First, realize that the aim of the CEV is to make the Bible easy to understand orally. It's not exactly renowned for its exactness in translation. The further you get from the source, the more ideas and context you lose.
Why would God let his holiest book be corrupted by human hands? If that's possible, then how can we trust any version of it? They've all been related through a thousand people. If God was protecting the purity of the word, when did he stop? Right after the KJV was written?
So who can't add or take away? You. Israel. Man. Jesus, as God or with God's authority, can. Well, shucks. That argument went out the window.
On second reading I am curious if you are aware how funny and circular this sounds? Was that intentional or are you serious?
God says "You can't change this". Then a few thousand years later a man appears, claiming to be God and you're perfectly happy with him changing the law.
Well heck: I'll just say I'm god (yes, me, localman on slashdot) and I say that I can change God's law too: "People of the Earth: homosexuality is okay!"
Oh yeah, that's right Jesus performed miricles and stuff -- all documented in the very same book that gives him authority to change the unchangable law.
I won't bother getting further into the ambiguity and waffling inherent in the holy scriptures -- but have you ever stopped to wonder what killing animals has to do with atoning for sin? Does that concept make any sense at all? And then to extrapolate it so that somehow God's son (an incomprehensible concept in itself) dying 2000 years ago will absolve the man in New York who molested his daughter today... if only he asks for forgiveness... um... what?
God seems to have gifted me with neither the intelligence nor faith or whatever to feel the slightest bit impressed with this concept. It makes about as much sense as a Zen koan. Perhaps that's the point.
Anyways, sorry for the rant. My grandfather was a pastor and I've been surrounded by Christian pseudo-logic for 32 years now and I'm a bit of a bore on the subject. The Christians in my family, though fine people, have the reasoning ability of a brick wall. I admit I use these little online opportunities to spout off and let off some steam.
Nonetheless: live well, take care, and peace to you.
Well, I'm tossing out a slashdot post here, not engaging in a sound theological discussion. I spent many, many years trying to make peace between my mind (which works with reason) and the bible, which works with faith.
I make no claim to have better answers than the bible. The bible is a book that requires faith and not reason, like most religious manuscripts. That's fine, but if you claim that the bible is logical... well... you're insane:)
What Christians need to realize is that the Old Testiment and the Jewish laws were pretty much done away with by Christ.
(Contemporary English Version)
Nm 15:15 This law will never change. I am the LORD, and I consider all people the same, whether they are Israelites or foreigners living among you.
Dt 4:2 and now he is your God. I am telling you everything he has commanded, so don't add anything or take anything away.
Seems to me that he didn't have the jurisdiction to do away with anything, at least according to the very book that gives him authority in the first place -- the one written by his father. I suppose you can totally disregard the Old Testament, but then where the heck did Jesus come from and who is he speaking for?
Ah well, Christian Logic is not something I'll ever wrap my head around. The LORD works in mysterious ways indeed.
Would you argue that the average US citizen "allows" persecution of Christians in Burma
No, because it's a bit outside our jurisdiction. I'm talking about the US internally violating (by turning a blind eye) to it's own laws.
I'd suggest that most individuals are opposed (consider it a Bad Thing) while very few are sufficiently concerned to become politically active on the topic.
Maybe you're right. But since we're both just guessing, what's the point?
My point was that a) some people in this country find prison rape acceptable and/or amusing and b) few people speak against prison rape itself or the people who find it acceptable and/or amusing.
If my initial post was sloppy, well, it was a rant, as I stated. But you knew what my point was and felt like being pedantic about it. Very well. I stand corrected.
Again, I don't see where I generalized beyond stating that our nation (as a group) allows this, which is simply a statement of fact: it happens and there isn't much being done about it.
And guess or no, it's pretty obvious. If you need hard data to see that not enough people care about stopping prison rape to get anything done about it, well, good luck to you.
This should be modded funny, right? An endless series of pulses as a sign of intelligent life? I guess Pulsars have been sending us back to back mersenne primes in binary for eons now!
I understand the difference between individuals and groups. I said "we" allow anal gang rape in my original post referring to our nation, which of course contains many people who dissent such a position, of which I am one, and perhaps you are too.
If one can talk about nations (or any group of people) at all one is going to have to do _some_ generalizing.
Human rights violations has nothing to do with our invading another countries.
I do know that. I am just latching on to a sentiment I've heard in war supporters. I have heard people saying that Iraq's rape rooms were justification enough for the war. "How can we allow such barbaric activities to continue?!?" they've said.
Of course they are completely ignorant or willfully blind of equally attrocious activities in other non-oil-producing nations and even our very own nation.
I didn't say that joking makes one a supporter. This isn't about joking. I'm posting about the people who stated specifically that they thought it was fine and funny for "criminals" (whatever that means) to be anal gang raped. Read some of the lower scored comments.
Aside from the joking and the slashdot posts, there isn't a lot of pressure on the prison system to stop this kind of behavior. In my experience most people seem to think it is part of the territory -- that it's really okay because prison is supposed to be rough.
Anyways, I find this line of reasoning sick, and more importantly it's entirely ineffective at building a more stable and healthy society for law abiding citizens.
Because we are no better than the people in Iraq we call barbarians for their "rape rooms".
It's interesting to me how rarely it comes up that anal rape isn't funny: that it's torture, and torture is a criminal human rights violation that would have us clamoring to invade another country. Yet we not only allow it, we practical cheer for it. On a large scale.
And for any fool who thinks it's about giving people their just desserts, tell me what happens when these anal gang raped men reenter society. What kind of respect for others do you think they'll have?
And what type of people are in prison anyways? Dangerous people? Or non-violent pot-smokers or what?
Anyways... sorry for the rant but it's amazing how at this point in human history mob mentality still rules even the most allegedly civilized nations.
But, the standard comback goes, why shouldn't the "creator" of a work get to keep copyrights forever?
Because it's simply ridiculous. No one time piece of work should entitle a person to endless income. People need to keep working to be useful. As a creative person myself (film and music) I appreciate creativity, but really, you should only get a short time to make money off a given work, and then you have to do something else to make more. Just like every other job.
attracted a roster of 75 respected scientists from 41 different nations
One of the great moments in history was when the scientific method replaced expert authority as the source of knowledge. It doesn't matter how many people believe something, or what their credentials are: that doesn't make it a fact.
Now, sure, maybe they've got something. How should I know? It sounds entirely impossible to me, but I certainly have no more say than they do. So I welcome them to try and prove something.
But I won't be holding my breath. Thing is, the mind is a pattern recognition system. The most amazing pattern recognition system ever. People see patterns in everything whether they exist or not.
Just about everyone has a favorite number that pops up more than other numbers, right? Well, it doesn't really, it's just your pattern recognition system kicking in. This sounds like another case of that.
I'm sure you know that perfection isn't necessary for success. But here's my story:
I wasn't really a perfectionist. I flunked a lot of classes, dropped out of high school, skipped college, worked at taco bell, and a bunch of other crap jobs. Basically, by some people's standards you could say that "any hope of a succesful life was ruined".
Today (twelve years later) I'm a very successful director of development at a very successful company. I'm married to a wonderful, beautiful woman, and live a good life.
So don't take any failure too seriously. Just keep at it and you'll work it out over time.
Your example seems to me to be entirely about free form creativity! You may be using a subset of SQL, but you're using a superset of that subset's intended usefulness. So I would say that rooting like that takes quite a bit of thinking outside the box.
Um... are you suggesting we wait until we see if we've ruined earth's atmosphere before testing our global warming theories on another dead planet? That seems a bit backwards...
You're right. I did this at payme.com (paypal competitor, no longer in business) to shorten the URLs in our emails. It is not at all novel. It's the first thing that came up when we wanted to shorten the integer in our URLs. "Um... let's do them in hex? Or base 64 or something?" I think that was the extent of the design meeting for that "feature".
If we had patented it, maybe we'd still be in business:)
Your interpretation of conservaite ideology may be true in theory, but in practice it is off by a mile. The popular group that labels themselves "conservative" today is the most "damn the side effects" thinkng group of people I've ever seen.
Sweeping labels like "liberal" and "conservative" have become nearly meaningless these days. Both sides contain sharp critical thinkers that are almost entirely drowned out by the popular idiots who rally people around hot-spot issues that they don't really want to understand fully.
Could we drop the political agenda for a moment out of respect for the dead and suffering? I hadn't heard a whisper of blame on either of those issues until I read your comment. Let it go.
My point was more that it is much much harder to upgrade a system when it's managed internally.
Wow, in my (admittedly limited) experience, this is the exact opposite of what I would say. At the company I work for nearly everything is written in house. We even wrote our own warehouse management software (in Perl!?!). On the occasions that we outsource development, it has always proven more difficult and time-consuming to get the contractors and outsource companies to make the changes we need. We almost always end up writing an in-house version after tiring of the external software management cycle.
If it was just a matter of processing power, a project like distribued computing could run a paralell neuralnet as large as our brain (give or take an order of magnitude). What would we run on it? How would we program a neural net that size? What would feed it? How would we interpret it's output?
The reason that this has never been done is because we don't even know how to make use of neural nets that are more than a handful of neurons a couple layers deep. If we did, you can be sure that someone would have a distributed.net client for AI.
Nobody is trying this because we don't understand it yet.
Sorry -- my post was unclear. I understand that the uncertainty principle is not a problem with the measuring technology, but rather the nature of the universe does not allow such information to be known.
I was referring to the idea that we can't measure how these quantum uncertainties effect large scale interactions (like billiard balls) in a way that _could_ be measured. And that those effects are amplified in large, high energy systems.
My point (in so many words!) is that I believe that quantum uncertainty ends up effecting things on a large, measurable scale, making even things like billiard balls nondeterministic. This is something I've heard many physicists deny, but I've never heard a compelling explanation.
Interesting choice... personally I'd rather be complete. I think that computers represent incomplete/consistent and they're not very interesting as dinner companions.
I wonder if in fact, a consistent mind could possible survive in this world. I mean -- your divide by zero error. I'd rather be able to think about it and hypothesize answers that may be wrong then to crash:)
Slashdot Mirror
First, realize that the aim of the CEV is to make the Bible easy to understand orally. It's not exactly renowned for its exactness in translation. The further you get from the source, the more ideas and context you lose.
Why would God let his holiest book be corrupted by human hands? If that's possible, then how can we trust any version of it? They've all been related through a thousand people. If God was protecting the purity of the word, when did he stop? Right after the KJV was written?
So who can't add or take away? You. Israel. Man. Jesus, as God or with God's authority, can. Well, shucks. That argument went out the window.
On second reading I am curious if you are aware how funny and circular this sounds? Was that intentional or are you serious?
God says "You can't change this". Then a few thousand years later a man appears, claiming to be God and you're perfectly happy with him changing the law.
Well heck: I'll just say I'm god (yes, me, localman on slashdot) and I say that I can change God's law too: "People of the Earth: homosexuality is okay!"
Oh yeah, that's right Jesus performed miricles and stuff -- all documented in the very same book that gives him authority to change the unchangable law.
I won't bother getting further into the ambiguity and waffling inherent in the holy scriptures -- but have you ever stopped to wonder what killing animals has to do with atoning for sin? Does that concept make any sense at all? And then to extrapolate it so that somehow God's son (an incomprehensible concept in itself) dying 2000 years ago will absolve the man in New York who molested his daughter today... if only he asks for forgiveness... um... what?
God seems to have gifted me with neither the intelligence nor faith or whatever to feel the slightest bit impressed with this concept. It makes about as much sense as a Zen koan. Perhaps that's the point.
Anyways, sorry for the rant. My grandfather was a pastor and I've been surrounded by Christian pseudo-logic for 32 years now and I'm a bit of a bore on the subject. The Christians in my family, though fine people, have the reasoning ability of a brick wall. I admit I use these little online opportunities to spout off and let off some steam.
Nonetheless: live well, take care, and peace to you.
You're not trying very hard, that's why.
:)
Well, I'm tossing out a slashdot post here, not engaging in a sound theological discussion. I spent many, many years trying to make peace between my mind (which works with reason) and the bible, which works with faith.
I make no claim to have better answers than the bible. The bible is a book that requires faith and not reason, like most religious manuscripts. That's fine, but if you claim that the bible is logical... well... you're insane
Cheers.
What Christians need to realize is that the Old Testiment and the Jewish laws were pretty much done away with by Christ.
(Contemporary English Version)
Nm 15:15 This law will never change. I am the LORD, and I consider all people the same, whether they are Israelites or foreigners living among you.
Dt 4:2 and now he is your God. I am telling you everything he has commanded, so don't add anything or take anything away.
Seems to me that he didn't have the jurisdiction to do away with anything, at least according to the very book that gives him authority in the first place -- the one written by his father. I suppose you can totally disregard the Old Testament, but then where the heck did Jesus come from and who is he speaking for?
Ah well, Christian Logic is not something I'll ever wrap my head around. The LORD works in mysterious ways indeed.
Cheers.
Would you argue that the average US citizen "allows" persecution of Christians in Burma
No, because it's a bit outside our jurisdiction. I'm talking about the US internally violating (by turning a blind eye) to it's own laws.
I'd suggest that most individuals are opposed (consider it a Bad Thing) while very few are sufficiently concerned to become politically active on the topic.
Maybe you're right. But since we're both just guessing, what's the point?
My point was that a) some people in this country find prison rape acceptable and/or amusing and b) few people speak against prison rape itself or the people who find it acceptable and/or amusing.
If my initial post was sloppy, well, it was a rant, as I stated. But you knew what my point was and felt like being pedantic about it. Very well. I stand corrected.
Cheers.
Again, I don't see where I generalized beyond stating that our nation (as a group) allows this, which is simply a statement of fact: it happens and there isn't much being done about it.
And guess or no, it's pretty obvious. If you need hard data to see that not enough people care about stopping prison rape to get anything done about it, well, good luck to you.
Cheers.
This should be modded funny, right? An endless series of pulses as a sign of intelligent life? I guess Pulsars have been sending us back to back mersenne primes in binary for eons now!
Those clever devils!
I'm not sure where I did that?
I understand the difference between individuals and groups. I said "we" allow anal gang rape in my original post referring to our nation, which of course contains many people who dissent such a position, of which I am one, and perhaps you are too.
If one can talk about nations (or any group of people) at all one is going to have to do _some_ generalizing.
Cheers.
That's a good point. If prisons were coed, I wonder if we'd still be laughing about anal rape.
Cheers.
Human rights violations has nothing to do with our invading another countries.
I do know that. I am just latching on to a sentiment I've heard in war supporters. I have heard people saying that Iraq's rape rooms were justification enough for the war. "How can we allow such barbaric activities to continue?!?" they've said.
Of course they are completely ignorant or willfully blind of equally attrocious activities in other non-oil-producing nations and even our very own nation.
Cheers.
I didn't say that joking makes one a supporter. This isn't about joking. I'm posting about the people who stated specifically that they thought it was fine and funny for "criminals" (whatever that means) to be anal gang raped. Read some of the lower scored comments.
Aside from the joking and the slashdot posts, there isn't a lot of pressure on the prison system to stop this kind of behavior. In my experience most people seem to think it is part of the territory -- that it's really okay because prison is supposed to be rough.
Anyways, I find this line of reasoning sick, and more importantly it's entirely ineffective at building a more stable and healthy society for law abiding citizens.
Cheers.
Because we are no better than the people in Iraq we call barbarians for their "rape rooms".
It's interesting to me how rarely it comes up that anal rape isn't funny: that it's torture, and torture is a criminal human rights violation that would have us clamoring to invade another country. Yet we not only allow it, we practical cheer for it. On a large scale.
And for any fool who thinks it's about giving people their just desserts, tell me what happens when these anal gang raped men reenter society. What kind of respect for others do you think they'll have?
And what type of people are in prison anyways? Dangerous people? Or non-violent pot-smokers or what?
Anyways... sorry for the rant but it's amazing how at this point in human history mob mentality still rules even the most allegedly civilized nations.
Cheers.
But, the standard comback goes, why shouldn't the "creator" of a work get to keep copyrights forever?
Because it's simply ridiculous. No one time piece of work should entitle a person to endless income. People need to keep working to be useful. As a creative person myself (film and music) I appreciate creativity, but really, you should only get a short time to make money off a given work, and then you have to do something else to make more. Just like every other job.
Cheers.
attracted a roster of 75 respected scientists from 41 different nations
One of the great moments in history was when the scientific method replaced expert authority as the source of knowledge. It doesn't matter how many people believe something, or what their credentials are: that doesn't make it a fact.
Now, sure, maybe they've got something. How should I know? It sounds entirely impossible to me, but I certainly have no more say than they do. So I welcome them to try and prove something.
But I won't be holding my breath. Thing is, the mind is a pattern recognition system. The most amazing pattern recognition system ever. People see patterns in everything whether they exist or not.
Just about everyone has a favorite number that pops up more than other numbers, right? Well, it doesn't really, it's just your pattern recognition system kicking in. This sounds like another case of that.
Cheers.
I'm sure you know that perfection isn't necessary for success. But here's my story:
I wasn't really a perfectionist. I flunked a lot of classes, dropped out of high school, skipped college, worked at taco bell, and a bunch of other crap jobs. Basically, by some people's standards you could say that "any hope of a succesful life was ruined".
Today (twelve years later) I'm a very successful director of development at a very successful company. I'm married to a wonderful, beautiful woman, and live a good life.
So don't take any failure too seriously. Just keep at it and you'll work it out over time.
Your example seems to me to be entirely about free form creativity! You may be using a subset of SQL, but you're using a superset of that subset's intended usefulness. So I would say that rooting like that takes quite a bit of thinking outside the box.
Cheers.
Um... are you suggesting we wait until we see if we've ruined earth's atmosphere before testing our global warming theories on another dead planet? That seems a bit backwards...
You're right. I did this at payme.com (paypal competitor, no longer in business) to shorten the URLs in our emails. It is not at all novel. It's the first thing that came up when we wanted to shorten the integer in our URLs. "Um... let's do them in hex? Or base 64 or something?" I think that was the extent of the design meeting for that "feature".
:)
If we had patented it, maybe we'd still be in business
Cheers.
Your interpretation of conservaite ideology may be true in theory, but in practice it is off by a mile. The popular group that labels themselves "conservative" today is the most "damn the side effects" thinkng group of people I've ever seen.
Sweeping labels like "liberal" and "conservative" have become nearly meaningless these days. Both sides contain sharp critical thinkers that are almost entirely drowned out by the popular idiots who rally people around hot-spot issues that they don't really want to understand fully.
Cheers.
Couldn't we just as accurately say we're travelling at 99.9% the speed of light and these hot gas blobs are stationary?
And then, at least in relation to the hot gas blobs, our time is almost stopped?
Relativity always confuses me.
Could we drop the political agenda for a moment out of respect for the dead and suffering? I hadn't heard a whisper of blame on either of those issues until I read your comment. Let it go.
My point was more that it is much much harder to upgrade a system when it's managed internally.
Wow, in my (admittedly limited) experience, this is the exact opposite of what I would say. At the company I work for nearly everything is written in house. We even wrote our own warehouse management software (in Perl!?!). On the occasions that we outsource development, it has always proven more difficult and time-consuming to get the contractors and outsource companies to make the changes we need. We almost always end up writing an in-house version after tiring of the external software management cycle.
Just my $0.02.
Cheers.
I'm absolutely sure. Proof (admittedly non-scientific):
If it was just a matter of processing power, a project like distribued computing could run a paralell neuralnet as large as our brain (give or take an order of magnitude). What would we run on it? How would we program a neural net that size? What would feed it? How would we interpret it's output?
The reason that this has never been done is because we don't even know how to make use of neural nets that are more than a handful of neurons a couple layers deep. If we did, you can be sure that someone would have a distributed.net client for AI.
Nobody is trying this because we don't understand it yet.
We will someday, I hope, but certainly not today.
Cheers.
Right you are about mathematical chaos... now, if we combine that with quantum uncertainty, aren't we back to a non-deterministic universe?
;)
I'm not totally sure of that, but I don't understand why it's not true. If you do, I'd love to know.
(Or more honestly, I'd love for you to agree with me
Cheers.
Sorry -- my post was unclear. I understand that the uncertainty principle is not a problem with the measuring technology, but rather the nature of the universe does not allow such information to be known.
I was referring to the idea that we can't measure how these quantum uncertainties effect large scale interactions (like billiard balls) in a way that _could_ be measured. And that those effects are amplified in large, high energy systems.
My point (in so many words!) is that I believe that quantum uncertainty ends up effecting things on a large, measurable scale, making even things like billiard balls nondeterministic. This is something I've heard many physicists deny, but I've never heard a compelling explanation.
Cheers.
Interesting choice... personally I'd rather be complete. I think that computers represent incomplete/consistent and they're not very interesting as dinner companions.
:)
I wonder if in fact, a consistent mind could possible survive in this world. I mean -- your divide by zero error. I'd rather be able to think about it and hypothesize answers that may be wrong then to crash
Cheers.