Just for the record though, RMS has stated many times that the decision to base GNU on Unix was a technical one, not a preferred one. He would have PREFERRED to create a whole new OS with a radically innovative design. The reason he chose to be Unix-like was very simple - he knew it would take a long time to finish, and nobody knew what kind of computers would be common when it was ready to use. Unix was (and to a large extent still is) the only portable OS in existence. So the decision to base his code on it was to ensure that GNU would be portable and still work in the future regardless of changes in computing architecture.
Linus did not originally have this goal - Linux was hard-targetted for the i386 platform, and was stuck there for some time -however it's own unixy roots combined with the GNU base it sat upon meant that making it portable was soon not just a high-priority but a working reality.
The fact that today you can run GNU/Linux on practically any computer in existence is a direct result of it's unix-like design. Now take a look at KDE4.1 though, and compare it to VISTA - then tell me OSS isn't being innovative on every level. Right now KDE4.1 is a better desktop for Vista than Vista's OWN desktop !
Hey, I'm not an American, just about everything I know about your law system I learned from the movies.
At least I was honest about not knowing details - it was a 'true-life drama' though, and like any half-smart person - I DID take any holywood movie, even a TLD with a few truckloads of salt.
The quote however was clearly stated as being a part of the original judgement, somebody had asked - so I tried to be helpful.
Though I am in South Africa, not America. I was dating a girl in Brazil (I married her later) and my company had several major projects in Nigeria. So I had regular flights to both countries (and both are common drug routes around here). Add to this long hair and a liking for heavy-metal t-shirts - I ended up on a watch list (nobody would confirm this but it became pretty obvious).
On my way out to see my girlfriend one time, I was searched on the plane (which they made late to do it) but my luggage was already in the hold and my hand luggage clean so they couldn't really finish the search. When I came back, I was arrested on site. My bags were searched and I had to explain almost every item. Not the easiest of those was a bottle of home-made spirit-vinegar I bought in a small country town in Brazil as a gift for my mother. Finally, convinced my luggage was clean (now I am already two hours late, my cellphone isn't charged and I cannot even contact my ride who is waiting outside the door for me) they decide I need to be X-rayed in case I swallowed condoms.
So I wait. I finally convince the cop to at least let me talk to the person who is picking me up (my boss) - with him coming along, so three hours later my boss gets to find out why I didn't show (lucky for me - he was still there). We wait for another 2 hours. Meantime I am missing a major business deadline (which would end up costing me a small fortune) but me and my boss are talking shop about the various projects. Still the police who are supposed to take me to the state hospital for X-rays haven't shown up. Finally the border-cop (who has been hearing us talk all this time) says: "I'm gonna let you go - I'm sure you're clean now but we have to be sure and if I keep you any longer I'm going to start running risk of false arrest complaints." As he uncuffs me and I walk away I asked him: "So will you take my name OFF your watchlist now ?" Him: "Who said your name was on a watchlist ?" Me: "You picked me up at passport control by my name and face. You tried to search me on the way out as well. You kept me here for almost 5 hours while all the random screen cases were gone in 30 minutes, despite the fact that I was the only one who wasn't complaining and shouting at you for the annoyance and understood you are just doing your job. I know my regular flights include two well known drug routes over a three year period... you didn't have to SAY I'm on a watchlist - it's obvious."
He didn't say anything. I dropped it after that, didn't feel like more hassle but I must tell you it was one of the most annoying experiences of my life.
And the worst thing: planes always upset my stomach. I have no idea if this is because of the airline food or the airpressure but it does. Getting of that plane, the first thing I wanted to do was go to the little boys room for a little private meditation. I wasn't allowed to go to the loo (in case I flushed the evidence of swallowed drugs) - and I had to hold it in for five painful hours. I must tell you - many times during that wasted day I was tempted to just let it go, and leave them the mess to clean up.
Actually it HAS been tested in court, more specifically it came FROM court. It was an example used by the SCOTUS in a landmark trial in the late 1890's which led to the first ever reductions in absolute free speach in the US.
I don't know the full details of the trial but there is a movie about it if you really want to find out. I do know that a landmark quote from the judgement (that endangering others would not be protected by the 1st) was "no possible reading of the first amendment could protect a person who shouts fire in a crowded theater-house."
Hence I stick to yelling theater in crowded firehouses.
And the answer to that is: so are the historians. There are a lot of strong theories but we really don't know exactly. We do know that the Macedonians were very close culturally to the Greeks and certainly later on very close genetically since they intermarried A LOT - but we don't know for sure what their origins were. Were the Macedonians descendents of the Greeks ? The Greeks from the Macedonians ? Or were they from entirely different sources that joined culturally largely because of their proximity ? Truth is, nobody knows for sure, there are no records going back far enough and most of what we have from the times are so mixed with mythology that it makes figuring out what mythology was truth, what was mythology but not real and what was real but LOOKS like mythology a veritable nightmare. For one thing, we now have archeological evidence of a genetic defect that could lead to giantism combined with a single centrally-placed eye - so that means the Cyclops MIGHT have been real. Of course the skull we based that on WAS found in Texas so COULD the anomally have been widespread enough to have occurred in Greece and be documented ? Or maybe there is no link and the Illiads' cyclops is really just a story. About the best answer anybody will give you is that however they originated it probably happened (and we can't even say THAT for sure) before the invention of writing. Genetics are unlikely to help that much either because even a strong set of correlating markers often cannot clearly tell you which set is older.
An example is my own genetics. The Venters in South Africa are Afrikaners who have long held traditionally that we are of German descent. Recorded history confirms this at least partially (there is strong records that the first Venter in South Africa was a German migrant who Dutchified his German name - Von Demptner) - but we bear a set of markers unique among all Afrikaners (including fellow German descendants) that is not found anywhere else in the world - except among one subset of Polish people. Nobody knows where or how our ancestors got to Hameln from Poland, but one theory suggests that they didn't. That we are in fact descended from Vikings who went to live in Germany and were themselves descended from interbreeding while the Vikings ruled much of Poland many years earlier. We don't yet have enough data on the Slavic gene-markers to confirm this though it matches a lot of what we DO have in recorded history (and I must admit I rather like the idea of being some tiny bit Viking:p ).
Brings up an interesting point though... if I get a hot air balloon and go low-flying over the neighbourhood taking pictures of all the girls sunbathing topless in their own backyards I am not breaking any law, even if I put the pictures on the net, but if I peer over my wall and take the same picture from my OWN property - I would already be likely to get at least a peeping-tom charged leveled against me. Despite the fact that the balloon can probably get me CLEARER pictures that show MORE detail and (for the subject mentioned at least) at a much better angle.
Makes ME think we should make it illegal to photograph private property even from above, only trouble is - if you DO that, the days of maps (especially streetmaps of urban areas) is over. On the other hand, in most parts of the world at least, maps are made by the government and are in the public domain (South Africa is a notable exception which is why GPS-mapping devices took much longer to come to market here, the GPS companies had to license the maps from private companies) - it's easy enough to make an exception ONLY for official government business, and for those who do not want the CIA taking pix either, we can limit it further to "where the results will be placed in the public domain and made easily accessible to all via an established mechanism for doing so such as an archives office, webpage or library". If you don't want the government to have special privileges, we could debate about only letting the second part stand (the requirement for public domain publishing of the results and derivative works). At least it would mean that Google earth's data would have to become public domain to be legal.
Can't see that flying with amount of power that intelligence agencies hold in modern governments though sadly.
The didn't exactly LIKE one another but they intermarried and got along. Alexander the Great (or rather more to the point, his father Phillip the Great) was Macedonian and would come to rule pretty much all the Greek Islands and (by the end of Alexander's life) most the known ancient world all the way to India.
There is clear references in Alexander's diary that he suffered some discrimination as a child for being a Macedonian but it was like the difference between a modern-day Scottish and Welsh. Very much like that actually. Ultimately the political differences were small and the cultural differences even smaller. Small enough for Macedonians to become the first Greek emperors anyway. Now as for Macedonians having been Slavic - that is a bit of a stretch, the slavic nations as we typically think of them didn't really come into their own for close on a thousand years AFTER the time of Alexander, though they outlasted the Romans by a bit they appeared around the same time. I would say it's plausable that the Slavics may have had Macedonian ancestry, since Macedonia was quite possibly the first settlement of any kind of civilization in Europe but that far back we have almost no evidence of anything and that is pure conjecture. The Slavics could just as easily have been there 10 thousand years earlier and just not left any earlier evidence. To say they may be descended from Macedonians is plausable, but no more so than to say they may have been the descendents of interbreeding between early homo-sapiens and early homo-Neanderthalenses that only developed into a more structured society later. Their highly barbarian society (as opposed to the highly tribal Greeks and Macedonians) doesn't really fit with a RECENT common descent though (for what my gutt feeling is worth - which is at least as much as any other person who studied ancient cultural history).
In the end, the only thing we know for an absolute fact about descent more than one thousand years old is that we are probably ALL descended from Africans our earliest human ancestors were probably dark skinned. Even THEN there are things we do not know - like did the Australian Aborigines split off from the same people who migrated to Europe ? Or did they reach Australia before the continents split ? There is no way to know short of DNA research which nobody has done yet.
*No, the fact that it is written down is NOT proof to a historian. Alexander probably wouldn't lie about being Macedonian as it must have put a crimp on his career prospects, but we cannot know that he DIDN'T - and a king could easilly pretty damn sure that nothing ever gets written down that contradicts his story - so seriously, we have no real proof. Only tiny bits of supporting evidence, history is trying to figure out the most sensible explanations for them, knowing one of your students will probably come up with something better than you did and be too lazy to write in his paper.
>The U.S. and, to a larger extent, all of NATO worked directly and indirectly against that Oh ? You mean when you swore to follow us into Angola and never showed up ? We WERE the NATO forces in Southern Africa.
But then, you're still drinking the kool-aid so what did I expect. I don't buy the propaganda of my government, nor the one that came before it - and I don't buy YOUR propaganda either.
As for your question: Easy, you don't and can't - but declaring war on an invisible target EVERYWHERE just makes the target bigger, more powerful and less likely to be beaten. If you went and negotiated WITHOUT any ideas of your own majesty with the middle east all along, you wouldn't have HAD a terrorist problem. Guerilla warfare is fundamentally dependent on the support of the local population - without it, it just cannot work. In South Africa my ancestors had the English on the verge of surrender with guerilla warfare - and we would have won, because the local population (our wives and children) were supporting us. To win - they burnt down every farm and put the women and children into camps killing 27 000 of them... Interesting how the US is learning exactly what the British did, the only way to beat guerilla's is to remove their support base. To do that you have to start killing, or at least imprisoning, the local population at large because there is no way to tell the enemy supporters appart. And everytime you jail on - you just made five more combatants... this is not working for you ! You want to solve the problem ?How about if instead of bombs, you start dropping food on the towns there ? ALL of them - not just the ones you like. Maybe, if you stop being those "fuckers who killed my son" and start being "the people who helped us during the drought" - your ennemies won't find it so easy to recruit ?
I'm not American, the last time 'terrorists' wanted to kill MY people - it turned out they were actually freedom freedom fighters and the whole world think they are heroes and ultimately we made peace and got two nobel prize winners for taking 50 years of shooting one another and RESOLVING it.
You think Iraq today has it hard ? I grew up in South Africa during the transition years. I grew up with bombs in wimpy-bars. I grew up one of the people who was taught to hate Nelson Mandella... wait isn't he a global hero now ? Even among the people who once hated him ? Didn't F.W. De Klerk win his peaceprize because he was prepared to NEGOTIATE... with a convicted TERRORIST ?
Sorry, I don't NEED to thank you. I am NOT American and I made that clear in my post, you don't protect me - quite the contrary, my country has the most powerful army ON this continent and in pretty much ever UN peacekeeping action here - we do your job for you - but we have NEVER gone ANYWHERE without UN sanction - the result is - our soldiers are, for the most part, heroes - yours are, for the most part scum, the BEST among them are the ones who are deluded enough to actually believe they are executing good policy and good orders and that there is no other choice. Oh, and for the record-none of the terrists you fight have ever had a presence in South Africa - they are just not that stupid.
I grew up in streets just like you walk in every day, they were as dangerous, and our enigmatic leader acted, sounded and had policies IDENTICAL to the ones Bush has.We chose to TALK. We sat down and negotiated our own defeat, and were able to mitigate it from the mass-slaughter it was about to turn into, into a country where instead everybody, even us white kids can build a future - can work together to fight REAL problems like poverty. There is only ONE difference between white South Africa at the end of the 80's and America today - we were outnumbered, so we HAD to talk, we HAD to overcome our prejudice and pride. You won't figure it out until you realize that you will ALWAYS BE outnumbered in the middle east, and start talking to your former enemies - to RESOLVE your differences and come to peaceful agreements.
For the record: I managed to sort out all my nvidia speed issues by loading XGL instead of AIGLX. Because XGL masks away the card itself and presents a generic interface, it worked around the nvidia driver issues very well. None of the other tricks made much difference for me.
You have a point, but I wasn't spreading the fallacy - I was attacking the one used by your president to get himself a lot of power. Constant barging messages about the latest threat, make sure everyone is always afraid it will happen to them (it's like the lottery in reverse, only slightly worse odds !) - and that is patently ridiculous.
People who then wish to support or refute a policy end up making a decision out of an unfounded PERSONAL fear. Not because they fear economic harm of terrorist activities, because they are afraid of a suicide bomber sitting next to them on the bus. It is crucial to break down this delusion and the lies that built it, only then can you RATIONALLY plan on how to protect your country from the real threats involved. For starters it would become obvious that your own government with too much power is able to harm you a LOT more (and more easily) than foreign combatants with third-world quality weapons and a tiny scattered army. More-over that bad foreign policy is the motivator for a good 80% (if not much more - this is a very conservative figure) of those combatants... and come to the logical conclusion that the best way to protect you and yours from credible threats is not to give your government MORE power - it's to take away a shitload of the power you already gave it. You're government is like a guard-dog - but like any dog that gets too much privileges, not enough discipline and can get away with too much... sooner or later he bites his master. I suggest it's about time Americans start rolling up the old newspaper and taking their country back.
I must admit I have an ulterior motive for this, beyond wishing the GOOD Americans a nicer, happier life. If they DO that, it will give all the rest of us NON-Americans happier more peaceful lives with OUR single biggest threat effectively removed as well.
You are aware are you not that the risk of an American being killed by a terrorist is just about the lowest of all the things likely to kill one right ? Cars kill the most, ciggarettes and burger king are pretty high on the list, PLANE CRASHES are higher than terrorists... heck SUICIDE is a higher risk.
You American's kill more of each other every year than the terrorists can pull of combined ! You kill yourselves more often than they have managed to do !
If I were you, I would stop worrying about a few people whom you think is fighting a religious war (they are not, suicide missions occur in all wars and all religions, you yourselves send your spies out on missions with arsenic pills in their pockets, the Japanese fought you with suicide pilots - and they were of two religions, neither of which promised any reward for it - the 'muslim extremisms' thing is a great big lie which THEY love to tell as much as your leaders love to repeat it) and worry a little more about why it seems that you cannot stop blowing peoples brains out (note: I said nothing about owning guns, I'm in FAVOUR of gun-ownership, for a reasonable value of 'gun' at least - I am talking about what you DO with them, I'm sure if we banned guns you would just end up killing each other with knives so it's probably a different problem altogether).
Short version: Terrorist won't do anything to you. Other American's are about 500 times more likely to kill you... or maybe that is WHY you are happy to defend the government listening on your neighbours' phone calls without so much as a judicial review ? It's just easier to pretend you fear terrorists than admit you fear the guy next door ? Especially if he has a darker skin than yours ?
>There are no such thing as false positives in insurance payouts. Fake your death - bag the life-insurance ?
And there could be false negatives too: "We regret to inform you that we will not be paying out your husband's life insurance as people of 25 have a high likelihood of still being alive"
Joking aside: what about a man whose insurance payout is not made because the insurance company (incorrectly) believes he committed suicide ? Is that not a false negative ?
You raise a valid consideration - so I will tell you what I think about it openly. Frankly, without those - what kind of God can you have ? Prescience, and even omniscience is just a given if you have infinity and no restraints on timetravel (the former is truly a requirement for a God and existing outside normal time grants both without TOO big a logical jump - even physics has areas that suggest the possibility - granted they are singularities but the very existence of singularities is supporting if not conclusive evidence for the idea) - if you can go anywhere, anytime as often as you want - well you can know anything. God can and DOES interfere - and many moderate Christians like me do NOT believe in absolute free will. We believe that God gives a degree of choice - over some things, more than we can handle in fact, but not everything. The idea of absolute human free will would rule out most of the bible - not just the "historics" but their meaning. How can you believe that God influences history if you don't accept that he influences some of our decisions ? For many Christians - we hear him every day, we believe that our conscience IS the voice of the Holy Spirit. It is not canonical because we know full well that we cannot tell the DIFFERENCE between that voice and our fantasies - but that is our shortcoming, not God's. In fact, we believe God would be MORE likely to influence a politician than to interfere with a natural process. Praying for rain is probably less effective than praying for an end to/increase in farm subsidies (depending on where you live). Infallibility is also easy - you can get it for free (or at least, the exact same effect) just by being able to retry as many times as needed, heck you can go see what would have happened at any time and change it to suit yourself - you won't need to try twice, so infallibility makes perfect sense.
Does this mean you have NO free will ? Of course not, if not then God could not hold us responsible for our actions - and he does. He chose to influence rather than enforce. His influence is powerful and to Christians we've seen the miracles when people had a sudden change of heart and did something against their stated wishes - to the ultimate benefit of the many.
In fact, I believe I have experienced a personal miracle. A few years ago, I was in a bad motorcyle accident. I broke my arm and my shoulder bone - my bike however was in tiny bits - there was nothing left. I should have been dead- except when it hit that volvo I was standing upright on it- not sitting (as I had been a moment before) - so I went OVER the car, instead of into it. All I know was that in that split second before I hit, when I knew I couldn't avoid hitting, I somehow realised I couldn't jump and couldn't dodge - but if I stand up - I'll survive this. Something I did not ever know before and if anybody had asked me my suggestion for such a situation - would not have occured to me. You can call it survival instinct if you prefer. I believe God saved me (from the stupidity of another person) - because my work wasn't done.
In fact, I and most calvinists believe that even believing in God is not humanly possible. It requires a miracle intervention by God himself. That is why I believe the most important form of missionary work is charity - God will plant the seed of faith, we cannot - we have to be sure that when the inspired person seeks answers and knowledge to grow that seed, we are there to give it - and that we are recognizable as the people to talk to.*
So for at least some Christians, even the inconsistencies you point out don't exist - but we are prepared to accept that our free will is a gift from God - and that he only gives us as much as he believes we should have. So why didn't he stop Hitler ? Who knows, maybe because the world needed to see and defeat that example of modern evil to prevent FAR WORSE from happening ? It's as good a suggestion as any other - and undoubtable, even if it's right, only a billionth of the real truth. Then again scie
>Unless the whole document is true, then none of it can be relied upon to be an accurate representation of what went on at the time.
What's your point ? I never said the Bible is a good history book. It isn't it's way too focussed on religion, even when it happens to mention historical facts they are told only for their religious significance. In many cases, they are still completely accurate, and this is useful to some scientists - but there are at best highly selective. If you want a historical knowledge, study history. The Bible is supposed to teach religion - and it only includes historical data to help illuminate ideas. It's still exceptionally good for another piece of historical studies - many would say a much more important one - it is our most complete and intact account of the culture and belief (two things that are intimately entwined in most people) of an ancient nation. Thanks to the Bible we know a huge deal more about how ancient Jews actually lived than any other culture. The Illiad doesn't give us any accurate data about the real wars of ancient Greece - but nobody denies it's value for what it can teach us about how they thought and what they believed in. This is a valuable historical insight. But if you want historical chronologies of events, with accurate timelines then you need to bring in things like archeology. These things are often complementary, but one cannot (and doesn't claim to) replace the other.
So to base your belief or not in God on the potential historical accuracy of the Bible is... stupid at best. Base you belief or lack there-off on your conscience. If your conscience demands proof for truth, without exception then believe only what scientist believe. I won't stop you. Heck I almost agree with you - when it comes to anything in the physical world, I'll trust a current physicist over the Bible (and any other 3000 year old source) any day. I happen to believe there IS a metaphysical world, I have my reasons, they are personal and only really EVIDENCE to myself. I don't require you to share that. But when it comes to those, the Bible has always offered for me, personally, answers that made more sense than anything else - especially a LOT more than 'there is nothing to make sense off'. Why does this make me a credulous fool in your opinion ? Has my whole post not shown consistent critical thinking, reconsidering of my own preconceptions ? All the things you claim to applaud - and base your anti-religion arguments on. Yet just because my conclusions differ from yours, despite either of us being able to prove what we think - you think I'm stupid. I cannot prove God exists. You cannot prove he DOESN'T. Karl Sagan put it so well "Absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence". Since I am not trying in any way to force you to agree with me- I merely mentioned what I thought in an on-topic thread and let you make up your own mind about what YOU think - why do you try to force me to think what you do ? How can you do that and claim to be ANY better than religion at it's WORST ?
This may be true - but I avoided that argument entirely. I just said there is no reason both can NOT be literal truth ! In fact Jesus says "For your heavenly father, one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day". This is usually taken just to mean that compared to an eternity, human timelines are meaningless - and it does mean that, but it doesn't only mean that. For God - time is something to be manipulated. He can do something and take a hundred billion years to do it in exactly six days (with apologies to Terry Pratchet for the phrasing). Theology isn't science and shouldn't try to be. Science isn't theology - and shouldn't try to be. There is only a contradiction if you imagine God to be limited by the laws he put in, in the first place. I don't.
You and I are bound by the laws of logic, but to think an omnipotent God would be - IS logically inconsistent. He cannot be both able to do anything AND unable to do two logically inconsistent things.
I didn't say it was THE only one, I said it was the only one that named it really explicitely. The one in Romans it is true is not in that same part of Leviticans (which Christians otherwise reject) but it still I would argue that the cultural bias created by that ancient rule probably clouded Paul's judgement. Fact remains I believe the rule was one of higiene, nothing more - and it isn't applicable today - which was my point. It was certainly still applicable in Paul's day. Is it entirely natural? Probably not. On the other hand practically every other line Paul write tells us NOT to BE slaves to our nature, to rise beyond and above it - so I don't see that as a prohibition, merely a statement of fact. LOVE isn't really "natural" and monogamy DEFINITELY isn't natural AT ALL - yet we are charged to do both ! So can we then say that love should be limited to cases where the sex is similar to what happens in nature purely for procreation ?
Would Paul - if he had lived in an age with modern science have felt the same ? Most Christians around the world do NOT require women to wear a hat to church and haven't for many years. Because we now believe that the line which charges them not to pray without a head-covering is entirely cultural. It SHOULD be translated as "do not pray without showing proper respect" - in Paul's day, for a woman, this meant wearing a hat, in our day it does not. But it's easy to get people to be open-minded about hats, sex is much more passionate, and evoke much stronger passions, so those who wish to control others always target it (isn't that a central theme in 1984 ?), Christians with power-lust not less than anybody else.
(And I do know the bible, I was making a point that these lines are ALL contextual, and gave the strongest example. The weakest is probably the story of Lot and Soddom and Gomorrah, which is hard to quantify the 'context' off - one interpretation that I am partial to (and it's a valid one, if not one that can be cited as absolute) is that the fire and brimmstone [and his wife turning to salt] was a metaphor - that what really wiped out the cities was an STD plague (based on the chosen metaphor probably gonorrhea) and that it's purpose is to be another teaching story - which the Bible is quite full of.)
There are probably other references, especially vaguer ones, I am not a theologian and my job is not to know every text relevant to everything (even they don't - my sister and brother-in-law are BOTH doctorates of theology and I know they use reference books when writing sermons to find texts relevant to their message) - my job is to know enough, to know God, nothing more is asked from people. Interestingly I can debate with these to PHD's about their own field and cite quite enough to force them to concede that though they do not agree with all my interpretations - they cannot deny their plausibility, and all but the most fundamentalist sects have a standard principle that where multiple interpretations are VALID, people cannot be judged for believing the one that suits their conscience. Paul told us we see in a dull mirror (in his days, that was a copper plate so it was far duller than the image you probably picture) - our understanding is imperfect at best - being fundamentalist about your interpretation when the MOST fundamental part of the Bible is that you will never get it ALL right is single most stupid thing we can imagine.
I never speak about my faith on slashdot generally, since doing so tends to get exactly same reactionism without considderation as talking to a Southern Baptist about evolution does. Most Christians in the rest of the world think American Christians are idiots who give us all a bad name. Not least because they seriously underestimate the very God they will use as an excuse to do anything they want and control everybody else.
Enlightened Christians have long since decided that Genesis is METAPHORICAL not LITERAL. Many parts of the Bible are literal truth and we often have archeological evidence to back them up (See the Towns built by Solomon for example - archeologists on those digs actually use the book of Kings to know WHERE to dig for WHAT part), many parts are not. The prodigial son is not literal truth - it's a teaching story. So why is it so hard to think that Genesis was a teaching story for a humanity 3000 years to early to understand the science of evolution ? It's point is that God created the universe and life, not HOW ! Evolution and the big bang theories make no claim otherwise (at least, when it's done by proper scientists without an agenda). What's worse is that they really don't seem to get what 'allmighty' MEANS. God is not bound by time ! He says it in the gospels and they still pretend otherwise. There is no reason why both the creation tales in Genesis AND evolution can't all three be literal truth ! God could create the earth in six days AND in the universe in a hundred billion years without contradiction - time happens to other people. Any God who couldn't do that wouldn't even be very potent, let alone OMNIpotent !
It's like the old question of whether God could create something to heavy for him to lift. The answer to one of faith is a simple "yes". And afterwards, he could lift it. This is only logically inconsistent if you are bound by the laws of logic - God can change them to suit himself.
Many people have forgotten that Christianity is all about love. Try this one out. A common reading of some texts get people to claim 'do good unto all, and especially good unto others of the same faith'. I read it the exact opposite: do ESPECIALLY good to people of other religions. Don't try to convert people with long speeches, or draconic laws ! The bible tells us that most important act of mission we must do is the example of love. American fundamentalists are creating a global impression of Christians as people without understanding or empathy or love - and that is undoing the single most important task given to them by God AND Jesus. Charity is the ultimate form of mission - and charity without agenda, those who - impressed by it - ASKS - you then teach why you do it, that you are trying to show the same love you have received. If Christians were any good at actually acting according to their faith - we would not be in the PR disaster we are in.
Some protestant theological schools (notably my own church's) even have a required subject for preachers called "criticism of scripture" which studies historical alteration of the Bible, modification of meanings, likely entries that got added by accident and the like and evaluates it line by line to try and improve the quality. It takes a lot of time and effort to make a correction (think 30-40 years) which then goes for ultimate approval (with all the evidence) to the synod - but they do happen, and being rash with them would be irresponsible- and it helps that every preacher voting at the synod will have studied the subject, and probably participated in some of the research when they were students.
So the vision of Christians as closed-minded bigots is limited to a few groups scattered around the world, with the American bible-belt most likely the single largest concentration - it is not how most Christians live and act. Most Christians do NOT think the SPLA deserves any of our support. We do not think we should get to write the laws either, quite the contrary - our mandate according to Jesus is to follow the law, whatever the
The interesting thing is the Ingo Molnar has said outright that none of the current Linux filesystems is GOOD ENOUGH for SSD's - he has his hopes on BTRFS to save us in the longer run - and the Linux filesystems are a damn-sight better at it than Vista... Intriguing how Linux was already the best, and yet working on improvement when the competition hasn't even considered the problem yet.
"We did not fully understand the limitations of the Vista environment" - Neither did anybody else, including Microsoft... no one can be told how limited Vista is - you have to suffer it for yourself.
If Russia actually thinks the space-race can ever go their way again ? Not inconceivable but surely a highly improbable concept. So why the effort then ? Perhaps because they would rather keep their rocket-scientists at home than have them all leave for high-paying jobs at NASA and the ESA ? Especially after the not insignificant government subsidies that paid a portion of their study fees. An investment the Russians would surely want to capitalize on - and the engineers must get a kick out of the new challenges they face. After all building viable rockets at a minor percentage of their usual cost is a very interesting challenge to engineers (we may not like to admit it but all engineering is within a certain resource-space and budget is one of the limited resources). More importantly - if they do it well, I can see it having a real benefit on their economy. If you can get nationalistic issues out of the way (and the cold was IS over right ?) surely the ESA and NASA would love to buy this cheap-but-great rocket tech and rather invest THEIR budgets in improving them to do even more, for example by investing more in robotics to build the NEXT generation rovers ?
So I wonder if these considerations were what really fueled the politicians (the scientists are easy, the good ones at least want knowledge of knowledge's sake and never really cared about the space-race for political reasons) to give the budget this required or is there perhaps a lingering longing for the power of old Russia and the days when they LED the space-race ?
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Just for the record though, RMS has stated many times that the decision to base GNU on Unix was a technical one, not a preferred one. He would have PREFERRED to create a whole new OS with a radically innovative design. The reason he chose to be Unix-like was very simple - he knew it would take a long time to finish, and nobody knew what kind of computers would be common when it was ready to use. Unix was (and to a large extent still is) the only portable OS in existence. So the decision to base his code on it was to ensure that GNU would be portable and still work in the future regardless of changes in computing architecture.
Linus did not originally have this goal - Linux was hard-targetted for the i386 platform, and was stuck there for some time -however it's own unixy roots combined with the GNU base it sat upon meant that making it portable was soon not just a high-priority but a working reality.
The fact that today you can run GNU/Linux on practically any computer in existence is a direct result of it's unix-like design.
Now take a look at KDE4.1 though, and compare it to VISTA - then tell me OSS isn't being innovative on every level. Right now KDE4.1 is a better desktop for Vista than Vista's OWN desktop !
Hey, I'm not an American, just about everything I know about your law system I learned from the movies.
At least I was honest about not knowing details - it was a 'true-life drama' though, and like any half-smart person - I DID take any holywood movie, even a TLD with a few truckloads of salt.
The quote however was clearly stated as being a part of the original judgement, somebody had asked - so I tried to be helpful.
Though I am in South Africa, not America.
I was dating a girl in Brazil (I married her later) and my company had several major projects in Nigeria. So I had regular flights to both countries (and both are common drug routes around here). Add to this long hair and a liking for heavy-metal t-shirts - I ended up on a watch list (nobody would confirm this but it became pretty obvious).
On my way out to see my girlfriend one time, I was searched on the plane (which they made late to do it) but my luggage was already in the hold and my hand luggage clean so they couldn't really finish the search.
When I came back, I was arrested on site. My bags were searched and I had to explain almost every item. Not the easiest of those was a bottle of home-made spirit-vinegar I bought in a small country town in Brazil as a gift for my mother. Finally, convinced my luggage was clean (now I am already two hours late, my cellphone isn't charged and I cannot even contact my ride who is waiting outside the door for me) they decide I need to be X-rayed in case I swallowed condoms.
So I wait. I finally convince the cop to at least let me talk to the person who is picking me up (my boss) - with him coming along, so three hours later my boss gets to find out why I didn't show (lucky for me - he was still there). We wait for another 2 hours. Meantime I am missing a major business deadline (which would end up costing me a small fortune) but me and my boss are talking shop about the various projects.
Still the police who are supposed to take me to the state hospital for X-rays haven't shown up. Finally the border-cop (who has been hearing us talk all this time) says: "I'm gonna let you go - I'm sure you're clean now but we have to be sure and if I keep you any longer I'm going to start running risk of false arrest complaints."
As he uncuffs me and I walk away I asked him: "So will you take my name OFF your watchlist now ?"
Him: "Who said your name was on a watchlist ?"
Me: "You picked me up at passport control by my name and face. You tried to search me on the way out as well. You kept me here for almost 5 hours while all the random screen cases were gone in 30 minutes, despite the fact that I was the only one who wasn't complaining and shouting at you for the annoyance and understood you are just doing your job. I know my regular flights include two well known drug routes over a three year period... you didn't have to SAY I'm on a watchlist - it's obvious."
He didn't say anything. I dropped it after that, didn't feel like more hassle but I must tell you it was one of the most annoying experiences of my life.
And the worst thing: planes always upset my stomach. I have no idea if this is because of the airline food or the airpressure but it does. Getting of that plane, the first thing I wanted to do was go to the little boys room for a little private meditation. I wasn't allowed to go to the loo (in case I flushed the evidence of swallowed drugs) - and I had to hold it in for five painful hours. I must tell you - many times during that wasted day I was tempted to just let it go, and leave them the mess to clean up.
Actually it HAS been tested in court, more specifically it came FROM court.
It was an example used by the SCOTUS in a landmark trial in the late 1890's which led to the first ever reductions in absolute free speach in the US.
I don't know the full details of the trial but there is a movie about it if you really want to find out. I do know that a landmark quote from the judgement (that endangering others would not be protected by the 1st) was "no possible reading of the first amendment could protect a person who shouts fire in a crowded theater-house."
Hence I stick to yelling theater in crowded firehouses.
And the answer to that is: so are the historians.
There are a lot of strong theories but we really don't know exactly. We do know that the Macedonians were very close culturally to the Greeks and certainly later on very close genetically since they intermarried A LOT - but we don't know for sure what their origins were. Were the Macedonians descendents of the Greeks ? The Greeks from the Macedonians ? Or were they from entirely different sources that joined culturally largely because of their proximity ? Truth is, nobody knows for sure, there are no records going back far enough and most of what we have from the times are so mixed with mythology that it makes figuring out what mythology was truth, what was mythology but not real and what was real but LOOKS like mythology a veritable nightmare.
For one thing, we now have archeological evidence of a genetic defect that could lead to giantism combined with a single centrally-placed eye - so that means the Cyclops MIGHT have been real. Of course the skull we based that on WAS found in Texas so COULD the anomally have been widespread enough to have occurred in Greece and be documented ? Or maybe there is no link and the Illiads' cyclops is really just a story.
About the best answer anybody will give you is that however they originated it probably happened (and we can't even say THAT for sure) before the invention of writing. Genetics are unlikely to help that much either because even a strong set of correlating markers often cannot clearly tell you which set is older.
An example is my own genetics. The Venters in South Africa are Afrikaners who have long held traditionally that we are of German descent. Recorded history confirms this at least partially (there is strong records that the first Venter in South Africa was a German migrant who Dutchified his German name - Von Demptner) - but we bear a set of markers unique among all Afrikaners (including fellow German descendants) that is not found anywhere else in the world - except among one subset of Polish people. Nobody knows where or how our ancestors got to Hameln from Poland, but one theory suggests that they didn't. That we are in fact descended from Vikings who went to live in Germany and were themselves descended from interbreeding while the Vikings ruled much of Poland many years earlier. We don't yet have enough data on the Slavic gene-markers to confirm this though it matches a lot of what we DO have in recorded history (and I must admit I rather like the idea of being some tiny bit Viking :p ).
Brings up an interesting point though... if I get a hot air balloon and go low-flying over the neighbourhood taking pictures of all the girls sunbathing topless in their own backyards I am not breaking any law, even if I put the pictures on the net, but if I peer over my wall and take the same picture from my OWN property - I would already be likely to get at least a peeping-tom charged leveled against me.
Despite the fact that the balloon can probably get me CLEARER pictures that show MORE detail and (for the subject mentioned at least) at a much better angle.
Makes ME think we should make it illegal to photograph private property even from above, only trouble is - if you DO that, the days of maps (especially streetmaps of urban areas) is over.
On the other hand, in most parts of the world at least, maps are made by the government and are in the public domain (South Africa is a notable exception which is why GPS-mapping devices took much longer to come to market here, the GPS companies had to license the maps from private companies) - it's easy enough to make an exception ONLY for official government business, and for those who do not want the CIA taking pix either, we can limit it further to "where the results will be placed in the public domain and made easily accessible to all via an established mechanism for doing so such as an archives office, webpage or library".
If you don't want the government to have special privileges, we could debate about only letting the second part stand (the requirement for public domain publishing of the results and derivative works). At least it would mean that Google earth's data would have to become public domain to be legal.
Can't see that flying with amount of power that intelligence agencies hold in modern governments though sadly.
The didn't exactly LIKE one another but they intermarried and got along. Alexander the Great (or rather more to the point, his father Phillip the Great) was Macedonian and would come to rule pretty much all the Greek Islands and (by the end of Alexander's life) most the known ancient world all the way to India.
There is clear references in Alexander's diary that he suffered some discrimination as a child for being a Macedonian but it was like the difference between a modern-day Scottish and Welsh. Very much like that actually. Ultimately the political differences were small and the cultural differences even smaller. Small enough for Macedonians to become the first Greek emperors anyway.
Now as for Macedonians having been Slavic - that is a bit of a stretch, the slavic nations as we typically think of them didn't really come into their own for close on a thousand years AFTER the time of Alexander, though they outlasted the Romans by a bit they appeared around the same time.
I would say it's plausable that the Slavics may have had Macedonian ancestry, since Macedonia was quite possibly the first settlement of any kind of civilization in Europe but that far back we have almost no evidence of anything and that is pure conjecture. The Slavics could just as easily have been there 10 thousand years earlier and just not left any earlier evidence. To say they may be descended from Macedonians is plausable, but no more so than to say they may have been the descendents of interbreeding between early homo-sapiens and early homo-Neanderthalenses that only developed into a more structured society later. Their highly barbarian society (as opposed to the highly tribal Greeks and Macedonians) doesn't really fit with a RECENT common descent though (for what my gutt feeling is worth - which is at least as much as any other person who studied ancient cultural history).
In the end, the only thing we know for an absolute fact about descent more than one thousand years old is that we are probably ALL descended from Africans our earliest human ancestors were probably dark skinned. Even THEN there are things we do not know - like did the Australian Aborigines split off from the same people who migrated to Europe ? Or did they reach Australia before the continents split ?
There is no way to know short of DNA research which nobody has done yet.
*No, the fact that it is written down is NOT proof to a historian. Alexander probably wouldn't lie about being Macedonian as it must have put a crimp on his career prospects, but we cannot know that he DIDN'T - and a king could easilly pretty damn sure that nothing ever gets written down that contradicts his story - so seriously, we have no real proof. Only tiny bits of supporting evidence, history is trying to figure out the most sensible explanations for them, knowing one of your students will probably come up with something better than you did and be too lazy to write in his paper.
>The U.S. and, to a larger extent, all of NATO worked directly and indirectly against that
Oh ? You mean when you swore to follow us into Angola and never showed up ?
We WERE the NATO forces in Southern Africa.
But then, you're still drinking the kool-aid so what did I expect. I don't buy the propaganda of my government, nor the one that came before it - and I don't buy YOUR propaganda either.
As for your question: Easy, you don't and can't - but declaring war on an invisible target EVERYWHERE just makes the target bigger, more powerful and less likely to be beaten. If you went and negotiated WITHOUT any ideas of your own majesty with the middle east all along, you wouldn't have HAD a terrorist problem.
Guerilla warfare is fundamentally dependent on the support of the local population - without it, it just cannot work. In South Africa my ancestors had the English on the verge of surrender with guerilla warfare - and we would have won, because the local population (our wives and children) were supporting us. To win - they burnt down every farm and put the women and children into camps killing 27 000 of them...
Interesting how the US is learning exactly what the British did, the only way to beat guerilla's is to remove their support base. To do that you have to start killing, or at least imprisoning, the local population at large because there is no way to tell the enemy supporters appart. And everytime you jail on - you just made five more combatants... this is not working for you !
You want to solve the problem ?How about if instead of bombs, you start dropping food on the towns there ? ALL of them - not just the ones you like.
Maybe, if you stop being those "fuckers who killed my son" and start being "the people who helped us during the drought" - your ennemies won't find it so easy to recruit ?
I'm not American, the last time 'terrorists' wanted to kill MY people - it turned out they were actually freedom freedom fighters and the whole world think they are heroes and ultimately we made peace and got two nobel prize winners for taking 50 years of shooting one another and RESOLVING it.
You think Iraq today has it hard ? I grew up in South Africa during the transition years. I grew up with bombs in wimpy-bars. I grew up one of the people who was taught to hate Nelson Mandella... wait isn't he a global hero now ? Even among the people who once hated him ? Didn't F.W. De Klerk win his peaceprize because he was prepared to NEGOTIATE ... with a convicted TERRORIST ?
Sorry, I don't NEED to thank you. I am NOT American and I made that clear in my post, you don't protect me - quite the contrary, my country has the most powerful army ON this continent and in pretty much ever UN peacekeeping action here - we do your job for you - but we have NEVER gone ANYWHERE without UN sanction - the result is - our soldiers are, for the most part, heroes - yours are, for the most part scum, the BEST among them are the ones who are deluded enough to actually believe they are executing good policy and good orders and that there is no other choice.
Oh, and for the record-none of the terrists you fight have ever had a presence in South Africa - they are just not that stupid.
I grew up in streets just like you walk in every day, they were as dangerous, and our enigmatic leader acted, sounded and had policies IDENTICAL to the ones Bush has.We chose to TALK. We sat down and negotiated our own defeat, and were able to mitigate it from the mass-slaughter it was about to turn into, into a country where instead everybody, even us white kids can build a future - can work together to fight REAL problems like poverty.
There is only ONE difference between white South Africa at the end of the 80's and America today - we were outnumbered, so we HAD to talk, we HAD to overcome our prejudice and pride. You won't figure it out until you realize that you will ALWAYS BE outnumbered in the middle east, and start talking to your former enemies - to RESOLVE your differences and come to peaceful agreements.
For the record: I managed to sort out all my nvidia speed issues by loading XGL instead of AIGLX. Because XGL masks away the card itself and presents a generic interface, it worked around the nvidia driver issues very well. None of the other tricks made much difference for me.
You have a point, but I wasn't spreading the fallacy - I was attacking the one used by your president to get himself a lot of power. Constant barging messages about the latest threat, make sure everyone is always afraid it will happen to them (it's like the lottery in reverse, only slightly worse odds !) - and that is patently ridiculous.
People who then wish to support or refute a policy end up making a decision out of an unfounded PERSONAL fear. Not because they fear economic harm of terrorist activities, because they are afraid of a suicide bomber sitting next to them on the bus.
It is crucial to break down this delusion and the lies that built it, only then can you RATIONALLY plan on how to protect your country from the real threats involved. For starters it would become obvious that your own government with too much power is able to harm you a LOT more (and more easily) than foreign combatants with third-world quality weapons and a tiny scattered army. More-over that bad foreign policy is the motivator for a good 80% (if not much more - this is a very conservative figure) of those combatants... and come to the logical conclusion that the best way to protect you and yours from credible threats is not to give your government MORE power - it's to take away a shitload of the power you already gave it.
You're government is like a guard-dog - but like any dog that gets too much privileges, not enough discipline and can get away with too much... sooner or later he bites his master. I suggest it's about time Americans start rolling up the old newspaper and taking their country back.
I must admit I have an ulterior motive for this, beyond wishing the GOOD Americans a nicer, happier life. If they DO that, it will give all the rest of us NON-Americans happier more peaceful lives with OUR single biggest threat effectively removed as well.
You are aware are you not that the risk of an American being killed by a terrorist is just about the lowest of all the things likely to kill one right ? Cars kill the most, ciggarettes and burger king are pretty high on the list, PLANE CRASHES are higher than terrorists ... heck SUICIDE is a higher risk.
You American's kill more of each other every year than the terrorists can pull of combined ! You kill yourselves more often than they have managed to do !
If I were you, I would stop worrying about a few people whom you think is fighting a religious war (they are not, suicide missions occur in all wars and all religions, you yourselves send your spies out on missions with arsenic pills in their pockets, the Japanese fought you with suicide pilots - and they were of two religions, neither of which promised any reward for it - the 'muslim extremisms' thing is a great big lie which THEY love to tell as much as your leaders love to repeat it) and worry a little more about why it seems that you cannot stop blowing peoples brains out (note: I said nothing about owning guns, I'm in FAVOUR of gun-ownership, for a reasonable value of 'gun' at least - I am talking about what you DO with them, I'm sure if we banned guns you would just end up killing each other with knives so it's probably a different problem altogether).
Short version: Terrorist won't do anything to you. Other American's are about 500 times more likely to kill you... or maybe that is WHY you are happy to defend the government listening on your neighbours' phone calls without so much as a judicial review ? It's just easier to pretend you fear terrorists than admit you fear the guy next door ? Especially if he has a darker skin than yours ?
>The moderators really are inconsistent on that site.
>Some are just useless, some are assholes, rarely do they do anything useful
So... just like this site then ?
Now we'll be able to send e-mail to Dr Edgar Mitchell's aliens and ask them if they exist !
>There are no such thing as false positives in insurance payouts.
Fake your death - bag the life-insurance ?
And there could be false negatives too:
"We regret to inform you that we will not be paying out your husband's life insurance as people of 25 have a high likelihood of still being alive"
Joking aside: what about a man whose insurance payout is not made because the insurance company (incorrectly) believes he committed suicide ? Is that not a false negative ?
You raise a valid consideration - so I will tell you what I think about it openly.
Frankly, without those - what kind of God can you have ? Prescience, and even omniscience is just a given if you have infinity and no restraints on timetravel (the former is truly a requirement for a God and existing outside normal time grants both without TOO big a logical jump - even physics has areas that suggest the possibility - granted they are singularities but the very existence of singularities is supporting if not conclusive evidence for the idea) - if you can go anywhere, anytime as often as you want - well you can know anything.
God can and DOES interfere - and many moderate Christians like me do NOT believe in absolute free will. We believe that God gives a degree of choice - over some things, more than we can handle in fact, but not everything. The idea of absolute human free will would rule out most of the bible - not just the "historics" but their meaning. How can you believe that God influences history if you don't accept that he influences some of our decisions ? For many Christians - we hear him every day, we believe that our conscience IS the voice of the Holy Spirit. It is not canonical because we know full well that we cannot tell the DIFFERENCE between that voice and our fantasies - but that is our shortcoming, not God's. In fact, we believe God would be MORE likely to influence a politician than to interfere with a natural process. Praying for rain is probably less effective than praying for an end to/increase in farm subsidies (depending on where you live).
Infallibility is also easy - you can get it for free (or at least, the exact same effect) just by being able to retry as many times as needed, heck you can go see what would have happened at any time and change it to suit yourself - you won't need to try twice, so infallibility makes perfect sense.
Does this mean you have NO free will ? Of course not, if not then God could not hold us responsible for our actions - and he does. He chose to influence rather than enforce. His influence is powerful and to Christians we've seen the miracles when people had a sudden change of heart and did something against their stated wishes - to the ultimate benefit of the many.
In fact, I believe I have experienced a personal miracle. A few years ago, I was in a bad motorcyle accident. I broke my arm and my shoulder bone - my bike however was in tiny bits - there was nothing left. I should have been dead- except when it hit that volvo I was standing upright on it- not sitting (as I had been a moment before) - so I went OVER the car, instead of into it.
All I know was that in that split second before I hit, when I knew I couldn't avoid hitting, I somehow realised I couldn't jump and couldn't dodge - but if I stand up - I'll survive this. Something I did not ever know before and if anybody had asked me my suggestion for such a situation - would not have occured to me.
You can call it survival instinct if you prefer. I believe God saved me (from the stupidity of another person) - because my work wasn't done.
In fact, I and most calvinists believe that even believing in God is not humanly possible. It requires a miracle intervention by God himself. That is why I believe the most important form of missionary work is charity - God will plant the seed of faith, we cannot - we have to be sure that when the inspired person seeks answers and knowledge to grow that seed, we are there to give it - and that we are recognizable as the people to talk to.*
So for at least some Christians, even the inconsistencies you point out don't exist - but we are prepared to accept that our free will is a gift from God - and that he only gives us as much as he believes we should have. So why didn't he stop Hitler ? Who knows, maybe because the world needed to see and defeat that example of modern evil to prevent FAR WORSE from happening ? It's as good a suggestion as any other - and undoubtable, even if it's right, only a billionth of the real truth. Then again scie
>Unless the whole document is true, then none of it can be relied upon to be an accurate representation of what went on at the time.
What's your point ? I never said the Bible is a good history book. It isn't it's way too focussed on religion, even when it happens to mention historical facts they are told only for their religious significance. In many cases, they are still completely accurate, and this is useful to some scientists - but there are at best highly selective. If you want a historical knowledge, study history. The Bible is supposed to teach religion - and it only includes historical data to help illuminate ideas.
It's still exceptionally good for another piece of historical studies - many would say a much more important one - it is our most complete and intact account of the culture and belief (two things that are intimately entwined in most people) of an ancient nation. Thanks to the Bible we know a huge deal more about how ancient Jews actually lived than any other culture. The Illiad doesn't give us any accurate data about the real wars of ancient Greece - but nobody denies it's value for what it can teach us about how they thought and what they believed in. This is a valuable historical insight. But if you want historical chronologies of events, with accurate timelines then you need to bring in things like archeology. These things are often complementary, but one cannot (and doesn't claim to) replace the other.
So to base your belief or not in God on the potential historical accuracy of the Bible is... stupid at best. Base you belief or lack there-off on your conscience. If your conscience demands proof for truth, without exception then believe only what scientist believe. I won't stop you. Heck I almost agree with you - when it comes to anything in the physical world, I'll trust a current physicist over the Bible (and any other 3000 year old source) any day. I happen to believe there IS a metaphysical world, I have my reasons, they are personal and only really EVIDENCE to myself. I don't require you to share that. But when it comes to those, the Bible has always offered for me, personally, answers that made more sense than anything else - especially a LOT more than 'there is nothing to make sense off'. Why does this make me a credulous fool in your opinion ? Has my whole post not shown consistent critical thinking, reconsidering of my own preconceptions ? All the things you claim to applaud - and base your anti-religion arguments on. Yet just because my conclusions differ from yours, despite either of us being able to prove what we think - you think I'm stupid. I cannot prove God exists. You cannot prove he DOESN'T.
Karl Sagan put it so well "Absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence". Since I am not trying in any way to force you to agree with me- I merely mentioned what I thought in an on-topic thread and let you make up your own mind about what YOU think - why do you try to force me to think what you do ? How can you do that and claim to be ANY better than religion at it's WORST ?
This may be true - but I avoided that argument entirely. I just said there is no reason both can NOT be literal truth ! In fact Jesus says "For your heavenly father, one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day". This is usually taken just to mean that compared to an eternity, human timelines are meaningless - and it does mean that, but it doesn't only mean that. For God - time is something to be manipulated. He can do something and take a hundred billion years to do it in exactly six days (with apologies to Terry Pratchet for the phrasing).
Theology isn't science and shouldn't try to be. Science isn't theology - and shouldn't try to be. There is only a contradiction if you imagine God to be limited by the laws he put in, in the first place. I don't.
You and I are bound by the laws of logic, but to think an omnipotent God would be - IS logically inconsistent. He cannot be both able to do anything AND unable to do two logically inconsistent things.
I didn't say it was THE only one, I said it was the only one that named it really explicitely. The one in Romans it is true is not in that same part of Leviticans (which Christians otherwise reject) but it still I would argue that the cultural bias created by that ancient rule probably clouded Paul's judgement. Fact remains I believe the rule was one of higiene, nothing more - and it isn't applicable today - which was my point.
It was certainly still applicable in Paul's day. Is it entirely natural? Probably not. On the other hand practically every other line Paul write tells us NOT to BE slaves to our nature, to rise beyond and above it - so I don't see that as a prohibition, merely a statement of fact. LOVE isn't really "natural" and monogamy DEFINITELY isn't natural AT ALL - yet we are charged to do both ! So can we then say that love should be limited to cases where the sex is similar to what happens in nature purely for procreation ?
Would Paul - if he had lived in an age with modern science have felt the same ?
Most Christians around the world do NOT require women to wear a hat to church and haven't for many years. Because we now believe that the line which charges them not to pray without a head-covering is entirely cultural. It SHOULD be translated as "do not pray without showing proper respect" - in Paul's day, for a woman, this meant wearing a hat, in our day it does not. But it's easy to get people to be open-minded about hats, sex is much more passionate, and evoke much stronger passions, so those who wish to control others always target it (isn't that a central theme in 1984 ?), Christians with power-lust not less than anybody else.
(And I do know the bible, I was making a point that these lines are ALL contextual, and gave the strongest example. The weakest is probably the story of Lot and Soddom and Gomorrah, which is hard to quantify the 'context' off - one interpretation that I am partial to (and it's a valid one, if not one that can be cited as absolute) is that the fire and brimmstone [and his wife turning to salt] was a metaphor - that what really wiped out the cities was an STD plague (based on the chosen metaphor probably gonorrhea) and that it's purpose is to be another teaching story - which the Bible is quite full of.)
There are probably other references, especially vaguer ones, I am not a theologian and my job is not to know every text relevant to everything (even they don't - my sister and brother-in-law are BOTH doctorates of theology and I know they use reference books when writing sermons to find texts relevant to their message) - my job is to know enough, to know God, nothing more is asked from people. Interestingly I can debate with these to PHD's about their own field and cite quite enough to force them to concede that though they do not agree with all my interpretations - they cannot deny their plausibility, and all but the most fundamentalist sects have a standard principle that where multiple interpretations are VALID, people cannot be judged for believing the one that suits their conscience. Paul told us we see in a dull mirror (in his days, that was a copper plate so it was far duller than the image you probably picture) - our understanding is imperfect at best - being fundamentalist about your interpretation when the MOST fundamental part of the Bible is that you will never get it ALL right is single most stupid thing we can imagine.
I never speak about my faith on slashdot generally, since doing so tends to get exactly same reactionism without considderation as talking to a Southern Baptist about evolution does. Most Christians in the rest of the world think American Christians are idiots who give us all a bad name. Not least because they seriously underestimate the very God they will use as an excuse to do anything they want and control everybody else.
Enlightened Christians have long since decided that Genesis is METAPHORICAL not LITERAL. Many parts of the Bible are literal truth and we often have archeological evidence to back them up (See the Towns built by Solomon for example - archeologists on those digs actually use the book of Kings to know WHERE to dig for WHAT part), many parts are not. The prodigial son is not literal truth - it's a teaching story. So why is it so hard to think that Genesis was a teaching story for a humanity 3000 years to early to understand the science of evolution ? It's point is that God created the universe and life, not HOW ! Evolution and the big bang theories make no claim otherwise (at least, when it's done by proper scientists without an agenda).
What's worse is that they really don't seem to get what 'allmighty' MEANS. God is not bound by time ! He says it in the gospels and they still pretend otherwise. There is no reason why both the creation tales in Genesis AND evolution can't all three be literal truth ! God could create the earth in six days AND in the universe in a hundred billion years without contradiction - time happens to other people. Any God who couldn't do that wouldn't even be very potent, let alone OMNIpotent !
It's like the old question of whether God could create something to heavy for him to lift. The answer to one of faith is a simple "yes". And afterwards, he could lift it. This is only logically inconsistent if you are bound by the laws of logic - God can change them to suit himself.
Many people have forgotten that Christianity is all about love. Try this one out. A common reading of some texts get people to claim 'do good unto all, and especially good unto others of the same faith'. I read it the exact opposite: do ESPECIALLY good to people of other religions. Don't try to convert people with long speeches, or draconic laws ! The bible tells us that most important act of mission we must do is the example of love. American fundamentalists are creating a global impression of Christians as people without understanding or empathy or love - and that is undoing the single most important task given to them by God AND Jesus. Charity is the ultimate form of mission - and charity without agenda, those who - impressed by it - ASKS - you then teach why you do it, that you are trying to show the same love you have received. If Christians were any good at actually acting according to their faith - we would not be in the PR disaster we are in.
Some protestant theological schools (notably my own church's) even have a required subject for preachers called "criticism of scripture" which studies historical alteration of the Bible, modification of meanings, likely entries that got added by accident and the like and evaluates it line by line to try and improve the quality. It takes a lot of time and effort to make a correction (think 30-40 years) which then goes for ultimate approval (with all the evidence) to the synod - but they do happen, and being rash with them would be irresponsible- and it helps that every preacher voting at the synod will have studied the subject, and probably participated in some of the research when they were students.
So the vision of Christians as closed-minded bigots is limited to a few groups scattered around the world, with the American bible-belt most likely the single largest concentration - it is not how most Christians live and act. Most Christians do NOT think the SPLA deserves any of our support. We do not think we should get to write the laws either, quite the contrary - our mandate according to Jesus is to follow the law, whatever the
The interesting thing is the Ingo Molnar has said outright that none of the current Linux filesystems is GOOD ENOUGH for SSD's - he has his hopes on BTRFS to save us in the longer run - and the Linux filesystems are a damn-sight better at it than Vista...
Intriguing how Linux was already the best, and yet working on improvement when the competition hasn't even considered the problem yet.
"We did not fully understand the limitations of the Vista environment" - Neither did anybody else, including Microsoft... no one can be told how limited Vista is - you have to suffer it for yourself.
>I'm still learning good C++ practice after a decade of commercial use
Don't worry, so is Bjarn Stroustrop
If Russia actually thinks the space-race can ever go their way again ? Not inconceivable but surely a highly improbable concept. So why the effort then ?
Perhaps because they would rather keep their rocket-scientists at home than have them all leave for high-paying jobs at NASA and the ESA ? Especially after the not insignificant government subsidies that paid a portion of their study fees.
An investment the Russians would surely want to capitalize on - and the engineers must get a kick out of the new challenges they face. After all building viable rockets at a minor percentage of their usual cost is a very interesting challenge to engineers (we may not like to admit it but all engineering is within a certain resource-space and budget is one of the limited resources).
More importantly - if they do it well, I can see it having a real benefit on their economy. If you can get nationalistic issues out of the way (and the cold was IS over right ?) surely the ESA and NASA would love to buy this cheap-but-great rocket tech and rather invest THEIR budgets in improving them to do even more, for example by investing more in robotics to build the NEXT generation rovers ?
So I wonder if these considerations were what really fueled the politicians (the scientists are easy, the good ones at least want knowledge of knowledge's sake and never really cared about the space-race for political reasons) to give the budget this required or is there perhaps a lingering longing for the power of old Russia and the days when they LED the space-race ?