If you want easy communications using the cellular network, I have an alternative preposition for you. Bear with me, because this gets crazy, but I propose: A cell phone.
Many people aren't aware that, back in the nineteen-nineties and the early twenty-aughts, there used to be an entire network for voice, with specific devices called 'cellular phones', that used the cellular network to operate. (Actually, technically, they didn't just use that...some people had these 'cellular phones' hooked to their DSL lines, also, although those were called just 'telephones'.)
And, even in this far future year of 2010, you can still purchase these communication devices. All of them can do data access.
In fact, while you probably don't realize it, you own one right now. Look over there at your cell phone charger. See that thing plugged into it? Yup, it's a cell phone.
So you don't need to buy a device that can do that. You've already got one!
And I will point out that, as that comic mentions, you can only get to Wikipedia. You cannot, in fact, randomly browse, which is what I was pointing out.
No cell provider is ever going to let people have a device where they can get unlimited access to unlimited sites, for the rest of the device's life. There are rather obvious issues with that, mainly people figuring out how to root it and having free internet access.
Rebates are stupid. It's the most regressive tax spending possible. If I can afford a large portion of something, I get the rest for free? If I can't afford that much, I get nothing? Um, something is wrong here.
If the government wants to encourage electric cars, why doesn't it buy them? Switch the entire damn postal service over to start with. Give grants for local comunity to switch their police cars and mass transit over.
What I see is that people buy devices because they really want them, and when the price is lowered just a tiny bit the sales double.
You realize the two halves of that sentence make no sense together, right?
According to the last half of that sentence, half of people don't buy devices because they want them, they instead wait until the price is lower.
This, of course, assumes that their valuation of the device stays the same, which is sorta silly. Of course if they see a lot of people using and apparently liking it, what they think the value of it is will go up, and hence their price point.
That isn't 'lying', it's 'recalculating', and it happens just as much in reverse, if people see it's not as good as they thought.
The normal nook has the same screen size as a "small" Kindle. The Nook itself is larger than the Kindle.
Ah, okay.
He wants a much larger screen than the Nook at the $150 price point.
I'm with him. Give me a big screen. That's it. Just a damn screen I'm carrying around. I don't need the ability to buy books with it at all, that's what my damn computer is for.
I often forget what it was before I get home.
Wouldn't a better solution be to take a note?
Seriously, we've not only turned into a society where we must have things the instant we want them, we've turned into a society that can't remember things. Which is strange, because we're constantly carrying devices around that we can record memos on or type notes to ourselves.
I have an iPhone, and my iPhone has an app that fingerprints music (Yes, it's that by that patent idiot Shazam). And I can, in theory, buy it and download right then, although that's not really an 'extra' feature, cell phones pretty much automatically have 3G built in.
But I've never actually done that. It does keep a record of what you identified, so I don't have to take a manual note, but that's all the convience I need. (Which is good, because I can't ever figure out the names of songs.)
I'd certainly not want to pay extra for the ability to do that.
$149 would be my sweet spot for a kindle DX (a.k.a. "full size") with a smaller bezel. Living in the city, 5 min from a computer at all times, I'm not really that interested in 3G for a book as a feature.
The Nook wifi-only is a full-sized Nook, and $149. I don't know how that compares to Kindle size, though.
The 3G model might make more sense to a parent who has a kid but can't afford to, or they're not old enough yet to buy them their own separate computer.
3G makes no sense at all unless it lets people randomly surf. (Which, in turn, would require a monthly plan.)
We're at the point in society where we can assume people buying $150 electronic devices have some access to a computer with an internet connection they can get to once a week to get new books. (In fact, we can almost assume everyone has that.)
I'm not even sure wifi makes that much sense, frankly.
Put more memory on the device, have a catalog built in, and let people select books to buy. Then make the USB interface smart enough that people can plug it in and have a program popup and prompt you to complete the purchase by the program logging into your account, and downloading the books, and an updated catalog. Aka, make the entire thing usable from a public terminal, or any other computer with an internet connection and USB. (Alternately, a USB networking connection might work better.)
There's convenience, and there's 'convenience'. I read faster than anyone I know, I read more than anyone I know, and I've never been wandering around in public, wifi signal or not, and said 'Hey, I should buy a book right now! Forget going to a book store or waiting until I get home, I need one this very second!'
Seriously, our 'immediate gratification society' is getting a bit obsessive. We used to have to buy things in stores, and then we could buy them at home and have them shipped, then we could buy them at home and get them instantly...but are we really at the point where we can't even wait until we get to a random computer to buy them? Just because it is possible to give books (and mp3s, while we're at it...I'm looking at you, iPhone.) to people instantly as they wander around in the world, is this really a sane business model to spend money on and build into devices?
If people randomly find themselves without books, I suggest they, duh, buy some extra books in advance.
Like I said, I don't care, but why wouldn't flat transaction fees work?
Coke has, for example, a dividend of about $1 a year. If you make the transaction fee $1, assuming the stock price doesn't move, they'd have to wait a year to sell and break even. ($1 is probably too high to start with, need to start lower and get companies used to providing dividends.)
The only difference is, with a tax, they can sell immediately when the stock price drops, as there's no tax on loss. Do you consider this a feature? I sorta consider it a bug.
REITs, hilariously, are actually structured exactly how I want. REITs have to give 90% of their income to their shareholders, and, hence, people buy REITs to hold REITs and make money from that, not to buy them and make money from selling them when the price goes up.
I don't think you could make those rules work for normal companies, though, as they avoid making any 'profit' to start with. And you can't really stop that without keeping them from spending money they need to spend.
There's plenty of ways to do it. I really don't care how.
An option I know has been proposed is a flat transaction fee. That fee is something like $0.02 a share, to slow things down some, but I think a $1 fee per share would be a good idea. Don't buy stock unless you intend to hold it long enough to make $1 in dividends.
But 90% of the profit on the sale might work better. Stock prices shouldn't actually change like that anyway.
We need to have companies aimed at providing dividends to stockholders, aka, companies aimed at making profit for the company, not at providing stock fluctuations so smart stockholders can sell and make a profit for themselves, while harming the company and the economy in general. The goal of shareholders must be realigned back to 'the company makes money'.
And, hilarious, I say this as someone fairly far on the left, who often thinks a corporation's pursuit of money should be regulated more than it is.
But a company that actually produces goods and services, employing people to make them, and then sells them, no matter how assholic it acts, is still a lot better than 'investors' taking over a board, getting their own CEO, laying off half the company, selling their stocks at a huge profit because of bogus profit 'projections', leaving a crippled company, unemployed people, and actual long-term investors who believed in the company, and random people with stock in mutual funds, getting screwed.
Give me greedy companies over greedy investors who eat companies and shit them out over all the other investors. It's the difference between jerkoffs who provide a service to society, and jerkoffs who literally provide an anti-service.
And this is the sort of results you get when you look at stock purchasing and selling as 'investments'.
Which is reasonable, it's how 99% of people look at stock purchasing and selling...but it's wrong.
Buying stock is buying part of a company. You have, to irrelevantly quote Marx, purchased some of the means of production.
The main money you make from that should be dividends. It should a percentage of the profit, distributed to you because you are part owner.
Because we're totally abandoned this system, and now we operate where people make money because the stock price rises, we've reaimed the entire American economy to cause fluctuations in stock price. CEOs get in there, cause a stock bump, everyone sells their stock to a new round of suckers, the price drops, and the new people try to find another CEO to do the same thing. It's a fucking pyramid scheme.
Companies are directed where stockholders direct them. The way we have the system now, a large section of stockholders want the stock price to go up for, oh, two hours. Or maybe two weeks.
If stopped this sort of nonsense, if we made people actually buy and hold parts of companies, perhaps American industry would return to the point where it actually attempted to make long-term money, and didn't do idiotic things like lay off half the workers for a stock bump.
You should not make money when you sell stock. That is not the damn investment. Stock ownership is like buying an apartment building. You're not trying to make money from selling the building later, you're trying to make money because the building is profitable. Or, at least, you should be.
The fact that stock is ever any price but 'value of company'/'outstanding stock shares' is pretty stupid to start with. I mean, yeah, companies can be overvalued or undervalued, but certainly not to the extent that stock prices would have people think, and their valuation certainly doesn't change from second to second.
Despite the fact no one is talking about the crash, you're utterly wrong about the CRA. I know you desperately need the economic crash to someone's fault beside Bush, but it's not.
There's all sorts of ways to prove you wrong, but Wikipedia's already done it. Here you go 'Only 6% of all the higher-priced loans were extended by CRA-covered lenders to lower-income borrowers or neighborhoods in their CRA assessment areas, the local geographies that are the primary focus for CRA evaluation purposes.'
This is because only 'banks', not 'mortgage brokers', are subject to the CRA, and likewise, thanks to the repeal of Glass Steagall, a lot of actual banks that used to be under it now have another 'aspect' of themselves that they can used to make loans without being covered by the CRA. The only institutions covered by the CRA are those who don't care anymore and very small banks and credit unions that don't want to become an 'investment bank'.
And people who are subject to the CRA are only are about half as likely to resell them. Because, um, if they resold them, they didn't count anymore under the CRA, and hence they had to make more loans to prove they weren't redlining. (The fact that a large percentage did resell them should indicate that the CRA is nowhere near as important as you think anymore, as loan officers aren't very racist anymore.)
Only about half of lenders are even vaguely covered by the CRA (And none of the big guys.), and only half of those 'must' follow it, as the rest can make loans via a non-CRA covered part them themselves. And of that 25%, probably only half them are in areas where the CRA actually requires they do something. The CRA affects maybe 15% of lenders, usually small city banks, and only a small percentage of the loans they made were because of the CRA. The idea they caused Wachovia and Citibank and whatnot to fail, businesses not covered by the CRA at all, is absurd.
Fannie was willing to buy many of the loans but the banks still needed a way to mitigate the risk, so they came up with the investments where bad debts were bundled with good debts and traded.
You are lying. Fannie operated in a regulated market. The mortgage-backed securities they sold were good. (And they did not 'come up with' them.) And, in fact, are still good. Where they got tripped up was a decrease in housing prices, which resulted in the fact that they literally had negative money on their asset sheet, and people were getting jittery about that. Freddie and Fannie did not actually 'fail', they just, as they were designed to do, invested all their money in houses...and housing prices went down.
And you do remember that it was subprime mortgages that caused the problem, right? (At least the start of it.) And you do know that Freddie and Fannie can't buy subprime mortgages, right? And hence weren't repackaging them anywhere?
The problem arose when the other banks started doing same thing, except they decided, once they started, that they didn't care about the quality of loans. Because, after all, they weren't going to hold them anymore, they were just selling them. And they managed to get their market entirely unregulated.
Blaming Freddie and Fannie for this is like blaming the government when someone builds a crappy Greek-pillar-style building that falls down and kills people...after all, that style is a replica of Washington DC government buildings!
As things started collapsing marginal debts became bad debts and then "safe" mortgages became bad because of the lowering prices of homes as a result of the glut of empty houses.
And this is stupid on top of your stupidity. (And it's stupidity without any conceivable political motive, to boot.) People don't default on their mortgage because some other people moved out of some other house.
The problem with setting long minimum ownership times is that it creates low liquidity. I'm not saying we need millisecond transactions to make markets, but a month would be way too long.
If you want low liquidity, you probably should not invest by purchasing things and then reselling them.
The universe presents many options for investing. Some with high liquidity, some with low.
If you want low liquidity, keep your damn investment in money. Put it in the bank, they let you get it out quickly.
There isn't any other investment where people buy actual things and have anywhere near that much liquidity.
But as far as I know there is no law or regulation that actually sets out time limits.
It's not so much that there's a law requiring delay in everything else, it's that there are laws allowing it, there are entire regulatory structures built up, to allow it in stocks.
As for houses, yes, there are actually laws 'requiring' delays, because you have to register transfers with the government, which means, at minimum, you have to stand in line and interact with a clerk.
It's absurd people have to do that for houses, but not for purchasing and reselling a million dollars of IBM.
People shouldn't be allowed to own parts of a company for intervals of less than a month, at minimum. I'd make an analogy here, except there's nothing in society we let people buy and sell that fast, certainly not giant entities....I'd like to see someone try to buy a house and resell it ten milliseconds later. I'd like to see someone buy a can of soda and resell it ten millisecond later!
What happens on Wall Street is simply a fancy game of roulette. Which is fine, I've got nothing against gambling, except they're playing roulette with ownership of the economy, and the only place people can actually invest in the economy.
Um, no. I didn't argue anything based on what Christians believe, at all. You're the only person hallucinating that I'm arguing what 'Christians' do, or do not, believe.
I have said what the Christian belief system says, in both the religious text, and as agreed upon by most Christian theological thinker. That's it. (You can feel free to argue with that if you want, but it's not any sort of logical fallacy.)
No True Scotsman requires me to have made some blanket statement about a group (and then done some other stuff when demonstrated wrong). I have not said a single fucking word about what 'Christians believe', I think the quote where you misunderstood 'Christian belief' to mean 'Christian's belief' makes that pretty clear.
As this was pretty clear, you were forced to resort to an analogy, so I will give you one back: I said the equivalent of "The Scottish constitution says that it is illegal for people to put sugar in their porridge.", and then you spend several posts arguing with me about what 'I said' the Scottish people do, when I didn't even mention their behavior whatsoever.
Please, point to a single instance of me referring to Christians as a group and them having some attribute. I have not.
You're having an issue with this because you dislike religion, and you find it impossible to comprehend that there is actually a structured, documented, and agreed-upon theology. You think Christianity is whatever some random person claims is Christianity, and hence anyone stating that 'Christianity include belief X' is wrong. The end result is, in your universe, no one can actually talk about any belief system at all.
This, incidentally, is a logical fallacy in and of itself. It's called Loki's Wager.
Dismissing any other Christian's beliefs as non-Christian is by definition committing this very fallacy.
Uh, no, although we've finally found the source of your confusion. I didn't say 'Christian's belief' at all. You've confused 'Christian belief', note the lack of an apostrophe s, which is what I said, and 'Beliefs that Christians have', which is a rephrase of what you said.
'Jesus rose from the dead' would be an example of the former. It is a belief contained within the philosophy of Christianity. 'The world is round' would be an example of the latter. It is a belief held by (most) Christians. (And most other people.)
You, because of a grammatical oversight on your part, thought I meant 'Beliefs of Christians'. Admittedly, it's slightly confusing because the adjective meaning 'Of Christianity' and the noun meaning 'Followers of Christianity' are the same word.
However, saying 'beliefs that Christians hold', I'd have to say 'Christians's belief...', not 'Christian belief...'. It is clearer if I use philosophy, which has different words. 'Philosophers's belief...' vs. 'Philosophical belief...'.
Talk about 'Christian belief' is talking about the philosophy, about the belief system, called 'Christianity', which has the adjective form 'Christian'. It isn't talking, in any way, about people who follow that belief system. If you find that confusing, please mentally replace 'Christian belief' with 'Christian theology'.
You're accidentally arguing that no one can ever state the tenets of any belief system at all, because surely there's someone, somewhere, who considers themselves a follower of that system, but doesn't hold that belief. I'm pretty certain this isn't what you mean to argue.
What a belief system 'actually' states, and who or what are 'in charge' of what it state, is an arguable point, but arguing about that is not magically a No True Scotsman fallacy.
A No True Scotsman fallacy would be arguing over what 'followers' believe, and having to exclude people who don't...and I haven't done that. I have argued what followers should believe, not that followers don't believe it. (In fact, my assertion about what Christians should believe is rather nonsensical if I think all Christians already believe that because I excluded everyone else from being Christians!)
Saying 'People don't eat other people.' and then denying Jeffrey Dahmer was a person would be No True Scotsman.
Actually, rereading, even that's a little vague. It depends on whether I was being descriptive or prescriptive when I said 'don't'.
It's descriptive to say 'People do not flap their arms and fly', and it would be a No True Scotsman fallacy if someone said that and then, confronted with flapping-arm-and-flying people, asserted they weren't people.
It's prescriptive to say 'People do not go to traffic court in clown suits'. That is not a statement about whether or not such people exist, despite what it sounds like. It's just an simplistic way of stating people's general behavior. It's stating a societal norm as an absolute, and is simply an exaggeration.
Anyway, at no point did I state or even imply that 'Christians don't believe in intelligent design', or, phrased more clearly as descriptive, 'No Christians believe in intelligent design.'.
If disbelieving in ID was a general Christian belief, I could have said something like the first statement, and you'd be arguing semantics to claim I meant that literally, to claim I meant the second form of that.
However, I didn't say the first statement, as that would be extremely silly. That would actually be a monumentally silly thing to say, especially in this discussion. I have not excluded anyone from the group of Christianity because they believe in ID. (I have, however, added them into the group of 'Christian heretics', which, I must point out, is a subset of Christianity. That is an admitted subjective group.)
Now, I don't think many of the pushers of ID are Christians at all, but it's not because they push that theory. It is because they are simply cynical right-wing pols who want to rile up their base. They aren't Christians because they don't actually believe in or follow Christ.
Which, before you get started, is not No True Scotsman. Groups actually do have definitions. If I say no true Scotsman eats porridge, and you point at an Frenchman who eats porridge....uh, no. No True Scotsman is making an absolute statement about a group, and then when presented with evidence otherwise, excluding members based on that. I, again, haven't done either of those.
What I'm trying to get to, is ANY religious doctrine is idiocy, and illogical, and will eventually be found to violate facts and reality.
Any doctrine will eventually be found to violate facts and reality.
Where you've tripped up is assuming that religious belief=fixed doctrine, that religions can't change aspects of them when they become useless.
In science, we throw out crap that stops working, but religious doctrine requires things be retained.
Only because the media only gives a voice to asshat fundamentalists, who claim their religion never changes. (Although they're utterly wrong.) That's the stuff you've been exposed to in the news all your life, and hence that's what you think 'religion' is.
Plenty of religions, yes, even Christianity, change, and openly admit it. The rest change and just don't admit it. Unchanging religions end up on the dustbin of history, because they can't handle the rest of the universe changing.
You attempt to show what "real Christian beliefs are", but you're committing the No True Scotsman fallacy first, and second, you're still making a logically fallacious argument. So, what good is it?
No, to make a No True Scotsman fallacy, I'd have to be arguing that no Christians hold a belief in intelligent design.
While I am making the almost incidental statement that people holding that belief aren't very good Christians, I have based no conclusion on that, nor have I argued they aren't really Christians. (Unless you've fallen for my satirical first post where I pretended not to know their religion.)
My claim their belief is wrong is based on the religious texts. I have at no point argued what they believe is not what 'true Christians' believe, because, duh, many do believe that....I'm arguing that it's incorrect based on the text, which both me, and they, claim define Christian belief. (They more than me, in fact.)
No True Scotsman requires a) me stating that an entire group has an attribute, and b) when presented with a member who doesn't, excluding them from the group. I have done neither of those. I have instead stated an attribute that members of a group should have, and stating that members of the group who don't have it are not good group members. I am not excluding them from the group, and I never said all group members had that attribute in the first place! I just said they should.
If I say 'People shouldn't eat other people, hence Jeffrey Dahmer is a bad person', I have not committed No True Scotsman. Saying 'People don't eat other people.' and then denying Jeffrey Dahmer was a person would be No True Scotsman.
And I suspect saying 'you're making a logically fallacious argument' without actually stating why is itself a logical fallacy.
Erm, Deuteronomy 19 doesn't say anything about divorce. You're thinking of Deuteronomy 24, which is mistranslated in almost every version of the Bible. Here is an actual correct formulation:
'When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a bill of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, and she departs out of his house, and if she goes and becomes another man's wife, and the latter husband dislikes her and writes her a bill of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter husband dies, who took her to be his wife, then her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after she has been defiled; for that is an abomination before the LORD, and you shall not bring guilt upon the land which the LORD your God gives you for an inheritance.'
It's a simple if...then statement. if (she finds no favor && he writes her a bill of divorce && she departs && becomes another man's wife && he divorces her) then she can't marry him again. (Interestingly, she can remarry him if she didn't get remarried to someone else else in the meantime.)
Almost all versions of the Bible mistakenly put some 'shalls' in that verse, implying the middle steps are supposed to happen. For example, 'When a man taketh a wife, and marrieth her, then it shall be, if she find no favor in his eyes, because he hath found some unseemly thing in her, that he shall write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house....'
These 'shalls' leads to the incorrect understanding that's what people are supposed to do. This interpretation is totally false.
The only thing that verse says people are supposed to do is not get married under certain circumstances of divorce. It does not say they can, or are allowed to by God, get divorces at all. It does not say that men should write women divorce papers.
The law of Moses did not allow divorce. The equivalent of 'Jewish case law' allowed divorce, with the man simply throwing the woman out (Which almost the entire world allowed at that time.), which Moses was unable to stop, so he banned a particularly absurd version of it, where people handed wives back and forth.
My question is... why is your god so deceitful that he would mislead millions of people, and hundreds of generations with laws that are meaningless?
And, at that point, I stop arguing, because I've run into a jerk who can't accept the fact that someone who's a Christian wants to help him fight the idiocy called 'intelligent design', and instead wants to debate Christianity.
I'm not here to debate Christianity. This is not a forum for that, and to be blunt, your 'God changed the law about divorce' argument is based on a misconception, as I've pointed out for two posts now.
Tell me, do you start arguments with all the people on the same side of an issue as you about their other beliefs? Or is it just religion?
Heh, maybe I'm an Christian fundamentalist from another dimension. One where the majority religion in this country is Pastafarianism or something, teaching people that God's just 'doing stuff' all the time. Or maybe Discordianism, where God(dess) is rather a screwup. "To hell with that!", I say, "God is perfect, stop teaching our children otherwise!".
But, yeah, I didn't really think about it, but I was sorta satirizing the Fundmentalist behavior, but putting in actual Christian beliefs in there, instead of the un-Biblical stuff they come out with. The 'Fundamentalists' that everyone sees walking about have the intelligence and knowledge of their own religion on par with a potted plant, and have been entirely hijacked for political purposes.
Actual fundamentalist Christians who were educated in their own religion would be demanding the government confiscate wealth from the rich and other such behavior. I'm not saying that would be a good thing, I'm just pointing out that what people see is 'Christian' fundamentalism than 'right-wing socially-conservative' fundamentalism. That is why you don't mix politics and religion.
Anyway, to continue the satire, I urge all intelligent Christians, when 'intelligent design' shows up, to go to school board meetings and launch into rants about how the Pastafarian want to teach your children about how God must constantly mess around with his noodly appendages during creation, instead of creating reality the way He wanted it to start with.
And then point out how Pastafarians make such a small percentage of the population compared to Christians, that we should not teach their 'intelligent design' theory, but we should instead teach the Christian teaching of God being perfect, and did not have to meddle during evolution because He did it right the first time.
Atheists (And actual Pastafarians, if you guys really exist.;), that your clue to leap in and demand that children are taught that God, aka, FSM, is not perfect, and He constantly had to fix things, and you demand the schools teach intelligent (and rather incompetent) design, because God is a fuckup who can't do anything right.
Watch the exploding heads. Watch them then try to argue that God is....um...not a good designer who had to fix...um...wait...he planned to fix things because...uh...
Seriously, Christians. Don't ceed the ground to this people who don't even understand basic concept of their religion, and want to convince children to join their religion by using the lies of intelligent design, which has exactly the expected effect on belief when the kids figure out they've been lied to.
I don't have any idea why you even vaguely think any of this is relevant. I am in no way here to debate Christian doctrine, except WRT intelligent design.
About divorce, as Jesus pointed out, the law said it was a sin, and at no point undid that. The law used to justify divorce was one saying that certain types of divorce and remarriage were not allowed. However, in Moses' time, people were stubborn, and would not stop divorcing their wives and doing a weird remarriage shuffle to flip wives back and forth, so Moses, unable to stop divorce at all, made that specific thing even more illegal.
Jesus did not say God used to allowed it. That is a common misunderstanding, and it is utterly wrong.
You tried to make an analogy to the laws about divorce, but that was not any sort of 'God mistake', that was just a weird contingency put in the law by Moses to cover the already existing divorce laws which Moses found himself unable to change.
If you want an analogy, it's akin to laws about how you treat your slaves. Those laws do not make slavery moral. They make certain behaviors while owning slaves more immoral.
And while James 2:10 is commonly used to claim that all laws are identical when you break them, it's worth pointing out that was written post-crucifixion, and thus the believers being written to were not under Jewish law anymore anyway, and the law it is talking about breaking is 'Love your neighbor as yourself', which isn't, duh, the same sort of old testament laws we were just talking about. (Granted, you didn't cite the verse, so I have no idea if this is what you're talking about.)
But we're not talking about that either, what we are talking about is some hypothetical shortcoming of God in designing the universe and how a miracle, aka, intelligent design was needed to fix this imaginary flaw. Which is nonsense and heresy and, bluntly, irreligious.
I think you've underestimated my sincerity, although you're right in that I was being a little satirical pretending I didn't know these idiots were claiming to be Christians while sprouting heresy.;)
Intelligent design, as I pointed out in a reply to the post you just replied to, is a heresy. It ascribes to God some defects that aren't supported by the text, and it invents miracles to address said 'defects'.
Which is rather interesting, because straight creationism, while rather stupid, isn't heresy. It's just a dumb reading of a metaphoric story, but whatever.
But intelligent design starts with the premise that God couldn't do something, namely, create the laws of nature in such a way as to get what He wanted. Now, as the GP pointed out, there are, indeed, known things that God apparently 'couldn't' do, although whether or not He 'couldn't' do them or just didn't is unknown.
But however you feel about the 'free will/disobeying God' issue, which is well known as an issue to theologians, you can't just wander around adding things He couldn't do. Not without damn good evidence. Nor can you add in miracles to fix those things you yourself invented.
You have made the same points about Christianity and free will that, essentially, people have been doing since the start of time.I addressed that in my other post, but, essentially, it is unknown and possible unknowable what, exactly, God was trying to do with human, and if there were any 'flaws' there.
For whatever purpose, God decided that people were free to do whatever they wanted. this is well accepted Christian doctrine, regardless of whether or not you personally think it makes sense, and I'll be the first to admit it's a mystery.
Feel free to believe it is a gaping hole in Christianity, and disbelieve Christianity because of it. I'm not trying to convert anyone here. Think whatever you want about this, but you should probably realize that this paradox is well documented in the Bible and, thus, Christian thought. It is a thing called 'free will' that we don't understand why it exists.
Compare this with intelligent design, which says 'God apparently had some problems making people evolve using the laws of physics He invented, so had to cheat in a few place.'.
There is no Biblical or theological support for these 'problems', or any documentation that God had to step in and fix them. It is not any of documented miracles, it is not listed as something that God would do, it is not discussed at all. It is claiming a miracle simple because these creationist asshat want there to be a miracle, because they've decided to take a metaphorical creation story literally, but can't teach that in school.
In fact, ascribing miracles to explainable events is a pretty damn good way of destroying people's faith when the truth comes out, and intelligent design has repeatedly failed. It is heresy, pure and simple, heresy of the worse kind.
If the FCC revoking anything was a threat, people wouldn't be allowed to sell wifi transmitters that just ask what country you're in, and hence which frequencies you can use.
The whole idea that the FCC is wandering around ready to revoke licenses is nonsense. The FCC does not revoke licenses of things that can be modified to operate where they are not allowed to. They don't even revoke licenses of things that can operate where they aren't allowed to with no modification at all, as long as the manufacturer made some effort to keep users within legal bounds, and isn't nudge-nudge-wink-wink telling people how to operate outside them.
The FCC cares that the device, as sold and intended to be used, is legal. They don't demand that no one can ever use it in an illegal way. At least, they don't bother the manufacturer if people can use them illegally, although they obviously sometimes go after people misusing those devices.
I've never heard of the Apple warranty people care about jailbreaking, period, and I'd like some documentation of this. (They do care about unlocking, but that's not the same thing.)
This is actually because with hardware it doesn't matter, and with software the first solution to a software problem is 'back up the phone, and restore', which also un-jailbreaks it.
Now, I suspect, if you went in with a non-jailbroken phone, they might have a solution or two to try first, whereas with the jailbroken one they'll (quite understandable) do a full restore first, but I've never heard of them refusing support.
I'm actually confused as to how they'd know you jailbroke your phone. Surely if they cared, people would just reset it before getting service.
Of course, this leads to some theological difficulties. A god who doesn't make mistakes that require after the fact correction and meddling is a god who doesn't need to incarnate himself in human to meddle and make things come out right.
Not really. Jesus was rather explicitly mentioned as having to come correct an existing problem, one caused by humans. (Because they had free will.)
It was a pretty big and important event in Christianity, prophesied and whatnot, and a good fraction of the religious texts are documenting it.
We can argue as to what extent 'humans turning their back on God' was foreseen, to what extent God, who presumably knew it would happen, as 'at fault' and if he could have stopped it, or if that wouldn't be possible if he was to give us free will...
...but that delves into rather obscure 'doctrine of evil' and 'free will' concepts and whatnot. Is it a mistake? Is it on purpose? Who knows? Let's just say that this is, at least, a well-documented 'mistake' on God's part.
In fact, the very first thing in the Bible, The Fall, documents this very 'problem' of humans not listening to God.
'Free will' has been debated for millennium, in fact, longer than Christianity, as Jewish thinkers saw the issue also. No one knows why the heck God did what he apparently did, or why he then stepped in to fix, or at least change, it. But it's a deliberate and documented design oddity we don't understand.
Almost all explanations humanity has come up with for the 'Why did God make a universe where people choose evil?' involve the idea that humans who are required to do what God wants were not the sort of beings God wanted.
But none of that works for this new 'flaw' in God's plan that intelligent-design-supporting 'Christians' have invented, a flaw not mentioned anywhere at all in the text. Dinosaurs being unable to evolve into flying animals without a 'boost' from God (Or whatever the idiotic intelligent design argument of the week is.) is not documented, nothing is said at all about it. Nothing about the flaw, nothing about God stepping in to fix it.
That imaginary failure in the design, unlike humans being less than perfect and turning their back on God, can't be explained by 'free will', as humans weren't around back there.
What? Christians acting like jerks? Why, the very idea is insane!
But, yeah, seriously. Asshats like that are why church attendance keeps declining.
Like by me. I no longer attend church. My final straw was when 'my' denomination, Southern Baptist, spent hours of debate at the convention about alcohol use, eventually saying that anyone who uses it should not be a leader in the Church. 'Uses', not 'abuses'. People who drink alcohol are not welcome as leaders in the SBC.
At least they stopped short of demanding members not use it, but they did, in fact, manage to kick Jesus, a guy who not only drinks, but aids and encourages drinking on others, out of his traditional leadership position. (And he's held that position almost 2000 years!) So bravo to them for their honesty, and I exited the denomination stage left with Jesus, because, frankly, I thought was Jesus had to say was more important than what they had to say.
There's two reasons we should separate church and state, and even church and politics. The lesser one is the destructive influence church can have on political debate...a much much more damaging and irreparable one is the damage that politics has on the church.
An irrelevant and inarguable fact of what happened in history have become tied up in some giant political/religious inseparable blob called 'intelligent design'. What's more, it's a patently dishonest blob that reinvents itself every times the courts rule against it or some 'evidence' of it is disproven. Can't teach creationism? Why, let's rename it intelligent design! Oh, this example of 'irreducibly complexity' was, um, reduced and explained? We'll just come up with another example!
This makes both the political party pushing it and the church look, um, patently dishonest. Can I politely, as a Christian, suggest that other 'Christians' STOP MAKING CHRISTIANITY LOOK LIKE LYING POLITICAL SCUMBUGS?
Because that, you know, makes it damn (pun intended) hard to make new converts or even keep current people in the church.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want easy communications using the cellular network, I have an alternative preposition for you. Bear with me, because this gets crazy, but I propose: A cell phone.
Many people aren't aware that, back in the nineteen-nineties and the early twenty-aughts, there used to be an entire network for voice, with specific devices called 'cellular phones', that used the cellular network to operate. (Actually, technically, they didn't just use that...some people had these 'cellular phones' hooked to their DSL lines, also, although those were called just 'telephones'.)
And, even in this far future year of 2010, you can still purchase these communication devices. All of them can do data access.
In fact, while you probably don't realize it, you own one right now. Look over there at your cell phone charger. See that thing plugged into it? Yup, it's a cell phone.
So you don't need to buy a device that can do that. You've already got one!
And I will point out that, as that comic mentions, you can only get to Wikipedia. You cannot, in fact, randomly browse, which is what I was pointing out.
No cell provider is ever going to let people have a device where they can get unlimited access to unlimited sites, for the rest of the device's life. There are rather obvious issues with that, mainly people figuring out how to root it and having free internet access.
Rebates are stupid. It's the most regressive tax spending possible. If I can afford a large portion of something, I get the rest for free? If I can't afford that much, I get nothing? Um, something is wrong here.
If the government wants to encourage electric cars, why doesn't it buy them? Switch the entire damn postal service over to start with. Give grants for local comunity to switch their police cars and mass transit over.
What I see is that people buy devices because they really want them, and when the price is lowered just a tiny bit the sales double.
You realize the two halves of that sentence make no sense together, right?
According to the last half of that sentence, half of people don't buy devices because they want them, they instead wait until the price is lower.
This, of course, assumes that their valuation of the device stays the same, which is sorta silly. Of course if they see a lot of people using and apparently liking it, what they think the value of it is will go up, and hence their price point.
That isn't 'lying', it's 'recalculating', and it happens just as much in reverse, if people see it's not as good as they thought.
The normal nook has the same screen size as a "small" Kindle. The Nook itself is larger than the Kindle.
Ah, okay.
He wants a much larger screen than the Nook at the $150 price point.
I'm with him. Give me a big screen. That's it. Just a damn screen I'm carrying around. I don't need the ability to buy books with it at all, that's what my damn computer is for.
I often forget what it was before I get home.
Wouldn't a better solution be to take a note?
Seriously, we've not only turned into a society where we must have things the instant we want them, we've turned into a society that can't remember things. Which is strange, because we're constantly carrying devices around that we can record memos on or type notes to ourselves.
I have an iPhone, and my iPhone has an app that fingerprints music (Yes, it's that by that patent idiot Shazam). And I can, in theory, buy it and download right then, although that's not really an 'extra' feature, cell phones pretty much automatically have 3G built in.
But I've never actually done that. It does keep a record of what you identified, so I don't have to take a manual note, but that's all the convience I need. (Which is good, because I can't ever figure out the names of songs.)
I'd certainly not want to pay extra for the ability to do that.
$149 would be my sweet spot for a kindle DX (a.k.a. "full size") with a smaller bezel. Living in the city, 5 min from a computer at all times, I'm not really that interested in 3G for a book as a feature.
The Nook wifi-only is a full-sized Nook, and $149. I don't know how that compares to Kindle size, though.
The 3G model might make more sense to a parent who has a kid but can't afford to, or they're not old enough yet to buy them their own separate computer.
3G makes no sense at all unless it lets people randomly surf. (Which, in turn, would require a monthly plan.)
We're at the point in society where we can assume people buying $150 electronic devices have some access to a computer with an internet connection they can get to once a week to get new books. (In fact, we can almost assume everyone has that.)
I'm not even sure wifi makes that much sense, frankly.
Put more memory on the device, have a catalog built in, and let people select books to buy. Then make the USB interface smart enough that people can plug it in and have a program popup and prompt you to complete the purchase by the program logging into your account, and downloading the books, and an updated catalog. Aka, make the entire thing usable from a public terminal, or any other computer with an internet connection and USB. (Alternately, a USB networking connection might work better.)
There's convenience, and there's 'convenience'. I read faster than anyone I know, I read more than anyone I know, and I've never been wandering around in public, wifi signal or not, and said 'Hey, I should buy a book right now! Forget going to a book store or waiting until I get home, I need one this very second!'
Seriously, our 'immediate gratification society' is getting a bit obsessive. We used to have to buy things in stores, and then we could buy them at home and have them shipped, then we could buy them at home and get them instantly...but are we really at the point where we can't even wait until we get to a random computer to buy them? Just because it is possible to give books (and mp3s, while we're at it...I'm looking at you, iPhone.) to people instantly as they wander around in the world, is this really a sane business model to spend money on and build into devices?
If people randomly find themselves without books, I suggest they, duh, buy some extra books in advance.
Like I said, I don't care, but why wouldn't flat transaction fees work?
Coke has, for example, a dividend of about $1 a year. If you make the transaction fee $1, assuming the stock price doesn't move, they'd have to wait a year to sell and break even. ($1 is probably too high to start with, need to start lower and get companies used to providing dividends.)
The only difference is, with a tax, they can sell immediately when the stock price drops, as there's no tax on loss. Do you consider this a feature? I sorta consider it a bug.
REITs, hilariously, are actually structured exactly how I want. REITs have to give 90% of their income to their shareholders, and, hence, people buy REITs to hold REITs and make money from that, not to buy them and make money from selling them when the price goes up.
I don't think you could make those rules work for normal companies, though, as they avoid making any 'profit' to start with. And you can't really stop that without keeping them from spending money they need to spend.
I have no idea what COKE is.
There's plenty of ways to do it. I really don't care how.
An option I know has been proposed is a flat transaction fee. That fee is something like $0.02 a share, to slow things down some, but I think a $1 fee per share would be a good idea. Don't buy stock unless you intend to hold it long enough to make $1 in dividends.
But 90% of the profit on the sale might work better. Stock prices shouldn't actually change like that anyway.
We need to have companies aimed at providing dividends to stockholders, aka, companies aimed at making profit for the company, not at providing stock fluctuations so smart stockholders can sell and make a profit for themselves, while harming the company and the economy in general. The goal of shareholders must be realigned back to 'the company makes money'.
And, hilarious, I say this as someone fairly far on the left, who often thinks a corporation's pursuit of money should be regulated more than it is.
But a company that actually produces goods and services, employing people to make them, and then sells them, no matter how assholic it acts, is still a lot better than 'investors' taking over a board, getting their own CEO, laying off half the company, selling their stocks at a huge profit because of bogus profit 'projections', leaving a crippled company, unemployed people, and actual long-term investors who believed in the company, and random people with stock in mutual funds, getting screwed.
Give me greedy companies over greedy investors who eat companies and shit them out over all the other investors. It's the difference between jerkoffs who provide a service to society, and jerkoffs who literally provide an anti-service.
And this is the sort of results you get when you look at stock purchasing and selling as 'investments'.
Which is reasonable, it's how 99% of people look at stock purchasing and selling...but it's wrong.
Buying stock is buying part of a company. You have, to irrelevantly quote Marx, purchased some of the means of production.
The main money you make from that should be dividends. It should a percentage of the profit, distributed to you because you are part owner.
Because we're totally abandoned this system, and now we operate where people make money because the stock price rises, we've reaimed the entire American economy to cause fluctuations in stock price. CEOs get in there, cause a stock bump, everyone sells their stock to a new round of suckers, the price drops, and the new people try to find another CEO to do the same thing. It's a fucking pyramid scheme.
Companies are directed where stockholders direct them. The way we have the system now, a large section of stockholders want the stock price to go up for, oh, two hours. Or maybe two weeks.
If stopped this sort of nonsense, if we made people actually buy and hold parts of companies, perhaps American industry would return to the point where it actually attempted to make long-term money, and didn't do idiotic things like lay off half the workers for a stock bump.
You should not make money when you sell stock. That is not the damn investment. Stock ownership is like buying an apartment building. You're not trying to make money from selling the building later, you're trying to make money because the building is profitable. Or, at least, you should be.
The fact that stock is ever any price but 'value of company'/'outstanding stock shares' is pretty stupid to start with. I mean, yeah, companies can be overvalued or undervalued, but certainly not to the extent that stock prices would have people think, and their valuation certainly doesn't change from second to second.
Despite the fact no one is talking about the crash, you're utterly wrong about the CRA. I know you desperately need the economic crash to someone's fault beside Bush, but it's not.
There's all sorts of ways to prove you wrong, but Wikipedia's already done it. Here you go 'Only 6% of all the higher-priced loans were extended by CRA-covered lenders to lower-income borrowers or neighborhoods in their CRA assessment areas, the local geographies that are the primary focus for CRA evaluation purposes.'
This is because only 'banks', not 'mortgage brokers', are subject to the CRA, and likewise, thanks to the repeal of Glass Steagall, a lot of actual banks that used to be under it now have another 'aspect' of themselves that they can used to make loans without being covered by the CRA. The only institutions covered by the CRA are those who don't care anymore and very small banks and credit unions that don't want to become an 'investment bank'.
And people who are subject to the CRA are only are about half as likely to resell them. Because, um, if they resold them, they didn't count anymore under the CRA, and hence they had to make more loans to prove they weren't redlining. (The fact that a large percentage did resell them should indicate that the CRA is nowhere near as important as you think anymore, as loan officers aren't very racist anymore.)
Only about half of lenders are even vaguely covered by the CRA (And none of the big guys.), and only half of those 'must' follow it, as the rest can make loans via a non-CRA covered part them themselves. And of that 25%, probably only half them are in areas where the CRA actually requires they do something. The CRA affects maybe 15% of lenders, usually small city banks, and only a small percentage of the loans they made were because of the CRA. The idea they caused Wachovia and Citibank and whatnot to fail, businesses not covered by the CRA at all, is absurd.
Fannie was willing to buy many of the loans but the banks still needed a way to mitigate the risk, so they came up with the investments where bad debts were bundled with good debts and traded.
You are lying. Fannie operated in a regulated market. The mortgage-backed securities they sold were good. (And they did not 'come up with' them.) And, in fact, are still good. Where they got tripped up was a decrease in housing prices, which resulted in the fact that they literally had negative money on their asset sheet, and people were getting jittery about that. Freddie and Fannie did not actually 'fail', they just, as they were designed to do, invested all their money in houses...and housing prices went down.
And you do remember that it was subprime mortgages that caused the problem, right? (At least the start of it.) And you do know that Freddie and Fannie can't buy subprime mortgages, right? And hence weren't repackaging them anywhere?
The problem arose when the other banks started doing same thing, except they decided, once they started, that they didn't care about the quality of loans. Because, after all, they weren't going to hold them anymore, they were just selling them. And they managed to get their market entirely unregulated.
Blaming Freddie and Fannie for this is like blaming the government when someone builds a crappy Greek-pillar-style building that falls down and kills people...after all, that style is a replica of Washington DC government buildings!
As things started collapsing marginal debts became bad debts and then "safe" mortgages became bad because of the lowering prices of homes as a result of the glut of empty houses.
And this is stupid on top of your stupidity. (And it's stupidity without any conceivable political motive, to boot.) People don't default on their mortgage because some other people moved out of some other house.
People defaulted on their mortgages
The problem with setting long minimum ownership times is that it creates low liquidity. I'm not saying we need millisecond transactions to make markets, but a month would be way too long.
If you want low liquidity, you probably should not invest by purchasing things and then reselling them.
The universe presents many options for investing. Some with high liquidity, some with low.
If you want low liquidity, keep your damn investment in money. Put it in the bank, they let you get it out quickly.
There isn't any other investment where people buy actual things and have anywhere near that much liquidity.
But as far as I know there is no law or regulation that actually sets out time limits.
It's not so much that there's a law requiring delay in everything else, it's that there are laws allowing it, there are entire regulatory structures built up, to allow it in stocks.
As for houses, yes, there are actually laws 'requiring' delays, because you have to register transfers with the government, which means, at minimum, you have to stand in line and interact with a clerk.
It's absurd people have to do that for houses, but not for purchasing and reselling a million dollars of IBM.
Indeed.
People shouldn't be allowed to own parts of a company for intervals of less than a month, at minimum. I'd make an analogy here, except there's nothing in society we let people buy and sell that fast, certainly not giant entities....I'd like to see someone try to buy a house and resell it ten milliseconds later. I'd like to see someone buy a can of soda and resell it ten millisecond later!
What happens on Wall Street is simply a fancy game of roulette. Which is fine, I've got nothing against gambling, except they're playing roulette with ownership of the economy, and the only place people can actually invest in the economy.
Um, no. I didn't argue anything based on what Christians believe, at all. You're the only person hallucinating that I'm arguing what 'Christians' do, or do not, believe.
I have said what the Christian belief system says, in both the religious text, and as agreed upon by most Christian theological thinker. That's it. (You can feel free to argue with that if you want, but it's not any sort of logical fallacy.)
No True Scotsman requires me to have made some blanket statement about a group (and then done some other stuff when demonstrated wrong). I have not said a single fucking word about what 'Christians believe', I think the quote where you misunderstood 'Christian belief' to mean 'Christian's belief' makes that pretty clear.
As this was pretty clear, you were forced to resort to an analogy, so I will give you one back: I said the equivalent of "The Scottish constitution says that it is illegal for people to put sugar in their porridge.", and then you spend several posts arguing with me about what 'I said' the Scottish people do, when I didn't even mention their behavior whatsoever.
Please, point to a single instance of me referring to Christians as a group and them having some attribute. I have not.
You're having an issue with this because you dislike religion, and you find it impossible to comprehend that there is actually a structured, documented, and agreed-upon theology. You think Christianity is whatever some random person claims is Christianity, and hence anyone stating that 'Christianity include belief X' is wrong. The end result is, in your universe, no one can actually talk about any belief system at all.
This, incidentally, is a logical fallacy in and of itself. It's called Loki's Wager.
The position is "Christians don't believe X".
Who said that? It wasn't me.
Dismissing any other Christian's beliefs as non-Christian is by definition committing this very fallacy.
Uh, no, although we've finally found the source of your confusion. I didn't say 'Christian's belief' at all. You've confused 'Christian belief', note the lack of an apostrophe s, which is what I said, and 'Beliefs that Christians have', which is a rephrase of what you said.
'Jesus rose from the dead' would be an example of the former. It is a belief contained within the philosophy of Christianity. 'The world is round' would be an example of the latter. It is a belief held by (most) Christians. (And most other people.)
You, because of a grammatical oversight on your part, thought I meant 'Beliefs of Christians'. Admittedly, it's slightly confusing because the adjective meaning 'Of Christianity' and the noun meaning 'Followers of Christianity' are the same word.
However, saying 'beliefs that Christians hold', I'd have to say 'Christians's belief...', not 'Christian belief...'. It is clearer if I use philosophy, which has different words. 'Philosophers's belief...' vs. 'Philosophical belief...'.
Talk about 'Christian belief' is talking about the philosophy, about the belief system, called 'Christianity', which has the adjective form 'Christian'. It isn't talking, in any way, about people who follow that belief system. If you find that confusing, please mentally replace 'Christian belief' with 'Christian theology'.
You're accidentally arguing that no one can ever state the tenets of any belief system at all, because surely there's someone, somewhere, who considers themselves a follower of that system, but doesn't hold that belief. I'm pretty certain this isn't what you mean to argue.
What a belief system 'actually' states, and who or what are 'in charge' of what it state, is an arguable point, but arguing about that is not magically a No True Scotsman fallacy.
A No True Scotsman fallacy would be arguing over what 'followers' believe, and having to exclude people who don't...and I haven't done that. I have argued what followers should believe, not that followers don't believe it. (In fact, my assertion about what Christians should believe is rather nonsensical if I think all Christians already believe that because I excluded everyone else from being Christians!)
Saying 'People don't eat other people.' and then denying Jeffrey Dahmer was a person would be No True Scotsman.
Actually, rereading, even that's a little vague. It depends on whether I was being descriptive or prescriptive when I said 'don't'.
It's descriptive to say 'People do not flap their arms and fly', and it would be a No True Scotsman fallacy if someone said that and then, confronted with flapping-arm-and-flying people, asserted they weren't people.
It's prescriptive to say 'People do not go to traffic court in clown suits'. That is not a statement about whether or not such people exist, despite what it sounds like. It's just an simplistic way of stating people's general behavior. It's stating a societal norm as an absolute, and is simply an exaggeration.
Anyway, at no point did I state or even imply that 'Christians don't believe in intelligent design', or, phrased more clearly as descriptive, 'No Christians believe in intelligent design.'.
If disbelieving in ID was a general Christian belief, I could have said something like the first statement, and you'd be arguing semantics to claim I meant that literally, to claim I meant the second form of that.
However, I didn't say the first statement, as that would be extremely silly. That would actually be a monumentally silly thing to say, especially in this discussion. I have not excluded anyone from the group of Christianity because they believe in ID. (I have, however, added them into the group of 'Christian heretics', which, I must point out, is a subset of Christianity. That is an admitted subjective group.)
Now, I don't think many of the pushers of ID are Christians at all, but it's not because they push that theory. It is because they are simply cynical right-wing pols who want to rile up their base. They aren't Christians because they don't actually believe in or follow Christ.
Which, before you get started, is not No True Scotsman. Groups actually do have definitions. If I say no true Scotsman eats porridge, and you point at an Frenchman who eats porridge....uh, no. No True Scotsman is making an absolute statement about a group, and then when presented with evidence otherwise, excluding members based on that. I, again, haven't done either of those.
What I'm trying to get to, is ANY religious doctrine is idiocy, and illogical, and will eventually be found to violate facts and reality.
Any doctrine will eventually be found to violate facts and reality.
Where you've tripped up is assuming that religious belief=fixed doctrine, that religions can't change aspects of them when they become useless.
In science, we throw out crap that stops working, but religious doctrine requires things be retained.
Only because the media only gives a voice to asshat fundamentalists, who claim their religion never changes. (Although they're utterly wrong.) That's the stuff you've been exposed to in the news all your life, and hence that's what you think 'religion' is.
Plenty of religions, yes, even Christianity, change, and openly admit it. The rest change and just don't admit it. Unchanging religions end up on the dustbin of history, because they can't handle the rest of the universe changing.
You attempt to show what "real Christian beliefs are", but you're committing the No True Scotsman fallacy first, and second, you're still making a logically fallacious argument. So, what good is it?
No, to make a No True Scotsman fallacy, I'd have to be arguing that no Christians hold a belief in intelligent design.
While I am making the almost incidental statement that people holding that belief aren't very good Christians, I have based no conclusion on that, nor have I argued they aren't really Christians. (Unless you've fallen for my satirical first post where I pretended not to know their religion.)
My claim their belief is wrong is based on the religious texts. I have at no point argued what they believe is not what 'true Christians' believe, because, duh, many do believe that....I'm arguing that it's incorrect based on the text, which both me, and they, claim define Christian belief. (They more than me, in fact.)
No True Scotsman requires a) me stating that an entire group has an attribute, and b) when presented with a member who doesn't, excluding them from the group. I have done neither of those. I have instead stated an attribute that members of a group should have, and stating that members of the group who don't have it are not good group members. I am not excluding them from the group, and I never said all group members had that attribute in the first place! I just said they should.
If I say 'People shouldn't eat other people, hence Jeffrey Dahmer is a bad person', I have not committed No True Scotsman. Saying 'People don't eat other people.' and then denying Jeffrey Dahmer was a person would be No True Scotsman.
And I suspect saying 'you're making a logically fallacious argument' without actually stating why is itself a logical fallacy.
Erm, Deuteronomy 19 doesn't say anything about divorce. You're thinking of Deuteronomy 24, which is mistranslated in almost every version of the Bible. Here is an actual correct formulation:
'When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a bill of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, and she departs out of his house, and if she goes and becomes another man's wife, and the latter husband dislikes her and writes her a bill of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter husband dies, who took her to be his wife, then her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after she has been defiled; for that is an abomination before the LORD, and you shall not bring guilt upon the land which the LORD your God gives you for an inheritance.'
It's a simple if...then statement. if (she finds no favor && he writes her a bill of divorce && she departs && becomes another man's wife && he divorces her) then she can't marry him again. (Interestingly, she can remarry him if she didn't get remarried to someone else else in the meantime.)
Almost all versions of the Bible mistakenly put some 'shalls' in that verse, implying the middle steps are supposed to happen. For example, 'When a man taketh a wife, and marrieth her, then it shall be, if she find no favor in his eyes, because he hath found some unseemly thing in her, that he shall write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house....'
These 'shalls' leads to the incorrect understanding that's what people are supposed to do. This interpretation is totally false.
The only thing that verse says people are supposed to do is not get married under certain circumstances of divorce. It does not say they can, or are allowed to by God, get divorces at all. It does not say that men should write women divorce papers.
The law of Moses did not allow divorce. The equivalent of 'Jewish case law' allowed divorce, with the man simply throwing the woman out (Which almost the entire world allowed at that time.), which Moses was unable to stop, so he banned a particularly absurd version of it, where people handed wives back and forth.
My question is... why is your god so deceitful that he would mislead millions of people, and hundreds of generations with laws that are meaningless?
And, at that point, I stop arguing, because I've run into a jerk who can't accept the fact that someone who's a Christian wants to help him fight the idiocy called 'intelligent design', and instead wants to debate Christianity.
I'm not here to debate Christianity. This is not a forum for that, and to be blunt, your 'God changed the law about divorce' argument is based on a misconception, as I've pointed out for two posts now.
Tell me, do you start arguments with all the people on the same side of an issue as you about their other beliefs? Or is it just religion?
Heh, maybe I'm an Christian fundamentalist from another dimension. One where the majority religion in this country is Pastafarianism or something, teaching people that God's just 'doing stuff' all the time. Or maybe Discordianism, where God(dess) is rather a screwup. "To hell with that!", I say, "God is perfect, stop teaching our children otherwise!".
But, yeah, I didn't really think about it, but I was sorta satirizing the Fundmentalist behavior, but putting in actual Christian beliefs in there, instead of the un-Biblical stuff they come out with. The 'Fundamentalists' that everyone sees walking about have the intelligence and knowledge of their own religion on par with a potted plant, and have been entirely hijacked for political purposes.
Actual fundamentalist Christians who were educated in their own religion would be demanding the government confiscate wealth from the rich and other such behavior. I'm not saying that would be a good thing, I'm just pointing out that what people see is 'Christian' fundamentalism than 'right-wing socially-conservative' fundamentalism. That is why you don't mix politics and religion.
Anyway, to continue the satire, I urge all intelligent Christians, when 'intelligent design' shows up, to go to school board meetings and launch into rants about how the Pastafarian want to teach your children about how God must constantly mess around with his noodly appendages during creation, instead of creating reality the way He wanted it to start with.
And then point out how Pastafarians make such a small percentage of the population compared to Christians, that we should not teach their 'intelligent design' theory, but we should instead teach the Christian teaching of God being perfect, and did not have to meddle during evolution because He did it right the first time.
Atheists (And actual Pastafarians, if you guys really exist.;), that your clue to leap in and demand that children are taught that God, aka, FSM, is not perfect, and He constantly had to fix things, and you demand the schools teach intelligent (and rather incompetent) design, because God is a fuckup who can't do anything right.
Watch the exploding heads. Watch them then try to argue that God is....um...not a good designer who had to fix...um...wait...he planned to fix things because...uh...
Seriously, Christians. Don't ceed the ground to this people who don't even understand basic concept of their religion, and want to convince children to join their religion by using the lies of intelligent design, which has exactly the expected effect on belief when the kids figure out they've been lied to.
I don't have any idea why you even vaguely think any of this is relevant. I am in no way here to debate Christian doctrine, except WRT intelligent design.
About divorce, as Jesus pointed out, the law said it was a sin, and at no point undid that. The law used to justify divorce was one saying that certain types of divorce and remarriage were not allowed. However, in Moses' time, people were stubborn, and would not stop divorcing their wives and doing a weird remarriage shuffle to flip wives back and forth, so Moses, unable to stop divorce at all, made that specific thing even more illegal.
Jesus did not say God used to allowed it. That is a common misunderstanding, and it is utterly wrong.
You tried to make an analogy to the laws about divorce, but that was not any sort of 'God mistake', that was just a weird contingency put in the law by Moses to cover the already existing divorce laws which Moses found himself unable to change.
If you want an analogy, it's akin to laws about how you treat your slaves. Those laws do not make slavery moral. They make certain behaviors while owning slaves more immoral.
And while James 2:10 is commonly used to claim that all laws are identical when you break them, it's worth pointing out that was written post-crucifixion, and thus the believers being written to were not under Jewish law anymore anyway, and the law it is talking about breaking is 'Love your neighbor as yourself', which isn't, duh, the same sort of old testament laws we were just talking about. (Granted, you didn't cite the verse, so I have no idea if this is what you're talking about.)
But we're not talking about that either, what we are talking about is some hypothetical shortcoming of God in designing the universe and how a miracle, aka, intelligent design was needed to fix this imaginary flaw. Which is nonsense and heresy and, bluntly, irreligious.
I think you've underestimated my sincerity, although you're right in that I was being a little satirical pretending I didn't know these idiots were claiming to be Christians while sprouting heresy. ;)
Intelligent design, as I pointed out in a reply to the post you just replied to, is a heresy. It ascribes to God some defects that aren't supported by the text, and it invents miracles to address said 'defects'.
Which is rather interesting, because straight creationism, while rather stupid, isn't heresy. It's just a dumb reading of a metaphoric story, but whatever.
But intelligent design starts with the premise that God couldn't do something, namely, create the laws of nature in such a way as to get what He wanted. Now, as the GP pointed out, there are, indeed, known things that God apparently 'couldn't' do, although whether or not He 'couldn't' do them or just didn't is unknown.
But however you feel about the 'free will/disobeying God' issue, which is well known as an issue to theologians, you can't just wander around adding things He couldn't do. Not without damn good evidence. Nor can you add in miracles to fix those things you yourself invented.
You have made the same points about Christianity and free will that, essentially, people have been doing since the start of time.I addressed that in my other post, but, essentially, it is unknown and possible unknowable what, exactly, God was trying to do with human, and if there were any 'flaws' there.
For whatever purpose, God decided that people were free to do whatever they wanted. this is well accepted Christian doctrine, regardless of whether or not you personally think it makes sense, and I'll be the first to admit it's a mystery.
Feel free to believe it is a gaping hole in Christianity, and disbelieve Christianity because of it. I'm not trying to convert anyone here. Think whatever you want about this, but you should probably realize that this paradox is well documented in the Bible and, thus, Christian thought. It is a thing called 'free will' that we don't understand why it exists.
Compare this with intelligent design, which says 'God apparently had some problems making people evolve using the laws of physics He invented, so had to cheat in a few place.'.
There is no Biblical or theological support for these 'problems', or any documentation that God had to step in and fix them. It is not any of documented miracles, it is not listed as something that God would do, it is not discussed at all. It is claiming a miracle simple because these creationist asshat want there to be a miracle, because they've decided to take a metaphorical creation story literally, but can't teach that in school.
In fact, ascribing miracles to explainable events is a pretty damn good way of destroying people's faith when the truth comes out, and intelligent design has repeatedly failed. It is heresy, pure and simple, heresy of the worse kind.
If the FCC revoking anything was a threat, people wouldn't be allowed to sell wifi transmitters that just ask what country you're in, and hence which frequencies you can use.
The whole idea that the FCC is wandering around ready to revoke licenses is nonsense. The FCC does not revoke licenses of things that can be modified to operate where they are not allowed to. They don't even revoke licenses of things that can operate where they aren't allowed to with no modification at all, as long as the manufacturer made some effort to keep users within legal bounds, and isn't nudge-nudge-wink-wink telling people how to operate outside them.
The FCC cares that the device, as sold and intended to be used, is legal. They don't demand that no one can ever use it in an illegal way. At least, they don't bother the manufacturer if people can use them illegally, although they obviously sometimes go after people misusing those devices.
Okay, I've very confused here.
I've never heard of the Apple warranty people care about jailbreaking, period, and I'd like some documentation of this. (They do care about unlocking, but that's not the same thing.)
This is actually because with hardware it doesn't matter, and with software the first solution to a software problem is 'back up the phone, and restore', which also un-jailbreaks it.
Now, I suspect, if you went in with a non-jailbroken phone, they might have a solution or two to try first, whereas with the jailbroken one they'll (quite understandable) do a full restore first, but I've never heard of them refusing support.
I'm actually confused as to how they'd know you jailbroke your phone. Surely if they cared, people would just reset it before getting service.
Of course, this leads to some theological difficulties. A god who doesn't make mistakes that require after the fact correction and meddling is a god who doesn't need to incarnate himself in human to meddle and make things come out right.
Not really. Jesus was rather explicitly mentioned as having to come correct an existing problem, one caused by humans. (Because they had free will.)
It was a pretty big and important event in Christianity, prophesied and whatnot, and a good fraction of the religious texts are documenting it.
We can argue as to what extent 'humans turning their back on God' was foreseen, to what extent God, who presumably knew it would happen, as 'at fault' and if he could have stopped it, or if that wouldn't be possible if he was to give us free will...
'Free will' has been debated for millennium, in fact, longer than Christianity, as Jewish thinkers saw the issue also. No one knows why the heck God did what he apparently did, or why he then stepped in to fix, or at least change, it. But it's a deliberate and documented design oddity we don't understand.
Almost all explanations humanity has come up with for the 'Why did God make a universe where people choose evil?' involve the idea that humans who are required to do what God wants were not the sort of beings God wanted.
But none of that works for this new 'flaw' in God's plan that intelligent-design-supporting 'Christians' have invented, a flaw not mentioned anywhere at all in the text. Dinosaurs being unable to evolve into flying animals without a 'boost' from God (Or whatever the idiotic intelligent design argument of the week is.) is not documented, nothing is said at all about it. Nothing about the flaw, nothing about God stepping in to fix it.
That imaginary failure in the design, unlike humans being less than perfect and turning their back on God, can't be explained by 'free will', as humans weren't around back there.
What? Christians acting like jerks? Why, the very idea is insane!
But, yeah, seriously. Asshats like that are why church attendance keeps declining.
Like by me. I no longer attend church. My final straw was when 'my' denomination, Southern Baptist, spent hours of debate at the convention about alcohol use, eventually saying that anyone who uses it should not be a leader in the Church. 'Uses', not 'abuses'. People who drink alcohol are not welcome as leaders in the SBC.
At least they stopped short of demanding members not use it, but they did, in fact, manage to kick Jesus, a guy who not only drinks, but aids and encourages drinking on others, out of his traditional leadership position. (And he's held that position almost 2000 years!) So bravo to them for their honesty, and I exited the denomination stage left with Jesus, because, frankly, I thought was Jesus had to say was more important than what they had to say.
There's two reasons we should separate church and state, and even church and politics. The lesser one is the destructive influence church can have on political debate...a much much more damaging and irreparable one is the damage that politics has on the church.
An irrelevant and inarguable fact of what happened in history have become tied up in some giant political/religious inseparable blob called 'intelligent design'. What's more, it's a patently dishonest blob that reinvents itself every times the courts rule against it or some 'evidence' of it is disproven. Can't teach creationism? Why, let's rename it intelligent design! Oh, this example of 'irreducibly complexity' was, um, reduced and explained? We'll just come up with another example!
This makes both the political party pushing it and the church look, um, patently dishonest. Can I politely, as a Christian, suggest that other 'Christians' STOP MAKING CHRISTIANITY LOOK LIKE LYING POLITICAL SCUMBUGS?
Because that, you know, makes it damn (pun intended) hard to make new converts or even keep current people in the church.