Read the article again, and pay close attention to the context that the author used your excerpt in.
As far as the adults go, it's not a question of needing to be protected from it... Most adults are perfectly aware of where to go to get it if they want it.
The point that the article's author was making was simply that there was no discernible means of verifying age, and since most states in the US have laws on the books stipulating a legal age to obtain sexual material, failure to have limits in place to prevent minors from getting that stuff is illegal...
Personally, I believe there's a time and a place for everything, especially sexual material.
Answer me one thing though. What the heck does THAT have to do with someone being an Atheist or a Homosexual? Well, if the person being excused from a leadership position is homosexual, then the reasoning is pretty simple: a homosexual man, surrounded by young, malleable minds, is more likely to try to affect his interests onto his charges. Given the age of the kids in Scouting (all under 18), this is a Bad Thing for more reasons than one......including (but not limited to) statutory rape, even if the case could be made that the kid was a willing participant.[1] Barring homosexuals from leadership positions within the Scouting organization could be seen as "removing the person from temptation, thereby helping them".
For the atheist bit, I don't have an answer, aside from perhaps trying to teach people not to say one thing and practice another. We all know that that sort of behaviour can only lead to one dirty, dangerous thing: politics.
---- [1] "Statutory rape" doesn't care what the state of willingness is between participants if at least one of them is under a certain age. It's against the law, whether they both were interested in pursuing that close a relationship or not.
No, all you have to say is "I am Gay" or "I am an Athiest" and the BSA national organization will say "Hope you enjoy Hell, you're no longer allowed to be a troop leader, buh bye!"
It's not "making waves" or "trying to enforce your beliefs on other people" (as if you could teach someone to be gay, jesus) -- the BSA's stance is that merely being gay or non-Christian means you are not fit to lead children. No, I think the BSA is acting on the fact that there are people out there who have no problem acting on their sexual desires with children (pedophiles and/or members of NAMBLA come to mind), and limiting the child's exposure to men who pose the least amount of risk for the kids is the best solution they see. The real problem is that there are some who apparently "forget" about the child's well-being, instead imposing their own biases over others.
Scouting is to teach kids how to deal with Nature and the world in general. It's not supposed to be a sex-fest... I don't remember there ever being a sex-related merit badge, and there's a good reason for that.
Pity there's no alternatives to the BSA. There are, but you have to know where to look. If you can't find anything that suits your interest, start your own group. Others have.
...then it's much more than a regional problem, because I was an agnostic Scout as a child. The only time I prayed then was just before major exams.
Now, things are a bit different. I think people have become way too thin-skinned over some things, opting to be "hurt" over something that hasn't changed in decades. It's not like the BSA suddenly said, "Oh. By the way, effective this date, there will be no tolerance for _________." It's always been a "known" where the BSA stood on issues.
It's interesting, too, that the people that claim to be hurt the most by groups like the Boy Scouts of America claim to be the most open-minded. The truth is that they are more closed-minded than most neocons. Go figure.
He read it into the record when? When everyone was asleep?
My guess is that Kucinich wasn't doing it because he believed in it, so much as he's going to use the fact that he read them into the record in a future election bid. Mark my words... Politicians are, by definition, sneaky devils that cannot be trusted to do anything but lie, cheat, and steal.
Besides, why would impeaching Bush be "off the table"? If Bush really did violate laws, then of course he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Something tells me that you are more interested in arguing for the sake of enforcing the idea of your own correctness than for the sake of distilling potential truth from a group of opinions that just happens to include your own. FYI, that is very annoying, and is counter-productive to establishing your own credibility. Criticizing someone's post under the guise of AC is more annoying than listening to SCOX spout on about their rights to UNIX. If you have something important to say, say it. Don't hide under an AC.
Anyway, you are being short-sighted in your analysis of the relationship between MS, hardware OEMs, and customers. Shut up, step back, and place yourself in each of their shoes, focusing your attention on possible transgressions on the behalf of all parties. Then hopefully you'll understand what this article is about instead of dismissing everyone else's concerns outright. First, you have no idea what I know with regard to this whole matter, neither do you know my experiences with Microsoft and any OEMs. You have no clue why think what I do.
My opinions about Vista are just that: opinions. However, I've noticed that a vast majority of those complaining about how badly Vista "sucks" are trying to run it on systems that (contrary to anything that Marketing Droids spew to the contrary) Vista was never intended to run on.
The core argument behind the whole lawsuit issue (as I see it) is that even though Vista really needs a relatively "beefy" system to run half-way decent, many systems that barely let Vista load were blessed as "Vista compatible".
I honestly don't know of any desktop operating system that Microsoft has released as a "replacement" that did not require more resources than its predecessor. Vista requires more resources than XP, which required more than Win9x, which required more than Win3.1. People that have made their career testing operating systems should bloody-well know that by now. *I* am not surprised, so why are they?
SO. I think I'm quite aware what I'm talking about, thank you.
Your points, I'll accept. Personally, I don't pay any attention to the stickers on a system, but that doesn't mean that there aren't people who do.
In the case of OEM systems, one would think that part of the blame is on the PC manufacturer, because they should know how any OS performs on their hardware, so they can honestly deal with customer complaints.
If a system cannot handle an OS, the system should not ship with that OS pre-installed. It's as simple as that.
Nice try at trolling. Go back to school to learn to do it better.
If XP works for you, great. I have it on two systems at home, myself.
My point is that if you WANT to run Vista, don't try it on half-assed equipment. I bought my laptop knowing it had Vista, knowing I didn't have an option to have XP installed instead. Heck, the company I bought it from even suggested that I get more RAM if I was going to use Vista.
Please give me your address, so I can send you the bill. (Hey it's your idea; you can pay for it too.) (I'm not rich contrary to what you might believe.) I'm not rich, either. That's why I haven't gone out to buy XP to replace Vista.
So just as good = Requires way more resources to perform the same functions? "Just as good", as in "It works well if you have enough resources."
The people that usually piss and moan about how bad Vista is are trying to use Vista on hardware that Vista really wasn't designed to run on. Most people are aware that "minimum requirements" means "this is the least you must have to get it to run, but if you want it to run well, double everything, at the very least."
If you don't have enough resources for a certain level of performance, then use a better OS, like Linux.
I'm a Linux fan, but I use Win* sometimes. Why? Because I can, and it drives the Win-only people I work with NUTS when I tell them that I probably know Windows better than they do.
When I bought my laptop a year ago, it came with Vista pre-installed. At the time, there was no option to "downgrade" to XP, and there's no option now... I mean, I COULD go out and buy XP and install that, but I'm not paying for two OSs for this thing.
Everyone keeps going on about how Vista sucks. I think if they got off a piece-of-crap 256MB RAM/600MHz CPU system, move on to something half-way decent (my laptop has 2GB RAM, 256MB dedicated video RAM, Core 2 Duo 1.6GHz CPU), they would find that Vista is about as good as anything else to come out of Redmond, Washington.
I mean, how hard is it to look at the "minimum requirements" and aim for something higher than that?
Vista works fine for me. I've seen it blue-screen maybe three times, and even then, it was because I had just installed something the system didn't like. I took it off (or fixed the compatibility issue; Vista can run things in "XP mode" for compatibility), and there were no further problems.
I've long-held that the biggest problem with politicians is that they are too stupid to realize that it's *OKAY* to have a string of days when legislation is not passed. They seem to work on the premise that if they don't maintain a QUANTITY of bills passed, they aren't doing their job.
I'd pick QUALITY over QUANTITY with respect to legislation ANY day...
Wouldn't this bit of legislation be redundant in some manner, if one were able to use the 14th amendment as a basis of filing a suit against a state to protect one's rights, or would it be better to have a law further detailing the application of the 14th amendment?
The big issue I have with Skype is that even though I had my account configured to ignore anyone that wasn't in my address book, I STILL got random people popping in, wanting to talk. The last conversation I had on Skype before I removed it from my system went something like this:
Sharma: Hi! What are you doing? Me: Uhhh... Working. Who are you? Sharma: Nobody in particular. Me: I thought so much. (I shut off Skype and uninstall it at this point.)
It's a timing issue for me. I don't usually "happen" to be on the front page when comments open-up on an article, and it was a complete fluke that it happened to do so when I read the article......which is why I didn't lay claim to "frist post" in my original comment.:)
Major sports leagues (NFL, NBA, NHL, etc) have always been pretty strict about enforcing copyright and redistribution rights for their broadcasts. They even put up a big warning like the FBI warning shown at the start of movies. It is their property I suppose so that shouldn't be a big issue of contention. Actually, if you pay attention to the wording of the warning they reel-off, people aren't even allowed to talk about the game in any detail without prior written consent from the league-in-question. I wonder how many people that talk about the "big game" afterwards actually got permission first?
Your answers indicate a quick and simple dismissal of the questions that you clearly don't fully understand. I understand them quite well, thank you. Your questions are cookie-cutter from those that don't want to believe in God. They are really not so hard to answer, given perspective. I used to ask the same questions until I was in my mid-20s, when I actually set out to find answers that made sense. I asked questions from people of faith and people who were agnostic or atheists. After a few years, I made my decision, and I would encourage you to do the same: stop taking a position because others are telling you that God doesn't exist, and see for yourself. Find out why people believe what they do (honestly!), and see how it stacks up against what you learned in grade school.
Perhaps you are just trying to ignore the fact that it's entirely possible to come to a position of having faith in God without being a sheep?
- anonymous because i'm an atheist in america (prefer to avoid that to be known at work) Where do you work? A church? There isn't any place that I can imagine that your faith (or lack thereof) would really matter.
I'm not terribly impressed that you're AC, but let's go over a few points anyway...
Why would an omniscient god bother creating life? Before it creates the life it already knows exactly what it all will do - and how it'll be rewarded or punished.
I can't answer for God, but I would guess it's for the same reason that people have children, even though they know that the kids will be hell-raisers from the start. I have three boys of my own, and I knew that they wouldn't be angels all the time, before they were even born. I decided to have them anyway. Personally, I choose to dwell on the (relatively few) times when they do something right. It warms my heart. Maybe it does the same thing to God?
Why would all all-powerful, all-good, all knowing god allow the holocaust, witch hunts, misc genocides, plagues, etc? Before you say "philosophical problem of evil" note that the holocaust could have been prevented by just changing a few males to females in the womb (hitler, etc) - which would have robbed them of political power but not free will.
Ah. Well, "simply changing the sex of the person" would actually result in a different person, one way or the other, and thus change the dynamic of the situation that such an action was meant to prevent. Ask any parent if their children had to be taught to lie, cheat, or steal. You'll find that a vast majority (very close to all of them) spent most of their time teaching the children to do right. It may be that there were people that could have prevented such horrible events from happening in the first place, but they failed to "step up" to the task.
According to the bible, the christian god is a jealous god. Exactly what would an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present, all-creator god have to be jealous of?
Mankind has a habit of placing their faith in made-up gods instead of in the One True God. At the time that God described Himself as "jealous", consider what people were doing: making idols of gods, be they imagined or otherwise, and praying to them instead of Him.
Why would the father of all mankind favor one particular nation over others?
Likely because of the habits of their forefathers. That's just my guess, though.
According to the bible we were created in God's image. Ok, why would god need nostrils and toes?
Look in a mirror and ask yourself the same question. Why does your reflection have nostrils or toes? Is it not your image?
Why would an all-powerful and all-knowing god have his message put into a book that is so subject to interpretation. So subject in fact, that there are hundreds of christian denominations and congregations that all believe that all others are wrong. So subject in fact that it takes years of bible study at a university to be considered an authority on using the bible to answer some questions.
I think that a lot of this stems from the fact that most of the people making the doctrinal decisions do not consider the cultural ramifications of "back then" on what why things were done or said, and how it shaped that particular religion. (This applies to Judaism, Christianity, and most any religion, in one way or another.) From a Christian perspective, I know that many "denominations" come about because of disagreements on what certain passages mean or to whom they were written. Some think that a passage was intended to apply to all people in all ages, when it was actually meant only for the original recipients. Sometimes, it's the other way around.
Why would an all-good, loving god create childhood leukemia?
My opinion on this is that it is a natural result of the corruption of the human genome over time.
Why would an all-good, loving god torture the majority of people in the world that die unaware of the christian gospels to eternal torture? Especially when you consider that most people believe in whatever religious i
Ever thought that I may be an environmentalist because I'm not stupid enough to destroy what lets me and everything I love or like live? Or you prefer to find yourself an excuse to, despite being atheist, be a polluting, gas-wasting redneck? You're working on the assumption that I am a wasteful person, when I am not. Perhaps you're like Al Gore, who talks a lot about the environment, but actually is more wasteful and environmentally UNfriendly than George W. Bush? I do what I can to care for the environment around me. It's the least I can do as a responsible resident of this rock we call Earth.
You don't understand what a theory is about, and you don't seem to understand belief either. Oh? I know enough to know that the "Theory of Evolution" doesn't warrant the "theory" moniker, because it's a hypothesis, yet to be proven. I have never seen (or heard of) cases where a direct lineage from one species to another is proven. There are ideas floating around, based on the examples that are found, but there's no evidence that one species became another. It isn't reproducible, etc. (Read up on the scientific method, and you'll see what I mean.) From this Wikipedia article, the gist is this:
Define the question
Gather information and resources (observe)
Form hypothesis
Perform experiment and collect data
Analyze data
Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis
Publish results
Retest (frequently done by other scientists)
The problem with people so anxious to write off the (possible) existence of God is that they seek to make the evidence fit their views, instead of letting their views change in view of the evidence. (The same might be said for some, though not all, people of faith. I think it is as important for one to know why one holds a particular belief or opinion as it is to actually hold it.)
As for your statement that "faith" is a problem, think a little more about what "faith" is. Think about it the next time you go to sit-- will the chair hold you? How do you know? Is it because the chair held you the last time you sat down in it, or did you actually test it to ensure its stability? Are you assuming it will hold you? That, my friend, is "faith", even if it's in a chair.
And you are: 1. Mocking environmentalism; Environmentalist "atheists" beg for mocking, because their deity is the environment. (What is the "supreme being"? Mother Earth or Mother Nature, of course.) If they want to be taken seriously (by me, anyway), they should at least be consistent.
2. Thinking by hating a religion I hate the gullible fools that follow it (if anything, I hate the immoral atheists who created it to abuse their lambs); Being "religious" doesn't mean anything. Where one chooses to put one's faith is, and no, it's not the same thing. Though I may disagree with the doctrine of some religions, I don't consider them "gullible fools" unless they are Scientologists. After that, remember that believing in Evolution requires that one be worse at math than one thinks he is, and it also requires that one have more faith than the much-maligned Christian.
3. Disregarding that illogical and contradictory things don't need to be disproven, and that even if presented with a non-illogical and non-contradictory belief such as "flying green elephants no-one has ever seen", it's their task to prove, not mine to disprove. This sword cuts both ways. I've yet to see anyone prove to me that my faith is misguided, and having someone scream "blind fool!" at me does nothing to sway my faith.
I am a Christian, and that's fine. If you're not, that's fine too. I don't have to agree with you. You don't have to agree with me. The differences we have (and a willingness to discuss them civilly) are what keeps life "interesting".
I worked at a place once where the IT Director wanted to schedule downtime for the mainframe.
I said that the suggested date was not a good idea, because I was planning to backup the Internet that day.
I found out a couple days later that the Director went to my boss and wanted to know how long that was supposed to take, and could I do it on another day.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the article again, and pay close attention to the context that the author used your excerpt in.
As far as the adults go, it's not a question of needing to be protected from it... Most adults are perfectly aware of where to go to get it if they want it.
The point that the article's author was making was simply that there was no discernible means of verifying age, and since most states in the US have laws on the books stipulating a legal age to obtain sexual material, failure to have limits in place to prevent minors from getting that stuff is illegal...
Personally, I believe there's a time and a place for everything, especially sexual material.
For the atheist bit, I don't have an answer, aside from perhaps trying to teach people not to say one thing and practice another. We all know that that sort of behaviour can only lead to one dirty, dangerous thing: politics.
----
[1] "Statutory rape" doesn't care what the state of willingness is between participants if at least one of them is under a certain age. It's against the law, whether they both were interested in pursuing that close a relationship or not.
It's not "making waves" or "trying to enforce your beliefs on other people" (as if you could teach someone to be gay, jesus) -- the BSA's stance is that merely being gay or non-Christian means you are not fit to lead children. No, I think the BSA is acting on the fact that there are people out there who have no problem acting on their sexual desires with children (pedophiles and/or members of NAMBLA come to mind), and limiting the child's exposure to men who pose the least amount of risk for the kids is the best solution they see. The real problem is that there are some who apparently "forget" about the child's well-being, instead imposing their own biases over others.
Scouting is to teach kids how to deal with Nature and the world in general. It's not supposed to be a sex-fest... I don't remember there ever being a sex-related merit badge, and there's a good reason for that. Pity there's no alternatives to the BSA. There are, but you have to know where to look. If you can't find anything that suits your interest, start your own group. Others have.
...then it's much more than a regional problem, because I was an agnostic Scout as a child. The only time I prayed then was just before major exams.
Now, things are a bit different. I think people have become way too thin-skinned over some things, opting to be "hurt" over something that hasn't changed in decades. It's not like the BSA suddenly said, "Oh. By the way, effective this date, there will be no tolerance for _________." It's always been a "known" where the BSA stood on issues.
It's interesting, too, that the people that claim to be hurt the most by groups like the Boy Scouts of America claim to be the most open-minded. The truth is that they are more closed-minded than most neocons. Go figure.
He read it into the record when? When everyone was asleep?
My guess is that Kucinich wasn't doing it because he believed in it, so much as he's going to use the fact that he read them into the record in a future election bid. Mark my words... Politicians are, by definition, sneaky devils that cannot be trusted to do anything but lie, cheat, and steal.
Besides, why would impeaching Bush be "off the table"? If Bush really did violate laws, then of course he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
My opinions about Vista are just that: opinions. However, I've noticed that a vast majority of those complaining about how badly Vista "sucks" are trying to run it on systems that (contrary to anything that Marketing Droids spew to the contrary) Vista was never intended to run on.
The core argument behind the whole lawsuit issue (as I see it) is that even though Vista really needs a relatively "beefy" system to run half-way decent, many systems that barely let Vista load were blessed as "Vista compatible".
I honestly don't know of any desktop operating system that Microsoft has released as a "replacement" that did not require more resources than its predecessor. Vista requires more resources than XP, which required more than Win9x, which required more than Win3.1. People that have made their career testing operating systems should bloody-well know that by now. *I* am not surprised, so why are they?
SO. I think I'm quite aware what I'm talking about, thank you.
Your points, I'll accept. Personally, I don't pay any attention to the stickers on a system, but that doesn't mean that there aren't people who do.
In the case of OEM systems, one would think that part of the blame is on the PC manufacturer, because they should know how any OS performs on their hardware, so they can honestly deal with customer complaints.
If a system cannot handle an OS, the system should not ship with that OS pre-installed. It's as simple as that.
If XP works for you, great. I have it on two systems at home, myself.
My point is that if you WANT to run Vista, don't try it on half-assed equipment. I bought my laptop knowing it had Vista, knowing I didn't have an option to have XP installed instead. Heck, the company I bought it from even suggested that I get more RAM if I was going to use Vista. Please give me your address, so I can send you the bill. (Hey it's your idea; you can pay for it too.) (I'm not rich contrary to what you might believe.) I'm not rich, either. That's why I haven't gone out to buy XP to replace Vista.
The people that usually piss and moan about how bad Vista is are trying to use Vista on hardware that Vista really wasn't designed to run on. Most people are aware that "minimum requirements" means "this is the least you must have to get it to run, but if you want it to run well, double everything, at the very least."
If you don't have enough resources for a certain level of performance, then use a better OS, like Linux.
I'm a Linux fan, but I use Win* sometimes. Why? Because I can, and it drives the Win-only people I work with NUTS when I tell them that I probably know Windows better than they do.
When I bought my laptop a year ago, it came with Vista pre-installed. At the time, there was no option to "downgrade" to XP, and there's no option now... I mean, I COULD go out and buy XP and install that, but I'm not paying for two OSs for this thing.
Everyone keeps going on about how Vista sucks. I think if they got off a piece-of-crap 256MB RAM/600MHz CPU system, move on to something half-way decent (my laptop has 2GB RAM, 256MB dedicated video RAM, Core 2 Duo 1.6GHz CPU), they would find that Vista is about as good as anything else to come out of Redmond, Washington.
I mean, how hard is it to look at the "minimum requirements" and aim for something higher than that?
Vista works fine for me. I've seen it blue-screen maybe three times, and even then, it was because I had just installed something the system didn't like. I took it off (or fixed the compatibility issue; Vista can run things in "XP mode" for compatibility), and there were no further problems.
I've long-held that the biggest problem with politicians is that they are too stupid to realize that it's *OKAY* to have a string of days when legislation is not passed. They seem to work on the premise that if they don't maintain a QUANTITY of bills passed, they aren't doing their job.
I'd pick QUALITY over QUANTITY with respect to legislation ANY day...
Thanks for the clarification.
Wouldn't this bit of legislation be redundant in some manner, if one were able to use the 14th amendment as a basis of filing a suit against a state to protect one's rights, or would it be better to have a law further detailing the application of the 14th amendment?
The only thing IE is good for is downloading FireFox.
Me: Uhhh... Working. Who are you?
Sharma: Nobody in particular.
Me: I thought so much. (I shut off Skype and uninstall it at this point.)
It's a timing issue for me. I don't usually "happen" to be on the front page when comments open-up on an article, and it was a complete fluke that it happened to do so when I read the article... ...which is why I didn't lay claim to "frist post" in my original comment. :)
Heh. Frist Post! Who knew? :D
It might be my imagination, but GTalk (through the GMail interface) allows one to open an AIM connection. I wonder if it's related to this?
You COULD take the PC and put the OS of choice on it...
Perhaps you are just trying to ignore the fact that it's entirely possible to come to a position of having faith in God without being a sheep? - anonymous because i'm an atheist in america (prefer to avoid that to be known at work) Where do you work? A church? There isn't any place that I can imagine that your faith (or lack thereof) would really matter.
Why would an omniscient god bother creating life? Before it creates the life it already knows exactly what it all will do - and how it'll be rewarded or punished.
I can't answer for God, but I would guess it's for the same reason that people have children, even though they know that the kids will be hell-raisers from the start. I have three boys of my own, and I knew that they wouldn't be angels all the time, before they were even born. I decided to have them anyway. Personally, I choose to dwell on the (relatively few) times when they do something right. It warms my heart. Maybe it does the same thing to God?
Why would all all-powerful, all-good, all knowing god allow the holocaust, witch hunts, misc genocides, plagues, etc? Before you say "philosophical problem of evil" note that the holocaust could have been prevented by just changing a few males to females in the womb (hitler, etc) - which would have robbed them of political power but not free will.
Ah. Well, "simply changing the sex of the person" would actually result in a different person, one way or the other, and thus change the dynamic of the situation that such an action was meant to prevent. Ask any parent if their children had to be taught to lie, cheat, or steal. You'll find that a vast majority (very close to all of them) spent most of their time teaching the children to do right. It may be that there were people that could have prevented such horrible events from happening in the first place, but they failed to "step up" to the task.
According to the bible, the christian god is a jealous god. Exactly what would an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present, all-creator god have to be jealous of?
Mankind has a habit of placing their faith in made-up gods instead of in the One True God. At the time that God described Himself as "jealous", consider what people were doing: making idols of gods, be they imagined or otherwise, and praying to them instead of Him.
Why would the father of all mankind favor one particular nation over others?
Likely because of the habits of their forefathers. That's just my guess, though.
According to the bible we were created in God's image. Ok, why would god need nostrils and toes?
Look in a mirror and ask yourself the same question. Why does your reflection have nostrils or toes? Is it not your image?
Why would an all-powerful and all-knowing god have his message put into a book that is so subject to interpretation. So subject in fact, that there are hundreds of christian denominations and congregations that all believe that all others are wrong. So subject in fact that it takes years of bible study at a university to be considered an authority on using the bible to answer some questions.
I think that a lot of this stems from the fact that most of the people making the doctrinal decisions do not consider the cultural ramifications of "back then" on what why things were done or said, and how it shaped that particular religion. (This applies to Judaism, Christianity, and most any religion, in one way or another.) From a Christian perspective, I know that many "denominations" come about because of disagreements on what certain passages mean or to whom they were written. Some think that a passage was intended to apply to all people in all ages, when it was actually meant only for the original recipients. Sometimes, it's the other way around.
Why would an all-good, loving god create childhood leukemia?
My opinion on this is that it is a natural result of the corruption of the human genome over time.
Why would an all-good, loving god torture the majority of people in the world that die unaware of the christian gospels to eternal torture? Especially when you consider that most people believe in whatever religious i
The problem with people so anxious to write off the (possible) existence of God is that they seek to make the evidence fit their views, instead of letting their views change in view of the evidence. (The same might be said for some, though not all, people of faith. I think it is as important for one to know why one holds a particular belief or opinion as it is to actually hold it.)
As for your statement that "faith" is a problem, think a little more about what "faith" is. Think about it the next time you go to sit-- will the chair hold you? How do you know? Is it because the chair held you the last time you sat down in it, or did you actually test it to ensure its stability? Are you assuming it will hold you? That, my friend, is "faith", even if it's in a chair.
1. Mocking environmentalism; Environmentalist "atheists" beg for mocking, because their deity is the environment. (What is the "supreme being"? Mother Earth or Mother Nature, of course.) If they want to be taken seriously (by me, anyway), they should at least be consistent. 2. Thinking by hating a religion I hate the gullible fools that follow it (if anything, I hate the immoral atheists who created it to abuse their lambs); Being "religious" doesn't mean anything. Where one chooses to put one's faith is, and no, it's not the same thing. Though I may disagree with the doctrine of some religions, I don't consider them "gullible fools" unless they are Scientologists. After that, remember that believing in Evolution requires that one be worse at math than one thinks he is, and it also requires that one have more faith than the much-maligned Christian. 3. Disregarding that illogical and contradictory things don't need to be disproven, and that even if presented with a non-illogical and non-contradictory belief such as "flying green elephants no-one has ever seen", it's their task to prove, not mine to disprove. This sword cuts both ways. I've yet to see anyone prove to me that my faith is misguided, and having someone scream "blind fool!" at me does nothing to sway my faith.
I am a Christian, and that's fine. If you're not, that's fine too. I don't have to agree with you. You don't have to agree with me. The differences we have (and a willingness to discuss them civilly) are what keeps life "interesting".
I worked at a place once where the IT Director wanted to schedule downtime for the mainframe.
I said that the suggested date was not a good idea, because I was planning to backup the Internet that day.
I found out a couple days later that the Director went to my boss and wanted to know how long that was supposed to take, and could I do it on another day.