You can make whatever conclusions you want. The Holy Spirit - your conscience - tells you what is right and wrong. If you choose to do wrong, you risk judgment from God. Their conscience warned them that what they were doing was wrong, whether there was a written law yet or not. They chose to do wrong. Refer to Romans 2:11-16.
Christianity would be difficult to teach in the public school system. People are far too defensive. How do you pick and choose which parts to teach in the limited time frame you would have? The stories you mention are good, but have little to do with Christianity. Even in the studies of other cultures and religions in the school system, you are barely scratching their surface. The history of Judaism and Christianity also covers thousands of years. There is much to choose from.
I don't remember encountering any teachers which taught Greek or Roman mythology as true, any more than American Indian legends or Islam. In general, they were at least respectful. To teach Christianity as anything less than true would offend many. The non-Christian teachers would be derisive (in a similar fashion to many of the comments on this article) and the Christian teachers would be walking on egg shells worrying they were going to get sued if they showed any passion for the subject at all. After all, if you teach the bare essentials of Christianity, you are teaching the gospel message and will almost certainly be accused of proselytizing. Yet if you leave those items out, you have completely gutted what Christianity is all about.
As an aside, Job is an interesting character study, and provides some interesting glimpses into heaven and the interaction between God and Satan. Heinlein's Job: A Comedy of Justice is an interesting read as well.
Omission correction - all children around the world who are not old enough to have reached the "Age of Accountability" where God holds you accountable for the actions you take are also taken in the rapture, regardless of the belief system they live under. This is not a specific age, although if I remember correctly it is in the series.
All who have accepted Jesus Christ as their Saviour are raptured at the start of the 13 book series (not counting the 3 book prequel), This rapture event leaves the world in an incredible mess (at least where it was daylight when the rapture occurred due to traffic accidents, plane crashes and the like. The areas where it was night fare slightly better. Parts of the world where Christianity is not prevalent do even better at surviving the rapture event intact. The only people who go to hell at that point are those who die in the ensuing mess and haven't accepted Christ as their Saviour.
The 144,000 are members of the Jewish tribes (12,000 each) which are supernaturally protected from the various judgments of God. They become missionaries to attempt to spread the news of the Messiah to the rest of Israel. This will happen later.
The great white throne judgment - Judgment Day - doesn't happen till after the Millennium is over.
Unfortunately, there are many people attending Christian churches which have not accepted Christ as Saviour. They won't go in the rapture and will be Left Behind - hence the name of the series. Many will make the choice they should have made before hand. But many hearts will be hardened and they will never make the choice. The world doesn't descend completely into barbaric chaos, but God does pour out His judgment on those Left Behind for whatever reason. Chaos yes. Possibly isolated areas which are barbaric for a time. But not a complete loss.
You could read the series, or just read Daniel and Revelation and a few other books of the Bible. The series is fiction, but the prophetical portions of the series follow the Bible closely.
Really? I had one of my Jr. High aged kids read your post and she went away shaking her head.
There have been problems in our world for all of recorded history in a diverse group of civilizations. The United States was really a reasonably decent place to live when I was growing up. People left their doors unlocked in large swaths of the country. Nobody was afraid to stop and help someone parked along the road. Neighbors helped each other out. Kids drove to school in our part of the country with loaded rifles in the cab windows of their trucks. Taking knives into the schools was a frequent occurrence and nobody thought anything about it. Drugs and alcohol abuse still occurred, but it wasn't as prevalent as it is today. I would leave home on my bike at 8 and spend the day at miniature golf and parents didn't think a thing about it because they knew I would be OK.
I won't claim that the lower position that religion has everywhere today (from school to parent's attitudes) is the sole cause of things being worse today. There are probably many reasons. Some of the drop in importance of religion has been brought on by religion itself. A lot of the drop is due to the fact that the generation of the 60's and 70's largely checked out of the social system, and their kids are the ones paying the price. But I am quite sure that taking all religion out of the world would not make the world a better place. The same crazy people who wrap themselves in the name of a religion when doing their evil deeds would still be doing their evil deeds. They'd just wrap a different cloak around it. Unfortunately the reverse is not true when large bodies of people are concerned. Good does need a support system. Perhaps it shouldn't, but it does. It is easy for an evil person to want to keep stirring up mischief or doing evil. It is hard for a good person to keep doing good when the amount of good that needs done seems so vast. That's where the support system of religion helps. You no longer feel that you are alone in trying to make a difference.
When natural disasters strike, many respond. Yet it is frequently organized religious groups that are prepared to make the most difference the quickest. Governments may decide to step in, and when they do, they can overwhelm the area compared to what religious organizations can do. But for all the disasters that occur around the world, it is frequently the religious groups that shoulder the burden. The more local the disaster, the bigger the help of strictly religious groups. Take the Salvation Army as an example. If that body was removed, would the world be better off or worse off?
I read a long debate a while back on objective reality versus subjective reality. It is difficult to prove God exists to someone whose mind is closed. For those who chose to have an open mind, it is easy to see His hand at work all around the world. Until you let Him change your heart, you will never really see the change belief in God brings.
Mythology examines a religion (although usually just Greek or sometimes Roman of the many forms it has taken over the years). Mythology just isn't followed much anymore and never caught on particularly in the United States. It's also OK to explore Islam and Hinduism and Native American beliefs in school to name a few. It's even OK to study the persecution of the Mormons (at least out here in the West and I should say LDS, I suppose, so as not to offend them). The only time the school board or parents or atheists or agnostics get offended is when Christianity is discussed yet issues involving Christianity have been part of history just as much as these other religions and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.
As a Christian, I don't mind if cultures and world religions are studied in school. If it will help our kids understand and perhaps deal better with their generation of peers in other parts of the world, that's OK. It only offends most Christians that one particular religion (Christianity) is singled out as something that cannot be discussed, even though it is likely to have a greater influence on people in the United States (whether you agree with it or not) than any of the others that are required in elementary school and junior high studies - perhaps more than all of them combined. If you don't want Christianity taught, then don't give special exemptions to the rest of the world's religions in the name of cultural studies. There are a great many kids out there who are just as unaware of the culture of Christianity. As I mentioned, they're more likely to run across Christians in America than a Native American (although I do work with some Native Americans myself). Shouldn't they be familiar with what makes Christians tick?
Christianity should not be in video games however. There's that whole be separate from the world thing that Christ tried to teach and I really don't think He would want some game developer's idea of Christianity to be some aside in a mass produced game filled with mahem and destruction. It is truly unlikely to bear any semblance to His church. Note that I was careful to delineate His church and not name a particular organization or denomination. I really don't think He's particularly happy with how far down His church has fallen since He started it - our fault and not His. If the power of the early church was present in every city where a Christian church was founded, you'd probably feel a bit differently than you do.
That isn't to say that religion isn't present in games. There are many that have been mentioned here that have direct religious overtones. Just don't confuse them with Christianity even if they use that label.
Could Christianity be successfully incorporated in a video game? Absolutely. I seem to remember Indiana Jones had a very popular franchise going where several movies had direct Christian/Jewish themes. If you didn't know the Christian or Jewish culture, you ended up getting killed for your lack of cultural diversity.
There was a brief (read days) interval very recently when the Fedora development group was thinking about allowing installation of packages without root access. They decided against it. On F11, which I am running now, an attempt to install a package from the repository responds with "You need to be root to perform this command." To my recollection, it has always been thus.
I suspect there was a sarcasm tag missing there someplace, but I'll answer anyway.
You can install SETI and not really know if your computer's help actually mattered should extra-terrestrial life be discovered. Of course if it isn't, then you know it didn't matter if you installed it or not.
I wish that I could say that you could go into any church and immediately know that God was. Sadly that isn't the case.
There are some denominations where His work today is more evident than others, but it is still difficult to make general recommendations that are always safe. You may have to attend many different churches many times to sense His presence or to see a visible manifestation of His work with your own eyes or to hear something with your own ears that couldn't occur without a higher power at work. But the difference between going to church and SETI is that if you persist, you will notice Him work eventually.
Whether you believe what you see or hear will depend on whether you get to know the people there, their problems, and their struggles so you will know that a miracle has happened or whether you just pick random churches and visit for a short time as an outsider (much like the SETI software does) so that if anything special happens you will be able to dismiss it as a production or something that was faked. Of course God could shock you by giving someone a word of knowledge that nobody else could possibly know and have them share that with you - that happened to me once. But I guarantee that something will happen at some point if you actually make the repeated effort. It doesn't have to be at a church, of course. But if you're looking for God, that's a good place to start looking.
Don't expect the people to all be enormously wonderful and kind and perfect. We're all Mark-I humans just like everyone else. Good luck with your quest.
Excellent! Keep up the good work!!! If the people running the big apps like konq and kmail were as responsive to their bugs as you are to yours, Microsoft would be history....
To be fair, the quote is "Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh." (at least in the KJV translation). It says nothing about months or years although it might be an idiom that implied the same thing to that culture. Having said that, His point is to be prepared at all times because even if He doesn't choose to come back right now, the reader could still die right now which might be just as bad for a particular individual as if He returned for all His church.
I would agree that picking and promoting a specific year generally does a disservice to Christianity and to the world in general. I do believe that most, if not all, prophecy relating to Christ's return for His church (whenever that happens to occur) is complete. After that there is at least one event which must occur that starts the rest of the clock ticking on the fulfillment of the rest of the Bible's prophecy.
Now that I've seen the right click menu, I won't have that problem again. But as a brand new user, I went through this thought process... I want to try to signal a process. There's that big kill button at the top that is insensitive. There's also way too many tasks to find what I want easily, so I start typing in that handy search box. I search for a process, knotes in this case. It finds the process but of course the kill button is still not sensitive. Aha! I think. I must highlight the process. If I click on the process the kill process button is made sensitive so I hit it and get the dialog. On that dialog there is only the option to kill the process.
I'll accept as a given that the button does say "Kill" and not "Signal", and that's what the dialog gives as its option. Yet if you need to send some other signal, and don't think of right clicking, you're just going to go "Bah! Yet another attempt to replace the command line with a GUI that doesn't do everything I need!" and use htop or the like where sending a signal is right there in the menu. It is very nice that ksysguard and this use the same menu (and perhaps the same complete widget) to do the heavy lifting as I note the options are the same in its process table as the one on the desktop. Of course if a system is thrashing, I'm probably going to be using a command line on a normal console to try to have the best and quickest chance to kill the offending task that is probably using up all available memory instead of trying to bring up any GUI that will be competing for whatever resource is scarce.
I wasn't aware it existed, but tried it and it seemed modestly useful.
It looked like it had most of the needed options. I almost always am working in a konsole window though, so htop is what I usually use.
I would think an option in the kill process screen to select the signal to send would be the one item I missed most. I usually prefer to send SIGHUP or SIGTERM to allow a graceful shutdown rather than kill. This is particularly useful for the ever present mysqld daemon that starts for things like Amarok or kopete or whatever it is that keep NFS shares mounted long after the user has signed off. artsd is also frequently one that needs to get shot.
Don't forget tactical nuclear, biological and chemical weapons (partially depending on wind speed and direction), really big conventional ordnance however delivered, and of course darts and dancing!
See if you can find someone with Santa Cruz Operation OpenServer or similar. I know there is much hate and loathing on Slashdot with them and when applied to management it is completely deserved. But they make a X based Unix distro which runs very well on old small low horsepower hardware. Or at least they used to. Back in the dark ages. Course you might not be able to find anyone with the license keys anymore. Still - it'd come closer to running on the old stuff than most other choices if you want something full featured.
My 82 year old mother has been running it for years on a P90 and refuses to change. She'll probably still be running it when she dies. Runs solid as a rock and she refuses to connect to the Internet as well so patches aren't a concern.
That would be my primary concern with many comments saying run old version X (including this one). The old stuff frequently has holes that have been patched. If you don't run any world services and never do anything as root with real world access, you might limit the risk. The risk won't be 0 though.
I'm a creationist. I happen to believe that the vast majority of the creation stories propagated by the church are flat out of line with what the Bible says. The young earth stuff is particularly offensive to me. I believe that what the Bible says in Gen. 1:1 is fundamental. In the beginning, God created... To summarize quickly the rest of my beliefs, I believe that the rest of Gen. 1 talks about the restoration of the earth to a second habitable state after a catastrophe brought about by Satan's uprising against God. Whether this was relatively local or global is less clear. Certainly the flood described in Noah's time was most certainly local and quite possibly when the Black Sea was formed. The Bible is largely silent about what went on in the intervening several billion years.
To get back on point, I've been in church services where people that I know have been sick - sometimes for long periods - have been healed, visibly. These are people who had seen doctors and in some cases were in wheelchairs for extended periods of time. The fact that God is working in the world today is dismissed as not reproducible by the skeptics even when some have X-Rays of lungs to show previously existing cancer that is now clear on the next X-Ray or other documentation to prove their previous state. Those who choose to believe what their eyes tell them or their ears hear, do so. Those who refuse to believe, do not. I'm not saying that everything you see promoted as a miracle is one. But I have been present when they do happen. When enough things like that happen, you realize that the Bible is true. That doesn't make all Biblical interpretations true, but the central message of the Bible is one of salvation by the blood of Christ. It isn't one of creation vs. evolution.
The healing events I've seen are not what would happen to these people naturally, and for people to dismiss them shows just as much lack of scientific thinking as most creationists are blamed for. God doesn't have to reproduce something to acknowledge that it happened. To use the excuse that because it isn't reproducible it isn't significant is lame and consciously omits data points that should be considered even if God doesn't fit into the scientific experiment category.
It would be no different on the flip side of the coin. The skeptics would say that over the 1,150 years the data or pictures were faked. (Look at how the gospels and rest of the Bible are treated today.) The believers would say it was all true even though they hadn't seen it with their own eyes. Neither group is particularly better than the other in this regard and it would still take faith on the part of the people in the middle in choosing either side.
Sorry, the buffalo comment was not necessary - but was in the slashdot tradition and just as wild as the other comments directed towards us creationists around it.
The fact remains that after 40,000 generations, what the scientist has is a marginally more efficient strain of E. coli than he started with. He can track all the mutations to see how it has changed. He can see how and when those changes occurred - which is indeed fascinating, but at the end, he still has an E. coli. His very statements were that the later changes were not as drastic as the first which leads away from an evolution argument.
If he is making other claims, then the linked abstracts don't make that clear.
I'd say it was a great study in the work of natural selection, but a weak study in evolution until it crosses the border into some other definitely recognizable bacteria. High school biology was a long time ago - I let my wife handle the micro-biology today - she has a degree in it.
Not at all. We will simply say that it is still e-coli. Marginally different, yes, but still e-coli. When he turns it into a buffalo, he'll have something.
Provide an on-line pass with the primary subscription to your local paper. Once you sign on to your local paper's internet site, you receive a cookie that permits you to access any other on-line content of the consortium for the day.
The papers get a win by increasing local readership and circulation. You don't have to worry about micro-payments. If you don't subscribe to the local paper, you're left with micro-payments to access major papers content.
All of my Linux servers are also actively used as Linux desktops. I'm not a server CLI purist and there's nothing mission critical on them. Worse, I run a Linux distro that I get to upgrade every 6 months or so. Fortunately, a live upgrade has worked fine for several releases now.
I know the servers would be faster if my kids weren't playing CPU intensive games on them, but the delay for web users isn't that much even when running Extreme Tux Racer. Everyone complains about CPU utilization rates - do something about it! Still, zippier X will be appreciated (once everything gets stable again).
Although you probably won't believe me when I say it, religion disgusts me today as well. But my faith isn't based on what the religious organizations and individuals in the world are doing today. My faith isn't based on the text of the Bible. My faith is based on what I have observed with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. It is because of those things that I accept that the Bible is what it claims to be and that God exists and is working in ways the Bible said He would.
You can't see someone you know who has just been to the doctor and heard they have no cure for their disease, that they can treat it with medicines that the body will eventually build up a resistance to and then have nothing else to try go up to the altar, be prayed for, and come back visibly OK (and stay at that level of health) and not believe. You can't hear testimony of someone who is in the hospital pray for an orderly who had a short leg and have the leg lengthened and not believe. Or maybe you can. Or maybe you just are certain to never be any place where something like that could challenge your lack of belief system. I know that for various reasons, there are people who are prayed for who aren't healed. But don't discount those that are.
That doesn't mean I understand why God made all the rules He did. That doesn't mean I understand why He has the expectations of us that He does. I don't think we've done a very good job of meeting His expectations as Christians (and I include myself in there) but I'm trying to do better and not be one of those judgmental people full of wrath and hate that you seem to have experienced in your life. The core of Christianity isn't fear (or at least it isn't supposed to be.) The core of Christianity is love. It is the core of God. But it doesn't mean He sets aside His righteousness and holiness and changes just because the norms of the world have changed. That isn't His nature.
I've seen enough happen in my life to know that there's something supernatural out there. It's bigger than me. The Bible describes what I have experienced closer than any other book. So I try to live the way it says I should and forgo the things it says I should forgo because that's how that bigger than me God told me to live. I make mistakes just like every other human being out there and depend on his grace and mercy to understand and try to live better the next day. I'm sorry you've shut yourself off from Him. Just keep your own eyes and ears open.
I apologize. It was phrased rather provocatively, so I made a false assumption.
To clarify some points. I believe that the original Word was inspired. I feel that it has been carried down through the ages remarkably intact considering the various distribution media. That is not to say it has been transmitted or translated perfectly due to the fragile media, but it is pretty self consistent considering all it has been through and the long time period the authors covered. As archeology uncovers more in the land of Israel and surrounding areas, there is more and more confirmation of its veracity. In the important points it tries to convey, there are no translation problems that are relevant. The story of creation isn't one of the important points that required or got much space.
Your third paragraph is only true if you are a young earth creationist. I am not of that camp. I believe that Gen. 1:1 is equivalent to the astrophysicists Big Bang. My interpretation of other portions of the Bible is that there was a period where Satan was in control of this planet. At some point he tried to wage war with God and ascend to take God's place. God wiped out his earthly kingdom resulting in the chaotic state described next in Genesis 1. The remainder of Genesis 1 describes the restoration of Earth to a second habitable state. That is the only way I can make the rest of the Bible passages fit consistently.
There is nothing in the Bible that talks about what went on in biology from the Big Bang to the point where Earth (or at the least the portion of earth where Satan had his kingdom) was destroyed. It is not the purpose of the Bible. By the way, the apparent break in the human fossil record seems to match approximately with when Satan's kingdom on Earth ended and modern man was recreated. There were several branches in existence until recently (geologically speaking). Then, there was just one and the transition seemed to happen rather suddenly again in a geologic time references.
Regardless of the time period looked at, a transition from amoeba to human with all the other branching variations in between goes against the way that nature seems to work. Random chance is not enough for those leaps. For me, the common shared DNA of most of us simply points to an efficient God that created a basic group of things to inhabit this particular planet with its characteristic gravity, atmosphere, foodstuffs, and the like and it doesn't surprise me that much is shared.
From a personal point of view, I find evolution to be a stretch. I'm OK with slight changes over a long enough time via what is possible by natural selection. The strongest and biggest generally are what survive to breed. Those that blend in best or have the most adaptable dynamic pattern matching abilities also have an advantage in survival and passing on their traits. If you compare the horse of today to the horse of fossil years, the former is still recognizable as a horse. Insects that change colors better and thus survive are still the same basic critter and could interbreed to create more. Scientists may choose to say that it is a new species, but it really doesn't appear to me to be genetically changed in any principal way. On the other hand, when trying to mix two disparate species, the results are often not able to have offspring. Having two such mixes occur the same way with one ending up male and the other female, and then having them find each other, and then having them also able to reproduce and carry it on beyond the first generation are even more of a wild stretch. It's so wide in my book that when most people question Bible truths as being far between that I am amused. Regardless, I don't generally get into the scientific aspects of the debate. I simply point out that by my interpretation of the Bible there is a time period when it could have happened while still maintaining Biblical consistency.
I don't for a minute believe that God put all the fossils and other scientific processes in place as a means of tricking humanity. Tha
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You can make whatever conclusions you want. The Holy Spirit - your conscience - tells you what is right and wrong. If you choose to do wrong, you risk judgment from God. Their conscience warned them that what they were doing was wrong, whether there was a written law yet or not. They chose to do wrong. Refer to Romans 2:11-16.
Christianity would be difficult to teach in the public school system. People are far too defensive. How do you pick and choose which parts to teach in the limited time frame you would have? The stories you mention are good, but have little to do with Christianity. Even in the studies of other cultures and religions in the school system, you are barely scratching their surface. The history of Judaism and Christianity also covers thousands of years. There is much to choose from.
I don't remember encountering any teachers which taught Greek or Roman mythology as true, any more than American Indian legends or Islam. In general, they were at least respectful. To teach Christianity as anything less than true would offend many. The non-Christian teachers would be derisive (in a similar fashion to many of the comments on this article) and the Christian teachers would be walking on egg shells worrying they were going to get sued if they showed any passion for the subject at all. After all, if you teach the bare essentials of Christianity, you are teaching the gospel message and will almost certainly be accused of proselytizing. Yet if you leave those items out, you have completely gutted what Christianity is all about.
As an aside, Job is an interesting character study, and provides some interesting glimpses into heaven and the interaction between God and Satan. Heinlein's Job: A Comedy of Justice is an interesting read as well.
Omission correction - all children around the world who are not old enough to have reached the "Age of Accountability" where God holds you accountable for the actions you take are also taken in the rapture, regardless of the belief system they live under. This is not a specific age, although if I remember correctly it is in the series.
No. Your analysis of the series is mistaken.
All who have accepted Jesus Christ as their Saviour are raptured at the start of the 13 book series (not counting the 3 book prequel), This rapture event leaves the world in an incredible mess (at least where it was daylight when the rapture occurred due to traffic accidents, plane crashes and the like. The areas where it was night fare slightly better. Parts of the world where Christianity is not prevalent do even better at surviving the rapture event intact. The only people who go to hell at that point are those who die in the ensuing mess and haven't accepted Christ as their Saviour.
The 144,000 are members of the Jewish tribes (12,000 each) which are supernaturally protected from the various judgments of God. They become missionaries to attempt to spread the news of the Messiah to the rest of Israel. This will happen later.
The great white throne judgment - Judgment Day - doesn't happen till after the Millennium is over.
Unfortunately, there are many people attending Christian churches which have not accepted Christ as Saviour. They won't go in the rapture and will be Left Behind - hence the name of the series. Many will make the choice they should have made before hand. But many hearts will be hardened and they will never make the choice. The world doesn't descend completely into barbaric chaos, but God does pour out His judgment on those Left Behind for whatever reason. Chaos yes. Possibly isolated areas which are barbaric for a time. But not a complete loss.
You could read the series, or just read Daniel and Revelation and a few other books of the Bible. The series is fiction, but the prophetical portions of the series follow the Bible closely.
Really? I had one of my Jr. High aged kids read your post and she went away shaking her head.
There have been problems in our world for all of recorded history in a diverse group of civilizations. The United States was really a reasonably decent place to live when I was growing up. People left their doors unlocked in large swaths of the country. Nobody was afraid to stop and help someone parked along the road. Neighbors helped each other out. Kids drove to school in our part of the country with loaded rifles in the cab windows of their trucks. Taking knives into the schools was a frequent occurrence and nobody thought anything about it. Drugs and alcohol abuse still occurred, but it wasn't as prevalent as it is today. I would leave home on my bike at 8 and spend the day at miniature golf and parents didn't think a thing about it because they knew I would be OK.
I won't claim that the lower position that religion has everywhere today (from school to parent's attitudes) is the sole cause of things being worse today. There are probably many reasons. Some of the drop in importance of religion has been brought on by religion itself. A lot of the drop is due to the fact that the generation of the 60's and 70's largely checked out of the social system, and their kids are the ones paying the price. But I am quite sure that taking all religion out of the world would not make the world a better place. The same crazy people who wrap themselves in the name of a religion when doing their evil deeds would still be doing their evil deeds. They'd just wrap a different cloak around it. Unfortunately the reverse is not true when large bodies of people are concerned. Good does need a support system. Perhaps it shouldn't, but it does. It is easy for an evil person to want to keep stirring up mischief or doing evil. It is hard for a good person to keep doing good when the amount of good that needs done seems so vast. That's where the support system of religion helps. You no longer feel that you are alone in trying to make a difference.
When natural disasters strike, many respond. Yet it is frequently organized religious groups that are prepared to make the most difference the quickest. Governments may decide to step in, and when they do, they can overwhelm the area compared to what religious organizations can do. But for all the disasters that occur around the world, it is frequently the religious groups that shoulder the burden. The more local the disaster, the bigger the help of strictly religious groups. Take the Salvation Army as an example. If that body was removed, would the world be better off or worse off?
I read a long debate a while back on objective reality versus subjective reality. It is difficult to prove God exists to someone whose mind is closed. For those who chose to have an open mind, it is easy to see His hand at work all around the world. Until you let Him change your heart, you will never really see the change belief in God brings.
Mythology examines a religion (although usually just Greek or sometimes Roman of the many forms it has taken over the years). Mythology just isn't followed much anymore and never caught on particularly in the United States. It's also OK to explore Islam and Hinduism and Native American beliefs in school to name a few. It's even OK to study the persecution of the Mormons (at least out here in the West and I should say LDS, I suppose, so as not to offend them). The only time the school board or parents or atheists or agnostics get offended is when Christianity is discussed yet issues involving Christianity have been part of history just as much as these other religions and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.
As a Christian, I don't mind if cultures and world religions are studied in school. If it will help our kids understand and perhaps deal better with their generation of peers in other parts of the world, that's OK. It only offends most Christians that one particular religion (Christianity) is singled out as something that cannot be discussed, even though it is likely to have a greater influence on people in the United States (whether you agree with it or not) than any of the others that are required in elementary school and junior high studies - perhaps more than all of them combined. If you don't want Christianity taught, then don't give special exemptions to the rest of the world's religions in the name of cultural studies. There are a great many kids out there who are just as unaware of the culture of Christianity. As I mentioned, they're more likely to run across Christians in America than a Native American (although I do work with some Native Americans myself). Shouldn't they be familiar with what makes Christians tick?
Christianity should not be in video games however. There's that whole be separate from the world thing that Christ tried to teach and I really don't think He would want some game developer's idea of Christianity to be some aside in a mass produced game filled with mahem and destruction. It is truly unlikely to bear any semblance to His church. Note that I was careful to delineate His church and not name a particular organization or denomination. I really don't think He's particularly happy with how far down His church has fallen since He started it - our fault and not His. If the power of the early church was present in every city where a Christian church was founded, you'd probably feel a bit differently than you do.
That isn't to say that religion isn't present in games. There are many that have been mentioned here that have direct religious overtones. Just don't confuse them with Christianity even if they use that label.
Could Christianity be successfully incorporated in a video game? Absolutely. I seem to remember Indiana Jones had a very popular franchise going where several movies had direct Christian/Jewish themes. If you didn't know the Christian or Jewish culture, you ended up getting killed for your lack of cultural diversity.
There was a brief (read days) interval very recently when the Fedora development group was thinking about allowing installation of packages without root access. They decided against it. On F11, which I am running now, an attempt to install a package from the repository responds with "You need to be root to perform this command." To my recollection, it has always been thus.
Things changed here? Sorry. I missed it. Perhaps you could enlighten us on what you think really is significantly different now.
I suspect there was a sarcasm tag missing there someplace, but I'll answer anyway.
You can install SETI and not really know if your computer's help actually mattered should extra-terrestrial life be discovered. Of course if it isn't, then you know it didn't matter if you installed it or not.
I wish that I could say that you could go into any church and immediately know that God was. Sadly that isn't the case.
There are some denominations where His work today is more evident than others, but it is still difficult to make general recommendations that are always safe. You may have to attend many different churches many times to sense His presence or to see a visible manifestation of His work with your own eyes or to hear something with your own ears that couldn't occur without a higher power at work. But the difference between going to church and SETI is that if you persist, you will notice Him work eventually.
Whether you believe what you see or hear will depend on whether you get to know the people there, their problems, and their struggles so you will know that a miracle has happened or whether you just pick random churches and visit for a short time as an outsider (much like the SETI software does) so that if anything special happens you will be able to dismiss it as a production or something that was faked. Of course God could shock you by giving someone a word of knowledge that nobody else could possibly know and have them share that with you - that happened to me once. But I guarantee that something will happen at some point if you actually make the repeated effort. It doesn't have to be at a church, of course. But if you're looking for God, that's a good place to start looking.
Don't expect the people to all be enormously wonderful and kind and perfect. We're all Mark-I humans just like everyone else. Good luck with your quest.
Excellent! Keep up the good work!!! If the people running the big apps like konq and kmail were as responsive to their bugs as you are to yours, Microsoft would be history....
To be fair, the quote is "Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh." (at least in the KJV translation). It says nothing about months or years although it might be an idiom that implied the same thing to that culture. Having said that, His point is to be prepared at all times because even if He doesn't choose to come back right now, the reader could still die right now which might be just as bad for a particular individual as if He returned for all His church.
I would agree that picking and promoting a specific year generally does a disservice to Christianity and to the world in general. I do believe that most, if not all, prophecy relating to Christ's return for His church (whenever that happens to occur) is complete. After that there is at least one event which must occur that starts the rest of the clock ticking on the fulfillment of the rest of the Bible's prophecy.
Point taken... I'd missed that, and that's handy.
Now that I've seen the right click menu, I won't have that problem again. But as a brand new user, I went through this thought process... I want to try to signal a process. There's that big kill button at the top that is insensitive. There's also way too many tasks to find what I want easily, so I start typing in that handy search box. I search for a process, knotes in this case. It finds the process but of course the kill button is still not sensitive. Aha! I think. I must highlight the process. If I click on the process the kill process button is made sensitive so I hit it and get the dialog. On that dialog there is only the option to kill the process.
I'll accept as a given that the button does say "Kill" and not "Signal", and that's what the dialog gives as its option. Yet if you need to send some other signal, and don't think of right clicking, you're just going to go "Bah! Yet another attempt to replace the command line with a GUI that doesn't do everything I need!" and use htop or the like where sending a signal is right there in the menu. It is very nice that ksysguard and this use the same menu (and perhaps the same complete widget) to do the heavy lifting as I note the options are the same in its process table as the one on the desktop. Of course if a system is thrashing, I'm probably going to be using a command line on a normal console to try to have the best and quickest chance to kill the offending task that is probably using up all available memory instead of trying to bring up any GUI that will be competing for whatever resource is scarce.
I wasn't aware it existed, but tried it and it seemed modestly useful.
It looked like it had most of the needed options. I almost always am working in a konsole window though, so htop is what I usually use.
I would think an option in the kill process screen to select the signal to send would be the one item I missed most. I usually prefer to send SIGHUP or SIGTERM to allow a graceful shutdown rather than kill. This is particularly useful for the ever present mysqld daemon that starts for things like Amarok or kopete or whatever it is that keep NFS shares mounted long after the user has signed off. artsd is also frequently one that needs to get shot.
Ask and thou shalt receive...
Don't forget tactical nuclear, biological and chemical weapons (partially depending on wind speed and direction), really big conventional ordnance however delivered, and of course darts and dancing!
That it didn't end well for the Ancient Egyptians might have had something to do with that.
See if you can find someone with Santa Cruz Operation OpenServer or similar. I know there is much hate and loathing on Slashdot with them and when applied to management it is completely deserved. But they make a X based Unix distro which runs very well on old small low horsepower hardware. Or at least they used to. Back in the dark ages. Course you might not be able to find anyone with the license keys anymore. Still - it'd come closer to running on the old stuff than most other choices if you want something full featured.
My 82 year old mother has been running it for years on a P90 and refuses to change. She'll probably still be running it when she dies. Runs solid as a rock and she refuses to connect to the Internet as well so patches aren't a concern.
That would be my primary concern with many comments saying run old version X (including this one). The old stuff frequently has holes that have been patched. If you don't run any world services and never do anything as root with real world access, you might limit the risk. The risk won't be 0 though.
Junk the old stuff and move on.
No, it really wouldn't do a thing.
I'm a creationist. I happen to believe that the vast majority of the creation stories propagated by the church are flat out of line with what the Bible says. The young earth stuff is particularly offensive to me. I believe that what the Bible says in Gen. 1:1 is fundamental. In the beginning, God created... To summarize quickly the rest of my beliefs, I believe that the rest of Gen. 1 talks about the restoration of the earth to a second habitable state after a catastrophe brought about by Satan's uprising against God. Whether this was relatively local or global is less clear. Certainly the flood described in Noah's time was most certainly local and quite possibly when the Black Sea was formed. The Bible is largely silent about what went on in the intervening several billion years.
To get back on point, I've been in church services where people that I know have been sick - sometimes for long periods - have been healed, visibly. These are people who had seen doctors and in some cases were in wheelchairs for extended periods of time. The fact that God is working in the world today is dismissed as not reproducible by the skeptics even when some have X-Rays of lungs to show previously existing cancer that is now clear on the next X-Ray or other documentation to prove their previous state. Those who choose to believe what their eyes tell them or their ears hear, do so. Those who refuse to believe, do not. I'm not saying that everything you see promoted as a miracle is one. But I have been present when they do happen. When enough things like that happen, you realize that the Bible is true. That doesn't make all Biblical interpretations true, but the central message of the Bible is one of salvation by the blood of Christ. It isn't one of creation vs. evolution.
The healing events I've seen are not what would happen to these people naturally, and for people to dismiss them shows just as much lack of scientific thinking as most creationists are blamed for. God doesn't have to reproduce something to acknowledge that it happened. To use the excuse that because it isn't reproducible it isn't significant is lame and consciously omits data points that should be considered even if God doesn't fit into the scientific experiment category.
It would be no different on the flip side of the coin. The skeptics would say that over the 1,150 years the data or pictures were faked. (Look at how the gospels and rest of the Bible are treated today.) The believers would say it was all true even though they hadn't seen it with their own eyes. Neither group is particularly better than the other in this regard and it would still take faith on the part of the people in the middle in choosing either side.
Sorry, the buffalo comment was not necessary - but was in the slashdot tradition and just as wild as the other comments directed towards us creationists around it.
The fact remains that after 40,000 generations, what the scientist has is a marginally more efficient strain of E. coli than he started with. He can track all the mutations to see how it has changed. He can see how and when those changes occurred - which is indeed fascinating, but at the end, he still has an E. coli. His very statements were that the later changes were not as drastic as the first which leads away from an evolution argument.
If he is making other claims, then the linked abstracts don't make that clear.
I'd say it was a great study in the work of natural selection, but a weak study in evolution until it crosses the border into some other definitely recognizable bacteria. High school biology was a long time ago - I let my wife handle the micro-biology today - she has a degree in it.
Not at all. We will simply say that it is still e-coli. Marginally different, yes, but still e-coli. When he turns it into a buffalo, he'll have something.
The government will need it for the updated national debt computations.
Another solution.
Provide an on-line pass with the primary subscription to your local paper. Once you sign on to your local paper's internet site, you receive a cookie that permits you to access any other on-line content of the consortium for the day.
The papers get a win by increasing local readership and circulation. You don't have to worry about micro-payments. If you don't subscribe to the local paper, you're left with micro-payments to access major papers content.
They're realizing that AdBlock works.
All of my Linux servers are also actively used as Linux desktops. I'm not a server CLI purist and there's nothing mission critical on them. Worse, I run a Linux distro that I get to upgrade every 6 months or so. Fortunately, a live upgrade has worked fine for several releases now.
I know the servers would be faster if my kids weren't playing CPU intensive games on them, but the delay for web users isn't that much even when running Extreme Tux Racer. Everyone complains about CPU utilization rates - do something about it! Still, zippier X will be appreciated (once everything gets stable again).
Although you probably won't believe me when I say it, religion disgusts me today as well. But my faith isn't based on what the religious organizations and individuals in the world are doing today. My faith isn't based on the text of the Bible. My faith is based on what I have observed with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. It is because of those things that I accept that the Bible is what it claims to be and that God exists and is working in ways the Bible said He would.
You can't see someone you know who has just been to the doctor and heard they have no cure for their disease, that they can treat it with medicines that the body will eventually build up a resistance to and then have nothing else to try go up to the altar, be prayed for, and come back visibly OK (and stay at that level of health) and not believe. You can't hear testimony of someone who is in the hospital pray for an orderly who had a short leg and have the leg lengthened and not believe. Or maybe you can. Or maybe you just are certain to never be any place where something like that could challenge your lack of belief system. I know that for various reasons, there are people who are prayed for who aren't healed. But don't discount those that are.
That doesn't mean I understand why God made all the rules He did. That doesn't mean I understand why He has the expectations of us that He does. I don't think we've done a very good job of meeting His expectations as Christians (and I include myself in there) but I'm trying to do better and not be one of those judgmental people full of wrath and hate that you seem to have experienced in your life. The core of Christianity isn't fear (or at least it isn't supposed to be.) The core of Christianity is love. It is the core of God. But it doesn't mean He sets aside His righteousness and holiness and changes just because the norms of the world have changed. That isn't His nature.
I've seen enough happen in my life to know that there's something supernatural out there. It's bigger than me. The Bible describes what I have experienced closer than any other book. So I try to live the way it says I should and forgo the things it says I should forgo because that's how that bigger than me God told me to live. I make mistakes just like every other human being out there and depend on his grace and mercy to understand and try to live better the next day. I'm sorry you've shut yourself off from Him. Just keep your own eyes and ears open.
I apologize. It was phrased rather provocatively, so I made a false assumption.
To clarify some points. I believe that the original Word was inspired. I feel that it has been carried down through the ages remarkably intact considering the various distribution media. That is not to say it has been transmitted or translated perfectly due to the fragile media, but it is pretty self consistent considering all it has been through and the long time period the authors covered. As archeology uncovers more in the land of Israel and surrounding areas, there is more and more confirmation of its veracity. In the important points it tries to convey, there are no translation problems that are relevant. The story of creation isn't one of the important points that required or got much space.
Your third paragraph is only true if you are a young earth creationist. I am not of that camp. I believe that Gen. 1:1 is equivalent to the astrophysicists Big Bang. My interpretation of other portions of the Bible is that there was a period where Satan was in control of this planet. At some point he tried to wage war with God and ascend to take God's place. God wiped out his earthly kingdom resulting in the chaotic state described next in Genesis 1. The remainder of Genesis 1 describes the restoration of Earth to a second habitable state. That is the only way I can make the rest of the Bible passages fit consistently.
There is nothing in the Bible that talks about what went on in biology from the Big Bang to the point where Earth (or at the least the portion of earth where Satan had his kingdom) was destroyed. It is not the purpose of the Bible. By the way, the apparent break in the human fossil record seems to match approximately with when Satan's kingdom on Earth ended and modern man was recreated. There were several branches in existence until recently (geologically speaking). Then, there was just one and the transition seemed to happen rather suddenly again in a geologic time references.
Regardless of the time period looked at, a transition from amoeba to human with all the other branching variations in between goes against the way that nature seems to work. Random chance is not enough for those leaps. For me, the common shared DNA of most of us simply points to an efficient God that created a basic group of things to inhabit this particular planet with its characteristic gravity, atmosphere, foodstuffs, and the like and it doesn't surprise me that much is shared.
From a personal point of view, I find evolution to be a stretch. I'm OK with slight changes over a long enough time via what is possible by natural selection. The strongest and biggest generally are what survive to breed. Those that blend in best or have the most adaptable dynamic pattern matching abilities also have an advantage in survival and passing on their traits. If you compare the horse of today to the horse of fossil years, the former is still recognizable as a horse. Insects that change colors better and thus survive are still the same basic critter and could interbreed to create more. Scientists may choose to say that it is a new species, but it really doesn't appear to me to be genetically changed in any principal way. On the other hand, when trying to mix two disparate species, the results are often not able to have offspring. Having two such mixes occur the same way with one ending up male and the other female, and then having them find each other, and then having them also able to reproduce and carry it on beyond the first generation are even more of a wild stretch. It's so wide in my book that when most people question Bible truths as being far between that I am amused. Regardless, I don't generally get into the scientific aspects of the debate. I simply point out that by my interpretation of the Bible there is a time period when it could have happened while still maintaining Biblical consistency.
I don't for a minute believe that God put all the fossils and other scientific processes in place as a means of tricking humanity. Tha