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A Savant Explains His Abilities
numLocked writes "Of the few hundred autistic savants in the world, none have been able to explain their incredible mental abilities. Until now, that is. It seems that Daniel Tammet, a mathematical savant who holds the record for the most digits of pi recited from memory, is able to explain exactly how he intuits answers to mathematical problems. Tammet is quite articulate and speaks seven languages, including one he invented. The Guardian is running an article about his amazing abilities."
Of the few hundred autistic savants in the world, none have been able to explain their incredible mental abilities.
They're too busy counting...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
...if the savants' abilities are compensation for "ordinary" cognitive abilities.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Question: why is autism associated with this kind of savantism? Granted there are 'normal' geniuses, but it seems like this sort of genetic brilliance is exactly the sort of thing that could be developed--ideally without autism--using gener therapy and modern genomics. Anyone remember the Orson Scott Card novels where the planet of Path is ruled by a class of people genetically engineered for superintelligence and obsessive-compulsive disorder, although the one could be separated from the other?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistic_savant
Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder. "When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think.
So presumably 69 is Jenifer Lopez, and 303 is the goatse guy?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I speak 400 languages. 399 of which I invented myself.
FTA: "Savants have usually had some kind of brain damage. Whether it's an onset of dementia later in life, a blow to the head...
Item 1, check. Item 2, check.
So how come I aren't a genius now?
This is clearly false advertising.
Certainly I will explain it. Certainly certainly indeed. I will explain it, explain it I will certainly do...
Table-ized A.I.
The one he invented doesn't count.
That sounds like Synesthesia, which Horizon did a program about last year. People with synesthesia can see numbers as shapes (A woman described being able to see 1 to 10 in a line, 11-100 stacked above them, and then on and on in blocks of 100), words as colours (Monday is green) and someone could even smell words (His best friend's names made him feel sick).
The program seemed to conclude that we all, to an extent, are synesthetic. Quite a large number of people assosciate colours with days of the week, and we all use words like a "soft/sharp sound", a "bite" to a tase, and so on. Although these words are ones of touch, we use them in other contexts. Cross-referencing the senses in a similar war to more advanced synesthesia.
... this came in a context of chunking.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
He uses a hex editor
Le français vous intéresse?
Neither, he uses Notepad! *dundundun*
> Now lets hear the slashdotters comment of how they too are misunderstood savants.
I've got the "misunderstood" part down, but I can't figure out where to go frome here.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
...first post savants
Table-ized A.I.
Why is multiplying large numbers considered mathematical genius? Or memorizing PI to 1,000 digits? Perhaps arithmetical genius
If he solved Fermat's theorem over breakfast, that would be mathematical genius!!
I don't really know a lot about autistic savants or encryption technologies, so this may sound idiotic, but if these guys can so easily factor large numbers why don't they have them working for NSA breaking public-key encryption?
Le français vous intéresse?
"When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think."
I don't understand. There is nothing intrinsic in the number 2 and the number 5 that will tell you what they will equal when they are multiplied.
The way we arrive at the solution is extrinsic, namely in the form of the operator (multiplication in this instance).
But if it's extrinsic, I don't understand what the author of the article means by "instinct" and "shapes" and that sort of thing. As far as I can understand, the only explanation would be the ability to compute those operations at much higher speed, then any "non-savant."
If that's the case, then, theoretically, would there not be a limit associated with the physical properties of the nervous system that would cap out at a certain number of such operations per unit time? So theoretically might we not be able to test such a thing by running him through a long list of operations? That'll let us know if he's really just making those calculations really, really fast, or if he really is viewing the mathematics in such a fundamentally different way (something I find rather unsettling).
Then again, how would we design such a test? I fear that the number of operations we can demand his brain to perform per unit time will be limited by his powers of cognition (i.e. by the time he reads/hears all the stuff he needs to hear, we'll already be beyond that critical operating time interval).
Eh, I think I come off as somewhat difficult to understand. Oh well, I wanted to make sure my question appeared in the main thread of discussion (rather than being posted after most people have moved on).
the seventh doesnt count if he is the only one using it
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
The upside is that this can make it easier to remember things- it means you've got more things about the thing to connect to other things- his description of how he remembered pi as a story is a *classic* description of the mnemonic technique for remembering things- you basically turn what you want to remember into a series of pictures that you string into a whacky story. It works really, really well; people easily get upwards of 90% recall using it. And he has a built in picture or sensation to help him with this; which is the hardest bit of the technique.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Now that Daniel is explaining how anyone can be a savant, Slashdot userids will become scarce enough to have value.
--
make install -not war
Me neither.
I think he is saying math is completely intuitive to him. He sees the two numbers being multiplied and the product comes to him in a private visual way he can readily translate to base 10 digits. The human brain is very parallel and associative, but to the WinTel guys it would be a machine with 10,000 cores completely interconnected with a clock rate of 100's to 1000's of Hz. Humans are not at their best when they think sequentially - savants are the postive proof.
"He can't drive a car, wire a plug, or tell right from left."
Is it possible that knowing how to drive a car, wire a plug, tell right from left, and other banal things that we do require a ton of processing power? Since he cannot do these things, all that processing power goes to processing numbers and memorising words.
It we would be cool if on a math test we cold forget our ability to drive cars and concentrate on processing numbers.
You have to remember that a typical slashdot editor is halfway to being an idiot savant.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder.
I'm wondering, do you think that perhaps if we could present someone with this man's abilities an interface to some kind for a programming language that he could also achieve amazing things?
maybe vocal recognition or a motion-capture interface? He did say he is making his own language.
For instance, if he combines these abstract ideas in his mind in a mechanical way he is showing the ability to visualize details of und use complex concepts with amazing precision.
what is a chunk of code if not merely an amazingly complex concept?
I'm not a misunderstood savant. I am a garden variety genius like most people.
99 bottles of beer in 175 characte
I speak Twi'lek. I learned it playing "Knights of the Old Republic". It's easy, there's only three or four spoken phrases, each of which means everything you can conceive of!
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
This man's abilities reminds me of a story, Funes, The Memorious.
Daniel's life story is not the same as Ireneo Funes' fictional life, but in a way they both lead to the same question - what does it mean to think?
Without effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.
In March 2001, there was an article in Science, "The Art of Forgetting" which touched on these issues, and more current research begins to detail the chemical methods of action for the brain's 'forgetting system'. Indeed, life would not be possible if we remembered everything. Human cognition seems to be defendant on removing details, as much of what we do is through abstracting away the differences... this allows us to generalize. Of course, over-generalization is a failure-point for human cognition as well, as we all know.
All of this will be very useful to AI research, especially if we are trying to model computer minds after the ones nature evolved.
... as "an idiot savant... without the savant part".
I used to have a problem with it when I was in school. I would know the answer to a problem but I couldn't explain to the teacher the process by which I derived the answer.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Have you published reference grammars and lessons for your conlangs on a web page?
I once dated a girl who had synesthesia. She told me my voice had an almond color. Long story short, it didn't work out between us (her condition wasn't an issue with me, and I don't think she was self-conscious about it). I thought it was an interesting 'condition', she seemed to think of it as a gift.
Most people can pretty easily memorize song lyrics and the sounds of a song, but yet the digits of Pi are incredibly hard to memorize. Might the digits of Pi be to this guy be like memorizing a song to most of us? I equally can't explain in a nice rational way why it's easy to memorize a song, but to anyone that can it doesn't need any more explanation.
AccountKiller
... show him the Google logo - it'll blow his mind!
Btw, do you think if we put a bag of ice on his head he'll run faster?
If slashdot editors were savants, they wouldn't repost the same flippin' articles all the time.
Well, then again, maybe their savants at reposting their own articles and those of hackaday.
The "shyness about making eye contact" is a symptom of austim and is used as a dianostic criterion.
A good story about an interesting individual but where was the "how he does it" part?
m
A quick search reveals:
http://www.optimnem.co.uk/Media.htm
http://www.centreforthemind.com/director/index.cf
I don't know what to think about it, really.
Mänti = a type of tree = mänty (pine tree)
ema = mother = emo (usually of animals)
ela = life = elo / elämä
päive = day = päivä
Päike = sun (not as direct a counterpart in Finnish)
The ability to organize complex, structured data (which is basically all a jigsaw is) is a key requirement in database administration. Being able to visualize the optimal structure is a talent people will pay a LOT of money for.
As another person has noted, the ability to reassemble a randomly scrambled structure (such as a shredded document) would appeal very much to certain areas of law enforcement, intelligence and homeland security.
Being able to connect bits of image that are associated by some non-obvious connection may well be of interest to people studying image compression. There may be organizations which can yield better compression, which do not require too much meta-data to explain and which do not take significantly longer to uncompress.
If all else fails, she can simply put "massively parallel combinatorial logic" on the resume and apply as a maths lecturer.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Bram Cohen is one...he seems to have integrated the "disease" into his life pretty well!
"He met the great love of his life, a software engineer called Neil, online. It began, as these things do, with emailed pictures, but ended up with a face-to-face meeting."
..? Oh right, he's gay."
and say "Wha
A gay, churchgoing autistic savant in fact. That's a tough call for someone trying not to stand out.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
010010010110011000100000011110010110111101110101 00100000011000110110000101101110001000000111001001 10010101100001011001000010000001110100011010000110 10010111001100101100001000000110011101100101011101 00001000000110000100100000011011000110100101100110 0110010100101110
In case you haven't realized it already, a surname is a -last- name, not a first name. Daniel Tammet's first name has always been Daniel... it's only the Tammet part that was changed.
:D
A man with this amazing ability to remember and combine data does not need a powerful text editor!
*duck*
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
00100010011001110110010101110100011101000110100101 10111001100111001000000110000100100000011011000110 10010110011001100101001000100010000001101001011100 11001000000110111101110110011001010111001001110010 0110000101110100011001010110010000101110
Le français vous intéresse?
I think this is the most interesting article I have ever seen on slashdot. Absolutely fascinating.
I caught the Mountain Wumpus! He gave me his treasure chest ($100) to let him go free again.
The language he claims to have made up, is actually just a rip-off of estonian with some mix of finnish...at least as far as the examples in the article go:
:)
The vocabulary of his language - "Mänti", meaning a type of tree - reflects the relationships between different things. The word "ema", for instance, translates as "mother", and "ela" is what a mother creates: "life". "Päike" is "sun", and "päive" is what the sun creates: "day".
In estonian "ema" means mother, "ela" (or "elu" as a noun) means (to) live, "päike" means sun, and "päev" (or in finnish "päivä" - finnish is extremely similar to estonian) means day.
The name for the language (a type of tree), "mänti" sounds like pine in finnish, though I'm not sure about that. But "mänd" in estonian means pine.
So it seems he has more than one gift. Some people plagiarize a poem or a painting, he aims for a whole language
It's an unusual form of brain damage. Look at how he describes the way he does sums; he doesn't think about it consciously at all. He just sees two shapes morphing into another shape, which to him represents a number. He then simply recites the number out loud. On the conscious level, there is no "calculating" involved whatsoever. It's all done for him by the deep recesses of his brain, without him lifting a metaphorical finger.
I would say that this isn't any sort of "intelligence" in any conventional sense; it's simply that his damaged brain has given him the ability to access "hidden" subroutines of the neural wiring we all have.
For instance, it's no secret that the human brain can do maths in real-time with frightening speed. Just walking involves real-time feats of calculus that would choke a calculator. The problem is that it's all subconscious. Well, in Tammet's case, that "subroutine"-- which is supposed to be wholly subconscious-- now has a window into his conscious mind, expressed through pictures.
This is fascinating, but arguably it's no form of intelligence. At least, not in any conventional sense of "intelligence".
Mind you, I fully understand what it's like to be able to do something without mentally "lifting a finger". It's the way I've always been with language. I first spoke at age one, and I've been able to write and speak at an "adult" level since early childhood. My grammatical skills are quite high, but if you asked me to diagram a sentence, I'd choke. I usually can't describe why I know that a certain sentence structure is "right" or "wrong", since I can't consciously describe many of the rules of language.
I suppose this fellow is much the same way with the pictures in his head. He's described to us how he (as in the conscious entity known as Tammet) does sums: He just sits back and his brain feeds him the answer without any conscious sort of calculation. However, he hasn't described to us how his brain does the work, which is the really interesting question.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
He can, among other things, tell you how many bpms the metronome is set to by ear.
And it's not an answer like "around 70 or 80". It's an answer he gives with full authority, like "Oh, that's 78".
The examples given of Mänti bear an odd resemblance to finnish words with similar meaning. Might be that the point is the language structure etc. and he's knowingly using slight modification from existing languages but I found this rather interesting:
Mänti: This is close to the finnish word "mänty" which means a pine tree (the article noted that Mänti is a type of tree)
Ema: "Emo" is a finnish word for mother, usually used when speaking of animals
Ela: Elo is a word meaning life in Finnish
Päive: the finnish word for this is Päivä
the only one example not near a finnish word is Päike for sun. I'm thinking he might've gotten the words from Estonian since he mentions that he likes it. Estonian has a strong resemblance to finnish and I can read it somewhat if I try because a lot of the words can be deduced from finnish. Maybe someone from Estonia here might be able to tell if there's an even stronger resemblance to it. I hope the rest of the language isn't a subconscious rewrite on another language as well.
he doesnt hold the world record for memorization of pi. The record is currently strongly held by one Hiroyuki Goto of Japan. See this site for the list:. html
http://pi-world-ranking-list.com/lists/memo/index
Not for his abilities, but for the beautiful, peaceful-sounding world he lives in. To most of us, numbers are either an obstacle or a challenge or work or whatever. To him they're his friends. That's so unique. I envy him.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
I really do not understabd why the parent is modded "Troll." Somebody please explain.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
I definitely agree with the parent. Being able to multiply large numbers/tell if they are prime is nice, but it doesn't make you a mathematical genius. He hasn't proven any new theorems or developed a new field; why is he being called a genius?
Perhaps if he can solve a few NP-Complete problem or at least advances the state of mathematics somewhat, then I might reconsider my view. But as far as I know, he contributes nothing to the body of mathematics, besides maybe impressing the occassional person with multiplication.
At first, I thought he did have a typical savant language problem, or at least a speach impediment. I didn't figure out it was a British thing until the end of the article. That means I've already met half the requirements of being an idiot-savant myself!
Well, although I like the article, the summary up top is inaccurate. The Pi Memorization record has been above 30,000 for over a decade (not that nearly 23,000 isn't impressive). I used to work in a lab with the a friend who was the record holder for 5 years with a 30,000-35,000 span for Pi (he could recall that many digits, I can't even remember the single five-digit number to descibe his feat). A link to Rajan:/ shanks_e xpertise.html
http://www.psychol.ucl.ac.uk/david.shanks
I am a teacher and have had nearly a dozen autistic students (none of whom were savants). There is a huge increase in Silicon Valley, and it is a fascinating, frustrating, and a lot of work for most of the support staff.
For anyone interested, I'd also recommend the book "Thinking in Pictures" by Temple Grandin (an autistic woman who has redesigned livestock handling machinery). She is quite eloquent and probably the most famous autistic person (she has also been interviewed by Terry Gross, which I suppose is online).
Like Peek, Tammet will read anything and everything, but his favourite book is a good dictionary
Thats just too damn funny. Peek btw, is buddy from rain man.
If this guy can describe the methods he uses to perform his math skills, I wonder if they could be used somehow in a curriculum for small children. If they can learn languages as easily as they do (they pick up that first language pretty fast, compared to any adult learning a second), a new way of perceiving numbers shouldn't be so hard to pick up. Perhaps this is the beginning of a new generation where everyone has access to those kind of skills that those of us taught and stuck in traditional methods and paradigms can't even comprehend.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
I was going to post a dastardly riposte to this by using ASCII shapes and diagrams.
Goddamn lameness filter.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
Tammet is creating his own language, strongly influenced by the vowel and image-rich languages of northern Europe. (He already speaks French, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Icelandic and Esperanto.) The vocabulary of his language - "Mänti", meaning a type of tree - reflects the relationships between different things. The word "ema", for instance, translates as "mother", and "ela" is what a mother creates: "life". "Päike" is "sun", and "päive" is what the sun creates: "day". Tammet hopes to launch Mänti in academic circles later this year, his own personal exploration of the power of words and their inter-relationship.
Disregarding the misspellings, all those words are straight from a Finnish or Estonian dictionary. "Mänty" is a pine tree, "päivä" is day, "pälke" means glimmer or glint. "Emä" and "elä" are the root words of mother and life, respectively. And "tammi" (tammet) is oak.
Finnish is a weird but logical language with a lot of nuances and forms that are not present in other languages. I'm not sure what Tammet is trying to do, but he's apparently just exploring the relationships between words in Finnish. Anything else would either not make sense, or be simple plagiarism. Too bad the reporter got stuck on the words and made such a big issue of it.
Tammet's not the first one to ponder on the Finnish language. It's well known that J.R.R Tolkien got hooked on Finnish at an early age and re-used some ideas in his works.
--Bud
There has been some progress in studies dealing with a language's base components. Research is leaning towards the idea that most if not all languages have a common base at the syllable level (or below ... read the study a couple years ago and it isn't my field) and from there the mixing and matching of syllables fleshes out the entire language. To him it could represent just another long equation or number string with seemingly infinite combinations and permutations (if you throw in pronunciation, cadence, etc ...).
"It's difficult to meditate on amphetamines." - Joe Walsh
Applications for cryptography? Maybe. I tend to think that if there were, someone from the NSA would have already tried it. Going by the amount of time it took them with the eight, ten, and twelve digit numbers, I'm not sure how useful they'd be on 128-bit numbers. That's, what, 2^128, which is about 10^37 digits? Not sure about the math.... On the other hand, maybe it works, and there's lots of autistics on government payroll. Where'd I put that tin-foil hat?
BTW - the Sacks book is phenomenal. Some of the problems these people have - there's one person who doesn't have the concept of right (as in right v. left). For dinner, she eats the food on the left half of the plate. If a ball slowly rolls to her right, she will turn a full circle to the left to find it. If I recall, there's about 10-15 cases, each one different.
fsh
A year or two ago the New York Times had a neat article titled Savant for a Day about research by Prof. Allan Snyder. Basically, he uses a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to temporarily induce savant-like symptoms in volunteers. The journalist writing the story also acted as a volunteer, and experienced greatly-increased drawing ability while the device was turned on.
...
From the article:
As remarkable as the cat-drawing lesson was, it was just a hint of Snyder's work and its implications for the study of cognition. He has used TMS dozens of times on university students, measuring its effect on their ability to draw, to proofread and to perform difficult mathematical functions like identifying prime numbers by sight. Hooked up to the machine, 40 percent of test subjects exhibited extraordinary, and newfound, mental skills. That Snyder was able to induce these remarkable feats in a controlled, repeatable experiment is more than just a great party trick; it's a breakthrough that may lead to a revolution in the way we understand the limits of our own intelligence -- and the functioning of the human brain in general.
Snyder's work began with a curiosity about autism. Though there is little consensus about what causes this baffling -- and increasingly common -- disorder, it seems safe to say that autistic people share certain qualities: they tend to be rigid, mechanical and emotionally dissociated. They manifest what autism's great ''discoverer,'' Leo Kanner, called ''an anxiously obsessive desire for the preservation of sameness.'' And they tend to interpret information in a hyperliteral way, using ''a kind of language which does not seem intended to serve interpersonal communication.''
In a 1999 paper called ''Is Integer Arithmetic Fundamental to Mental Processing? The Mind's Secret Arithmetic,'' Snyder and D. John Mitchell considered the example of an autistic infant, whose mind ''is not concept driven. . . . In our view such a mind can tap into lower level details not readily available to introspection by normal individuals.'' These children, they wrote, seem ''to be aware of information in some raw or interim state prior to it being formed into the 'ultimate picture.''' Most astonishing, they went on, ''the mental machinery for performing lightning fast integer arithmetic calculations could be within us all.''
And so Snyder turned to TMS, in an attempt, as he says, ''to enhance the brain by shutting off certain parts of it.''
I have a book by Oliver Sacks called 'The man who mistook his wife for a hat' in the book he has a story called 'the twins', both of who are savants who dish out 20 figure primes, amongst other things.
He says, "What is not made clear, by Myers, and perhaps was not clear, is whether Dase had any method for the tables he made up, or whether, as hinted in his simple 'number-seeing' experiments, he somehow 'saw' these great primes, as apparently the twins did.
and goes into a little more detail later on in the book.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
lmao that was great.
He is obviously rather different from your usual autistic person. That means that it may be hard to draw conclusions from what he does about other autists. It's quite possible, for example, that his synaesthesia is not caused by his autism, but simply another manifestation of some underlying organic disease.
Likewise, the fact that he sees shapes when doing math doesn't mean that the shapes are responsible for doing the math, they may simply be cross-talk.
As for his social skills, it's also hard to know whether that's organic or learned; I mean, if you see the world completely differently from everybody else, it's not exactly surprising that the behavior of everybody else may be a bit counterintuitive to you.
Altogether, an interesting case that should remind us how much variety in intelligence and thought there is even among human beings. Just wait until we meet aliens.
Leviticus also states that eating meat on Fridays, shaving your beard and wearing blending fabrics are crimes punishable by death. Will you be casting the first stone?
You say you are OK with homosexuality in one breath and then make a crude, insulting comment in the next. Which is it?
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
Cantide, re your sig: It's tea, not coffee. The quote is from an exchange between Lady Astor (sp?) and Sir Winston Churchill
"Like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."~RAH
When you get down to it, though, we do most of our "thinking" in sounds or visuals. Everything else is translation. For instance, LANGUAGE is incredibly complex, but we can do it with ease since our brain has such an amazing "processing chip" for sorting sounds. Reading is simply converting things to sounds (or visuals - when you "remember" a quote you will normally either remember it by sound or by a visual memory of the words.)
Even math is, at it's root, visual for all of us. Take 2 + 2 = 4. There is cold memorization of the result, but if you were learning math for the first time, you would break it down to:
|| + || = ||||
ie. a visual representation, or counting fingers etc. The reason many people have so much trouble with math is they end up doing too much cold memorization - the brain remembers associatively, so this doesn't work well (but it explains why mneumonic devices DO work well). Unfortunately, that's how they teach it.
I tend to believe that we have an amazing ability to remember sound and sight (makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint) but we're NOT hard drives and "cold memorization" just doesn't work. By knocking out some part of the brain, the brain is forced to take in math through the visual/sound process, inventing a network of logic that handles all the work in the subconscious.
"Most people can pretty easily memorize song lyrics and the sounds of a song, but yet the digits of Pi are incredibly hard to memorize. Might the digits of Pi be to this guy be like memorizing a song to most of us? I equally can't explain in a nice rational way why it's easy to memorize a song, but to anyone that can it doesn't need any more explanation."
You mean like this song?
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
I think you are the one who doesn't read much. The parent's point was not the stoning, but rather the selective nature of the quote from Leviticus. If homosexuality and wearing blended fabrics are both sins with the same punishment (nevermind what it is), how do most Christians justify the picking and choosing of the ones that are most convenient or tolerable?
That'd be very interesting and useful. A list of what games equate to what job skills. Especially since many are non-verbal standardized tests. ... So what are people who are good at chess good at?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Wow. What a nitpick, he's less socially adaptible then you and has a higher computing power making you less geek.
Mod parent down.
Go sit in the corner and wear the conical hat this very instant!
This was exactly my point. Leviticus is the "moral code" for the perfect Christian. No Christian I have *ever* met follows even a fraction of this code. So how can they justify taking one quote out of context and hold homosexuals to it absolutely? I say that if Christians want to make homosexuality an unforgiveable sin, they need to make every "abomination" in Leviticus an unforgiveable sin. It's only fair.
I think the right word to describe this person's numerical abilities is "good calculator". Mathematics is something different.
For the love of Pete.
How could you turn an article about an Australian Autistic Savant who happens to be gay into an "America sucks" comment?
For once, put your hate of your nation aside and read the fucking article.
An estimated 10% of the autistic population Bullshit. They must mean 10% of the low-functioning autism community. The rates of savantism are nowhere near that good for the Asperger/PDD crowd.
I can't explain it, it is just a natural ability I have.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these guys.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Because the modder didn't RTFA.
I Encrypt My IM's
This kind of makes me wonder if the emotional connection people have with music (or the aural sense basically, only we're dealing with organized sound specifically) could be explained in a similar way. Yes, it also has a lot to do with mental conditioning from what we've listened to and what we associate with it, but such an explanation as initially stated could possibly indicate that our tendancy to associate tonal structures with feelings like love, hate, and excitement, as opposed to say, hunger, might not simply be arbitrary.
Also, personally, I tend to associate certain chordal structures played on specific instruments with colors. For instance, a minor on an Electric Piano is Green, a minor 7th is bluish green, a major 9th is a dull light blue.
They need to have a placement agency targeted towards the unique needs (and disabilities) of Savants.
I'm sure it'd be welcome to many.
How do other savants get along with one another?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Please send it directly to me then. I'd love to see the "dastardly riposte"
I Encrypt My IM's
it's no secret that the human brain can do maths in real-time with frightening speed. Just walking involves real-time feats of calculus that would choke a calculator.
Just like when you catch a baseball you're actually solving differential equations, not just estimating where the ball will go.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Yeah, now they just need to get the savant part down.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Hi, my name is Robert Beck and you might call me a "savant". I'm currently working at the NSA and `(@#&&!^^#!@!>>~~NO CARRIER
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Actually, Leviticus is the moral code for the perfct Jew...there nothing Christian about the old testament...it is the historical/cultural text of the Jewish people...Christianity did not exist until thousands of years after Leviticus...I bet 99% percent of "Christians" don't even realize that they only reason the old testament ended up in the "bible" anyway was because a small group of people voted on it 300 years or so after Christ....oh, but i forgot, its god's word...well 51% of the guys in the meeting felt it was god's word
I'm not a christian anymore....but I used to be a pastor and taught a lot of bible studies in my time, so I think I might be able to help you here. When modern day christians talk about certain things they take most of their cue from the new testament, which (recursively) according to the same new testament is the substance of which the old testament was a shadow Heb 8. Paul is a focal point because he usually interpreted the old testament in his writings and tried to show what they foreshadowed. In Roman 1, he specifically counted homosexuality as one of the grieviances that the christian God had with certain generations. Hence the preoccupation of new testament christians with homosexuality as a perversion of 'Gods' original plan for relationships between man and woman. So while the practitioners of Judaism hold to a lot of the stuff in the old testament, christians are not bound by the literal text of the old testament. The 'spirit of the law' 1st of 2nd Corinthians chapter 3 talks about the danger of literally interpreting the law and instead advocates imbibing the spirit of the law instead. I hope I've been able to throw some light on these things. I might not be as coherent as I'd like to be but you have to blame that on my just having just woken up.
All straight things must come to a bend
Now if only it were this trivial to solve them consciously ;)
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Spoiler Alert: It turns out the zebra did it!
Hey, that's nothing. I know a merchant mariner who has gotten the language down to precisely *one* word, expressed in astonishing gradiations of emphasis, inflection and tonality! It was quite edifying to my young sons to hear him expound on the weather one afternoon.
Crazykimchi linked it two days ago. Granted, I never thought of linking it myself. But since I'm never at fault, I blame you, yes you. You should have had RSS set up to monitor all news sites while bathing in a tub full of coffee. With 1,000 or so of you doing this in shifts you could cut down the response time to around a minute.
Why are you not a christian anymore? You stopped believing.. what? :-) That God exists, or that He wants to save us.. or? Also, what denomination, if any, were you? Thanks
and I invented 7 of them!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I wonder what would happen if they could make a pill that eliminated boredom? What effect would that have on someone's mental processes?
What if you could remove that particular ward against obsessive compulsive behavior without destroying someone's mind?
There's an important difference between being very bored by a subject and being physically unable to do it.
People learn better if they find certain things interesting. And there's been precious little research done on why we find certain things interesting.
I'm going to get modded flamebait for this, but there was an interview on NPR about a woman who tried to get a chemical sex change to become a man (her plumbing didn't change.) She mentions how she wasn't interested in science before they pumped her full of testosterone. Not sure if there's anything to that, but it seems reasonable that a lot of what we're mentally rewarded for doing has a neurological basis.
i.e. I like math\sex\science\art, etc.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
The summary of the whole article can be summed up with this one quote: Caboose - "That guy tex is really a robot and you're his boyfriend so that makes you... a gay robot."
Biddi wanna bidi boo!
if you asked me to diagram a sentence, I'd choke
I couldn't diagram a sentnce if my life depended upon it. Having a large vocabulary (which I gather you obtained at an early age) is no replacement for an in depth understanding of the language itself.
Here's to finally giving Bush his exit strategy in November
Easy. I hate being stuck here but I have no hopes of being able to afford to leave for greener pastures (EU). BTW I did read the article. Very interesting. I can relate to the guy quite a bit in terms of having the compulsion to count. When I was a kid I had a collection of notebooks in which I wrote numbers by hand in the following fashion:
:)
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14
etc...
I couldn't stop. I would spend hours doing this because it was fun and comforting. I also get very bothered when objects on my desk or in my bedroom get moved out of the order I placed them in. I need patterns. I also will not cross a a crosswalk unless the sign says "Walk" even if there is no car coming or everyone else is crossing anyway. I feel like I am part of a machine and I must obey all rules. I also have a very hard time knowing how to react to other people. I actually have to think about what reaction to project in most situations. But these are just personality quirks though as I know I'm not autistic or obessive compulsive and I'm definitely not a savant. But I definitely feel for the guy and people like him.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Run'ba di hutunga cun hunkadi, juana ching des, ching'pa na mu're...
How do us people who have this magic ability to come up with solutions in an instant without 12hrs of flowcharts and powerpoint slides and 12 cups of coffee put this down in a resume and a job interview as a 'skill' ??
It is a damn usefull skill but how can you qantify it and proove it. I am sure there are many many superuber skilled people with such automatic solution finding tricks in their minds, but overall could be graded as 'C average' joes who cannot get that top job.
Its sad that we must all get paper grades from universities.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I've been around the whole spiritual block as it were. I was raised by roman catholic parents, who, by the way didn't start out as Catholics. Mom was from a muslim family so I had a lot of muslim cousins. My father was of the Apostolic denomination. I suspect they 'agreed' to be catholics (i say that because my mom became fascinated with catholicism having gone to a high school run by British/Scottish/Irish nuns so I think it was her idea of a compromise). I got involved with AMORC (Rosicrucians - it's just a modernization if you will of an ancient egyptian religion or bits and pieces of various ones) at age 9/10 through my mom - she was a member for several years. I won't even go into how that ties into Roman Catholicism. Well I got born again in my first semester of college and was serious enough to remain a virgin until I left (or backslid if you prefer the term). I gave you the background because it helps I think to know that I didn't arrive at christianity without having been around the block a few times. Getting back to your question, I gave God 10 years of raw, faithful service, no compromises. Just to let you know, I wasn't practising Christianity in america where it's relatively easier to be a christian, I grew up in Nigeria where to get anything done (even getting a driver's license means you have to bribe somebody) you had to soil your hands, apart from having to deal with family - I'm talking about 50/100 family members as we have an extended family structure unlike anything in the west - or even the voodoo guys and if you've never been to a village evangelism where the local juju man can make a leaf dance to the beats of a drum you probably think voodoo is just balderdash. Point it to be a real Christian was hard with a capital H but I didn't mind 'cause I felt God had my back. Imagine my surprise when after getting an electrical engr degree (everyone that meets me from elementary school till grad school and even out of class are usually impressed by how intelligent I am - not boasting just trying to give you an idea), I couldn't get a decent job, first I thought it was because I was in nigeria and you had to know someone who knew somebody...to get a job, so I packed my bags and came to america got in grad school and even though I was poor did my best to get a simple internship just to be able to afford to live in the basement (i'm not a materialistic person) and pay my rent and afford food and tuition (had to pay as an international student thats about $7k/$8k per semester), but apparently my dear God was nowhere to be found. I prayed fasted. YOu see all those things you see in the bible like fasting without food and water (no orange juice like you guys do here), I've done it before (not because I wanted anything from God by the way, except to just open myself up to Him to use me in anyway He wanted, in college we would go on 24hour prayer binges - on public holidays - just to immerse ourselves in his presence so he could minister through us). I've done 3 days straight several times. I've done 7 days straight once. I know a personal friend (he's a medical doctor now) who did 21 days before, so don't think I chickened out at the first sign of tribulation. God never showed up, now after almost seven years of graduating college, I'm too old to be a first career job hire (i'm 30) so my dream of contributing to the field by getting into telecoms/dsp as a career is not going to materialize anymore. Just in case that sounds contradictory, I was willing to go anywhere, do anything if i was called but as far as I know i wasn't so my thing barring that was to keep doing my one on one preaching and doing my thing in church while practising engineering but look where it got me. So there you go bro. Where is God? Looks to me like I wasted 10 years of my life, it was my choice so I think I was stupid but I don't blame anyone for my situation. To answer the second part of your question, I was evangelical/pentecostal i.e. your regular born-again, bible-believing, holy-ghost filled christian. This is a public board so this is a lot of dirty laundry but once in a while I like to answer that question because I used to ask the same question when I was on the other side.
All straight things must come to a bend
I can imagine now, a whole subset of porn culture based on wierd disabilities.
Turets - swearing and being wacko during sex acts
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
But what if he doesn't need a sexual companion to be happy. Once you are happy, nothing else matters. If the man is truely happy, I'd envy him as much as I envy anyone or anything that is.
Wait, so all gay christians should become one atheist?
I thought 3% seemed a little high. From http://www.autisticsociety.org/article130.html:
In this issue of THE JOURNAL, Yeargin-Allsopp et al1 report the findings of a survey, which was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that found a rate of 34 per 10 000 for autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) among 3- to 10-year-old children in metropolitan Atlanta.
That's 0.34%, not 3%. Still a lot though.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
I suspect the crux of the matter is in the word offenders, but since I (nor you, I'm assuming) don't speak or read ancient Greek we can't be sure, can we?
From the article they appear to be romantically in love (ie, exchanging flowers), but does this make them homosexual?
I guess it depends on what you mean by homosexual, but I would define it as being *sexually* attracted to one another. Which may or may not be the case here.
One could perhaps even hypothesize that due to their diminished emotional capabilities, women simply confuse the hell out of them, and therefore they find solace in each other as emotional compatibles.
Not that it matters one way or the other whether they are homosexual or not... but thought I'd point out that, from the article, we don't really know exactly what the nature of their relationship is.
For starters, they're not Savant's, they're "Idiot Savants". Due to the complications of political correctness, we can no longer acknowledge their cognitive deficiencies by invoking the legally defined status of idiot, mostly because the real idiots are offended by the term. A savant is someone who is highly knowledgable and educated, often part of a honors society.
But that technicality aside, some of these people don't deserve to be called savants. A classic savant is someone with severe functional handicaps who displays an indordinant aptitude in one area. Rainman is an example. I knew a black guy who could sculpt a statue from clay by memory, and showed tremendous adaptation and improvisation in his form. That's a savant. This guy is able to communicate, knows seven languages, and is a mathematical prodigy. If that makes him a savant, then there are alot of unrecognized savants roaming the campuses of this country. And lurking on slashdot.
In case anyone is interested:
Invisible Algebra
This is a quick-start guide/excerpt of a book I wrote. It teaches how to solve algebra equations mentally.
Starting in my teens, I always had an ability to do abstract math in my head. (I've met lots of people who are better - no claims to savanthood here.) I liked to examine what I was doing internally that let me do integration by parts, 2d integrals, etc. in my head, so I could work to improve it. (Though with the heavier stuff I'm a little out of practice now :)
I'm working on another, more general book, that would cover algebra, calculus, maybe diff eqns, and the basics of extending it all to other areas of higher math. Describing it in words is HARD. Have you ever been able to do something, but had no clue how to describe how you do it? Or the other way, where you saw someone doing something neat, and asked them to teach you how, but they had a hard time doing so. That's what it is like, but I'm slowly making progress with it.
Some of the most beautiful experiences of my life have involved working equations out in my mind's eye. When I'm in "math mode" it can feel like I'm in another world.
Aaron Maxwell - redsymbol.net
to put it in terms any slashdotter can understand: leviticus is deprecated.
the point of Christianity is that there IS NO SUCH THING as an unforgivable sin. You just have to ask forgiveness (the sacrement of confession, which is done to a priest individually for Catholics (me), and usually as part of the mass as a congregation for protestants). However, when one knows that they do is a sin and repeatedly do it, asking for forgiveness doesn't really have the same weight. It's like, multiple offender thing in the court system. For instance, it's a venial sin to masturbate. But if you keep doing it even if you know its wrong, it becomes a mortal sin. Mortal sins send you straight to hell (if you don't get last rights and that sort of thing) if you haven't confessed them. Venial sins are not so bad.
For instance, yes, theoretically, Hitler could have confessed his sins, been given absolution, and gone to heaven. But not bloody likely, of course any actual "documentation" of the last hours must be suspect in its truth. If a gay person keeps on keeping doing gayness and doesn't ever feel remorse or confess his sins, then yeah, that's hell-bound. If he does, it's not hellbound, likely.
What Christians need to realize is that the Old Testiment and the Jewish laws were pretty much done away with by Christ. There is a new set of laws. Do what he said, and that's fine. He never mentioned gays in the new testement. I don't know what the rules are. Old Testement God was a hard-core bad-ass who killed people. New Testement God is not. Yes, Jesus talks about hell. Yes, I believe there is hell (that Stalin and St Francis would meet the same fate is not something I wish to believe. It makes no sense).
Now, does the fact that Christ did away with it mean that sin isn't there anymore? No, there is sin. But a lot of the shit in the old testiment is just bullshit. Like Kosher. No one is going to go to hell for eating pork. Kosher makes sense in the days before refridgeration and stuff, but now it does not. Et cetera.
Do I think gayness is wrong? Yes, absolutly. But my best friend is gay. Do I believe God created the universe and everything in it? Yes. But Genisis is more of a poem on creation. I believe it may have been divinly inspired (I am a poet and English major and I do believe in muses and things because whether it's a literal thing or not, the principle is sound), but it is not literal truth. Even the notes in the new bible I bought last year (my old family bibles are like, 200 years old and I don't like to handle them) say not to take Genisis seriously (Catholic bible).
The point is that God loves us, Christ died for us, and because of that all sins are forgiven. But as it also is said, "God helps those who help themselves" -- ie, one must ask to be forgiven. It's like how showing remorse effects sentencing phases in trials. In fact, it's exactly the same. Last time I went to confession was a month ago in St Peter's in Rome. In the part of the Priest's schpele were he tells you your penence, part of it is "for your own peace of mind" -- people have a need to confess otherwise guilt builds up. This is a kind of hell. So, whether one believes in an afterlife or not, yes, telling the priest what you've done does help your own peace of mind and makes you feel better. Guilt weighs heavily.
It's lent. I ate meat on Friday. I'm Catholic. I should be going to hell like a fag according to ultra-radical militant puritan fucks in this country who take shit way too seriously. Boo Fucking Hoo. I can go to confession and get away with it. But it's not like the methodist-affiliated college I go to is going to serve fish on friday for 6 weeks to make me feel better.
"Or did I just blow your fucking mind?"
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
yes, they can all combine like voltron into one being, and then renounce their faith
Now go look that up in a few other translations. It is quite a bit different.
I've never understood how people can believe that the Bible is true, yet at the same time not find it important enough to read in the original languages.
New International Version
Well there's your problem. You need to get the KJV and a good set of translation notes. The NIV and other "modern" bibles are the word of Bob the fallablle translator, not the word of God. I'll never understand why you people waste your time on those things. It's like trying to understand Shakespeare by reading only the Cliff's Notes.
Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.
That's both more accurate to Paul's original text and more beautiful to read. If Paul had intended to say "homosexual", he would have used the well-known word "paiderasste." Instead, he uses, "malakoi" and "arsenokoitai," neither of which have ever had clear homosexual connotation. Do a Google search on the Greek words if you want to learn more. It's fascinating.
about AIDS...
Lesbians have the lowest infection rate for these things... it seems to me that it's not homosexuality that's harmful... it seems it's more a matter of going anywhere near a penis.
Same for those idiot churches that say AIDS is a punishment for homosexuality... if that's the case it seems lesbians are God's chosen people.
Could we prove P = NP with then?
That would be really interesting and would be a major break in the theoretical computer science.
But in reply to your comment, perhaps there already are many working for the NSA. It appears that from the Silberman article, there is a predominance of those with Asperger's syndrome attracted to the tech field, hence a localized concentration of them in Silicon Valley (and perhaps higher cases of new diagnoses in children, because after all, there is a hereditary component).
Linux at home
your best friend must find you insufferable
1) Homosexuality only disrupts the nuclear family when said family or society deems it necessary to harm homosexuals. Many children are thorwn out of their homes for being gay without a second glance. In several states it is illegal for homosexuals to even try and have a family via adoption or fostering.
2) Homosexuality is not a vector for disease spread. The vector is massive ammounts of sexual activity without proper precautions (such as condoms, limiting partners [to a perferred one], and plain ignorance). I will not say that there are not a large number of sexually over active individuals and I will not condone actions which are well known to be stupid and dangerous, but just because a large portion of a population engages in a dangerous activity is no reason to attack this population en masse. There are no laws preventing smokers from adopting children or raising children they alreayd have, but there are similar rules against gays. While it is known that being around smoke and smoking is dangerous to your health and to the child's health, being around gays is not dangerous to the child or to the homosexual.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Jerry Newport is a mathematical savant who has been able to talk about his abilities for a long time, and he has described talking to other savants so they must exist. He wrote a book called _Your Life Is Not A Label_ in which he devoted some space to the discussion of savant skills. Donna Williams, an autistic woman, has also described savant or savant-like abilities, for instance never sculpting and then the first time she took a sculpting class, being able to create expert-level detailed life-sized sculptures. She describes in some of her books what she believes the basis for these seemingly out-of-nowhere talents to be. I have known a few autistic people who are instant calculators or other kinds of savants and perfectly able to describe and talk about this. I know this person is not the only autistic savant to describe his abilities, so I have to wonder if he's more the only one certain aspects of the media could find who wanted to talk to them. Similar to how when Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay wrote a book relatively recently, it was hailed as the first book by a non-speaking autistic person, when in fact there had been several before him and the first book by any autistic person (who disclosed their autism at any rate) was by a person with a story very similar to Tito's.
and I think he's a hippie. But we get along fine.
I think you are making a false distinction. If I were to ask you to add 5+4 in your head, would you do something consciously to come up with the answer or would the answer just pop out of your mouth? I think it would be the latter. Now, if I asked you to solve some algebra problem, you might right out a couple steps on a piece of paper. But, this is really a memory technique isn't it? What to do between the steps still just pops out. People who are good at math tend to have good intuition when it comes to numbers. They can make bigger leaps without breaking things into steps. I remember in 8th grade, I had a math teacher who would give me on C on any test on which I didn't write down just one step. This drove me mad, because, of course, I would just look at the problems and know the answer, and she could not possibly understand this. Would you argue that I am not better at math because of my intuition? The deep secret about human intelligence is that it is all intuitive. Language is the perfect example. As you said, you can't say why something sounds wrong, it just does. You rarely think about a sentence before you say it. It just pops out.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
"your name is Peter and you are the rock upon which I will build my Church" -- Peter was the first Pope. "Whatsoever you shall hold true on Earth I shall hold true in Heaven" -- The rules of the Church are honoured by God. I went to college to study Biology and Computer Science. my first job out of high school was at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility programming the beam viewers for the Free Electron Laser in C on Linux systems. But I didn't love it. I got a 4 on the AP Bio exam. But I didn't love it. That's why I'm an English major. But I say that to say, yes, I understand the concepts of Science. However, it is utterly inconcievable to me that /randomly/ chemicls would just align themselves into DNA and randomly that would cause other chemicals to build other chemicals into structures in which to hold the DNA. It's absurd. My family has been Catholic since St Patrick. My cousin is a franciscan Priest. It gives me a "why," if not a "how" -- God works through the laws of the nature he created. But understanding the laws does not tell us why they are that way, just how they work. This is a failing of Science. Of course, lacking a "how" is a failing of Religion.
People have a general misconception of homosexuality in the church, and that is that it is somehow separate or more drastic than other sins that the Bible discusses. Doesn't really matter if you're gay, an alchoholic, or a pastor, you're in the same boat as everyone else. Not many churches have embraced this idea in the past and that is why you couldn't be a member of the church, but this should (and is/will) change.
My position is if a homosexual does not profess to be a believer then there is no reason for me to say anything to him about it. If someone professes to be a Christian, and a homosexual then I am to have nothing to do with him until such time as he repents.
Not to prod too much, but how is such a view of Christianity helpful to anyone besides yourself? Jesus hung with the worst of the worst, perhaps you should be a little more accepting. All people deserve to be accepted in the church as it is the church's acceptance of people that will allow people to feel comfortable. It's the church's responsibility to love and help others not to condemn them.
Get me a meat pie floater!
Oh I see. Because the NIV uses "you" instead of "ye", it's completely mistaken. What makes you think the KJV is any better? It too is just one translation, fallable as the others.
Just because it's OLD doesn't make it RIGHT.
Being nice to someone and smiling when you can. It tends to brighten up a lot of people either genuinely or making them feel awkward for being rude toward you because others will look down on them. That's why the Bible tells you to love your enemies: the love will either help God make a good person out of them or show to the world the evil in the person and the righteousness in the believer and God who love them.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
When you use the framebuffer memory to do ordinary calculations, seemingly random crap will appear on the screen when the program is run, and the answer will technically appear as an image as well.
If we think of our brains as highly sophisticated computers, it makes sense that somewhere inside exists the "circuitry" to do complex calulations like a computer in the blink of an eye, however, we somehow can't accesse these mechanisms, as hypothesized somewhere in the article. Perhaps (I'm just taking a random stab here) something happened to these people where some of the "wiring" of their brains got messed up so that they can actually use different parts of their brain. These "images" might not have anything "intrinsic", but might just be the effect of something else, like the example above.
read the gender though. Man lie with a man as he would a woman?
The gay guys I know lie with thier men like men.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I should know better than to feed a troll, but Christianity is based on the principle that ALL OF US are sinners and Jesus was the only 'human' truly free of sin.
Wow, that's quite a leap. Let me start off by saying that my goal is only to analyze this a bit and not attack you.
First, the nuclear family is a relatively modern concept in the grand scheme of Humanity's history. Second, how is a nuclear family more stable, than say, the larger extended family of your village, which is a more traditional family structure? Third, if the nuclear family is so "stable" why is it that we have a 60% divorce rate, lots of domestic violence, and other seriously family issues in this country? I can honestly say that I have yet to encounter a "stable" nuclear family. Fourth (I am going to make a leap of my own and delve into what I think you're implying), if nuclear families are so effective at raising quality individuals, why are advocates of nuclear families always complaining about social decay in a country where nuclear families are ubiquitous?
I cannot comprehend how so many people can advocate this family structure so adamantly. Where is the evidence?
Why bother.
well, having never died myself, I don't know if it works or not. I'm just saying that it's meaningless to ask for forgivness if you're not really sorry for your actions, whether you ask God, the Judge, or your wife. If you're not truely penetent then you'll probably do it again, whether it be leaving the seat up or committing genocide. (note: i'm not saying their the same, merely two extremes on a scale to illustrate the point).
I know it's a little nerdy, but sometimes Star Trek just gets it right...
I find the concept of the Savant to be fascinating. It's like someone's showing us, in small fragments, what we're really capable of. All of those amazing things are possible in the human mind, yet our limitations hold us back from it. It's incredible.
-Vendal Thornheart
Daniel Tammet's web site is here and looks quite nicely done.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Well, the specific information as to who it is better would be in the SECOND half of the post.
-josh
Ahh modern religious interpretation. Mmmm, its like Burger King. Do it Your Way. Believe what you agree with, rationalize away what you don't. Contradict yourself at every turn because Your Way, made up by You, is somehow the Right Way. What a sickness to rather twist and distort, rewrite and reinterpret all just to uphold some fairytale. You'd do yourself a favor using logic and reason and just letting go of this man-made framework of control and self-pity.
neither science nor religion will paint a perfect picture. Philosophy, from which both grew out of, would. Religion is stupid in the face of Plato's theory of forms, as any God we can concieve of is merely a shadow of a perfect God we're too low to recognize. Science is "natural philosophy" -- today we are a far cry from Pliny the Elder, but it's still an attempt to say how the world works, just as other branches try and tell us the "whys" and "hows" of other things.
:-)
But the general and special relativity theories combine with the laws of motion, into a way which i would say proves predestination if one thinks about it right. If energy and matter are interchangebale, and all of it's linked together, and everything moves in predictable fashion, and their is only so much matter/enegery in the universe, than from the moment of creation (big bang), every particle and wave has been moving on a course which can be charted. Theoretically, we could know everyhing which will ever happen and has ever happened if we could track everything bit in the universe. Free will would then just be an illusion. Just like billiard balls, everything's movement effects the particles it touches next. that includes the chemicals in our brains every bit as much as the asteroids in space. But that's not fun to think about, not that we really have a choice
For some reason I've always seen channels 1-10 in a straight left-to-right line, things curve upwards until about 15, and keep curving until they're a right to left line at about 25. By 30 they've curved straight up, and about 37 - 42 they make a quick left turn to be right to left again. After about 44 they make a slight 30 degree turn upwards, and continue to curve upwards somewhat though never above 70 degrees. Once you reach the audio - only programming channels, like the streaming christmas music channel, they head straight up.
I've never been able to explain exactly how this physical relationship formed in my mind, but it has been embedded in there for some time now, and doesn't seem likely to go away.
Ironically, I don't really watch television anymore.
The ______ Agenda
I've never understood how people can believe that the Bible is true, yet at the same time not find it important enough to read in the original languages.
Interestingly, many Jews find this a confusing aspect of Christianity. "What do you mean there's 197 different versions? Which one is, you know, the *real* one?"
...Micyh jivc nvari 'rys streisand."
No no no.... I didn't say "idiotic bitch".
In that book you quote, the word of "God" it is called, there is section about the rapture and how "angels" will beat their wings at the 4 corners of the earth to keep people from escaping judgement. My question would be as follows, Didn't the writer realize the earth was a sphere? Also, two tribes of Israel were the result of a pair of daughters getting their father drunk and having sex with him. Amazingly, sex between father and daughter isn't explicity forbidden in the Bible though it is a good way to have retarded children. Women hit menopause in their 40's and 50's today but back then women lived for hundres of years and had children well into their hundreds. Is it evolution that lead to us not living so long today and not being fertile for so long as well, or were the people back then actually pious enough that they received long life and we all are not worthy and going to hell? It really is like shooting fish in a barrel when people cite that book. It was written by simple people that didn't understand the world around them and some thousands of years later, people still follow it... amazing. It has some very good ideas and beliefs in it but it also has some real crap too.
I'm just saying that it's meaningless to ask for forgivness if you're not really sorry for your actions
This is what I'm saying too, I would hate to worship a God that didn't care what I had done as long as I said (not mean) "I'm Sorry" when faced with the prospect of spending eternity in Hell.
A relative of mine is such a savant. If he ever hears a phone number once in his life, he'll never forget it. Same with anything, license plates, credit card numbers, winning lottery numbers, etc. etc. whatever.
It's sort of impressive, but it's also a horrible condition. I'd rather lack that ability and at least be more able to function normally in the world. He's still a great person but obviously life is much more difficult for him.
I speak Twi'lek. ... It's easy, there's only three or four spoken phrases, each of which means everything you can conceive of!
The second Starvin Marvin South Park episode had an alien language, marklar. Where everything is marklar. An even easier language. Marklar this!
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I may not read much, but I read my Bible, and all I need to know is I don't care what you liberal city boy types think about the Word of God: what's wrong is wrong, what's a sin is a sin, and you degenerate sickos better watch yer asses when you see my pickup comin' cos I'm gonna take a 2-by-4 bash in the head of the next GOLLDAMN PREVERT I see wearing a cotton/polyester T-shirt.
Met any gay parents lately? My best friend and his partner have two children with four parents. Two Moms and two Dads and are their children growing up just fine. Our society is developing new ways of parenting and allowing people express their sexuality as they biologically feel. All the while creating new definitions of families that are arguably stronger than the nuclear family.
It's only in the last 30-40 years since Stonewall and the human rights movement that gay, lesbian and bisexual have had an opportunity to participate in society as who they are. Perhaps you'd like GBLT to go back in the closet and have sex with multiple partners in secrecy? The "prime disease vector" you speak of still exists, gay parents or not. Although I question your data on HIV infection rates in populations. There are an awful lot of people who have sex with multiple partners who are heterosexual. By shear volume of heterosexuals alone. Adjusted per-capita you might perhaps a point but I suspect it's a lot slimmer than you'd imagine.
So you're right, it is a disruption but it's also progress. Your assertion that homosexuality is an intrinsic sin due to the risks that population faces due to AIDS seems like hubris to me. Arguably the lack of recognition of homosexuality and same sex partnership has lead to lifestyles that include multiple partners of the same sex. The data on men who have sex with men (including men who identify as homosexual) shows a large quotient identify as heterosexual and are even married to a partner of the opposite sex or "MSMs" (men who have sex with men). This is because society does not recognize how they biologically feel as acceptable. So they are forced into hiding. This is known factor and has been for quite some time in the epidemiology of HIV. The creation of the "prime disease vector" you speak of is a societal construct of the supposed moral majority such as yourself. And it is not limited to homosexual people as HIV is outstandingly non-discriminatory.
So really I do believe your lack of acceptance of GBLT people is a sin of your own that falls under the first category you outline "doing harm to[wards] others". But really I question your whole belief system as, best to my knowledge, God does not hate. I hope you find it in your righteous heart to love GBLT people for who they are so we can all come together and make this world a better place. Because I am a gay man and that is never going to change. I believe it was the super deity in question who said "I am who I am".
_nfotxn
Yeah, all except the intravenous drug-using variety of lesbians..or the bisexual part-time lesbians. They're both at risk.
Nowhere have I been able to find a citation or clear reference to the paper that Snyder presumably was (going to?) publish about this TMS-creativity connection. The closest I find is his own page. This page is somewhat telling in my mind of the level of "seriousness" of this research. One would think from the "Autistic genius? Nature, 1 April 2004, by Allan Snyder" pseudo-citation that Mr. Snyder had an article published in Nature, but closer examination shows it to be a book review (follow the link to the pdf on the page above and see for yourself).
/ apr/01_snyder.shtml.
On the other hand it appears that he at least exists, and that his story is not fabricated from whole cloth: http://www.usyd.edu/news/newsevents/articles/2004
Finally, in reference to the Guardian article, I find the parroting of autistic savant folklore such as the tale of the savant able to play Tchaik 1 without having taken a piano lesson (or touched a piano depending on the retelling) extremely galling. Playing a piano concerto depends on technique, muscle memory, and many other things besides pure mental contortion. To think that someone who has never played scales would be able to wrap their untrained fingers around a concerto of non-negligible complexity is positively ridiculous in my mind. I suspect that the story arose as a vast but innocent exaggeration initially and has taken up a life of its own through repeated retellings by reporters too lazy to check the source material of their stories.
Despite this being demonstrated as rediculous and stupid over 2 thousand years ago (before the birth of Christ even) by Socrates, I'll try to explain why it is to those of you who think this post makes some sort of sense.
Either God hates sin because it is wrong,
OR sin is wrong because God hates it.
Something cannot both be the cause and the consequence of something else.
So if God hates sin because it is wrong, then there is some higher authority beyond God which dictates wrongness, and God hates based on this authority. This contridicts our conception of God, so...
If things are wrong because God hates them then wrongness is totally arbitrary. If "sin" is arbitrary then God might have chosen the exact opposite values for morality. Thus if God had decided that boiling babies was a good idea, then it would be the best thing you could do (and NOT boiling babies would land you in hell). God might have decided that, say, that for a woman to speak in church is an abomination (actually, he did if you believe the bible).
The second issue with Authority driven morality is that of whether or not it is binding.
God says "do such and such". Now, you have to do this, IF you have to listen to God. But why do you have to listen to God? Because God says you have to listen to God. See how this is circular? Now, thankfully God has given us an additional reason. If you decide not to listen, you can burn in hell. Any appeal to authority in morality must end with a threat, or there is really no reason to pay attention to it at all. (There still isn't, since the threat is empty, but empty threats seem to have worked well so far)
Now, this is why you are an idiot. Why are things that are harmful to you a sin? Is fasting a sin? What about mortification of the flesh. How about eating a Big Mac. Is refusing medical treatment a sin? What about LETTING YOURSELF GET CRUSIFIED?
You are even more of an idiot, though, because you don't critisize homosexuality AT ALL. You critisize promiscuous behavior, regardless of who is screwing who.
Does it hurt to be so stupid? Or does your cult shield you with promises of crackers and grape juice which turn into Jesus when you eat them?
I do not know alot about savants but it seems to me that people who are able to instinctively perform arithmetic operations quickly suggest that mathematics is innate in humans, and possibly in nature, instead of being purely invented. Can anyone offer any further insite into this?
I think a lot of replies are misreading the parent. If christianity doesn't allow it, find a different club to be in. It's like Tiger Woods fighting to join the KKK.
In Virtually Normal, Andrew Sullivan writes that the Story of Soddom and Gamorrah was a tale about lack of hospitality rather than sex. Biblical scholars such as John Boswell, et al., have drawn similar conclusions after studying the original texts.
If God is infallible, then everything he makes must be good. God created homosexuals.
The primary biblical argument used today against homosexuality is that such a union cannot procreate. Yet we do not condemn male/female couples who are unable to produce children or those who have no desire. This singles out one group against all others. The Old Testament goes as far as condemning masturbation yet 97% of you males out there practice it regularly. That too is a mortal sin.
So we enter moral relativism where we humans rank the various sins against one another. As others have argued, Christians can pretty much ignore Leviticus because that comes from the Old Testament. Yet Jesus makes no mention of homosexuals in the four Gospels. He does spend a lot of time with the outcasts and chastises those who want to throw stones. He chastises the Rabbis who openly preach on the street corners. He has nothing to say about homosexuality.
In my conversations with Christians, I have found that nearly all believe it is more important to take the oath of accepting Jesus Christ than to live a "Christian life." In other words, what I say is more important than what I do. What a strange way to live one's life.
signature pending slashdot approval
the point of Christianity is that there IS NO SUCH THING as an unforgivable sin.
Matt 12:31-32 - (NAB) - " Therefore, I say to you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come."
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
This guy makes me pround of being human ;-).
But then again:
sn Whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. This passage has troubled many people, who have wondered whether or not they have committed this sin. Three things must be kept in mind: (1) the nature of the sin is to ascribe what is the obvious work of the Holy Spirit (e.g., releasing people from Satan's power) to Satan himself; (2) it is not simply a momentary doubt or sinful attitude, but is indeed a settled condition which opposes the Spirit's work, as typified by the religious leaders who opposed Jesus; and (3) a person who is concerned about it has probably never committed this sin, for those who commit it here (i.e., the religious leaders) are not in the least concerned about Jesus' warning.
From bible.org at the bottom of the page.
For instance, yes, theoretically, Hitler could have confessed his sins, been given absolution, and gone to heaven. But not bloody likely, of course any actual "documentation" of the last hours must be suspect in its truth.
So what if he held a gun to a priest's head and force him to give absolution? Does that still get Hitler into heaven? Shouldn't God be the one to forgive one's sins anyway, not some corruptable mere mortal? Can a priest give himself absolution for having sex with the children in his congregation?
I want to recommend Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark. It's sci fi (good /. tie-in), but actually draws on the author's own experience as the parent of an autistic child. Apart from the sci fi plot, which is decent, there are many insights into the thought processes of people with autism. It seems quite consistent with the Guardian article, and is based on current research that the author read about.
The sci fi classic, which is OT for this thread but will be of interest for folks thinking of how to "cure" mental "disabilities," is Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon. It's the diary of a man who starts with a very low IQ, but then is given a medical treatment to "cure" him. A control subject, a mouse named Algernon, is given a similar treatment. The diary follows his vastly increasing intelligence, but then complications set in. A movie called "Charly" was based on the book. Sci fi buffs, and other folks interested in these topics: these titles are highly recommended!
What Christians need to realize is that the Old Testiment and the Jewish laws were pretty much done away with by Christ.
(Contemporary English Version)
Nm 15:15 This law will never change. I am the LORD, and I consider all people the same, whether they are Israelites or foreigners living among you.
Dt 4:2 and now he is your God. I am telling you everything he has commanded, so don't add anything or take anything away.
Seems to me that he didn't have the jurisdiction to do away with anything, at least according to the very book that gives him authority in the first place -- the one written by his father. I suppose you can totally disregard the Old Testament, but then where the heck did Jesus come from and who is he speaking for?
Ah well, Christian Logic is not something I'll ever wrap my head around. The LORD works in mysterious ways indeed.
Cheers.
In other words, we don't know how our brains work.
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
I have synesthesia, and as a child I thought it was normal until I realized other people didn't see numbers and letters as colours. I believe synesthesia can link any kind of sensory input to abstract forms like letters and numbers, but in my case (and in most), it's simple colours. This makes it easy for me to remember trivial information like phone numbers, account numbers, historical dates, and pi (2.141592653589 is how far I remember without looking it up). Every string of numbers and letters forms a composite colour based on those of its individual characters. I've studied Japanese for a few years and now find that Japanese syllable characters also have colours for me now. I imagine that with extreme synesthesia, a person might understand abstract notions like numbers and math in a completely different way. I remember once showing my sister two Smarties (they're like M&Ms) and telling her they were "3" and "6" instead of yellow and green. It took me a moment to realize why she didn't understand.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
So what if he held a gun to a priest's head and force him to give absolution? Does that still get Hitler into heaven?
No, the priest needs to be clenching his biceps the right way and think of lingonberries to grant an absolution. If he only does the other thing, the patient will "feel" like having given absolution, but will still go to hell.
You atheists fail to grab even the most basic realities of religion...
Can a priest give himself absolution for having sex with the children in his congregation?
"Making love", my friend, "making love".
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
I understood completely what the article was describing because to some (very much lesser) extent, I "see" math too. When I'm doing arithmetic, for example, the best way I can think to describe it is that it's like fitting together tetris pieces. It's the way that my brain visualizes the abstract concepts behind the numbers. I can sort of describe my thought processes when it comes to arithmetic, but as you get into increasingly complicated higher mathematics, I can still "see" it but there is no way that I can describe it in any way that people who don't think that way can understand.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
I doubt the brain models the trajectory as a differential equation.
><////>
Not for his abilities, but for the beautiful, peaceful-sounding world he lives in. To most of us, numbers are either an obstacle or a challenge or work or whatever. To him they're his friends. That's so unique. I envy him.
Don't forget the language genius. This guy seems a lot like somenone who might have been one of the inventors of Qabbala and influenced Judaic mysticism. There is no reason to expect that people of his kind weren't around back then.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
I'd prefer produce bug-free code unconsciously. Or at least compile to assembler.
Having a large vocabulary has nothing to do with the difference between a technical understanding of a language's grammatical structure (diagramming a sentence) and an innate understanding of the language structure, where you simply look at a sentence and *know* what needs to change, and why it needs to change. I share GP's view towards this; I can barely tell you the difference between the subject and the object of a sentence, but have always been able to write properly, and to do proofreading and editing to a standard acceptable for anything up to a full journal. I don't know if my standard is good enough for a journal, not having submitted anything to one, but I suspect it is.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
What you may or may not realise, is that you are quoting a well known (fallacy?) from Boswell's book, Christianity, Social Tolerance & Homosexuality (1980)
. html
There are quite a few flaws in his argument, and therefore, flaws in your argument.
The fact is, if he was refering only to male prositutes, Paul would have used the word pornos (which was the word used at the time for male prostitutes), since that is related to the purchasing of sex.
Even if you know greek and hebrew, you will be unable to understand completely the words in the context of the times they were written.
If you do a Google Search for "Boswell Critique" you will find a lot of information regarding this.
Here is some text from http://www.mindspring.com/~scarlson/greek/boswell
Often the evidence about a word's meaning in a certain context is not conclusive but merely indicative. When the best and strongest evidence consistently points to the same conclusion, however, we can become more confident. In this case, the immediate context of the word arsenokoithV (arsenokoitês), all throughout the New Testament, its Septuagint parallels, and its usage among the Apostolic Fathers, like Polycarp, all point to a meaning of a homosexual and not a male prostitute. Boswell's general argument, apart from a facile consideration of the context, relies too much on the argument from silence and an egregious etymological analysis.
It is very important to note the context from the other parts of '1 Cor 6'.
Paul's message is not one of fear or hate, but rather joy and thankfullness for forgiveness; he goes on to say:
"But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God." NIV.
Kudos, and good luck to you!
In the way he describes it, though, there are clues. We know, for example, that when you imagine yourself seeing some object, there are visual areas and connected "meaning" areas of the brain that will fire simultaneously, just as if you were actually looking at that thing.
Now that we know he's visualizing something, we can know which parts of the brain to pay special attention to. The way the visual centers of the brain fire, and what fires with them, will show us the physical connections that make this possible. And possibly give us a hint as to what connections in the "normal" brain are suboptimal.
And, just maybe, give us an idea as to how we can engineer it so everyone's brains are optimized. Provided we can figure out how to do it without breaking the shoe tying ability.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I'm not religious, though I'm facinated by the steadfast certianty that folks who are talk about what the religion they practice means to them. (For simplicity, I'll state things as absolutes...though I don't think that anything below is absolutely correct. FWIW.)
Here's a bit of an explanation. It's a bit chaotic, so please forgive me. See if it fits what you've discovered on your own. Either way, food for thought...
Here's what I figured out (see the explanation below for more): religious beliefs are based on conscience.
No big deal, right? Let that soak in for a moment. It gets much more complex. If you've studied anthropology, much of this will make sense fairly quickly. If not, you might need to come back to it later. It took me ~15 years on and off after college to figure out this stuff!
To most people, having a soul is roughly the same as having a conscious; souless people have no conscience. Souls come from God/god, thus they are part of God/god;
So, if someone is kind, they have a soul since kindness is a trait of people who are aware of others and have sympathy for them; people who have a conscience ... and kind people must believe in God/god since souls come from God/god ... even if they aren't religious or know what this god is.
If the person is religious and acts like a real rat bastard, they may be justified and allowed because they are religious and thus have a soul and a conscience as a manifestation of God/god. It doesn't matter if this doesn't make any sense in real life ... because ... the tribe forgives or at a minimum absolves the bastard for defects in character. If they can't, they throw the bum out of the group and consider that they are 'lost'; no soul or conscience.
That's the reason why telling someone that you don't follow what they believe god-wise will get one of a couple reactions; disbelief (if they like you) or anger/fear. Atheists tend to get this the most since they flat out don't consider God/god credible.
If you state any of these things, you've just told religious people that you have no conscience, have no soul, and aren't from God! Sprout antennas if you want...it wouldn't get you any stranger treatment!
(Corrilary: If you are well outside of the person's group and religious group you are more likely to be tollerated (or pittied), unlike groups that have a very very close similarity. Part of the reason is that ignorance is acceptable, while informed defiance is not.)
Any discussion of religious practice and morals/actions are wrapped up in the person's view of themselves and of those around them . The deity never contradicts these two; what the person thinks is right or the group the person associates themselves with thinks is right almost always matches how they would describe what God follows. If they hate fags, so does God!
Talking about details is entirely beside the point. Academics and serious researchers get wrapped up in these and loose focus on how people behave and talk when they describe God/god.
People almost never talk about details when referring to religious issues. The stories are constructs to hang ideas on; that the stories can be traced to other religions or communities doesn't matter. They need a structure to hang morals on. Good or not, it's handy to have those stories.
Consider this to be a form of tribalism. Note that I am not slamming religious people as backward thick foreheaded cavemen. Even to this day, everyone is in a tribe (or two). They just don't refer to the groups as a tribe or if they do they joke about it. These tribes are not radically different from the small tribes that are vanishing in all corners of the world except that they travel around more.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
The point of this story is that modern medicine may develop a basis for understanding savantism and then maybe autism. The real goal with this guy is to get him to write a diary, so shrinks can pick his brain. This guy may be the greatest discovery made by psychology ever. And it seems to have been completely missed by everyone here on /.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
And why do you think that they already don't have all decryption algorithms they will ever need for the foreseeable future?
Homosexuality is a religion now?
...but it looks like his language "Manti" has the same exact structure as Finish.
Ah well, Christian Logic is not something I'll ever wrap my head around.
You're not trying very hard, that's why.
(New International Version)
John 8:58: "I tell you the truth," Jesus answered, "before Abraham was born, I am!"
And they immediately tried to stone him for blasphemy. Why? "I am" is one of the names of God in the Old Testament. More specifically, it's a name-title, which means that whether Jesus was claiming to be God himself or not (and whether you interpret this from a trinitarian viewpoint or not), he was certainly claiming the same authority.
Now, on to your quotations. First, realize that the aim of the CEV is to make the Bible easy to understand orally. It's not exactly renowned for its exactness in translation. The further you get from the source, the more ideas and context you lose.
(KJV)
Deuteronomy 4:2: Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you.
Well, that's certainly different, isn't it? So who can't add or take away? You. Israel. Man. Jesus, as God or with God's authority, can. Well, shucks. That argument went out the window.
Context!
Numbers 15:15: One ordinance shall be both for you of the congregation, and also for the stranger that sojourneth with you, an ordinance for ever in your generations: as ye are, so shall the stranger be before the LORD.
First, there's a little ambiguity over what's "for ever." Is it the ordinance, or the fact that strangers (non-Israelites) should observe the law of Moses when living in Israel? If it's the latter, no problem. If it's the former - see above. Jesus had the authority to revoke it.
In the scriptures, God says quite often that he doesn't change. His people, on the other hand, do. Christians live in different circumstances than Israelites. The final sacrifice has already been made - by Jesus. Why would we sacrifice animals, when that ordinance was supposed to help Israel "remember" something that hadn't happened yet? That's the logic behind the removal of it.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
okay, this is going seriously OT, but you are completely forgetting Quantum Theory. Hiesenburg's uncertainty principle introduces a level of randomness which makes predetermination problematic, at best. If it wasn't for uncertainty and the resulting 'lopsidded' big bang, there would be equal amounts of mater and antimatter, and whatever hadn't been annihlated would be equaly distributed throughout the universe - the existance of galaxies proves that didn't happen.
That is the best thing i have read all morning.
Acrylic Bubble Panels www.beyond7.com
Matthew 18 nor Matthew 18 nor Acts 10.
Romans 1 doesn't specifically mention homosexuals, and indeed you could argue that gays just are that way from the start, so they can't "give in to the sinful desires of their hearts".
Thank you, please try again.
My email addy? should be easy enough.
As per the post above (the one about god being your concious), I'm not going to hell because I don't believe god (If there is one) wants me to someone who I am not.
But "you" say I am because you think being gay is wrong and i'm unrepentant about being who I really am.
These beliefs cancel out, so it doesn't really matter, except maybe to you personally.
My email addy? should be easy enough.
> the point of Christianity is that there IS NO SUCH THING as an unforgivable sin.
Yes there is - it's called suicide.
>You just have to ask forgiveness (the sacrement of confession, which is done to a priest individually for Catholics (me), and usually as part of the mass as a congregation for protestants).
And how do you do that after you've commited suicide?
It seems a basic feature about the existing memory techniques is that the things to remember are embedded in something richer(visually, spatially).
For example there is an old technique of visualizing a building with decorated rooms, where you place the data to remember.
With mindmaps, added colors and illustrations make remembering easier.
So 'Richer' does not mean "oh no, more things to remember!". It makes remembering easier. For anyone.
I suspect part of what Tammer does is natural ability, and part is natural ability allowing him to discover by himself what can also be taught to others.
Frances Yates' book
The Art of Memory
describes the history of methodologies of memory, from the Romans(when written records were still rare, trained memory was precious, and the training was fairly common good) till beginning of 18th century.
In modern day education, "learning by heart" has become unpopular.
True, it's much less needed, but maybe it would be worthwile to separate technique from the content, and have schools only teach technique. I think in recent times, only content was taught.
"The NIV and other "modern" bibles are the word of Bob the fallablle translator, not the word of God."
The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the New in Greek. Neither of them are English, of any time period.
I always hate when people spice things up... Here is the list...
It occurs to me that the only people breaking this law are:
The following are safe:
So, the only ones screwed over are bisexuals and nerds who can't get any.
Erm... best to keep this quiet guys.
In Finnish,
Mänty, äiti, aurinko, päivä
So he's actually making a mixture between two...
maybe more.
Wait, all those rules and interpretations... they are completely made up. It says if you speak against the holy spirit you are going to hell no matter if you later find jesus and completely everything clicks and you are truely sorry. I don't know where you got your rules, here is what it says: "Whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven." Will NOT be forgiven. How can you say it is only if you ascribed the holy spirit to satan in a very literal sense or blah blah blah. Here's another choice quote I'd like to hear you explain away with made up legal tests. This one is fucking plain. It straight out lays it down for you: "As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church." Women shouldn't talk in church, they should wait til they get home and have their husband explain it to their tiny little subhuman selves.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
You would have to have an absolutely mathematically perfect distribution for this to be the case. The slightest deviation by one single particle and it all comes apart and galaxies start forming. With quantum mechanics, even a mathematically perfect distribution is not enough, due to the quantum randomness.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
> but whoever speaks against the holy Spirit
...I have thus just FUBAR'd myself?
> will not be forgiven, either in this age or in
> the age to come
So when I say Yaweh is an asshole for sitting up there while children are raped and murdered -- and does nothing because he is good and could do something -- is a fucked up god who deserves to be shit upon...
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I was raised Christian, though I no longer hold faith in any religion. But I was, of course, well aware of the animosity towards homosexuality; despite the rare mention of it in the Bible, and the regular mention of a dozen other things that Christians should be far more concerned with.
All that being said, I have recently realized that God Hates Shrimp
He hates them so much, that he calls them an "abomination" just as when referring to homosexuals.
If you didn't think the Bible was ridiculous before, please think again. Shellfish are an abomination. This also provides me another answer when my father asks why I no longer go to church: I like shrimp, dad, and God hates them.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
> Homosexuality is a genetic trait. There is
> nothing, and I mean *nothing*, they can do about it.
Actually, this belief is so hopelessly intertwined with the political need for it to be true that one should suspect it. Certainly the force with which it is asserted is derived from said need.
Having said that, I think that, properly, people do not authorize the government to regulate human (adult) sexuality. Hence the question of "born with it" should, in theory, be of academic interest only.
Have sex with whoever wants sex with you. Enter into contracts with whoever you want, including something labeled "marriage".
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
> And how do you do that after you've commited suicide?
You don't. That's why my dad's uncle strayed from the Catholic Church for the last 50 years of his life when his sister killed herself and they wouldn't let her be buried in the church cemetery.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
> Interesting... Americans do it by eliminating
> sources of clean drinking water.
Interesting... Europeans do it by standing around while genocide occurs, or by comitting the genocide themselves, or by allowing at least 10 billion dollars of "food for oil" mercy money to instead line the pockets of a murderous dictator, which is to say, help prop him up instead of buying food and medicine, said lack which, umm, leads to death of children.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Oh, and, assuming your (generic your) end-times cosmology includes instant resurrection and sending to your destination, they are both currently alive somewhere with indestructible bodies, enduring indescribable agony as they lie in a pool of molten lava, him for 15 years now, her for 65.
Nice, kind "god", eh? Do not troll this statement as it needs to be said: And you Christians worship this fuck as "good"?!?!?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Mark Twain points out how the OT God was capricious and murderous, slaughtering children by the millions in the Flood (among many other incidents) even as their terrified and despairing mothers looked on helplessly, all while pleading with Him to stop.
But that wasn't good enough for good old Yaweh. No. He had to go and "get religion". Which is to say, leaving people dead wasn't good enough. With Christianity, now the dead won't even stay peacefully dead. Now he brings them back to life and tortures 99% of them for ever and ever, denying that final rest to them.
Yeah, let's worship this god.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Just wanted to say hi from one Canadian (Torontonian) gay geek to another - we're an endangered species, it would seem, so it's always good to meet another of our kind!
*waves*
last rights and requiem masses. intercession of saints. but yeah, suicide is not cool. I like to try and forget about that one because I've lost many friends to it.
Talking about god and stuff; from Carl Sagan:
(part 1)(part 2)^ Neither one isn't more correct than the other one.
But still: i dont believe in god.
Maybe he just disappeared in a puff of logic together with the wail while falling down.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Jesus hung out with the worst of the worst *unbelievers*. They are unbelievers and so are not expected to behave as Christians should.
Yes the church should love and help others, but they should not support them in their sin. If you know someone is addicted to drugs you are not helping them by driving them over to their dealer.
Homosexuality is a choice. People can say "I was born this way" all they want, but that doesn't change the fact that they choose to indulge their desires. Christianity is about acting in a way contrary to your fallen nature and setting yourself apart from things that would lead you away from God.
If the person was to come to you honestly seeking help overcoming their sin then that is a completely different story. Then you can help them because they have made the commitment to change.
Otherwise you are just hurting the church as a whole as well as the individual. I know this from personal experience. My church fell into the trap of universal acceptance until it was torn apart by
the internal strife caused by the people we knew only professed to be Christians for the benefits the church provided.
I'll admit that there is not much study invested in the children of homosexual parents. (Quite possibly because the various special interest groups would crush any such study no matter which side it came out in favor of.) However the fact remains that homosexuals are naturally non-reproductive couplings.
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Other then that the only thing I can argue is that while being raised by homosexual parents may be better for children than say, being raised in a government run orphanage, it is definatly not as good as the traditional stable family model. (Which is sadly becoming more and more of a rare thing.)
As for your other point. In my post I at no time attacked any group of people. I mentioned a homosexual in the abstract for an example of how my religion instructs me to deal with one. I'm sorry if it seemed as an attack to you. However it is quite statistically correct.
http://www.homosexuellt.com/infosida/show_article
http://aids.about.com/blUS3.htm
These all seem to be Estonian words (my mother tongue) with small misspellings that may have been created by trying to apply finnish grammar to estonian root nouns.
:P
The words mentioned, in English, Estonian and Finnish:
Pine, Mänd, Mänty
Day, Päev, Päivä
Sun, Päike, Aurinko
Mother, Ema, Äiti
Life, Elu, Eläma
Oak, Tamm, Tammi
I believe I have the finnish words correct but hope to be corrected if there is misspellings in there.
As to what this guy is doing, only a true masochist would be learning Estonian of his own free will. It has a very complex grammar with very obscure rules, Im not sure how we manage to learn it ourselves
As a warning example: estonian nouns can have 14 different forms(cases) represented by suffixes added to word root. To make the matters nore difficult, those suffixes vary for same case, for different words.
Quick google turned out this page with following example:
1: Nominative (nimetav): kirik 'a church'
2: Genitive (omastav): kiriku 'of a church'
3: Partitive (osastav): kiriku-t 'a church'
4: Illative (sisseütlev): kiriku-sse 'into a church'
5: Inessive (seesütlev): kiriku-s 'in a church'
6: Elative (seestütlev): kiriku-st 'out of a church'
7: Allative (alaleütlev): kiriku-le '(on)to a church'
8: Adessive (alalütlev): kiriku-l 'on a church'
9: Ablative (alaltütlev): kiriku-lt 'from a church'
10: Translative (saav): kiriku-ks '(change) into a church'
11: Essive (olev): kiriku-na 'as a church'
12: Terminative (rajav): kiriku-ni 'up to a church'
13: Abessive (ilmaütlev): kiriku-ta 'without a church'
14: Comitative (kaasaütlev): kiriku-ga 'with a church'
But if this guy actually manages to come out with a simplified, reasonable grammar for Estonian, I would think it a Good Thing and be very interested.
Found his page about the language too. Its from 2001 though so it may have changed a lot. The language described there seems to be heavily based on Finnish indeed.
New International Version
Well there's your problem. You need to get the KJV and a good set of translation notes.
Wellll. If you want to be that picky why don't we all just learn Greek and Hebrew and get hold of the "real" original texts so to speak.
The NIV and other "modern" bibles are the word of Bob the fallablle translator, not the word of God.
You're telling us God personally handwrote the KJV? Because unless He did that at some point a human had to be involved in the process. That human is just as "fallible" as the next guy. I hope you were just kidding and I missed that.
I agree. It's like having access to inner private parameters of an object/class that's normally not exposed publicly.
It is likely that people actually know exactly how many objects they see e.g. walk into a room and know instantly how many chairs there are.
However that info is abstracted away under layers and layers of abstraction - e.g. one, two, many, dozens, hundreds, thousands, enough, not enough - after all most people spot desks without chairs quite quickly, this is not necessarily such an easy thing.
These abstractions were probably very useful millenia ago. There's no point knowing that there are 23312 wildebeest on the plain if you don't even have a number system, much less express it to someone who doesn't. Just have to give the appropriate grunt(s) or clicks.
And these abstractions probably allow us to avoid the detail and focus on the big picture - the guy has problems going to the supermarket or the beach.
Even if you can count the number of hairs on a lioness instantly, I doubt the lioness bothers remembering how many bites of meat you make up - it's probably "enough for me and cubs, or need one more".
I suspect some of these people would be troubled and have difficult working if you gave them 1001 bolts and only 1000 nuts and told them to fasten stuff together. Most normal people won't even notice till the last one, and then they'll just shrug and go whatever...
Modern software can easily count how many light and dark pixels there are in picture. It has difficulty seeing how many chairs. But soon programs will count X chairs of type A, Y chairs of type B etc, but the next step then is "few, many, enough, not enough".
A number of good points. I wish it was possible to have some studies done without people on both sides shouting at each other. From the statistics I've seen homosexual men make up from 65 to 80 percent of HIV cases in the US depending on where you get your data. Now I'll admit that corrolation does not equal causation, but from a purely rational point of view it is a risky behavior (or at least an indication of other risky behaviors)
As to them going back in the closet no I don't want them to go back in the closet. I want them to stop. I know it isn't going to happen while this world exists though. I do love the GBLT people. They are made in God's image just as I am. They are fallen just as I am.
I do not however support their actions. I will not do anything to stop them because it is not my place to judge them. I believe that when the time comes that they will be judged by God. I do not want them to suffer so I speak out to them to change. Other than that I do nothing against them.
However if they claim to follow my relgion, and join my church then it is my place to judge whether they are willing to accept the restrictions that my church places on its members. This is not discrimination. It is a set of restrictions placed on everyone who wants to be in my church. If you want to play baseball you must agree that if you miss the ball three times you strike out. If you want to be a member my church you can not continue to commit homosexuality (Or in the "MSMs" case adultry and homosexuality, same rules for both BTW).
You seem to think my personal decision to follow my faith's teachings is less valid than your decision to choose your mate. That seems to me to be a bit hypocritical.
As for God not hating. Through our actions we left him. He hates the sins that we commit even though he loves us. Notice that my post said "Things god hates" and followed with actions, not the people who do those actions.
In any case I appreciate you debating me without resorting to blatant attacks on my beliefs as one of your post siblings did. I personally do hope you become a believer, and stop your sinful ways, but that is just my general world-view. I'm not going to preach at you however. You have chosen a dangerous path so be careful out there.
God is love and that's all there is.
If Love is all there is, there can be no opposite.
It is only our illusion that we are separate from God or that we are alone. In reality, we are one with God and we are loved.
Don't tell this to the Gov't though, or they will call you a Commune and the ATF will destroy you. Remember Waco? Take mushrooms, folks and squeegee your Third F***ing Eye.
Peace out.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Yeah, let's all force ourselves into the same mould so the kids don't pick on each other at school. It's such a fantastic idea, it *has* to work.
Is it really true that homosexuality is genetic? Is there actually sufficient evidence to say that it's definitely not your environment? Keep in mind that I have nothing at all against homosexuality, I'm just suspicious of the statement that homosexuals have no choice in the matter, since I've not seen any rigorous studies.
Imagine my surprise when after getting an electrical engr degree...I couldn't get a decent job
I appears you are saying that you lost your faith in God because you couldn't get a job.
Consider: if you had gotten a job you might still believe in God, which you now think is wrong. So the question is, which is more important? The job or knowing the truth?
Where is God?
Even people with fulltime jobs still ask this question.
Leviticus isn't a moral code for the perfect chrisitan. It's a Judaic rule book. It has little relevance to most christians, who don't live in the kind of environment where eating meat from an animal with cloven hoofs could be poentially life-threatening. Also, a lot of the old covenant was overwritten by bible 2.0, ahem, the new testament.
"What created the earth?
-God.
What created god?
-.."
-NOTHING. He's eternal. It's that whole "I AM" thing, and the reason there's not an answer to that question.
WOW That's interesting - some small insight here - the King James Version is not the original written word of God. The Bible is in Hebrew, Aramaic, some Arabic, and Greek (Koine to be exact).
So the KJV is just a translation - its not even the first translation. The Vulgate predates the KJV by centuries, and is in latin.
The frequent, and incorrect, assertion that older translations are more accurate is false. Currently we have access to manuscripts, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other manuscripts found since the 1700s which improves the accuracy of current translations. As well peer review and improved methodology etc.
The KJV is not the best translation. It is however, the most poetic and many people find it the easiest to memorize verses from. As someone whose taken Ancient Greek as their second language at University - YOU need to get a concordance and a Greek New Testament because anything else is "reading cliffnotes"
Homosexuality is a choice. People can say "I was born this way" all they want, but that doesn't change the fact that they choose to indulge their desires.
Good grief... okay, thought experiment: the world is full of homosexuals, and the bible says heterosexuality is wrong. Ask yourself: could you spend the rest of your life loveless or part of a homosexual relationship? And answer that question honestly... really reflect on it.
Then ask yourself: is your god really cruel enough to create people who are not *allowed* to be with the people they love. If the answer is yes, I pity you and your choice of religion.
It's a bit late to answer this, but what the hell. You have greatly misunderstood the nature of spectrum disorders. Autism, like many neurological or psychological conditions, is a spectrum disorder -- it ranges (possibly continuously) from severe to normal, and there are probably multiple factors (perhaps most genetic, perhaps not) involved. With any spectrum disorder, people who are near the normal end of the spectrum are just a little different from the norm, and those differences present as personality quirks (the same being true for mood disorders, schizoaffective disorder, and possibly many of DSM-IV Axis II disorders). Kids show different personalities from a very early age; where do you think those come from anyway, if not differences in how we're wired up? I also think you overestimate psychologists. Until we have some sort of physiological test -- a genetic test, brain scan, whatever -- that can objectively determine who has a particular condition and who does not, it's all subjective anyhow. While a psychologist or neurologist is certainly better educated and has more experience, and thus in a better position to say who might have Asperger's syndrome than a layperson, they're still making a judgement call, one which other psychologists may disagree with when the patient is close to the normal end of the spectrum. Are geeks towards on the Autism/Apserger's spectrum? I certainly don't know. I don't see any reason why it couldn't be the case -- for example, discomfort with, and avoidance of, socialization is sometimes a response to innately poor ability. But my personal feeling, having known several people with Aspserger's syndrome when I was a mathematics major, is that most geeks probably aren't; the most obvious difference I noted was humor (much geek humor delights in playing with ambiguity, blurred levels of abstraction, and metaphor, and the people I knew with Asperger's syndrome were poor at those). However, I do think it's possible that if, say, genetic (or developmental, or whatever) conditions C1, C2, ..., Cn are necessary for Autism spectrum disorders, some subset of these conditions, perhaps with other conditions, may contribute to geekiness.
Oh, and frankly, I'm getting sick and tired of all the "victim victimhood", myself, and I hear a lot more bleating from people whining about how we've become such a victim society than I do from any of the supposed "victims". There's nothing wrong with wanting to understand one's nature, one's strengths and weaknesses. Doing so is NOT the same thing as expecting special treatment. I'd be delighted, for example, if I could see a "road map" of my own neuropsychological development, and know where and how the elements of my personality arose, because it would make it easier for me to work on changing (or compensating for) those elements if I saw fit to do so.
For example, I'm mildly bipolar -- diagnosed as such by several gen-yoo-wine psychologists. I've never gone completely off the deep end, and I've never understood that annoying, narcissistic addiction to hypomania some bipolars have that makes them regularly go off mood stabilizers and act like fools, but it's still had profound impact on my life. I don't generally tell people about it in real life unless they ask or it's topical, and I certainly don't expect any special treatment (or a get-out-of-jail free card when I fuck up) either. From my perspective, it's just an element of my personality, and I deal with it like any other element. Does it occasionally make life difficult? Sure, but we all have burdens to bear and I know plenty of people in much worse shape than I. But knowing a major contributing factor to my behaviour and personality has been enormously useful to me, so I'd appreciate it if people would stop crying "poor me, I'm surrounded by victims" every time someone speculates about contributing factors to personality.
Flamebait? It was an honest question asked in mild jest. Geez.
I always thought Leviticus was referring to prison rape and other types of fucking whatever just had a hole.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Some people can tell what makes a hit single and what doesn't (not necessarily that they can make one).
HOWEVER, there is no guarantee that their "hit single" sense will be as good as it is, or be consistent. Who knows how reliable your math intuition is?
As such corporates are always looking for ways to quantify such stuff.
The danger is that they will miss entirely new and cool stuff - since if they are mapping human tastes, it is unlikely to be that accurate - accurate enough to make a profit, but subpar enough to possibly set back discovery of new stuff for a long time.
BUT calculator and computer stuff like what these savants are doing are often quite easily defined and narrow in scope, so rather than depend on the vagaries of perishable neurons, for these tasks I'd prefer to depend on the likes of Casio, AMD et all.
Thus if you want savant skills, rather than risking brain damage, you'd be better off waiting for wearable/implantable computers AND extra auxiliary senses/inputs and outputs. You'd have video+audio memory, telepathy and possibly a form of telekinesis (if a room/area is suitably enabled). ( Gun muzzle recognition might be very useful for soldiers, so would be instant triangulation of shots).
But the more human stuff is likely to still remain a core competency.
Trying to force everybody into the same mould *does not work*. That is my point. Why bother with the pretense that everybody's the same when it simply doesn't work? The best way to counter bullying is by *encouraging* difference, not shying away from it.
FWIW, there are plenty of teenagers who attempt suicide because they're forced into this silly pretence of normal/mediocricy.
So yeah, the kid's probably going to have a tough time, but guess what, the same thing happened when house-husbands started appearing. The same thing happened before divorce was the norm. Unfortunately, societal change means some people will get burned. Sorry, it's rather unavoidable.
I think that some heterosexual people have fucked up their kids enough that even super-gay people would have a pretty tough time competing. If we can't have a law that prevents warped heterosexuals from reproducing I don't see why we should have a law banning a gay couple from adopting on the same premise.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
I've always wondered how some of these people would explain away lesbian seagulls and other homosexual activity in the animal kingdom, but I've never got a straight answer on it. Maybe god does hate figs afterall, he must've made The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. Because if he didn't, WHO DID?!
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Regarding the cavant from Kent, I'd love it if he would write a book called "genius math for the non-autistic" or "Math: a study in art." If this guy could capture what he is talking about with the colors, sounds, and patterns, enough to teach, think of the amazing gift that would be. We could rid ourselves of these evil computers and think for ourselves. Until then, I continue to feed at the trough of Slashdot.
I'm modding at the moment, and wish you could get a +6.
The word hypocritical consists of two parts: hypo=insufficiently, and critical.
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Here's my eternal, inviolable truth. Oh, it's nasty, vicious and self-contradictory? Well, here's the revised version. Ignore the first part, I only really meant the second part.
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A priest could confess to another priest. And I'm not saying Hitler would have had to force the priest to absolve him. That is not the case. The priest would have given absolution. I'm saying, we don't know if he confessed or not. I doubt it. The man, while having grown up Catholic, was quoted as having said, "The revolution cannot be compleated until we destroy Christianity. This generation is lost to us."
So heaven is a big community full of lesbians.......?
Makes perfect sense, actually...
Not really. Leviticus is the Law given by God to the Hebrews. It's not supposed to bind the non-Hebrews. The Law was an agreement with the people of Israel. The people of Israel may or may not honour their part of that agreement. The rest, i.e. the non-Hebrews, didn't make such an agreement with God.
The Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, himself god, was the source of an agreement between god and the rest of mankind.
Therefore, the rest of the world is not bound by what the hebrews agreed with God. There is another agreement, and we may or may not honour our part of that agreement.
Leviticus itself shows that what it includes is supposed to be kept by the people of Israel; it's not supposed to bind all mankind.
Jesus taught that "For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law untill all is accomplished. (Matthew 5.18) and "But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away, than for one stroke of a letter in the law to be dropped." (Luke 16.17)
Therefore Jesus didn't "do away with anything".
What about all the gay people who are NOT savants?
I find it pathetic that your reaction to an article on the fascinating subject of the workings of the human brain focuses on the entirely irrelevant subject of the guy's sex life. It seems to me that if you were getting any you wouldn't care what others were doing. Maybe you are just jealous.
Eternal punishment is not something some priests made up.
Since this is not a place for showing the antiquity of that concept, I'll just point you to what Jesus showed to John: "and anyone whose name was not found in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire." (Revelation 20.15) Because Jesus will give "living water" to those that "will conquer", but to the rest, "their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death." (Revelation 21.8)
Just in case the Revelation is not enough, I point you to the end of Isaiah, where it is written: "And they shall go out and look at the dead bodies of the people who have rebelled against me; for their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh." (Isaiah 66.24)
Why shouldn't homosexuality be considered an illness?
Moving on to your main point, I want to seek to clarify what has already been said about the OT law being superceded or "deprecated". The role of the law is complex: it includes giving a national identity to Israel, and preparing them for the coming of the Messiah. Part of the law then, and a major theme of Leviticus in particular, relates to the sacrifices which God appointed as substitutes, until the sacrifice of Jesus, in part to remind of the serious nature of sin, and in part, somehow, to allow a sinful people to have relationship with the holy God. Since Christ's sacrifice is so much greater, these sacrifices are no longer necessary.
Another part of the law relates to civil matters, for Israel was not only a religious body but also a sovereign nation. Thus you see laws relating to civic offices, labour legislation, punishment scales, etc. As the modern church is not a nation, these laws are not directly applicable.
I should observe, though, that neither the so-called ceremonial nor civil law of the Old Testament is entirely irrelevant to modern Christians. Although they're not directly applicable, the principles behind them give insight into God's attitudes and priorities. The third category of law, the so-called moral law, is that which is purely principles based on God's character, the unchanging nature of which means that those laws are directly relevant today. (Not that Christianity is about living to a set of rules: rather that the law's revelation of God's nature shows us how to live to please Him).
I realise that this may not fully address your objection, but I've already gone on for a long time. If you want me to elaborate, please ask.
One could ask them the same: why do MT, Qa and LXX not always agree? The NT isn't the only half of the Bible to need textual analysis.
I completely agree... it was wonderfully written, and nothing was made of it in the article, very, very nice.
What I am saddened to see is that the first few screens worth of comments on this article became discussion about homosexuality and autism and then religion and homosexuality...
so sad.
I wish you well in your hunt for a partner... and hey, as a question, did you leave the church because of its stance on homosexuality, or completely unrelated issues. (I guess I just find it odd how gays can go to church considering how much hatred and anger the church has dolled out to them...)
So we just kill more vegetables instead ?
Where does it say that the rule only applies to humans and animals and not vegetables ?
Where do you draw the line on what size of animal counts (you only eat unleavened bread ?) ?
well, it does breed illness, I would say. It makes AIDS and heptitis and stuff a lot easier to get (dermal membrane up the ass easily ruptured) Frankly, I just say it's a sin because I think it's absolutly disgusting. The whole concept anal sex is just not cool at all.
Also, homosexuality is lumped in with a lot of other sexual sins. The thing is, sex is for reproduction. God said, "Go forth and multiply" -- it was his first commandment, even before "i am the lord thy god and you shall have no other gods before me." There is a story in the old testiment where a man dies without children, and his brother is then by law supposed to marry his wife and have kids with her and bring them up in his brother's name. He has sex with her, but does not cum inside of her. "spilling his seed" as they call it, breaks the law, dishonours his brother, and is also the rational behind saying masturbation is evil.
But, aside from breaking the law of God (which most people here don't give a shit about anyway), and spreading disease and stuff, for some reason there is a reluctance to call it a disease. It is more of a "condition," maybe, like dwarfism, if it's genetic at all. But people try and claime genetic component to legitimize what is otherwise a perversion that less than 10% of the people in the world do, and try and call it "normal" and "natural." Well, i'm waiting for someone to try and claim a genetic predisoposstion to pedopheilia. "hey! it's genetics! i can't help it, i was born this way!" Well, Mary had Christ at the age of 13 and joesph was already like, 30+. So, we have there that God knocked up at 13 year old girl, and she was married to a middle-aged dude (Actually, rather old for those times). So, that behaviour has been legitimized in the bible, where as homosexuality is not. However, today gays are being legitimized and pedophiles are going to prison. Other than the law, I don't see why it should be wrong for like, a 14 year old girl and a 20 year old guy to hook up, for instance. It's only been in the 20th century that it's been frowned upon. Roman girls sometimes married as early as 7 (usually waiting until 13, on average) to husbands anywhere from 14 and up. Elizabeth I was paraded naked in front of potential suiters at the age of 8 (some claim this is why she never got married). I suspect such practices still go on in large portions of the world.
I'm not making the case that pedophiles are not evil, just that we can't have one perversion be a crime and the other be accepted. Quite frankly, a 15 year old girl knows damned well what she wants, and it's not usually a 15 year old boy. the whole "consenting adults" thing may fly for like, s&m, but any "un natural sex act" is usually covered by sodomy laws, and thus that is also probably illegal.
But I don't really care about old testiment jewish law. like i said, anal sex is repugnant. that's probably why it's against the law in the book anyway. But my friend mentioned in the original post can do what ever the hell he wants to, just so long as I don't have to look at it.
A strong part of being a savant - or being autistic for that matter - seems to be about being obsessive with details. Quote from the article:
"Tammet has never been able to work 9 to 5. It would be too difficult to fit around his daily routine. For instance, he has to drink his cups of tea at exactly the same time every day. Things have to happen in the same order: he always brushes his teeth before he has his shower. "I have tried to be more flexible, but I always end up feeling more uncomfortable. Retaining a sense of control is really important. I like to do things in my own time, and in my own style, so an office with targets and bureaucracy just wouldn't work.""
I'm wondering what, for him, constitutes a habit. How's a habit formed? What kind of granularity is involved? If he can't follow a habit for whatever reason, what effect does it have on him and the special abilities he has, on top of the probable (and indeed confirmed) uncomfortable feeling?
Hmmm. . . interesting theory. . . are YOU gay?
. . . Eyosgii thinks thus.
The best thing christian church can do for the society is to immediately expel all the sinners. Surely someone who drops his seed to the ground should never be allowed to have a holy communion. And deadly sins of gluttony and sloth should lead to expulsion after several attempts to get one to repent and mend his ways. Jesus himself only hung around with virtuous people and told sinners to get lost and never be saved.
In the meantime, we can take the newly liberated minds into our fold and really work on getting more "blue" votes next time.
If people want to be gay, they must either be attracted to men(or women, whichever applies). So why don't they just marry one of those women that look like men? (Michelle Rodriguez springs to mind)Then everyone would be happy.
. . . Eyosgii thinks thus.
Bwah-ha-ha please... less than 10%... riiiight, sure. Sorry, that just struck me as unbearably funny.
Sex isn't purely about reproduction. It's a social act just as much as a biological one.
By your definitions, eating escargot or sushi is a mortal sin, because I find both of those utterly vile experiences. I must have a really, really weird god... oO
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
Because I hate Gays. So what? Have you seen Levitivus 18:22? I mean, I'm not a Christian but I am willin to belive that all those *gay* bishops are!
. . . Eyosgii thinks thus.
eating those foods puts the things out the ass, not into it.
They are illogical
. . . Eyosgii thinks thus.
Same question. Answer me!!
. . . Eyosgii thinks thus.
It's not as random as you might think. It isn't like any two random atoms can just stick together any old way; it doesn't work like that.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
What othe rdog? You know I suspect that you're just completely nuts. (Not that thats a bad thing) (Not that I'm complementing you.)
. . . Eyosgii thinks thus.
yeah. but why? and why, out of all of infinite space, would all the things come together HERE of all places for life? And why in such varity? It's mind-blowing. Sure, it may have happened other places also, but we havent found them yet. Maybe we never will? what then?
For someone who had just made a truly deserved "+5 interesting" post I don't understand how you could possibly have fallen so far off the deep end with this one.
15 year olds ARE consenting adults in many developed countries. Sodomy is illegal in a few backwater pockets of the US and legal everywhere else. You really should have quit while you were ahead. Why are you arguing legalities anyway? We all answer to the same God.
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
Yes the church should love and help others, but they should not support them in their sin. If you know someone is addicted to drugs you are not helping them by driving them over to their dealer.
I wasn't implying that at all. Getting people over their hurdles such as addiction is the goal, not getting them to like you or get them in a seat, but to get them back to a point of restored living. Jesus hung out with the worst of the worst *unbelievers*. They are unbelievers and so are not expected to behave as Christians should. Jesus went to the temple and talked w/ the pharisees too, he offered help to them, but once they rejected him he moved on to other places.
Get me a meat pie floater!
dude, i don't have anything to do. I have 4 literature classe and latin this semster. it's not much work, all things concidered. I just make random arguments. I don't really give a shit. I think apathy is probably the secret to happiness, because it's sure as hell not the drink or women.
Well, I got the reaction I was expecting! Thanks for the laugh!
Such as me? There are several thousand (I believe; certainly over 150 that I know of) conlangers in existence and still living. A conlanger is a person who invents or has invented one or more languages. Tammet's language is what we call a philosophical language. Vocabulary is built as a sort of phonetic map of meaning. This is far from realistic; we tend to want similar-sounding words to have vastly different functions so we can better differentiate through context. (You don't confuse 'hat' and 'cat' often because there are few situations in which they are treated similarly. If, on the other hand, the meaning of 'cat' was changed to be the meaning of 'wig', you would have more trouble.) Philosophical languages are nothing new. Some examples off the top of my head are Ro, Ygyde, and aUI. Tammet's Mänti is probably the least screwed up of all them; it seems to have a very loose correlation between sound and meaning, compared to Ygyde (very ugly language, that). Tammet's threat to introduce Mänti into academic circles angers me. He believes it to be an entirely new view of language possibilities, or he simply wants it to be an international auxiliary language. Constructed languages don't work as auxlangs; Esperanto failed (trust an oculist to make a language--and trust Polish phonology to take All-Under-Heaven), and before it Volapük and Solresol, and after it Ido, Interlingua, Europanto, Interglossa, Latino Moderne, and countless others. If you own or advocate a particular auxlang, please do not feel that this reflects on you personally. Most if not all the languages listed had flaws that impaired ease of acquisition. However, with a speaker base of zero, it is not profitable to learn a language. That is why natural languages have been used as international auxiliaries. Anyway, I'm sure that Mr. Tammet will have the utmost difficulty in finding a journal to publish him.
I know a merchant mariner who has gotten the language down to precisely *one* word, expressed in astonishing gradiations of emphasis, inflection and tonality!
Dude! "Dude," dude.
Or maybe you're thinking of another word. Dude.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
I've never understood how people can believe that the Bible is true, yet at the same time not find it important enough to read in the original languages.
Yep, I hear it's much more clear in the original Klingon.
You're not trying very hard, that's why.
:)
Well, I'm tossing out a slashdot post here, not engaging in a sound theological discussion. I spent many, many years trying to make peace between my mind (which works with reason) and the bible, which works with faith.
I make no claim to have better answers than the bible. The bible is a book that requires faith and not reason, like most religious manuscripts. That's fine, but if you claim that the bible is logical... well... you're insane
Cheers.
First, realize that the aim of the CEV is to make the Bible easy to understand orally. It's not exactly renowned for its exactness in translation. The further you get from the source, the more ideas and context you lose.
Why would God let his holiest book be corrupted by human hands? If that's possible, then how can we trust any version of it? They've all been related through a thousand people. If God was protecting the purity of the word, when did he stop? Right after the KJV was written?
So who can't add or take away? You. Israel. Man. Jesus, as God or with God's authority, can. Well, shucks. That argument went out the window.
On second reading I am curious if you are aware how funny and circular this sounds? Was that intentional or are you serious?
God says "You can't change this". Then a few thousand years later a man appears, claiming to be God and you're perfectly happy with him changing the law.
Well heck: I'll just say I'm god (yes, me, localman on slashdot) and I say that I can change God's law too: "People of the Earth: homosexuality is okay!"
Oh yeah, that's right Jesus performed miricles and stuff -- all documented in the very same book that gives him authority to change the unchangable law.
I won't bother getting further into the ambiguity and waffling inherent in the holy scriptures -- but have you ever stopped to wonder what killing animals has to do with atoning for sin? Does that concept make any sense at all? And then to extrapolate it so that somehow God's son (an incomprehensible concept in itself) dying 2000 years ago will absolve the man in New York who molested his daughter today... if only he asks for forgiveness... um... what?
God seems to have gifted me with neither the intelligence nor faith or whatever to feel the slightest bit impressed with this concept. It makes about as much sense as a Zen koan. Perhaps that's the point.
Anyways, sorry for the rant. My grandfather was a pastor and I've been surrounded by Christian pseudo-logic for 32 years now and I'm a bit of a bore on the subject. The Christians in my family, though fine people, have the reasoning ability of a brick wall. I admit I use these little online opportunities to spout off and let off some steam.
Nonetheless: live well, take care, and peace to you.
Um, then why aren't we stoning our disobedient children, as instructed in Dt 21:18-21? Or slaughtering peoples who worship other gods as instructed in Dt 13:13-17? These are part of God's unchangable laws. How much of the Old Testament have you read anyways?
:/
If you're anything like most Christians, not much
Stuff like that makes you wonder if Jesus himself, a seemingly peaceful teacher, read it himself.
Cheers.
A gay Christian genius... Something doesn't add up.
"Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity."
This would seem to open a giant chasm in the belief that symbolic language (conventionally conceived as words and numbers) is a precursor to human-level intelligence.
This could re-write what we think we know about language, intelligence, and possibly our "uniqueness" at the "top" of the brain pyramid.
Those words that are said to be of his own invented language resemble very much words in Estonian and Finnish languages (whiach are very related). His word Estonian Finnish English Mänti Mänd Mänty Pine tree Ema Ema Äiti Mother Ela Elu Elämä Life Päike Päike Aurinko Sun Päive Päev Päivä Day I guess he has invented the language, but read an Estonian vocabulary once. Estonian and Lithuanian do not much resemble each other.
What I would like to know is if he can use this 'ability' only with decimals- or for instance binary too?
The question seems interesting because the answers seem to be simply emerging from his head...
I've never understood how people can believe that the Bible is true, yet at the same time not find it important enough to read in the original languages.
I've never understood how people can believe that the Bible is true despite the real possibility that many scrolls were excluded, and most of it was written hundreds of years after the fact. Hundreds people. We can't even get a story straight 5 minutes after it happened. So we're going by a few centuries of word of mouth, and then select parts of recovered scrolls, and a couple of peoples interpretations of those. Sounds reasonable to me.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I am not going to talk about God etc. For me, there is no God. There is only logic and mathematics. If the universe is absolutely governed by math, then why God does not make any sense? mathematics are mathematics in any system. And the concept of an entity that created the universe is equally absurd to the entity that the universe was created out of nothing: if the universe (due to irreducible complexity etc) needs a creator, then that creator also needs a creator, creating an infinite recursion of 'gods'. In religions we see all the human trends, that actually bear no relation to reality.
Now that I put religions aside, let's talk about homosexuality: it is a disease...a mental one. Yes, homosexuals are 'crazy': their mental model about themselves is totally wrong. They think that they have feminine attributes and qualities, and they act accordingly.
What's the reason that homosexual men exist? the reason is that, during their childhood, one of the parents did not fullfil the psychological requests of the child. The child's role remains 'unvalidated' by the parents, either because the parents are too dominant or too weak.
As the kid grows up in adolesence, natural urges ripple through the kid's body. When the boy is normal, the 'natural urges' are relieved by the natural means: the penis is erected, and the boy feels 'good' in touching his organ.
When the boy is not normal, then the 'natural urges' are not relieved in the normal way: the boy feels 'good' from the anus. It's not that the anus is a reproduction organ, but the male body has a very important organ near to it: the prostate.
When a boy is psychologically reluctant to express his male power and let the pleasure reach up to his penis, the body reacts by making the person feel pleasure in 'other' ways.
A psychologically reluctant boy is very obvious: it is shy, not very active, and often his ways are 'not very powerful'. Other boys not in the same condition easily notice this, and the boy becomes a target for bullies, or for sexually active possibly older boys. Within a moment of adolecent craziness (either during 'games' or dissapointment), the psychologically reluctant boy becomes a homosexual, by surrendering his male power to other males: he becomes a male slave, often finding pleasure in being punished for not being a proper male.
After the initial 'harm' is done, the boy takes a homosexual lifestyle, with all the complications; and there are great many complications, both physical/anatomical and psychological.
If homosexuality develops in early age, the male body is developed accordingly. The person's psychological status affects the development of his body. The body becomes less strong, partially because it does not undertake the training a fully active male does (for example, less participation in sports), and partially because the brain gives orders to muscles to develop less (since they are needed less).
Gay men adopt women's behaviour. They mimic certain parts of female behaviour, usually to the extreme. They want to make everybody else aware of their situation and their 'feminicity'. They want everybody to validate their stance in society. But it is only the parts of female behaviour that have to do with sexual 'availability' that they mimic: they don't mimic a woman's affection to children (for example), because their 'female status' is not affected by genes and DNA, but only by their warped mind.
In fact, the behaviour of homosexuals is the behaviour of the woman they would like to get in bed with! but since they can't find that woman, they imitate her. They become the woman they want.
The great social issue with homosexuals is that they do not confess that they are perverts. Most of them develop feelings for women, but they never let these feelings develop/shown, because then it might be obvious that homosexuality is a perversion, a psychological problem. So by not wanting to admit their condition, the old lie that homosexuality is a natural condition goes on and on. Homosexuals get their own lifestyle, places to hang out, body language, etc, thus not making it possible to really understand and solve the problem.
Yes, i think your right. My friend, when he gets drunk, will like, feel up chicks and stuff -- and they let him get away with it "because he's gay" so he's "harmless."
However, there is then the problem of the Greeks. However, they are easily understood in the context that to them, women were nothing. They were not citizens, they were not equal, they were property there to make more children. They were week and probably concidered stupid most of the time. Men then turned to men for pleasure and companionship because they were equals.
However, the Romans did not want anything to do with that Greek gayness. Durrin the Republic, when Greek wrestlers where brought to Rome, they had to wear clothes instead of competeing naked like they would have in Greece.
Did Jesus not say to make yourself pure first? Only by taking the log out of our own eye can we clearly see how to help others.
Try yoga. Even if you can't quiet your mind and body enough to touch god at least you'll be healthy.
Sure forgiveness has to take place. YOU must forgive yourself for your acts of ignorance(karma).
You live in hell. People live in their past and future, constantly living in suffering. Drop it and move on.
Is it not said that god will make a heaven on earth? When you are enlightened you can see that we do live in heaven, where everything is perfect.
It requires more reason and less faith to actually understand the teachings of the bible.
That's why the creator made many religions including science. Science will eventually lead to the same understanding that any religion leads to but is seldom understood.
Because people are dumb sheep that need to be led, whether it be science or religion. haha, i won't hear a WORD of it unless it has some scientific backing. haha.
Homosexuality is mainly social. Americans beleive you have to be one way or the other, and only wear american/western influence has spread is there such a thing. Everybody possess "male" and "female" qualities. they're actually "human" qualities.
Well, sir, that's a very nice eastern sentiment you have there, but I'm Irish-Catholic. I've had guilt beaten into me since I was little. I'm frankly ashamed to live. I try to live as right as I can, but I break at least 2 commandments a week anyway. There is plague and suffering and death all around us. Enlightenment may help me see a divine justice or order, but I am but a man. I am by nature incapeable of rising above that limitation and seeing the world as God sees it. You have a very nice philosphy there, if you really believe it and it's not just a counter-argument, and I hope it brings you fulfillment. I, on the other hand, do what I am going to do. We shall leave it at that, I think.
I applaud the church for being able to misguide people all across the world, and hiding their divinity from themselves, while taking away all responsability for their actions, because after all they are born evil.
Christ's purpose was to wash away original sin, near as I can tell. And I was baptised anyway, which is the sort of magic method for doing it.
But quite frankly, if I didn't fear hell, there would be nothing keeping me from dealing drugs to kids, raping their mothers, and killing their fathers. I'd have no interest in the future. Why would I care? No god? Sweet. No heaven? Then my grandparents will never know that I didn't have kids and let 2 lines die out. Who cares? not me. Why bother cleaning up the environment? I don't give a shit, no being fruitful and multiplying for me. by the time the shit hits the fan, i'll be dead. Why not genetically engineer slaves? Who's to say it's wrong? Without an absolute good (God), then there is no standard by which to judge good and evil.
The point is, the natural state of man is but a beast. Without a sense that there is something perfect that is better than us and has an interest in us, then we really have no reason to do anything but be out for our selves and our own immediate pleasures.
The bible seems to disagree with you on that point. I can't recall many passages where reason was upheld as a virtue. Usually it's faith and obedience, which are often opposite.
Cheers.
Science as it is practiced is indeed a religion. But it is not a religion in it's pure form: it is the endless quest to question what is known. In religion, you are given the answers from an authority which you are not really supposed to question.
But that doesn't matter much -- just a point of clarification.
So what is the understanding that you believe both Science and religion leads to?
Cheers.
And for the record, the punishments recorded in the bible for "shaving your beard" and "blending fabrics" is not death at all.
I'll just add that from the Jewish tradition, the prohibitions on these activities are much more detailed and complex than the simple translations here imply. Many ways of shaving one's beard are acceptable, and blending most any combination of fabrics is perfectly permissible; it is only the specific cases (detailed elsewhere) that are circumscribed.
And for the astute Slashdot crowd, no, there is no prohibition on women shaving their faces. ;-)
"Software is either testable or detestable."
Which I pointed out in my first post.
So long as they continue to indulge their desires you can not help them. What do you expect people to do? Duct tape a taser to them to shock them when they get near another guy?
You can't help them until they are ready to accept your help. When they reject your help there is nothing you can do for them other that tell them that they have somewhere to go when they are willing to accept your help.
I know I'm not autistic or obessive compulsive...
If you don't mind my asking, how do you know you're not obsessive compulsive? You indicate that you have obsessions (e.g. collection of notebooks, order, patterns, rules) and compulsions (e.g. writing, organizing, rule following.) I'm not a psychologist, but I am familiar with OCD, and you do present several symptoms.
From the DSM-IV:
DSM IV Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) Criteria
A. Either obsessions or compulsions:
Obsessions as defined by (1), (2), (3), and (4):
(1) recurrent and persistent thoughts, impulses, or images that are experienced at some time during the disturbance, as intrusive and inappropriate and that cause marked anxiety or distress
(2) the thoughts, impulses, or images are not simply excessive worries about real-life problems
(3) the person attempts to ignore or suppress such thoughts, impulses, or images, or to neutralize them with some other thought or action
(4) the person recognizes that the obsessional thoughts, impulses, or images are a product of his or her own mind (not imposed from without as in thought insertion)
Compulsions as defined by (1) and (2):
(1) repetitive behaviors (e.g., hand washing, ordering, checking) or mental acts (e.g., praying, counting, repeating words silently) that the person feels driven to perform in response to an obsession, or according to rules that must be applied rigidly
(2) the behaviors or mental acts are aimed at preventing or reducing distress or preventing some dreaded event or situation; however, these behaviors or mental acts either are not connected in a realistic way with what they are designed to neutralize or prevent or are clearly excessive
B. At some point during the course of the disorder, the person has recognized that the obsessions or compulsions are excessive or unreasonable. Note: This does not apply to children.
C. The obsessions or compulsions cause marked distress, are time consuming (take more than 1 hour a day), or significantly interfere with the person's normal routine, occupational (or academic) functioning, or usual social activities or relationships.
D. If another Axis I disorder is present, the content of the obsessions or compulsions is not restricted to it (e.g., preoccupation with food in the presence of an Eating Disorder; hair pulling in the presence of Trichotillomania; concern with appearance in the presence of Body Dysmorphic Disorder; preoccupation with drugs in the presence of a Substance Use Disorder; preoccupation with having a serious illness in the presence of Hypochondriasis; preoccupation with sexual urges or fantasies in the presence of a Paraphilia; or guilty ruminations in the presence of Major Depressive Disorder).
E. The disturbance is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, a medication) or a general medical condition.
I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens. --Isaac Bashevis Singer
Well... not enough that it interferes with my ability to have a pretty "normal" life by outward appearances. About the only thing that some people who know me personally have ever confronted me about is my "type A" side. Fairly atypical for a "liberal". :)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
There is only one path, and that leads from ignorance to truth. Everybody who isn't on the path just walks around in circles repeating the same things over and over again in ignorance.
Jesus never says to swallow unthinkingly what the scriptures and he himself has said. He tells you to actively seek out the truth within you. You need to decode his parables for yourself, and not let the church do it.
Jesus came to help people wash away their ignorance, those who were ready that is. "let those who have ears hear".
Ever wonder why he didn't even explain all his parables to his disciples?
I think you've spent to much time indoctrinated by the church and not enough time reading the bible. There is no hell.
Why, if the natural state of man is beast, does Jesus say 'the kingdom of god is within you'? Why does he say that others will do greater deeds than him? Why does he say that we are all son of man?
We are all divine by nature. Our vision has been veiled to blind us to our true nature.
Jesus says that once you enter the kingdom of heaven (which is in you) then there will be made a heaven on earth. There is no heaven in the sky that people go to when they die.
It's just enlightenment like every other religion out there, just covered up more in ritual than something like buddhism. Have to say Hinduism might have the catholics beat on ritual though.
Ironically, I'm also a member of the British Druid Order (although I'll never progress past the level of bard because I cannot memorize 300 poems in Welsh). But there is hell in the bible. Jesus talks about hell. Jesus went to hell for 3 days. No, I don't sit around reading the bible. it's boreing and for protestants. Besides, I have one in english and 2 in Latin. I can't really find the english one, and my latin is none so good (2nd semseter latin student)
Well, I asked because I have OCD. It doesn't negatively interfere with my life (well, not anymore, and never to a large degree.) It's actually very useful, and I credit it with my success in academics, business, and life. OCD is probably one of the most useful "disorders" to have, and it is very common among successful people.
My obsession and compulsion were both thinking, so it never manifested itself in hand washing or counting or anything like that. It did manifest itself in persistent, unwanted thoughts.
I responded very well to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in a very short amount of time.
I'm liberal and perfectionistic, and I have a "type A" personality. Many of my friends are the same way. (I should note that I live and work in a city. I didn't have much in common with my neighbors in the 'burbs.)
In any case, when I read your description about your behavior, I was immediately struck by the classic OCD characteristics. You might benefit by looking into it more. I know that I'm much happier now.
I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens. --Isaac Bashevis Singer
Tell that to Michael Jackon's latest victim.
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
Are you kidding? The entire Old Testament is filled with story after story of the Lord demanding obedience in the face of all reason. The story of Abraham and Isaac is the most ridiculous example of this: in Genesis 22 God demands that a father sacrafice his only son -- an innocent boy. Yes, God stops the sacrafice at the last minute, but the whole point of the story is: don't question God.
The Bible goes on at great length in the law sections (mostly in Deutoronomy) on how you are to follow the absolute letter of the law (including many cases where you are to instructed to kill people) and that you are not allowed to question it or God will open his wrath against you.
You can believe the bible or not -- I have no issue with that. But it most certainly does demand unthinking faith and obedience. I'm not sure which of Jesus' words you are referring to, but I doubt they undo the overall sentiment that God's authority takes precidence over reason.
Cheers.
I think in many ways the word "religion" exists to differentiate between spiritual beliefs found while questing for self as opposed to spiritual beliefs held by dogma.
But in any case I like your description of the path to truth.
Cheers.
Hivemind harvest in progress..