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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?"
I know this can sound weird, but Jobs is my hero. Not because what he did for all the people, but because something he said.
I was on my deepest depression crisis ever and I was already planning my suicide. I was sure that day would be my last day when I came across his speech at Stanford University. And his words made me rethink everything I was going through at that moment, and gave me enough strength to give up the plan and keep going.
So yeah, Jobs is my personal hero. No matter how great amount of money Gates throw at projects, Jobs is the guy who said the right thing at the right moment.
[And I tried to send him my story, but I'm almost sure he would never see it]
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).
You are so ridiculously incorrect that it's not even amusing. I know, this is Slashdot, and we've become used to this sort of thing. The Bible doesn't say a single thing about "hate gays, hate other religions, hate sex, hate the darkies". Not once. Sorry, bub. Jesus repeatedly demonstrated that it was more important to love than it was to enforce the law. An example of this is when the pharisees looked to condemn him for healing a man on the sabbath (in the OT, it is unlawful to perform any work on the sabbath). At no point was the message to "hate" anyone for anything. Regardless of whether homosexuality is a sin or not, we are told to love each other (friends and enemies both).
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.Must the muslims accept what happen to the World Trade Center? I don't see either as needing acceptance. If I bomb fundamentalist Christians in the name of Durandal64, is it your problem? You clearly seem to not like them and I took it to mean that you thought the world would be a better place without them. Please accept my actions as they were done in your name.
Those people had unquestioning faith. Saying that they weren't Christians belies a staggering ignorance of history.
Was Ptolemy not a scientist? Did he not get the whole solar system completely wrong? Does that invalidate all of science? No, but you learn from it that sometimes scientists are wrong. The same goes for Christians. Big whoop.
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.
You really don't get the Bible or the religion. Sure, you can pull out one liners and short stories, but when you take them out of the context of the entire thing, they're useless. It's not surprising that you don't get it. I don't, either. Jesus three times told his disciples (who followed him around constantly and heard everything he said) that they didn't get it.
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.
Won't ever happen. It's part of the story of God's relationship with man. It's a part that you don't seem to understand, but that doesn't make it wrong or morally abhorrent. It's neither of those things.