you and help you believe. Maybe try that for a month and see what happens. All you got to lose is maybe 5 minutes every day. Also helpful would be to be around Christians, attending a Christian event, etc. If you do all of that then I seriuosly doubt you will walk away empty handed.

The other classic line

[jcsehak]

"And now let's all sing hymn #42... "

It is called POD...

[Dog and Pony]

... or "Plain Old Documentation". It is very simplistic yet powerful enough to write books (like the Camel) in.

It can also be easily converted into almost anything, be it PDF, HTML, PostScript, nroff, plain text or what have you. the list goes on and on.

It is also the built in documentation language of Perl, and it is everything javadoc (for instance) should have been, since it is so easy to write, human readable as it is and powerful in its output.

Yes it does

[rutledjw]

I absolutely agree. The only proof is to those who have turned to God. Look and you will find. The rest is simply philisophical argument. Given the nature of the thing, cannot be proven since God doesn't perform the "obvious" miracles such as parting the Red Sea (which didn't make any long-lasting impression anyway as the Jews quickly turned from God afterwards).

In the end, nobody can "sell" you on it. Either you go find out for yourself or regard it all as nonsense, dillusion, whatever. However, keep in mind that many of the historians and archeologists who've gone searching for evidence to dis-prove God have become Christians themselves! I believe the actual stat was in "Wild at Heart" by John Eldridge

The magic knob!

[j3110]

Hopefully, this knob of which he speeks will have a "Readable" selection. I find myself, after having written some perl (and commented it), wondering what I just did to make it work. When I go back to fix some bug, I find it easier to just redo a section than to figure out exactly why it was functional (not even considering the bug at this point). The line noise perl programs should be impossible when the knob is set "Readable".

As for theology, the existance of God to me is a qubit that can be observed with any given teaching. When I use the Bible to observe it, I keep getting a 0 because the old testiment was much to brutal for me to accept as devine. That's better than getting the -1 that I think I would get with scientology though :).

Re:The magic knob!

[orkysoft]

Hopefully, this knob of which he speeks will have a "Readable" selection. I find myself, after having written some perl (and commented it), wondering what I just did to make it work. When I go back to fix some bug, I find it easier to just redo a section than to figure out exactly why it was functional (not even considering the bug at this point). The line noise perl programs should be impossible when the knob is set "Readable".

I'm sorry, but you really must be doing something wrong. It's entirely possible to write readable Perl programs. Also, it looks like you can't read regular expressions. When I didn't know about them, they looked like line noise. After I read about them, they suddenly didn't look like line noise at all, they looked like regular expressions.

Go look at some Greek text, then learn the Greek alphabet (not hard), and then look at it again. It'll suddenly not look like some garbled text anymore! (Of course it's still Greek.)

Really, all that flak that Perl is getting for being unreadable seems to be from people who haven't bothered to learn it (of course, I don't know how well you know Perl, and I am generalizing here).

If you use strict and warnings and take care to use a consistent style, you'll see your programs actually are readable.

As for theology, the existance of God to me is a qubit that can be observed with any given teaching. When I use the Bible to observe it, I keep getting a 0 because the old testiment was much to brutal for me to accept as devine. That's better than getting the -1 that I think I would get with scientology though :).

The Old Testament is probably much more realistic than the New One. In those days, there was no such concept as human rights. The King 0wnzed j00. If you read the Greek mythology, you'll know that just looking in the wrong way at someone in power could cost you your head.

Regarding Scientology, I think everything that has to be said has already been said. Someone here on Slashdot has a signature that goes something like:

Lawsuits are to Scientology as breathing is to humans.

which I think is awfully close to the truth.

Re:The magic knob!

[j3110]

I know it's possible to write good Perl, I was just exagerating quite a bit :) I only complain because I think there should be some sort of set standards about what is OK about publicly released code that was designed to be functional (It's not really open source if only you can read it). With the big knob, there would be some social issue to not using it on a pretty high setting for code that you expect people to use. That's all I really want :) (and looks like I will have!)

I use reg. ex. in Java (yep, now you know my source of liking structure), and I think they could be better defined, but it could take away from the ease of writting a reg-ex. In that case, you should probably just make a procedure if you want that much structure instead of a quick (and a little dirty) regular expression. That is unless Larry has some magic tricks for Perl6's reg. ex. that we don't know about :)

I'm more concerned about the things God told men to do in Leviticus. Stoning a woman for being raped or a child for disobedience is much too brutal for a devine being to have said. If the Bible says that this is the case, how can I believe the Bible to be devine? Besides, if it was ever right, by the definitions of having a perfect God, then it is still the right thing to do. I think religions are very good at showing how morality of man has progressed.

Larry would have you believe that there is no basis for morality without religion, but an atheist will usually say that religion is an expression of the human desire for morality that branched from the Golden Rule, equality, and very rudementary logic. I hold these as being truths that I test any potential religion with. Sexism (men are better than women) and racism (jews are God's favorite) only serve to make the writers of the Bible feel better about themselves (being jewish men and all). I fail to see how it's so easy to take the Bible seriously with such statements in it. I'm sure Larry isn't sexist, but the Bible is. Should Larry be sexist, or is Larry smarter than God? According to the Bible, one or the other must be true. Don't give me that crap about "all will prophesy in the end" because according to the Bible, all women are still being punished for Eve's sin. Appearantly you're being judged before your own existence based on others. Today, we call this prejudice(look up it's roots... pre->before, judice->judgement), and it's not tolerated. Society has evolved beyond the Bible, and Christians are leaving it behind (not taking it literally already).

I'm an ex-Christian. I know as much about the Bible as the average christian, I just got tired of making excuses for the Bible's prejudice.

Re:The magic knob!

[orkysoft]

I'm more concerned about the things God told men to do in Leviticus. Stoning a woman for being raped or a child for disobedience is much too brutal for a devine being to have said. If the Bible says that this is the case, how can I believe the Bible to be devine? Besides, if it was ever right, by the definitions of having a perfect God, then it is still the right thing to do. I think religions are very good at showing how morality of man has progressed.

These kind of things still happen, regrettably. But you make a good point.

Larry would have you believe that there is no basis for morality without religion,

I don't believe that. I don't believe in gods, but I do believe in morality, but I think it exists because it, and the expectations it brings (i.e. people should not kill you or steal your hard-earned food), are necessary to build a civilization, whether it's a religious one or not. Perhaps the pre-civilization humans couldn't build a stable society because they lacked the concept of Thou Shalt Not Kill?

but an atheist will usually say that religion is an expression of the human desire for morality that branched from the Golden Rule, equality, and very rudementary logic.

My hypothesis on religion is, it served a useful purpose: once people had developed morality and stable societies, they needed a reason to keep obeying the leaders. Thus, the smart leaders made up tales of supernatural beings, who created the earth and themselves, and whom they represented. This way, the people would have a common cause and a faith that would give them strength during harsh times, which were plenty. Just about all primitive tribes discovered in the last couple of centuries has some king of religion. Perhaps the non-religious tribes had died out ages ago, because they didn't have the internal consistency to co-operate during hard times?

I hold these as being truths that I test any potential religion with. Sexism (men are better than women) and racism (jews are God's favorite) only serve to make the writers of the Bible feel better about themselves (being jewish men and all). I fail to see how it's so easy to take the Bible seriously with such statements in it. I'm sure Larry isn't sexist, but the Bible is. Should Larry be sexist, or is Larry smarter than God?

It's clear he's pretty smart, but as I don't believe in God, I can't compare them without getting a "Use of uninitialized value" warning :-)

According to the Bible, one or the other must be true. Don't give me that crap about "all will prophesy in the end"

I won't give you that crap. I'm not sure there will ever be an end. That depends on the Hubble-constant, it appears.

because according to the Bible, all women are still being punished for Eve's sin. Appearantly you're being judged before your own existence based on others. Today, we call this prejudice(look up it's roots... pre->before, judice->judgement), and it's not tolerated. Society has evolved beyond the Bible, and Christians are leaving it behind (not taking it literally already).

I'm an ex-Christian. I know as much about the Bible as the average christian, I just got tired of making excuses for the Bible's prejudice.

I've never been religious, but I've seen some movies about the bible, and read lots of (mostly translated) Greek myths, and have been extensively schooled about the Greek and especially the Roman cultures, so I know that the world was quite a bit crueler back then.

Re:The magic knob!

[j3110]

I'm sorry if I came off a little angry or anything. Just years of repressing that side of myself causes me to be a little imbalanced now and again. You're absolutely right, religion probably did serve a purpose at some point. I still think a lot of the minor religions were bulldozed by catholisism and islam. I wonder what the French believed before "moral fortitude" became their military strategy :) On the other hand, the catholics documented a lot of things we wouldn't have known otherwise.

i am so impressed

[lingqi]

Only if Taco had spelling like that!

Re:"because God told me"

[barawn]

Similarly, if anyone were to use logic to examine, for example, the Bible, they would be shot down by the very same Elephant Argument you are quoting here: the Bible reveals only a part of the story, and therefore it's perfectly reasonable to find contradictions. However, once we allow a system that is by definition contradictory, then we cannot study it scientifically. It's that simple.

Part of the whole scientific process is to weed through seeming contradictions to find the truth. That's the whole point. If you can find the contradictions, you can understand them, and resolve them. Nothing can be truly self-contradictory ; some things can appear self-contradictory, but are not (much of Hinduism, Taoism, etc.) because once you think about the contradictions, you see they aren't contradictions at all. If there are contradictions in the Bible, they can be reasoned out, or something's seriously wrong. This doesn't preclude study - it encourages it!

I, too, like the Many-Worlds interpretation of free will. You will note, however, that it doesn't resolve the question of free will versus fate.

No, it does. If all paths are already taken, then the choices we take are all predestined, because there are no other paths to take. However, it doesn't presuppose the uniqueness of the life being lived - you still have free will. You are the one making the choice, but the choice will be made. If you're thinking about something like Calvinistic determinism, then that's a little different - whether or not you were fated to "go to hell" or to "go to heaven" when you were born. That's a stupid argument, anyway - it presupposes that going to hell/heaven are determined by your actions, rather than by your self. Actions are of this Universe, "self" - as in, the Observer in each of us - is not (if you want to debate this, enjoy, but you won't win. I won't either, though) - so it makes more sense to be judged by the self.

I dislike the Elephant Argument because I dislike the God it describes. God is all-powerful according to Christian dogma, right? If he *is* all-powerful, why did He make us so dumb that not only do we not understand him, but we cannot find any "beyond reasonable doubt" evidence that He exists, and our records of him are all confused and sometimes flat-out state the opposite of another, equally credible record?

Ah, the limitations of the human mind. :) God is all-powerful - but not in the way you're thinking. You're thinking that God can "do" things. "Do" implies time - before this instant, it wasn't done, after an instant, it was done. It's an action verb. God's outside of time, so "actions" don't really apply (this is the kind of rigorous analysis I mentioned). God can't do anything. In that sense, he's impotent. Then again, he's already done everything. In that sense he's omnipotent. The span of possibilities in the Universe is extremely large, but it is not boundless - there are "cause and effect" relationships. People often say "Why did God do this?" "Why did God let so and so die?" etc. - or in your case, "Why did God make us so stupid?" You're all missing the point. God didn't do any of that - he created the Universe. The form you currently have followed from that creation. The disasters people attribute to God are simply due to the fact that the Universe exists.

If your statement is "why didn't God make a Universe where the conscious beings in it are capable of understanding him?" - the simple fact is, you don't know what's possible and what's not. Self-contradictions can't exist - and it's easy to believe that there's no way for a conscious being to be able to understand God in a consistent universe.

The next statement might be "well, what exactly does God do then?" It's not that He's impotent. We know that we make choices all the time throughout the day, and we know that we have "impulses", and feelings, and instinct - "It just feels right." There might be some logical answers to those, but not all. It's like saying "why" an electron fell out of its energy level at that exact time - scientists say it's random, but that's implicitly acknowledging a reference frame. What's random to us need not be unguided.

Re:"because God told me"

[mlong]

I am constantly amazed that christians find it so hard to believe that muslims or jews or whoever else don't easily and readily convert to christianity upon hearing of it. Is it so hard to see that they are no more likely to convert to your religion than you are to convert to theirs, and for pretty much exactly the same reasons (or at least, by exactly the same reasonings)?

This is true. That is why Christianity stresses that we can never "convert" someone. It's only God that can do the converting. But it is a Christian's responsibility to share the good news and let God take it from there. Because its the Holy Spirit that does it...no well-formed argument or elegant speech will do anything.

that is, you point to your book and say, "see, no one comes to the father except through christ" and then wonder how a muslim fails to accept that, but it doesn't surprise you in the least when a muslim says to you "There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger" and you fail to accept *that* as true. If you died today and Allah said to you, "You read on slashdot that there was no God but Me. And yet you failed to believe. I condemn you to everlasting torment!" would you accept that as a fair judgement?

In the same bible it says God is patient and slow to anger. In other words, He gives us about a zillion chances to believe in him. He isn't going to condemn someone because they ignored a post of Slashdot.

Re:"because God told me"

[Lemmy Caution]

I think you understate the vast differences in actual doctrine that separate different Protestant denominations. They include differences not only in the doctrine of redemption, but in predetermination and free will, the nature of the trinity, the nature of the incarnation, that status of scripture. There are even a large and growing number of Anglican vicars who believe in neither the divinity nor the resurrection of Christ.

My criticisms are focused on the emerging strain of evangelism in the US, the convergence of born-again, Bible literalist/creationist/fundamentalist, and dispensationalist views, that I think have become the plularity of Christian belief in the US.

Re:"because God told me"

[barawn]

Prove that there isn't a God.

Now prove that there is.

In fact, the two explanations are exactly identical, right? They produce the exact same situation (the Universe was created: whether it happened on its own, or because it was created by something) and have no differences between the two. In fact, the two questions are irrelevant for effects - if you presuppose an action, then whether or not it was "done" by something or it just happened, the effects will still be the same, and the two situations will be indistinguishable.

Given that, one would suppose that Occam's Razor would hold true, and that the simpler explanation would hold true. The one thing that people consistently miss is that the simpler explanation between "it just happened" and "God did it" is currently (stress currently) "God did it". The problem is that "it just happened" is not an explanation. It is a statement lacking explanation - a non-explanation, in fact. It in fact implies that it was caused by something, because "happen" implies a causal relationship. So "it just happened" falls flat on its face.

If you want to say that the Universe always was there, well, there's experimental evidence against that.

If you want to say that the Universe self-sprang into existence... there really isn't any good evidence for that, either, and it's got as many variables (if not more) as the deity hypothesis. Moreover, "self-sprang" from what perspective? From our perspective it would, but from outside the Universe, it may not.

Religion isn't fiction. It's thousands of years of people trying to understand the bizarre fact of the fact that you are here. That's your evidence - you are here. We don't see aliens, and we don't see any evidence of them having been here. However, we know that we are here, and therefore that fact requires explanation. There have been quite a good number of discussions on that fact, although I think the lack of scientific rigor really is holding us back. But that's what religion is. Answering that fact.

You exist (maybe. I can only speak for me!) Explain that. Explain the entire world around you. Not Earth, not humans, not the duck-billed platypus - everything. The Universe. That's what religion is trying to answer. You're ignoring the question - and that is a character flaw, not me trying to answer it.

Re:Give me a break, Mr. Logic

[mlong]

What, exactly, does the Bible prove? This is a pretty reasonable question to ask, I think.

Well if you take it on its historical basis alone, then finding evidence to back up the historical information would add to its credibility. Thus if you can provide reasonable evidence that Christ existed, and that he performed the miracles he is said to have done, then you would put some credence into what he actually said. See "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel.

Delegation is hard work...

[ryanvm]

I haven't an executive bone in my body. All my managerial skills are delegated.

Of course, he doesn't do the delegating himself - that's hard work. He's got a guy that delegates for him. ;-)

[Props to The Daily Show.]

I might be wrong.

[cpeterso]

The scientists I know take a much more... intelligent point of view, that is, "I might be right, I might be wrong." Interestingly enough, some religious folks I know say that, too.

If facts prove the scientist was wrong, then the scientist updates his hypothesis to match the observed facts. This is called the scientific method. With it, science is self-optimizing. If facts prove the Bible wrong, then the religious person changes the FACTS to match the Bible. How often does the Bible get updated with new information? It doesn't.

Science can do amazing things, like saving lives and sending humans into space. What has religion done for us lately?

Re:"because God told me"

[barawn]

Well first off, Hindus don't believe in God but rather thousands and a Wiccan worships nature not any God..

I don't see any reason why all of those deities couldn't be the same thing, seen by humans and mangled into (mostly) unrecognizable forms. The fact that they appear distinct is exactly what the parable is trying to address.

Indeed, how can we ever know God?

He gave us a wealth of experimental data. We call it the Universe.

Oh He can, and He does. But there is a problem with your opinion. Because you see not every religion says the same thing ... Now why would God contradict himself so much?

How do you know that every religion says different things? They all fundamentally say "Be nice to each other". And every one stresses some spirituality. Isn't that what Christ said is important? You're quibbling over details.

Want a test? Sure. Take a child. Take him to as many religious ceremonies as you can think of. Now ask him or her what the philosophical difference is between them. I'd bet that he won't be able to tell you. (I know. I was one of those kids.) This isn't because he's stupid, or he doesn't understand - it's because you've become stupid about this kinda thing, and you don't understand that they're all saying the same thing.

And as for God contradicting himself, He's not ! That's what the elephant story explains! What you see as contradictions are merely different people seeing God in different ways, and then mangling and destroying the religion due to human greed, envy, and suffering. Every religion is like that - Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Muslim, Judaism, Wiccan, all of them. But all of them have the same kernel of truth in them.

Well thats up to God. But you're only talking about those people who never heard about Christianity. I'd say disqualifies quite a number of people from your argument. And I am sure God will deal appropriately with those who could not make the decision on their own (babies, mentally ill, etc.)

I think you're insane to believe that God has a list of "by-laws". What about those who were slaughtered during the Crusades? They heard of Christianity - it was at the end of a sword. To believe that up in Heaven, God's got a list of "exceptions" - that's crazy. If that were true, every lawyer would go to heaven just so they could work for God.

No - if you believe in a salvation and damnation, it better be independent of religion if it's universal. Otherwise God is nothing more than another human being. It has to be some basic simple fact about human existence.

"There's more than one way"

[wytcld]

So why isn't there more than one god? Keep in mind that the Qaeda don't want to kill us because we worship a different, single god, but because they see us as worshipping a number of gods - as being polytheists. But if there's one god, why not many? And when Jehovah says "Worship no other god before me," isn't he agreeing that there are many? But if there are many, why should any one of them be singled out to be worshipped, and the rest condemned? (Check out Milton's Paradise Lost on this big question.) Some of us might prefer to believe that the universe was created by a single architect, rather than a committee - but that's our preference, not the necessary reality. And maybe the committee just, whatever its conflicts, made up a really good team. Just because we do committees poorly, does that mean gods might not be better at it?

If there are many gods - and again, if there's one, why not many; what kind of ecological niche has but a single individual in it? - then while some gods may be preferable to others in various contexts, the most evil of gods is a god who insists that the other gods are not worthy of worship and respect. I'll leave deduction of the names of these evil gods as an exercise for the reader (but pay attention to who our worst enemies (domestically as well as internationally) worship, and look to ideologies other than "religion" too).

But isn't Wall really a polytheist? Looks to me like he's made the sow's ear of Christianity into a purse that can hold the treasures of many gods, rather than being the exclusive sort of evil I've despised above. Similarly the midaeval Xians retained a healthy dose of polytheism by transforming many of the old gods into archangels and saints - a kludge, but a good one until free worship of the many gods can be fully restored.

Re:"There's more than one way"

[barawn]

If there's more than one God, then the collection of them could be called "God". Same thing. Semantics. It's a little difficult when we retain old ideas of what "god" is, when you can clearly extend it to something singular (see later).

As per the statement in the Bible, what does "god" mean? Do you know? Do you know the real etymology of the term, when it was first applied? Are you sure it's distinct from "idol" (which is what many translations use)? It doesn't necessarily imply a multitude of gods. It more logically implies a multitude of things which could be worshipped, and above those all, worship God. Doesn't every religion say that? Isn't it reasonable to suppose then that they're all the same thing?

As per "what niche has but a single individual in it?" - your idea of "individual" and what God is may be two distinct things. God is that which created the Universe. All I'm presupposing is that it is conscious. Nothing more. Make arguments for plurality later.

Re:"There's more than one way"

[mlong]

And when Jehovah says "Worship no other god before me," isn't he agreeing that there are many?

No he's not saying other God's exist just that we should not worship other Gods. Men tend to try to do that, just look in the bible to see how the jews built and worshipped a golden calf while Moses was up on the mountain chatting with God. Many people worship other stuff to like money, cars, etc. God is saying not to do this. This is the same thing when God tells us to have no idols.

Re:"because God told me"

[n9hmg]

Furthermore, what about the Indians, Turks, Asians, Ethiopians, Saxons, Celts,

That's one of my points, which sometimes sets me at odds with others in my rather fundamentalist church - For the life of me, I just can't picture Gandhi roasting in hell.

Now, for my silly comment, since I don't see it in anyone else's comments: I though Larry was God.

Re:"because God told me"

[xtremex]

You would enjoy my paper on Christianity for the Scientist using Logic and Reasoning.
Go to http://cguru.ma.cx and click the link at the top

Re:"because God told me"

[barawn]

OK, more later, because I want to go home now. :) but if you're wondering really about whether or not there's a consistent belief structure here, no, there isn't. There's an inconsistent belief structure (like all the others) that I'm working to make consistent. Go to my home page and check out "views". That's a good place to start.

Splat == Asterisk

[Starship Trooper]

It's not an operator in Ruby per se, just a special method declaration/calling syntax. When you declare a method like so:

def foo(bar,bas,*qux)
(...body goes here...)
end

it means that the method takes at least two arguments. The first two will be assigned to bar and bas, and the rest will be stored in an array qux, e.g. if you were to call:

frob = foo(1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8)

the parameters would be set as follows:

bar = 1
bas = 1
qux = [2, 3, 5, 8]

Following Ruby's philosophy of Least Surprise, the same syntax works to expand an array in-place. So you could call the above function as follows:

array = [2, 4, 8, 16]
frob = foo(1, *array)

which will expand the elements of array into the argument list, resulting in the following parameters for foo():

bar = 1
bas = 2
qux = [4, 8, 16]

Perl 6 will pass arrays by reference into subs, rather than expand them in-place as Perl 5 does now. Wall has chosen to borrow Ruby's splat (*) to achieve this effect, so that the following possibly misleading perl5 code:

@foo = (0666, "/home/joe/file.txt");
chmod @foo;

would need to explicitly expand the array in perl6:

@foo = (0666, "/home/joe/file.txt");
chmod *@foo;

The name of God

[vandemar]

Note that God, in the Bible, didn't even give himself a name - just "I am" (which is about as fundamental as you can get).

Just a minor point bordering on the unrelated, but the proper name of the biblical God is YHWH (see Isaiah 42:8). The Jews never actually pronounced it, as a sign of reverence, but it is commonly transliterated as Yahweh. For a long time it was mistakenly thought to be Jehovah, because the word "Adonai" was always written on top of YHWH (to prevent the accidental pronounciation of the Name, IIRC). You won't find it in the verses of the Bible because translaters always substitute it with LORD (in small caps). But if you flip to the introductory notes in the front, there should be an explanation.

For all of you who read Cryptonomicon, you might recall a joke about buying a pack of Magic cards and finding one with the large letters YHWH printed on it.

Re:"because God told me"

[mlong]

This isn't just how it is. God made it that way. God's rule on how to get into heaven is unjust.

Yes he did make it that way. But its not unjust. Unjust being defined as "unfair". It is actually quite fair...you reap what you sow, you receive punishment for what you did. Unless you believe in Christ, then the sentence is thrown out since Christ took our punishment himself. Seems pretty just to me.

Your logic is bad. How does it follow that since I don't believe in him, I don't need him?

Hmm, so you've just said you don't need him, yet you're complaining that by Christian doctrine, you'll go to hell and be seperated by him forever (as in being unjust?).

Or is he just a spoiled brat. Just because I don't believe in Jesus, it doesn't mean I'd rather not go to hell, yet Jesus would refuse to help me? Doesn't sound like the Jesus I know.

Jesus will indeed help you if you ask him. Of course you have to ask him this side of eternity.

Re:"because God told me"

[mlong]

I don't see any reason why all of those deities couldn't be the same thing, seen by humans and mangled into (mostly) unrecognizable forms. The fact that they appear distinct is exactly what the parable is trying to address.

Well two issues here... One is that many times these dieties exhibit traits and personalities that conflict with each other. One being would not do that. Secondly, just because something is similar doesn't make it identical. I could say two people are white, male, programmers, like computers and perl, etc, etc. and yet they are two distinct people (or maybe one doesn't even exist).

Indeed, how can we ever know God?

By Christian theology: We can only know about God via what he has revealed in his word, his dealings in history, and his prophet. Now KNOWING God is entirely different. For that we are told the holy spirit will dwell inside of us and that is how we will know him - via a one-on-one relationship.

He gave us a wealth of experimental data. We call it the Universe.

Of course the universe in and of itself can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, and thus science can neither provide or disprove him. It ultimately comes down to faith (which means, believing and trusting in God even though you can't directly see and hear him)

How do you know that every religion says different things? They all fundamentally say "Be nice to each other". And every one stresses some spirituality. Isn't that what Christ said is important? You're quibbling over details.

Hmm, well Islam says that in its marketing materials but there is an awful lot of conquest, killing of the infidels, etc. in the Quaran. So it is a god of Love or War? Likewise what little I know of buddahism, etc. seems to have absolutely nothing to do with God but with man seeking the path of enlighenment. Well that is a lot different than Christianity that stresses we were created by God to worship him and be in fellowship with him.

Want a test? Sure. Take a child. Take him to as many religious ceremonies as you can think of. Now ask him or her what the philosophical difference is between them. I'd bet that he won't be able to tell you. (I know. I was one of those kids.) This isn't because he's stupid, or he doesn't understand - it's because you've become stupid about this kinda thing, and you don't understand that they're all saying the same thing.

Geez I don't know where to start. Get a book on world religions and then try to tell me they all say the same thing. They don't. Not even close. And its a lot more than small differences. Also a child isn't a good example, what does a child know? They know they are sitting in church being bored and would like to go get an icecream cone. Do you think they are listening to or understanding the sermon or anything else? If they are then they must be smart because I certainly wasn't when I was young.

And as for God contradicting himself, He's not ! That's what the elephant story explains! What you see as contradictions are merely different people seeing God in different ways, and then mangling and destroying the religion due to human greed, envy, and suffering. Every religion is like that - Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Muslim, Judaism, Wiccan, all of them. But all of them have the same kernel of truth in them.

Actually this doesn't have anything to do with the elephant story. Sure, if all we knew of religion was what man had figured out. But you will find in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and probably others statements which are portrayed as the direct commandments and direct word of God. So if God is talking then, we're not feeling up an elephant but rather listening to the truth as he says it.

I think you're insane to believe that God has a list of "by-laws". What about those who were slaughtered during the Crusades? They heard of Christianity - it was at the end of a sword. To believe that up in Heaven, God's got a list of "exceptions" - that's crazy. If that were true, every lawyer would go to heaven just so they could work for God.

I said if someone was incapable of understanding or accepting Christ then the Lord will deal with them appropriately. He is just and he is love. Those two qualities would not allow someone to be punished for what they are not guilty of.

No - if you believe in a salvation and damnation, it better be independent of religion if it's universal. Otherwise God is nothing more than another human being. It has to be some basic simple fact about human existence.

I don't understand this. What rules says salvation and damnation cannot be part of religion? If a religion says "God created you. He'll decide how you spend eternity". That seems to fit religion very well.

Re:"because God told me"

[mlong]

How many posts does it take, how slow is god to anger? 10 posts, 20? 100? at what point does Allah say, "he's been reading pro-Islam posts on Slashdot all day, but died in a car accident without believing in me. To hell with him."

Who can say? to the Lord a post is like a thousand posts, and a thousand posts is like a post. Although no doubt you've been having to hear Christian beliefs for a long time and probably will continue to, long before an SUV kills you. By the way, you're talking about Allah here. He will no doubt strike you dead after just a few posts, or at least have you slaughtered like the infidel you are. Now Jehovah won't do that.

Religious proof

[guttentag]

Larry, could you write a Perl script that proves your existence to the non-believers?

My co-workers keep demonstrating magic tricks... turning pipes into python... making c look like ruby... unleashing a plague of locusts on exchange servers... all as proof of the power of their gods. Can you smite their firstborn or something? Just to shut them up? Thanks.

Re:I have everything I ever prayed for.

[Reality Master 101]

Without God, NOTHING has meaning.

Why do you think anything HAS to have meaning? To be honest, I gave up on the idea of anything anyone does having any intrinsic "meaning" a long time ago. The only reason anything matters at all is because we are genetically programmed to assign meaning to thing in order to maximize our survivability through a stable society.

But hell, isn't that enough? Can't we take pleasure in the "grand machine" that is the universe, and the random chance (through the process of evolution) that produced us? Why do we need a "clockmaker" behind the curtain?

Re:"because God told me"

[seanw]

who are you, and what on earth are you doing on slashdot?

not that I mind at all

Hammers... Nails...

[sterno]

Sort of the, "if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail argument" :). I've personally come to love Java after having been a Perl programmer initially. Why? Because I found that most of what I wanted to do, Java did, rather easily. I'll admit though that occasionally I do something silly like do parsing of something in Java because I've almost completely forgotten how to do perl from disuse.

Java isn't a fad, it's incredibly well suited to certain tasks, just like perl is. I'm not going to write device drivers in perl or java, and I'm not going to write a distributed application in perl or C. So as long as Java does what I need, I'll use it. Then when it doesn't I'll go learn the next thing, as long as it runs on something other than windows :)

Re:"because God told me"

[belroth]

Yes he did make it that way. But its not unjust. Unjust being defined as "unfair". It is actually quite fair...you reap what you sow, you receive punishment for what you did. Unless you believe in Christ, then the sentence is thrown out since Christ took our punishment himself. Seems pretty just to me.

No, it's not just.
It is merciful.
It would be just to condemn us for our sin, but fortunately He is Merciful.

Re:"because God told me"

[An Onerous Coward]

1.1a heaven
1.1b earth

Wait, so you get the Big Bang and the formation of galaxies and stars and planets out of "God created the Heavens and the Earth?" Worse, Genesis doesn't say the sun has been created yet.

Seems pretty obvious that you're twisting the story like a pretzel to get it to match up with current scientific understanding.

1.2 water
1.2-1.5 earth rotation

The Earth was rotating before it had even settled down into a nice ball-ish shape. Conservation of angular momentum and whatnot.

1.6-1.8 air
1.9-1.10 continents

1.11-1.13 plant life
1.14-1.19 moon and/or decrease in cloud cover

Notice how he deliberately leaves out the creation of the Sun at the same time. Kinda throws a nice big kink in the whole thing.

1.20-1.25 land, air and sea animals

"Plants," as we normally think of them, probably hit the evolutionary scene before animals. They evolved together, yet the story seems to make the two separate, distinct, and most importantly unsynchronized events.

1.26-1.31 human
2.1-2.2 vacation!

Now, I don't mind if people claim the general correctness of the broadest strokes of Genesis (God is the Creator, God is powerful, and whatnot). But trying to match up the details is an exercise in futility, and trying to demonstrate that the authors of the Bible had special knowledge based on the misrepresentation of those details is an exercise in dishonesty.

Heresy! You are damned!

[chazR]

Every truly faithful person knows that God was trying to create wine, and that when the perfect wine is created, God will drink it, be satisfied, and the universe will end.

However, as scripture teaches us, God's kid brother, Satan, was goofing around with early yeast prototypes while God wasn't looking and accidentally created beer.

The problem with beer is that it takes less time to brew than wine. This led to a problem. The finest vine-growing areas on the planet are in Australia and South Africa. Satan tempted the fine people of these areas with beer. The results are well-documented. Wine production has been delayed by centuries.

For the True Rapture to take place, Australians and South Africans must be kept away from beer long enough for them to get the wine right. They are so close to perfection.

That's why the truly religious mission is so hard. I have chosen to follow the One True Path.

I'm ridding the world of beer, one pint at a time.

Re:"because God told me"

[mlong]

So, if I fail to ask him, he turns his back on me. This is justice? Justice means doing whats right. Whats fair. It is not fair that a murderer who repents goes to heaven, but a saint who doesn't know jesus goes to hell. And what is the point of punishing someone for misbehaving, with no "Your cured mate" or "here's time off for good behaviour." What exactly is the point? Is God sadistic? Is he happy knowing that he torturing billions of souls for all eternity? What about people who never misbehaved? Do they go to heaven, even if they don't know christ?

Well first off he never turns his back...he says he is always there (you know...if he knocks let him in and he will share a meal with you, etc.). Now once you go to the next life then eventually justice will have to be served. But I don't think he tortures people and he certainly doesn't enjoy it (he is love and he doesn't want anyone to perish). Rather, he is pure and holy and someone who is not cannot spend eternity with him. Or better yet, he honors a person's will. If they have rejected him then he will honor that by them being seperated from him for eternity. And lastly, we are told we have all sinned and fallen short of God's glory. Nobody is innocent or never misbehaved. At least nobody I've ever known.

Re:"because God told me"

[mlong]

No, it's not just.
It is merciful.
It would be just to condemn us for our sin, but fortunately He is Merciful.

Well its still just in the fact that *someone* had to receive punishment, and the Lord took it upon himself to satisfy that. But in a bigger sense yes he is merciful, or better yet, loving.

Re:"because God told me"

[johnnyb]

What is "just" about making assent to a single doctrine the basis of eternal damnation?

****

What is unjust about it? Too many people try to make life happy-happy. They try to make God into a cheery teletubby or refuse to believe in Him at all.

God is who He is, or He isn't at all. It's no use trying to figure out if you want to believe in someone who would do such a thing. How you want God to be is of no importance. What matters is a) whether He exists, and b) what He is like if He does exist. I can't answer those questions for you, but I will pray that God makes Himself known to you.

In fact, that's how the early Church started - God made a showing of His power.

Of course, questions of "just" and "unjust" are nonsense when dealing with the person who created the rules in the first place.

You should read the book of Job sometime, even if just to prove me wrong. You might find something you can connect with.

Re:Give me a break, Mr. Logic

[johnnyb]

What gets my goat is that so many people confuse what faith and science are _for_.

Imagine we have a crime committed. Let's say Joe stabs Jim while Jane watches. The medical examiner who did an autopsy of Jim was named Jesse.

Now, if we ask Jesse how Jim died, he would say something like "Jim was killed by a sharp cut in his main artery". If we ask Jane how Jim died, she would say "Joe killed him in a mad rage!" Which one is correct? Or are they just talking about different parts of the same thing?

Science deals with mechanism. Religion deals with the relationship between God and man. To say that one has anything to do with the other misunderstands both completely. A great friend and a great scientist are often two different people.

All things foul and nasty

[Scrameustache]

Monthy python wrote a song about it.

Its basically about the fact that is god created everything, he also purpusefully created siphillis and ugly people...

Re:Give me a break, Mr. Logic

[An Onerous Coward]

After you're done evaluating "The Case for Christ," try this link for a secular evaluation of the "evidence."

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Glad my "score 5" question did not make the cut...

[King Babar]

Seriously, I thought my question was good, but the questions that got answered *very* thoughtfully were all better. I'm sincerely impressed with the way this particular slashdot interview went, and I have to say that this gives me a bit more faith that slashdot will continue to be a real forum that dishes news to nerds...stuff that matters.

As far as the Larry Wall answers go, I think the most important one had to do with testing one's own slogans. So while it's safe to say that TIMTOWTDI is still strong, I was floored by Larry's admission that there was indeed something to think about in the "Perl makes easy things easy and hard things possible" line. Now, if there's time and energy to ponder another imponderable slogan, I'd suggest a second look be given to the "perl is a diagonal language" (rather than an orthogonal language) notion. That one has always worried me. If I had to get picturesque about it, I would observe that a Bishop in chess is the most Diagonal piece, while the rook is slightly more powerful for being Orthogonal. But, of course, the Queen combines both qualities, and is more powerful than the other two put together. Perl should be like that (and Ruby tries to be like that).

OK, so that one *is* pretty cheesy, but I think that it might be true. :-)

Re:"because God told me"

[tshak]

I'll agree that none of us know for sure, however, we could get into quite a discussion that gives credit to:

A) There is a higher being or higher beings
B) There is a single higher being.
C) There is a single higher being in which a part of him was born human ("Who being in very nature God, but did not consider equality with God, something to be grasped." Philipians 2 something - I'm too lazy to look it up!)
Furthermore, this human revolutionized the entire concept of religion and essentially destroyed a lot of what religion stood for (and stands for today).

After this point we start arguing "morality" and that can get rediculous!

Re:"because God told me"

[Lemmy Caution]

Perhaps I have faith in other things. But my faith obeys my moral instincts. A faith that told me to consider all who do not claim a certain belief as damned, would not pass the filter of my moral intuition. A faith that I would live forever if I drank the blood of virgins would also fail to circumvent my sense of fairness. A faith that contradicts evidence, likewise.

Re:Give me a break, Mr. Logic

[J. J. Ramsey]

And then read the reviews of that review here and here

Re:"because God told me"

[tshak]

You're missing the point. I'm not going to do the research for you, rather, I'm saying that you shouldn't effectively blow off the person who pointed out that "God Created the World" is a plausable concept.

Re:"because God told me"

[barawn]

I apologize for being overly emotional here. A few things are hitting point which I am incredibly angry that most people ignore.

Well two issues here... One is that many times these dieties exhibit traits and personalities that conflict with each other.

You mean like being human and being not human? That seems to be pretty conflicting, yet Christianity resolved it pretty well. Don't limit God by pathetic human understanding.

Hmm, well Islam says that in its marketing materials but there is an awful lot of conquest, killing of the infidels, etc. in the Quaran. So it is a god of Love or War?

Christians killed a ton in the Crusades, and justified it. If we had written a book on Christian actions, it'd look a lot like the Koran. There's a ton of killing in the Old Testament - Sodom, for instance. This is poor logic - you're using examples of people misusing religion to disprove it. Poor implementation doesn't disprove the idea.

Geez I don't know where to start. Get a book on world religions and then try to tell me they all say the same thing. They don't. Not even close.

YES, they do! They all say "Be nice to each other!" How is that hard to understand? You're seeing differences where none should exist.

Also a child isn't a good example, what does a child know? They know they are sitting in church being bored and would like to go get an icecream cone.

Children know everything. They don't have the prejudices, the biases, the hatreds and the fears that adults have. Children are far smarter than any adult. Look how fast they learn.

And what do children know? How to get into Heaven, by Christianity's own admission.

"He called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said: "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven."

Matthew 18. Christ knew - and I listened. You, and many other people who disparage children, apparently did not.

Matthew 19.

"Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these."

Do you think they are listening to or understanding the sermon or anything else? If they are then they must be smart because I certainly wasn't when I was young.

Yes. They are extremely smart - and you were too. You're not smart now, because a) your brain is no longer expanding as fast as it was then, and b) you've forgotten what it was like to be a child. I only wish I could be as smart as I was when I was a kid!

Kids don't understand prejudice, religious differences, hatred, or any of that stuff. Not because they're stupid. They're not - they pick up thousands of years of human learning in extremely short timespans! No - they don't understand these things because there's nothing to understand. Those things are stupid.

I don't understand this. What rules says salvation and damnation cannot be part of religion? If a religion says "God created you. He'll decide how you spend eternity". That seems to fit religion very well.

You're correct - it does. But it's also not what religions say. For instance, they might say "Say you believe in Christ, or you'll be damned." That's not God deciding - that's humans deciding that God cares what you say!

Christians claiming that only Christians will be saved are usurping God's right to judge, and that's damned wrong.

Re:"because God told me"

[barawn]

"God did it" is not anthropomorphizing if we try to elucidate exactly what God is. Then it's a statement - especially if we don't necessarily attribute human qualities to God. Saying you can't do that is not trying. I think you can do it. I think that's what religion has been trying to do for years.

You might not know. That's fine. But you wonder, don't you? And so you must have ideas. Thoughts. Questions. If you don't, I'm sorry for you, as that would be a very sad life.

Even if you end up not believing in God, it's worth thinking and questioning about it to see if there's any basis for your disbelief other than personal feelings. I know for me that there is no basis for disbelief, as my beliefs are self-consistent with the Universe as a whole. I don't have another option that works for me. If someone wants to try to argue a different method for the Universe being created, go right ahead. (Quote Stephen Hawking if you want - it's the beauty of being a physicist - I can even argue against that. :) )

Re:"because God told me"

[barawn]

Nope. Because there's more to the Universe than the first cause.

Take you, for example. What are you? Precisely - not the "meat" you, the "you" you. What are you? You're an Observer - a quantum observer. You collapse wavefunctions, make choices, and move forward through time due to time's opposite metric signature. But what makes you make those choices? Some say your history, your upbringing, your genes determine all of that. I say bull, because I know that whatever choice I make, I could make another one. You can argue that with me, but that, along with "I exist" is something that I know - I make decisions.

So could God influence the Universe? Not what happens, no - because God is outside of time. Everything that can happen, could happen, will happen, He already knows. But what He can do is point us down the right path. Ever wonder why some things just "feel" right? In my mind, that's God. Instinct. That's God.

So what about all the stories? Eh. All of them can be explained. Paul was a temporal lobe epileptic - but what exactly generates the visions that a TLE seizure causes? Ah. And that's the kicker.

God doesn't "do" anything. He guides.

Re:"because God told me"

[barawn]

The trouble is that the elephant argument isn't a scientific explanation. It's a faith-based explanation. If you have to use the elephant argument to explain a seeming contradiction, you are following the path of faith, not the path of science.

It's a principle, not an explanation. To use it as an explanation would be a cop out. But it's a principle - the idea is that seeming contradictions can be worked out by people, if they try hard enough. If you can't work it out - if you come back to a self-contradiction, then maybe you've got a real problem. But a lot of those seeming contradictions can be wiped out by just a tiny bit of work.

Redarding the Many-Worlds Interpretation of the universe, you have re-explained it, but have failed to demonstrate why it is a more scientifically compelling explanation of free will than, say "There is no free will", or "We are brains in a vat with God telling us what to do."

It's scientifically compelling to me because I have empirical evidence. Me. I know that I choose. I know that whatever someone says, I can choose to do something, and not choose to do something else. Yes, this is a slightly biased observation, but it's just not unprovable to me. You will never convince me that you can predict everything I will do. Free will is my own ability to choose what I say, choose, think, do. It's kindof a tautology if you think about it that way. Your suggestion that we're just brains being controlled by God is interesting - you're proposing it assuming that it does contradict MWI, but I don't think it does. First, I'm not talking about my brain - my brain doesn't choose. I do. If you're talking about God controlling me - point made. But that would make me "God with a limited viewpoint" which, in some sense, would be a new distinct being, wouldn't it? So whether or not I am distinct from God or part of God is an interesting question - definitely interesting! I raised this myself, or something similar - but it doesn't preclude free will. It merely brings up an interesting variant.

I'll pass on the "in His image" thing, because first you have to define what "we" are. I know what I am - I am my Observer. Not a human, not a brain, but my Observer. So "in His image" to me, means that God (the ultimate Observer) made me an Observer. Works with me.

"For with God nothing is ever impossible, and no word from God shall be without power or impossible of fulfillment."

"impossible" is a poor word in the human language. There are two kinds of "impossibilities": things which are possible but unlikely, and things which are utterly impossible. It is utterly impossible for 2+2=5, for instance, without a redefinition of what 5,2, or + means, because it's basically a definition. Same way with things in reality - can't arbitrarily change the speed of light, permittivity of free space, and permeability of free space, because they're all the same thing. That's what I was trying to explain - what humans see as "possible" is just due to a limitation in scope, in the same way that what humans see as "impossible" can easily be possible. Bread falling from the sky, out of nowhere - that's impossible, right? Except it happened - because it is possible. Manna is the edible excrement of a plant louse in the Sinai peninsula. Poor human scope.

Note that I've already addressed the fact that Christian doctrine stating that nothing is impossible for God is poorly worded - God is outside of time - all of the Universe is already there. All the possibilities, everything - God can't change it because, well, change implies time, doesn't it? In that sense God is impotent, and everything is impossible for God. But God created the Universe, so in that sense he's omnipotent, and nothing is impossible for God, because he's already done everything.

It's kinda like Deep Thought in Hitchhiker's Guide - 42's a perfectly valid answer, and Deep Thought wasn't responsible for the fact that the people who asked the question didn't understand it. Same way here.

Re:Joseph Campbell proves your point quite thoroug

[barawn]

You have just made one person quite amazingly happy. I actually had never heard of Joseph Campbell - I'll have to look it up, definitely! I had been terrified all of this time that I'm the only one who had thought that the questions that religion/mythology raised were worth studying in a scientific, rigorous manner.

As per the new religion project, I don't know. Some times I feel so strongly about how bad many of these religions are messing it up that I really want to, but I just don't think that my brain is wired right for it. I'd be a contributor, though! :)

Thank you very much for writing this - you've really relieved a lot of my fears about humanity. :)

Re:"because God told me"

[barawn]

Bingo! You're exactly right. The problem is that far too many people look at two things, say "They look contradictory" and ignore them. So here I am, I go and say "you know, it might behoove you to actually try to figure out if they're contradictory, or whether or not you can understand them in a different light," and about seven or eight replies show up and say "No, they're contradictory, because my evidence cannot be interpreted any way except the way that I interpret it."

If you have two explanations of an event, both with equal evidence to support it, and you can either a) interpret both in ways which make them contradictory, or b) interpret them both in ways which make them complementary, which do you think is going to be true? This is kinda like an Occam's Razor type philosophy: if a dualist interpretation can incorporate multiple other explanations, it will tend to be the correct one rather than an interpretation which excludes one or the other.

Physicists have dealt with this for years (wave-particle dualism, renormalization, etc.) which is why I started looking into this. :)

Re:"because God told me"

[barawn]

Notice how he deliberately leaves out the creation of the Sun at the same time. Kinda throws a nice big kink in the whole thing.

Not really. First, Genesis never said "God created the Sun." It said "God said, "Let there be light" ". From a scientific standpoint, this could be talking about the solar ignition, rather than the solar formation, and the Earth was (at least) starting to form before solar ignition.

There was reference to "water" before solar ignition, which I'd buy more as a translation/interpretation/vocabulary problem. It seemed to refer more to "space" than "water", which I'd buy.

"Plants," as we normally think of them, probably hit the evolutionary scene before animals. They evolved together, yet the story seems to make the two separate, distinct, and most importantly unsynchronized events

The two did not evolve together. The first life to show up on the planet was cyanobacteria, followed by slews of other bacteria. Do you know the Hebrew word for bacteria - oh wait, there isn't one. :) "Plants" seems a good substitute. Multicellular life appeared in an explosion of new life later - those are your animals forming.

(Note that I'm not suggesting that the explosion was divine created - it's obvious, once you get to multicellular life, that things are going to differentiate, respeciate, and respread fairly quickly).

The one thing that I keep reminding people is that Genesis said something ridiculous at the time - it said to people, "The Earth was created. It took time to create. There was a time when the Earth was not here." Who would believe this? This is crazy! The Earth had always been here, as far as they knew. This was the point that was trying to be gotten across, not the specific order using pathetically bad vocabulary.

That was wierd

[beleg777]

I'm not sure if you'll see this, but just in case. I don't know what prompted you to respond to my post, but I'm confused. I've reread it, and I still don't see why you assumed I wasn't a Christian. I was simply pointing out a difference between science and religion, and how that applied to the post I was responding to.

Reagardless, I'm a Christian. Christian reformed, to be exact. Personally, I've found C S Lewis to have the best books to point people to, but that's mostly a matter of taste.

Re:Pasta & Phonenumber

[madprof]

I disagree. :-)
First point:
Why do I need to pray to an omnipotent god to ask himself to appear to me?
God can appear to me at any point he wants.
I would love it if he appeared now. God clearly knows this so why do I have to pray?
I mean, it'd be great if there was an all-loving god as depicted in the Bible but just because it'd be nice doesn't make it true.

Second point:
I have prayed a number of times throughout my life.
Why should I pray now when my feelings on god are the same as they were then ie. "I am here - where are you?"
No, I've never felt anything that could remotely be called divine.

I am careful to treat my feelings with respect. I don't play games with what I perceive to be reality. That is dangerous as any psychologist will tell you.
Indeed I imagine I could convince myself of anything if I wanted it to be true enough. It's happened before - look at Scientologists.

Perhaps a rather cynical view is that praying opens you up to the possiblity god exists and thus carefully influences you into thinking more about this thus-far invisible god. Up until the god meme embeds itzself into your head enough to make you think "well I'll go for it - I can live in this state comfortably". Although not conciously.

I wouldn't like to place a value on the worth of that view but if you can provide a reason why I should pray to your god rather than any of the other thousands of gods people worship across the world daily then I'd be glad to listen.

Re:"because God told me"

[anomaly]

Ok, I think I see your point of view, but I still struggle to identify with it.

I don't understand your worldview in two areas. Will you please help me better understand it?

1. Order as a property? As defined by what? Couldn't it merely *appear* to be order - in the same way that something which on the surface seems chaotic may actually be complex and ordered? How can you say that order is a property of the universe?

2. A naturalistic worldview leaves little place for morality, right? I mean, if there's no transcendant meaning - then why does the whole of humanity (or at least the extreme majority) clamor for love, duty, honor, courage? Why are we as animals different in that respect from the others? Does this question make sense? After all, if there's no objective standard to measure right and wrong, why shouldn't I just kill people who disagree with me or get in my way?

I concur that we're not all the same, but *if* there's an objective judge of morality, wouldn't it be wise to understand what the judge's perspective on morality is?

Respectfully,
Anomaly

Re:Pasta & Phonenumber

[madprof]

I can only reply to this one - the other 2 posts are retreads of what you've already said. This is more interesting.
First of all I don't trust the Bible anymore than I trust any book I that tells me things I cannot verify the veracity of.
The difference is that I am happy to accept a computing book that tells me how the innards of my PC work because it's less important. Accepting it is no big deal. Now accepting a book that wants to change the way I fundementally view my experiences...that's different.

So first of all - I think that, for me, the "pray and see what happens" approach is meaningless.
I am perfectly open to the idea God exists as I have already stated. Praying does nothing for this.
I've seen no good evidence so I feel I cannot believe as yet.
What praying will do is merely confuse me, as it used to. I am not confused at the moment.
You can't verify what I am saying you'll have to take my words on trust.
If you find that hard to do, sorry.

As for the points you've given:
1) Which gods want to be far away from us? Why does how far away some god, let's call them X, wants to exist from us have any bearing on whether they exist or not? Evidence is important, not "oooh I like the sound of this one"
2) There is a risk which I mentioned above. I believe I am totally open to the existence of God.
I fail to see how praying changes how open I am.
3) Thanks for this point - it's definitely something I agree with. I couldn't tell you how to live your life, and I feel you've failed to explain (thus far) why I should be living my life with a very different set of core beliefs.
That's fine because I'm not angry - heck, you do what you think is right and good for you.
I'm quite happy with my position as it stands though, because it is consistent and it is safe.

Electric hurricanes

[madprof]

When looking for things you have to apply a proper discipline in what you do. It is no good me looking for the existence of dark matter by looking at some astronomical figures and having faith that they prove what I was looking for.
Similarly it is no good me praying and having faith in the existence of a God in the hope that they will reward that. That is, after all, what you're saying here. I say I am open, you say that it is not enough, and that I must ask God to reveal himself with my heart ready to accept him. This really means I have to believe in order to get anywhere. And that is clearly wrong.

Re:"because God told me"

[jonabbey]

I don't understand your worldview in two areas. Will you please help me better understand it?

1. Order as a property? As defined by what? Couldn't it merely *appear* to be order - in the same way that something which on the surface seems chaotic may actually be complex and ordered? How can you say that order is a property of the universe?

I'm sorry, but your question doesn't make any sense to me. It seems like you're talking about order as some sort of metaphysical issue. I'm simply talking about order as the presence of physical regularities, of consistent physical laws, if you will. What's the difference between F 'appearing' to equal MA and F=MA? If the appearance is so close that we can never find any exception to the correlation, and if all of observable nature behaves in accordance with that correlation, then I'd say that's real enough to work with, and real enough for nature to evolve accordingly, as that law plays out over time.

2. A naturalistic worldview leaves little place for morality, right? I mean, if there's no transcendant meaning - then why does the whole of humanity (or at least the extreme majority) clamor for love, duty, honor, courage? Why are we as animals different in that respect from the others? Does this question make sense? After all, if there's no objective standard to measure right and wrong, why shouldn't I just kill people who disagree with me or get in my way?

There are a number of answers to that question:

• Because you'll go to jail.
• Because people won't like you.
• Because someone might shoot you.
• Because you may feel guilty in violating the mores that were taught you when you were a young child, and which are reinforced by the society in which you live and by your very human instinct to live in a social context.

Simple, good, practical reasons, all.

Many of these reasons also apply to wolf packs and other social animal societies.. if you break the rules of the society, you will suffer for it, your pack will suffer for it, and you may have less chance to reproduce, which may tend to extinguish that behavior.

Love, duty, honor, and courage are part of the human psyche, and we all benefit tremendously from those aspects of our nature. Not all animals have the instincts to live in societies. Ever seen a wolverine? Pure viciousness on four legs. If humans acted like that, we could not survive in our present numbers. Wolverines, though, have the physical attributes to survive on a solitary basis. Ever seen a dolphin? Dolphins don't have the physical attributes to survive on their own in the great ocean, generally. What dolphins do have are the social instincts required to survive in groups.

We're more like the dolphins than the wolverines. For long, long history we have depended on our social instincts and our ability to cooperate to make up for our lack of muscles, fangs, and claws.

I concur that we're not all the same, but *if* there's an objective judge of morality, wouldn't it be wise to understand what the judge's perspective on morality is?

There is an objective judge of morality over the long term, it's called natural selection, and it is constantly in play, and it shapes life all over the planet. Natural selection is the morality that applies to the wolf, and the dolphin, and the wolverine, and the dung beetle, and the lion, and the elm tree.

There are also subjective judges of morality over the shorter term.. they are the other creatures who live in society with you. Dolphins and wolves have to worry about this sort of morality, and so do we. Elm trees don't, so far as we know.

Re:Electric hurricanes and bacon

[madprof]

The subject? Because yours did not make much sense so I decided to go the whole hog. :-)
I have no theory as to God, really.
There are no scientific tests to bemade though.
Praying is not scientific. How can I know I really meant God to appear in my heart of hearts? What about my subconcious desires I may not fully understand etc.?
And what if god does get in touch? What test is ther for knowing if it realy is god? I can't just go "oooh I feel this is god" - I can fool myself just as much as anyone else can.
Maybe I'll think it was the way I nearly got run over but saved by a random stranger - maybe I'll believe that stranger was god. Maybe it is the way the sun shines every morning for a month. Maybe I'll think God made it shine for me.
Maybe I'll see a burning bush.
I am not testing a condition so it's hard to do this sort of thing. with any sort of rigour.

Now...historical evidence for the existence of Jesus and evidence he was the son of god. That's another matter.
That can be tested or at least examined for veracity.

Re:"because God told me"

[jejones]

If the Christian God exists, then yes, he must in some way want everyone going to hell to be there, because he established the initial conditions of the world, and being omniscient, knew exactly what would happen, and being omnipotent, could do exactly what he wanted.

In everyday life, foreknowledge and action add up to responsibility. If I set a shiny Ginsu knife down in front of an infant and it manages to kill itself, I'm the one hauled into prison. How much more responsibility must be borne by an omniscient, omnipotent god!

Re:"because God told me"

[jejones]

Thanks, I've read the book of Job. The Cliff Notes version: God kills and/or tortures Job and his family to settle a bar bet with Satan. When Job complains, God says, a la Chevy Chase, "I'm God, and you're not. Shut up, I can do what I want."

If an earthly father did that, he'd be in the slammer so fast your head would spin. Such a being is a vile beast.

Re:Electric hurricanes and bacon

[TheLink]

I'm a Christian but I've a bit of a skeptical nature myself, and sometimes I seem like a child covering my eyes and thinking Dad has vanished.

Coz even though God has provided a fair bit of evidence of his existence to me, I sometimes have periods where I become doubtful, and it's just not polite to question the existence of a friend just because you can't see the friend (especially in this day and age where we have friends we may never see or touch, but we know they exist).

Honestly are scientific tests enough? I often question scientific tests myself.

But they are helpful so how about:
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_41423 7.html
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/01/09/in_v itro_pra yer.html

In my personal opinion this test seems to have been done quite properly - the first line people praying only had photos of the people they were praying for. And the people being prayed for didn't know a thing about it.

One cannot be sure that God will make future tests work, after all God has his own agenda, and is not a force or an idol or pet that we can control. Seems God answered someone's prayers many times in a row and so he believed, but after that God stopped answering his prayers, and he asked my friend (a church worker) why, and was rightly told, "Hey God is NOT your _genie_!"

I see an analogy: a father does often oblige his little children, but we are still expected to grow up, and sometimes we should not get what we ask for.

I believe the best convincing is between God and you. That is the most real.

So how about praying?

Sure prayer doesn't seem very scientific. But neither does consciousness. Lots of scientists don't seem to think it's necessary and few care, even though IMHO that's peculiar coz consciousness is the _first_ observation anyone makes. Not light, not sound, not any of the senses.

Most people aren't scientific either, and yet they do matter, and the good news is God cares and loves us and so he sent his son Jesus to die for us and save us.

Strange? Perhaps the dying bit was the flipping of the qubits, or maybe not. Or maybe those who believe will observe a universe where God and they are alive, rather than one with destructive interference. I don't really know how it works - just wild speculation, so don't go holding any of that as truth.

But the main thing is it's good news :).

Pray, ask God to help you, to show himself to you.

Link.

Wow that many languages?

[TheLink]

Well my guess the brick wall effect is because the elegant languages are more prone "only one way to do it".

If there's more than one way to do something "correctly", then there could be a higher chance for a newb like me to succeed, and have fun redoing again.

Whereas if there's only one (maybe obvious) way to do it, the odds probably drop somewhat for me...

I'm trying to learn Lisp. Any tips? So far it seems like Lisp programmers tend to be very smart, efficient and industrious, and so
1) They don't mind writing everything themselves.
2) Everything else is crap anyway - not doing the "right thing".

Whereas with Perl, a lazy but reasonably bright chap like me can easily build on other people's work- modules, talking to all sorts of DBs, other programs, websites etc.

In contrast I found Java very annoying - e.g. whose bright idea was it to have an easy way to find out the number of selected columns in db query, but not have an easy way to find the selected rows? Move to the last row and get the row number? Doh. Do the language authors actually use their language? Java programmers must be extremely hardworking and verbose to boot(StuffWithSuperLongNames2). Man. If I wanted that something like that I'd go back to my 65xx machine code days, calculate my branch offsets by hand, count cycles etc.

Gone soft with age :).

Link.