The US produces more than 25% of the world's goods.
How do you figure that? According to the World Bank, in 2003 the US produced 21% of the world's GDP on a PPP basis - the nearest thing to a suitable proxy that I can think of. (If you don't use PPP, it's more like a third, but PPP is surely more appropriate here as you are basically talking about raw production of goods and not the value or quality of those goods.)
It is, in fact, a core principle of the Geneva Convention that Signatories are entitled to retaliate IN KIND against terrorist attacks, nuclear/chemical/biological attacks, attacks against civilian populations, assassinations, torture of POWS[1], etc.
If it is indeed a core principle, then perhaps you would be so kind as to point out where this entitlement is established? I agree that it doesn't forbid such activities against non-signatories (even then, it does if such a power "accepts and applies the provisions" of the treaty; see Article 2 of Convention III - the convention reating to POWs) but I seeing nothing saying that if one side violates the treaty, then the other side is entitled to as well. In fact, Article 132 of Convention III merely says:
Once the violation has been established, the Parties to the conflict shall put an end to it and shall repress it with the least possible delay.
IANAL but I don't think this is intended to include torturing POWs of the violating power. No, signatories are bound to treat POWs from other signatories according to the Convention whether the other signatories do so or not. It's only when a non-signatory violates the Geneva conventions that a signatory can disregard it in relation to POWs from the violating nation.
In fact, the Saddam Regime, not being Signatory to the convention, was a legitimate target for U.S. nuclear attacks, under the Geneva Convention.
Iraq was and is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions (there's actually more than one). According to the Red Cross, Iraq acceded to them in 1956, although not to the later additional protocols.
In fact, it even permits torture against signatories who haven't violated the Convention, with the caveat that they are then free of their Convention commitment to not practice torture against you.
Even if that were true, it would be like saying the law permits me to walk up to you and shoot you dead, with the caveat that the the police are then free to arrest me and imprison me for the rest of my life.
No, a conspiracy generally has malign intent (and that's the sense I meant it in). Unless you are a complete cynic, Congress and the EU aren't conspiracies in and of themselves. If the EU were hypocritically promoting anthropogenic greenhouse in order to somehow force the US to use less gas, then that would be a conspiracy. Which is what you have described.
Instead of wisely shaking your head and opining that it's just human nature for the EU to do this, try finding some actual evidence for your assertions. Show me some evidence that Europeans are obsessed with lowering their oil prices (yes, they are a lot higher in Europe, but they always have been, and people don't drive as much as in the US). Look at the sums and estimate how much the EU might save in lower oil prices (and note that this is unlikely to happen under your scenario since the US hasn't ratified Kyoto) compared with how much they they will lose in complying with Kyoto. It would not be a rational economic decision in this sense. Try this on for size instead: perhaps they honestly believe in anthropogenic greenhouse. Perhaps they honestly believe that Kyoto, with all its faults, is better than doing nothing. Perhaps they honestly believe that "protecting their own interests" involves mitigating global warming.
What it comes down to is that if you spend enough money, you can get a scientist to say whatever you like - which kind of destroys the credibility of science in general...
It doesn't come down to that at all, except in your mind, because in general it is not true. Do you actually know anything about science? Ever done it yourself? I do and I have, respectively, and this does not accord with my experience.
Oh, I hope you're trolling. Geocentric cosmologies were abandoned well over a century before the American Revolution even occured, so they are hardly evidence that Europeans are less rigorous thinkers than Americans. If "Science has... become a means to gain political power", where are all the scientists running countries? And please, WHAT is with Americans and conspiracy theories? According to you, everyone else in the world is sitting around obsessing about why Americans have cheap gas and are prepared to massively distort their economies in order to force you to use less. Here's a clue: we really, really don't care that much. I know that I myself can sometimes go for days - yes, days! - without hatching some plot to bring the United States to its knees.
Once can be agnostic and beleive in a version of Creationism (evolutionary Creationism).
No, because if you believe that "another being" created the universe, then you aren't agnostic. I can just about buy that there might be agnostics or atheists who believe in intelligent design, but by definition they can't believe in a being that created the universe.
Good question! There are a few examples that spring to mind - probably most notably after WWI, Germany, Turkey and the successor states of Austria-Hungary were not occupied by the victors for any significant length of time. In fact, I'm not sure they were occupied at all (but I'm a bit fuzzy on that) - of course, they agreed to an armistice just before they were actually conquered (as opposed to staring defeat in the face). You could also point to more recent American precedents - like the invasion of Panama in 1989: they installed a friendly government and got out quickly. Even Rome would do this sometimes: in places like Armenia that they didn't think it worth trying to control themselves, they would install a client king to do their bidding. Most wars these days are fought over pretty limited aims, so outright wars of conquest are relatively rare; the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was a notable exception. But you are probably right, over the longer term.
Ahh, that site takes me back! I used to be the webmaster of the host site; I inadvertantly tipped off the head of the physics department about it (who didn't even know what "the world wide web" was, let alone that we had a website - to be fair, this was 1995 or 1996). He thought it was glorifying nuclear weapons and I had to tell the maintainer to shut it down. How shortsighted - it's thrived since then and is a great resource for information; it would have been a great asset to attract traffic to the departmental site.
He didn't delay funding so much as kept changing the requirements, ie insisting that the Me262 be able to carry bombs, which set the project back a year or two. But yes, big mistake!
Verne is widely known (among historians and other similarly involved disciplines) for having introduced the ideas to the public long before it was practical to utilize them in reality.
Heh, well, I am an historian:) One of my interests is future-war fiction and its effects on the perception of war, in particular fiction about aerial bombing in the first half of the 20th century (H.G. Wells' The War in the Air (1908) being a good example). Which is why I don't dispute your general point - I'm just saying (and I don't think you disagree) that the influence of Verne (or any sf writer) does not depend on him predicting the exact details. On the other hand, it is easy to exaggerate such influence - sure, the first nuclear submarine was named Nautilus in Verne's honour, but submarines were invented well before Verne wrote about them, and were developed into practical machines during the World Wars. It would have happened without him.
I'd agree with the general thrust of your post, but not the examples you chose! Verne was hardly amazingly accurate - he launched the Columbiad (not Columbia) from a giant cannon, which (IIRC) he knew was impractical to say the least, as it would leave the occupants thinly smeared across the floor of the capsule. Was the Nautilus really nuclear powered? Nuclear power was unknown in 1870 when 20000 Leagues was published. And I doubt The Andromeda Strain had anything to do with prompting the Apollo quarantine measures - it was only published in 1969; NASA would have been working on the quaratine for years beforehand.
In terms of generalities, yes, Verne was an inspiration to some of the pioneers. Just don't go looking to hard for specific examples.
Firstly, the US did invade some of those countries... it's just that somebody else had invaded them first:P
Secondly, and more seriously, the UN hardly ever commands US troops, certainly not in any substantial numbers. Eg UNPROFOR in Bosnia had around 700 US troops, out of around 38000 total. And when there are substantial US forces, there's usually a US commander, eg UNMIH in Haiti a decade ago. The only war ever fought by the UN (as opposed to with UN approval) was the Korean War, with Douglas Macarthur in command. Any time US soldiers are fighting, you can be sure they are doing so under US command. In fact, I don't think it's true to say that the UN is dragging the US into wars it doesn't want to fight either. Certainly not any of the cases you mention...
He's an MD, not a PhD (much less a PhD in climatology), and the fact that you would change your mind about any scientific issue after reading a novel (no matter how well referenced) is pretty scary. You might like to read this for some informed criticism of Crichton's book.
I'm not saying that the system isn't vulnerable[1], just that this doesn't prove it so. This is the same reason we have entrapment legislation.
Of course it does! Sokal set out to deceive the editors into publishing something they shouldn't have. He succeeded. Therefore their system is vulnerable to deception. I don't understand your point about entrapment legislation - the very reason we have laws is because we think someone is going to try to whatever the law prohibits, not because it never happens. Peer review provides some measure of protection against deception; Social Text has none, except the good sense of the editors.
There can be value in having a lower threshold. While some junk may get in (which then should be noticed by the readership) so could controversial, unorthodox, or unpopular ideas.
I'm not denying that there's no value in non-peer reviewed journals; not everything has to be peer-reviewed to be useful. But according to your OP, Social Text avoided peer review because the editors believed it to be
"just a mechanism for protecting and extending current scientific orthodoxy". That's a rather stronger claim than just saying that having a forum for free debate is a good thing, even if a few bad apples might abuse that freedom. It's saying that peer review as a whole is a rotten system, and I'm saying that if the editors of Social Text still believe that their system is better overall, then they are idiots.
Who says it only fails when somebody is trying demonstrate that it doesn't work? What if somebody is trying to manipulate it for their own profit, or is just producing sloppy work? How are the editors going to distinguish between such articles and genuinely worthwhile ones? (They can't, is Sokal's point.) Science does not progress by taking people at their word, and nor do any humanities worth a damn. Peer review can be abused too, but it's considerably more robust than the alternatives. If Social Text is trying to make a point by discarding peer-review, then they're not making a very good one.
So in other words it was fine right up until the point where it failed. Do you think their system is less likely or more likely to be abused in this way than peer review is?
I've seen those lists plenty of times. The lists are very badly put together as the authors have taken no time to use a more modern translation (they misinterpret some of the words from the KJV because language has changed in the last few centuries), do not bother to interpret passages in context, get the chronology wrong and always assume contradiction when there is a much more obvious explanation.
You're right, many of the contradictions can be explained this way. But not all. OK, so did God create man before or after he created the animals?
All relevant in that they teach us things about God, us and our relationship with him.
This is completely circular. You say one of the reasons you believe in God is the relevancy of the Bible, but when I point out sections that are completely irrelevant to modern life, you say they are relevent because they teach us about God. So in fact you could only have been impressed by the "relevancy" of the Bible if you assumed it was true in the first place.
The evidence I have seen suggests historical accuracy and there have been a great number of historians who agree.
No, there haven't, at least not in modern times. I'm a historian (well, a history grad-student-to-be), remember, so give me references. Here's one for you: Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). The author is a Christian but doesn't let that blind him to seeing the Bible as a historical document like any other. It depends on what you mean by "historical accuracy", I guess. I'm not saying that the history in the Bible is wholly made up, but it's also clearly far from wholly true.
Historians, lawyers and reporters who have examined the evidence to prove Christianity wrong have been converted by it.
Oh, that old chestnut. Plenty of people have examined the evidence to prove Christianity right and found it completely lacking. So what? How about we set aside what other people think and look at the evidence for ourselves?
I don't have a problem with those events.
Then I respectfully submit that you go back and reread the Bible's account of them in the light of logic, science and history. Because there is no evidence outside of the Bible to suggest that these events happened (or are even possible), and plenty of evidence to suggest that they did not. Chapter 4 of Ian Plimer, Telling Lies for God: Reason vs Creationism (Milsons Point: Random House Australia, 1994) brilliantly exposes the absurdities of Noah's Ark. It doesn't even begin to make logical sense - forget about all the science and history it contradicts. And there weren't even 600,000 people in all of Egypt at the time of Exodus, as far as we can tell - let alone were wandering around in the Sinai desert for 40 years, leaving no archeaological evidence behind. But ancient writers routined exaggerated or overestimated the sizes of armies and so forth, so historians are not too troubled by the 600,000 figure. You ought to be, though, if you think the Bible is inerrant.
They are only biased in the sense that they report from the point of view of how faithful to God the people are.
No, I said they were politically biased, and that is so, whatever else they may be. For example, Kings is probably based on court records, king lists, and the like, which served a political purpose. The power and wealth of Solomon is exagerated beyond all historical plausibility. And so on. It all suggests human authorship.
The New Testament manuscripts date from much closer to the time they were authored, were authored closer to the events described and occur in much greater numbers than any other historical document from the period.
This is plainly not true, unless (for example) you think that Julius Caesar didn't write an account of the Gallic wars. He was not only an eye
Quite probably, but that doesn't change the fact that the two meanings are now distinct. If I call George W. Bush "dumb", I'm not thinking to myself "hahaha Bush is like one of those people that can't talk". I'm thinking "hahaha Bush is stupid". You are being offended by a meaning that is not intended. There are better things to be offended at, IMHO.
You're in danger of making an assumption yourself.
Quite right - I assume that anyone who had ever approached Christianity with a critical, inquiring attitude - even if they ultimately concluded it was right - would have some tolerance for others who doubt it, rather than spout religious zealotry at them.
It's only good if I'm right. And if I'm right, then it would be good for everyone else to trust in that authority.
Fine, but how about demonstrating that authority rather than simply asserting it. If you are a physicist, then you ought to know the value of evidence.
I believe in the authority because of the self-consistency, the relevancy, the the self-evident truthfulness and the historical reliability of the Bible.
You've got to be joking. There are about a zillion places where the Bible contradictsitself. Whole chunks of the Bible are completely irrelevant to modern life (try Leviticus 15:19-30 on menstruation, for example, or all the advice on what to do about errant oxen at the end of Exodus 21). And if you think the Bible has been proven to be historically accurate - well, lucky you're not an historian then. Two of every species being preserved from a worldwide flood in Noah's ark? 600,000 Israelites wandering around the Sinai for 40 years? All the accounts of the kings and so forth are riddled with political and religous bias, just as one might expect from a historical document. It's just another historical source, no more authoritative than any other. In fact, less so.
Oh yes, nearly forgot: self-evident truthfulness! ROTFL. No, it's not self-evident. Really.
Given that Jesus is God, he condones that.
This is precisely what I was on about in my original post. If you want to convince a non-Christian of the truth of your argument that Jesus wasn't a pacifist, then you cannot assume "Jesus is God" as an initial premise - because I don't accept that as a premise. You'll need to argue it a different way. Is this really so difficult to understand?
Oh, we can do this! According to the Library of Congress itself, it has some 29 million books (lets neglect all the other stuff they have, to make this simple). Call it 30 million. The average weight of a book is what, 0.5 kg? To within a factor of 2 anyway. So the mass of the LOC is about 15 million kgs. From E=mc^2 this mass is equivalent to 1.35 x 10^24 Joules. So the 23 trillion Joules of the probe is about 0.017 nanoLOCs.
I don't know why I did this either. But Google Calculator is very cool:)
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How do you figure that? According to the World Bank, in 2003 the US produced 21% of the world's GDP on a PPP basis - the nearest thing to a suitable proxy that I can think of. (If you don't use PPP, it's more like a third, but PPP is surely more appropriate here as you are basically talking about raw production of goods and not the value or quality of those goods.)
If it is indeed a core principle, then perhaps you would be so kind as to point out where this entitlement is established? I agree that it doesn't forbid such activities against non-signatories (even then, it does if such a power "accepts and applies the provisions" of the treaty; see Article 2 of Convention III - the convention reating to POWs) but I seeing nothing saying that if one side violates the treaty, then the other side is entitled to as well. In fact, Article 132 of Convention III merely says:
Once the violation has been established, the Parties to the conflict shall put an end to it and shall repress it with the least possible delay.
IANAL but I don't think this is intended to include torturing POWs of the violating power. No, signatories are bound to treat POWs from other signatories according to the Convention whether the other signatories do so or not. It's only when a non-signatory violates the Geneva conventions that a signatory can disregard it in relation to POWs from the violating nation.
In fact, the Saddam Regime, not being Signatory to the convention, was a legitimate target for U.S. nuclear attacks, under the Geneva Convention.
Iraq was and is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions (there's actually more than one). According to the Red Cross, Iraq acceded to them in 1956, although not to the later additional protocols.
In fact, it even permits torture against signatories who haven't violated the Convention, with the caveat that they are then free of their Convention commitment to not practice torture against you.
Even if that were true, it would be like saying the law permits me to walk up to you and shoot you dead, with the caveat that the the police are then free to arrest me and imprison me for the rest of my life.
Australia is only the worst CO2 emitter per capita. The US still reigns supreme in absolute terms.
Instead of wisely shaking your head and opining that it's just human nature for the EU to do this, try finding some actual evidence for your assertions. Show me some evidence that Europeans are obsessed with lowering their oil prices (yes, they are a lot higher in Europe, but they always have been, and people don't drive as much as in the US). Look at the sums and estimate how much the EU might save in lower oil prices (and note that this is unlikely to happen under your scenario since the US hasn't ratified Kyoto) compared with how much they they will lose in complying with Kyoto. It would not be a rational economic decision in this sense. Try this on for size instead: perhaps they honestly believe in anthropogenic greenhouse. Perhaps they honestly believe that Kyoto, with all its faults, is better than doing nothing. Perhaps they honestly believe that "protecting their own interests" involves mitigating global warming.
What it comes down to is that if you spend enough money, you can get a scientist to say whatever you like - which kind of destroys the credibility of science in general...
It doesn't come down to that at all, except in your mind, because in general it is not true. Do you actually know anything about science? Ever done it yourself? I do and I have, respectively, and this does not accord with my experience.
Oh, I hope you're trolling. Geocentric cosmologies were abandoned well over a century before the American Revolution even occured, so they are hardly evidence that Europeans are less rigorous thinkers than Americans. If "Science has ... become a means to gain political power", where are all the scientists running countries? And please, WHAT is with Americans and conspiracy theories? According to you, everyone else in the world is sitting around obsessing about why Americans have cheap gas and are prepared to massively distort their economies in order to force you to use less. Here's a clue: we really, really don't care that much. I know that I myself can sometimes go for days - yes, days! - without hatching some plot to bring the United States to its knees.
No, because if you believe that "another being" created the universe, then you aren't agnostic. I can just about buy that there might be agnostics or atheists who believe in intelligent design, but by definition they can't believe in a being that created the universe.
Good question! There are a few examples that spring to mind - probably most notably after WWI, Germany, Turkey and the successor states of Austria-Hungary were not occupied by the victors for any significant length of time. In fact, I'm not sure they were occupied at all (but I'm a bit fuzzy on that) - of course, they agreed to an armistice just before they were actually conquered (as opposed to staring defeat in the face). You could also point to more recent American precedents - like the invasion of Panama in 1989: they installed a friendly government and got out quickly. Even Rome would do this sometimes: in places like Armenia that they didn't think it worth trying to control themselves, they would install a client king to do their bidding. Most wars these days are fought over pretty limited aims, so outright wars of conquest are relatively rare; the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was a notable exception. But you are probably right, over the longer term.
Yeah, that would be because it was in the post you responded to.
Yeah but the invasion of Afghanistan was at the end of 2001, ie more than two years ago :P
Ahh, that site takes me back! I used to be the webmaster of the host site; I inadvertantly tipped off the head of the physics department about it (who didn't even know what "the world wide web" was, let alone that we had a website - to be fair, this was 1995 or 1996). He thought it was glorifying nuclear weapons and I had to tell the maintainer to shut it down. How shortsighted - it's thrived since then and is a great resource for information; it would have been a great asset to attract traffic to the departmental site.
References? How could there be so many deaths - are the use of nukes assumed? If so, surely that's a worst case scenario, not a likely one.
He didn't delay funding so much as kept changing the requirements, ie insisting that the Me262 be able to carry bombs, which set the project back a year or two. But yes, big mistake!
Their WHAT?
Heh, well, I am an historian :) One of my interests is future-war fiction and its effects on the perception of war, in particular fiction about aerial bombing in the first half of the 20th century (H.G. Wells' The War in the Air (1908) being a good example). Which is why I don't dispute your general point - I'm just saying (and I don't think you disagree) that the influence of Verne (or any sf writer) does not depend on him predicting the exact details. On the other hand, it is easy to exaggerate such influence - sure, the first nuclear submarine was named Nautilus in Verne's honour, but submarines were invented well before Verne wrote about them, and were developed into practical machines during the World Wars. It would have happened without him.
In terms of generalities, yes, Verne was an inspiration to some of the pioneers. Just don't go looking to hard for specific examples.
Secondly, and more seriously, the UN hardly ever commands US troops, certainly not in any substantial numbers. Eg UNPROFOR in Bosnia had around 700 US troops, out of around 38000 total. And when there are substantial US forces, there's usually a US commander, eg UNMIH in Haiti a decade ago. The only war ever fought by the UN (as opposed to with UN approval) was the Korean War, with Douglas Macarthur in command. Any time US soldiers are fighting, you can be sure they are doing so under US command. In fact, I don't think it's true to say that the UN is dragging the US into wars it doesn't want to fight either. Certainly not any of the cases you mention ...
He's an MD, not a PhD (much less a PhD in climatology), and the fact that you would change your mind about any scientific issue after reading a novel (no matter how well referenced) is pretty scary. You might like to read this for some informed criticism of Crichton's book.
Wow! It's been so long since I've seen a slashdot thread end with "You're right ..." that I'm compelled to mark you as a friend.
Of course it does! Sokal set out to deceive the editors into publishing something they shouldn't have. He succeeded. Therefore their system is vulnerable to deception. I don't understand your point about entrapment legislation - the very reason we have laws is because we think someone is going to try to whatever the law prohibits, not because it never happens. Peer review provides some measure of protection against deception; Social Text has none, except the good sense of the editors.
There can be value in having a lower threshold. While some junk may get in (which then should be noticed by the readership) so could controversial, unorthodox, or unpopular ideas.
I'm not denying that there's no value in non-peer reviewed journals; not everything has to be peer-reviewed to be useful. But according to your OP, Social Text avoided peer review because the editors believed it to be "just a mechanism for protecting and extending current scientific orthodoxy". That's a rather stronger claim than just saying that having a forum for free debate is a good thing, even if a few bad apples might abuse that freedom. It's saying that peer review as a whole is a rotten system, and I'm saying that if the editors of Social Text still believe that their system is better overall, then they are idiots.
Who says it only fails when somebody is trying demonstrate that it doesn't work? What if somebody is trying to manipulate it for their own profit, or is just producing sloppy work? How are the editors going to distinguish between such articles and genuinely worthwhile ones? (They can't, is Sokal's point.) Science does not progress by taking people at their word, and nor do any humanities worth a damn. Peer review can be abused too, but it's considerably more robust than the alternatives. If Social Text is trying to make a point by discarding peer-review, then they're not making a very good one.
So in other words it was fine right up until the point where it failed. Do you think their system is less likely or more likely to be abused in this way than peer review is?
You're right, many of the contradictions can be explained this way. But not all. OK, so did God create man before or after he created the animals?
All relevant in that they teach us things about God, us and our relationship with him.
This is completely circular. You say one of the reasons you believe in God is the relevancy of the Bible, but when I point out sections that are completely irrelevant to modern life, you say they are relevent because they teach us about God. So in fact you could only have been impressed by the "relevancy" of the Bible if you assumed it was true in the first place.
The evidence I have seen suggests historical accuracy and there have been a great number of historians who agree.
No, there haven't, at least not in modern times. I'm a historian (well, a history grad-student-to-be), remember, so give me references. Here's one for you: Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). The author is a Christian but doesn't let that blind him to seeing the Bible as a historical document like any other. It depends on what you mean by "historical accuracy", I guess. I'm not saying that the history in the Bible is wholly made up, but it's also clearly far from wholly true.
Historians, lawyers and reporters who have examined the evidence to prove Christianity wrong have been converted by it.
Oh, that old chestnut. Plenty of people have examined the evidence to prove Christianity right and found it completely lacking. So what? How about we set aside what other people think and look at the evidence for ourselves?
I don't have a problem with those events.
Then I respectfully submit that you go back and reread the Bible's account of them in the light of logic, science and history. Because there is no evidence outside of the Bible to suggest that these events happened (or are even possible), and plenty of evidence to suggest that they did not. Chapter 4 of Ian Plimer, Telling Lies for God: Reason vs Creationism (Milsons Point: Random House Australia, 1994) brilliantly exposes the absurdities of Noah's Ark. It doesn't even begin to make logical sense - forget about all the science and history it contradicts. And there weren't even 600,000 people in all of Egypt at the time of Exodus, as far as we can tell - let alone were wandering around in the Sinai desert for 40 years, leaving no archeaological evidence behind. But ancient writers routined exaggerated or overestimated the sizes of armies and so forth, so historians are not too troubled by the 600,000 figure. You ought to be, though, if you think the Bible is inerrant.
They are only biased in the sense that they report from the point of view of how faithful to God the people are.
No, I said they were politically biased, and that is so, whatever else they may be. For example, Kings is probably based on court records, king lists, and the like, which served a political purpose. The power and wealth of Solomon is exagerated beyond all historical plausibility. And so on. It all suggests human authorship.
The New Testament manuscripts date from much closer to the time they were authored, were authored closer to the events described and occur in much greater numbers than any other historical document from the period.
This is plainly not true, unless (for example) you think that Julius Caesar didn't write an account of the Gallic wars. He was not only an eye
Quite probably, but that doesn't change the fact that the two meanings are now distinct. If I call George W. Bush "dumb", I'm not thinking to myself "hahaha Bush is like one of those people that can't talk". I'm thinking "hahaha Bush is stupid". You are being offended by a meaning that is not intended. There are better things to be offended at, IMHO.
Quite right - I assume that anyone who had ever approached Christianity with a critical, inquiring attitude - even if they ultimately concluded it was right - would have some tolerance for others who doubt it, rather than spout religious zealotry at them.
It's only good if I'm right. And if I'm right, then it would be good for everyone else to trust in that authority.
Fine, but how about demonstrating that authority rather than simply asserting it. If you are a physicist, then you ought to know the value of evidence.
I believe in the authority because of the self-consistency, the relevancy, the the self-evident truthfulness and the historical reliability of the Bible.
You've got to be joking. There are about a zillion places where the Bible contradicts itself. Whole chunks of the Bible are completely irrelevant to modern life (try Leviticus 15:19-30 on menstruation, for example, or all the advice on what to do about errant oxen at the end of Exodus 21). And if you think the Bible has been proven to be historically accurate - well, lucky you're not an historian then. Two of every species being preserved from a worldwide flood in Noah's ark? 600,000 Israelites wandering around the Sinai for 40 years? All the accounts of the kings and so forth are riddled with political and religous bias, just as one might expect from a historical document. It's just another historical source, no more authoritative than any other. In fact, less so.
Oh yes, nearly forgot: self-evident truthfulness! ROTFL. No, it's not self-evident. Really.
Given that Jesus is God, he condones that.
This is precisely what I was on about in my original post. If you want to convince a non-Christian of the truth of your argument that Jesus wasn't a pacifist, then you cannot assume "Jesus is God" as an initial premise - because I don't accept that as a premise. You'll need to argue it a different way. Is this really so difficult to understand?
I don't know why I did this either. But Google Calculator is very cool :)