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Who is Your Hero, Gates or Jobs?
feranick writes "Wired and Ars Technica are both running articles comparing Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, not for their business/technological achievements but for their humanitarian involvement. I am curious to see what you are thinking about the issue. What is more important, be a showmen technologist like Jobs or an humanitarian missionaire like Gates? And even more important: Is it important that donations from rich billionaires be public or should they remain private?"
Who would you rather see dragged out into the street and shot, Gates or Jobs?
AEIOU: open-source anonymous internet currency
The idea of "true Christianity" is quite frankly, religiously ego-centric and insulting. It's a form of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. You assume that all Christians must be good people just by virtue of being Christians. Therefore, being Christian is virtuous.
I won't deny that the progressive forms of Christianity are far more desirable and tolerant than fundamentalist Christianity, but insofar as adherence to the religion itself, the fundamentalists have plenty of Biblical basis for their points of view, far more than the progressives. Fundamentalists read the Bible, look at the actual black-and-white text and do what it says: hate gays, hate other religions, hate sex, hate the darkies and try and save everyone else's soul. Progressives simply pretend that those parts of the Bible don't exist and pay attention only to Jesus (who never explicitly said that the Old Testament was wrong, in error or should be ignored). And that's fine. Progressive Christians who can recognize their religion's need to co-exist with societal norms are common and reasonable people for the most part.
But what's bad is pretending that their take on Christianity is the only valid one. They start from the assumption that Christianity must be tolerant and loving and interpret the Bible from that framework, completely disregarding history and the text on the page. I'm sorry, but reasonable Christians have to simply accept that there are some real atrocities in their religion's history and that there was valid grounding in their holy scriptures for them. Pretending that people like the Inquisitors didn't believe in God is just absurd, to be honest. In the Middle Ages, religion was literally entrenched in everyone's life. You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who exists today who believes as strongly as the peasants, inquisitors, lords or anyone back then did. Those people had unquestioning faith. Saying that they weren't Christians belies a staggering ignorance of history.
I'll give credence to this "true Christianity" claim when major churches start putting their money where their mouths are and declare the racist, sexist, morally abhorrent parts of the Bible invalid. If they truly value the principles of being loving and tolerant, they'll acknowledge that no God who with those characteristics could have possibly inspired someone to write the Book of Leviticus. Until then, they want to have their cake and eat it to: pretend that they have the divine words from God and simultaneously ignore those words whenever it's not convenient or societally acceptable.
>>It's a part that you don't seem to understand
I'll agree that the GP is a bit over the top, but you fully do not understand the old testament, the religions built upon it, what "god's rules" have done historically, and what they continue to do under the guise of holiness by the big three monotheistic traditions. Even the Christian religion has not disowned the Old Testament and has historically used it push morals and punish others in a despicable fashion. You can be purposely obtuse about this or admit that your religion has led to some of the worst things man has ever done to man and the problem of religious law has yet to be solved.
To put it gently, people like you are pretty much the cancer that currently infests the technology world. Fortunately, you didn't discover computers until AOL started running them, or the computer as we know it would never have even made it to the desktop; and when freedom overcomes tyrany and M$ goes away, you'll quit using computers again and go on to webphones or whatever the market commands you to do with your empty life roaming the aisles of the malls.
Here, wanna change that? JUST ONCE IN YOUR LIFE THINK A THOUGHT ALL BY YOURSELF INSTEAD OF SUCKING UP WHATEVER PROPAGANDA GARBAGE THE MEDIA PUT THERE IN THE VACCUUM BETWEEN YOUR EARS AND SPEWING THE PARTY LINE. Of course, Hell would not only freeze over, but go superconductive before you'd venture into *that* little bit of uncharted territory, wouldn't it?