The reason is that there are too many different brands of Christians. Each particular subset of Christians feels attacked because they see all the churches, television networks, mega-churches and voters who claim to be Christian but are really just going to hell like the rest of us and frankly give the real Christians a bad name.
That is a very confusing thing to those of us who see "Christians" as a giant homogeneous group.
There's also this idea that even though Christians are in control of just about everything in our country, we still have free speech. Unfortunately (from their perspective), our biggest pop-cultural influences are secular at best and downright anti-Christian at worst. When you watch TV and see casual sex, drug use, violence and other decidedly non-Christian behavior portrayed as no big deal or even encouraged as positive behavior, it's easy to feel like your way of life is under attack. Take a quick look at the TV shows out there (on mainstream TV, not on the Christian channels). There are a handful of shows (7th Heaven, etc) that have a Christian theme. But in most shows and movies any character that's Christian is only there to be an obnoxious zealot and is just a caricature of how most Christians truly act. This, too, causes them to feel under attack.
I think that looking at the entertainment industry as their main source to see how Christianity is portrayed is flawed analysis. You only need to take one look at everything outside of the entertainment industry to see that the points you make are true. But at least it makes a little more sense in this way.
Well, shit. I haven't actually been paying too close attention. I suppose the last eBook I bought was the same price as the paperback, now that I think about it.
Sometimes I check out paper books from the library, download the ebooks illegally, read them electronically, and return the paper book, just so I don't feel like I'm stealing (my library doesn't have e-lending). I can't tell if that implies there's something wrong with me or the system.
I'm fairly certain the parent meant that the current "5-20% below list price" pricing structure is too high, and was agreeing with the assertion that $.99 books would be better.
That's a good point, but I think if you explain the distinction even the most hard-core pro-lifer will acknowledge that stem cell harvested from skin cells or whatever are fine (unless maybe they're part of one of those denominations that thinks all science is bad). I do agree that it's a problem when people think all stem cell research is embryonic (like I obviously just did:-) )
Where exactly does it say in the Bible "thou shalt not perform experiments involving genetics or stem cells"?
It doesn't, exactly, but it does say "Thou shalt not murder". There are many annoying ways in which Christians attempt to shove religion down our throat, but their beliefs on stem cell research and abortion are pretty fair.
As an analogy, if someone came and murdered your tall neighbors and said, "Look, it's OK, because in my belief system, people over 6'2" are not human, so it's not murder", would you stand by and let it happen, just because you don't want to "force your beliefs down others' throats"? This is kind of what you are asking Christians to do.
A pro-choice person (maybe not all of them) might argue that a 6-week old embryo is not human and so it is not murder. To a Christian, it is a human from the moment of conception, and by doing scientific research on him or aborting him, you are murdering him. Please try to understand that fact when arguing with pro-lifers, it will lead to much more productive discussions.
Also, if more people understood that it might lead to me not having to spend so much time defending pro-life Christians even though I am an atheist and find most of them to be nutjobs.
I would agree, at least in some respects. However I would go further and say that I think the real issue is that people find it easier to believe there is no God than to change their behavior to match the morals taught by whichever god in whom they would otherwise believe.
I appreciate your points about why a good God can allow an evil world. However, I take some offense to the idea put forth in the quote above. Consider the following points:
1. I do not kill, steal or commit adultery. I respect my parents. I try to love my neighbor as myself. I give to charity, I am respectful. Yet I do not believe in God. The main thing I find hard about living a "good Christian life" is the actual believing in God part.
2. There are plenty of things that many (not all) Christians and people of other religious believe that I find morally wrong (ie, withholding information about sex from children). In this sense, yes, it would be harder for me to be a Christian because I would have to do things that go against my own morals.
3. To some of us, the existence of God does NOT seem to be the most logical explanation for the world around us. Despite the protestations of many religious scholars, the fact that we don't yet understand the transition from amino acids to cells doesn't imply there is no natural explanation. If you insist that I guess I will be able to come up with a few, but "God decreed it so" will not be one of them. Both sides of this debate like to appeal to Occam's Razor. But that really is never going to work, because the concept of a "simplest explanation" is itself subjective. We both look at the evidence and are asked to guess the answer to a question that is inherently unasnwerable. You have decided that, given the evidence, God is the simplest explanation. I think that "very unlikely things become likely on a timespan of billions of years" is better. For all I know we're both wrong, But I certainly don't feel like I have to do mental gymnastics to avoid God.
4. You don't need to be an atheist to ignore the morals taught by your religion. If I was really an atheist simply to avoid the commitments religion heaps on you, I would simply join a religion that didn't expect me to do anything and say I believed in THAT god.
God may be so obvious to you that you cannot conceive that a person does not believe in him, but there are those of us that genuinely do not (although I concede we can't REALLY know and it's possible God does exist, I just find it unlikely). If you really want to find a group that is closer to what you're suggesting, look for people who claim to be "spiritual, but not religious".
Well that's exactly my point. I am a good programmer, even great when I'm in my element. But you have (almost creepily) described exactly my knowledge about databases and exactly my gaps. Everything I know about SQL I learned from hacking around with web programming and Android using SQLite on my own time.
But in the real world, how much software DOESN'T use a database in some form as its backend, if you look at it as a percentage of all the software being written? How many jobs are out there that require C++ and Linux (like I and all my college-educated CS buddies know), vs. how ones that require Java, ASP.NET or C#, and 3-5 years experience administering a SQL or Oracle database?
I wish I would've learned databases at school, so at least I could plausibly CLAIM I knew something about databases. Now I'm just screwed unless I start writing my own websites or something, which I really just don't have time for.
I am about half self-taught and half college-taught. I am currently looking for jobs, and despite having 10 years programming experience and knowing more than a handful of languages, understanding OO and algorithms, I don't have the minimum requirements for most jobs I'm looking at. Why? I don't know SQL well. It's one thing if you're looking to work at a major, kickass place like Google or Microsoft, but a lot of the smaller shops are looking for people who can write client-server code in Java and SQL. If you don't have that, 80% of the jobs on Monster are off the table.
But as the swashbuckling anti-copyright types are always quick to point out, theft is when you have something, someone takes it, and now you no longer have it. These works were never in the public domain to begin with, so preventing them from ever becoming public domain can't really be theft.
How's that pirates? Doesn't feel so good when your own rebuttal rebuts you, does it? \sarcasm
I hate to be one of the "me too" posters, but I have to second this. Dancing is perfect for shy, socially inept dudes. You start by mechanically learning the moves, which should be OK, it's all about muscle memory, much like playing video games. When you're a crappy dancer then girls find it cute that you try. Then after awhile you start to get better and they find it hot that you're good. You can be the shittiest flirter/small talker in the world and it doesn't matter, because the dancing is the focus. Also, most ballroom clubs have way more girls than guys, and in all the places I've been it's considered extremely rude to turn someone down unless you have a good reason, so you don't have to worry as much about rejection.
I'm disconnected from the phone company as well, so this should work for me. Did you need to do anything special to power the signal, or did the Xlink provide enough power? (in other words, does "drive the wall jack backwards" mean I have to flip some wires or something, or is it just a figure of speech?)
The coupons were payed for by the sale of freed-up pieces of the spectrum, and actually the coupon money was only a fraction of the sale price (1.34 billion out of 20 billion). The real thing you should be objecting to here is that they sold a natural resource that should be owned by the people, then paid us back in the form of $40 coupons that basically raised the price of the converters by $40 apiece. In any case, the coupons were not paid for by taxes.
No, digital TV sucks for people in your situation. Where I live, I only got about 3 analog stations well. Now I get all the major networks and multiple channels from each one. I received my coupons shortly after ordering them and successfully used them to buy converter boxes that work great. My TV's picture has never been better in my life.
I understand the arguments against DTV, and even agree with some of them, but I would like to present myself as a counterexample to the "sucks for everyone" claim, because it's actually pretty awesome for me. Also I agree that it sucks that all we got in return for the sale of the spectrum was the stupid $40 coupons, which only accomplished raising the price of each box by $40.
I'm not sure if you're trolling here, and if you are I apologize to everyone else, but seriously? When the ISP's start forwarding their (supposedly) vast profits on to the internet content providers maybe you'll have an argument. A lot of people are able to give away their stuff for free, and good for them. But all you're accomplishing is getting your favorite TV shows canceled because the majority of their viewers are people like you. Or, if you consider that the question for the content providers is not "how many people are watching this show?", but "how many people are watching this show's ads?", then basically no one is watching.
al a carte is a request to take a very simple system and make it relatively very complicated
But they are already doing this to some degree. They have the Basic tier, with local channels, CNN, CSPAN, maybe the 20 most popular cable channels, then the extended package that has some of the more esoteric ones, then the different add-ons, like the "Movies Package", "Latin Package", "47 Sports Channels Package", etc. They are already charging us for levels of service, so why not make it smart enough that I can "downgrade" my service to just what I want?
Or why not give up "cable" per se for something like Hulu, where everything is on all the time, supported by ads (and not just one 30-second ad 4 times, 8 minutes per half hour, like we're subjected to on TV), only instead of shows only getting ad revenue during the 30 minutes when they air, they get it every time someone watches it until their damn copyright expires. And you could ask people for their location, age and gender, to tailor ads to them so I don't have to watch 14 denture creme and arthritis medication ads just because I like The Price is Right. Someone please explain to me what is wrong with my logic, because if I were right, Hulu would be doing this right now.
Question for someone who uses this: The descriptions seem to imply that you need to connect every land-line phone directly into the back of the device. This device hardly makes sense unless you can plug it into a phone jack on the wall and all the phones connected to the other jacks in the house will ring. Is this actually how it works?
I don't really see how this is a win (or even a loss, for that matter) for the consumer. Who owns the content that I paid for? The argument was whether it was owned by the cable company or the network, and it came up for the cable company. Who cares? It's still not me.
I don't tell people I'm against abortion, because I'm afraid they'll think I'm Pro-Life.
I don't tell people I don't think God exists, because I'm afraid they'll think I'm an Atheist.
I certainly never share both those opinions with people because they're such <sarcasm>obvious contradictions<\sarcasm>.
You're right, it's almost impossible to share your nuanced opinion with people, because they as soon as they hear certain key words they'll lump you in with the crazies associated with that viewpoint.
So, you're saying "just shut up and do all these green things we tell you to, pay your carbon taxes and offsets and inflated energy bill - and everything will be fine. We're the experts and we know what's best?"
Fair enough, but I could make the same argument from the other side: So you're saying "just close your eyes and don't worry about it, and everything will be fine. We're the experts and we can confidently tell you that climate change is nonsense put forth by greedy hippies trying to steal your money."
I guess the point of TFA is that unless you want to dedicate years of your life to learning the ins and outs of climate science, you're just going to have to trust someone. I don't know who you should trust, though, because your point is valid. The people claiming to be experts don't necessarily know what they're talking about.
I don't think Hulu does care. It's the people that provide them with content that seem to think because it's a website that it can only be run on a computer and only nerds and people slacking off from work will use it. Once they realized that Boxee was designed for running on a TV, the situation changes. Once your computer is hooked up to your TV, the only reason to watch TV over Hulu is if you can't wait until the next day.
Now, consider how many ads run on TV vs on Hulu. One 30-second ad 6 times during a show? Half of which are for charities? How much money can they really be making off of Hulu? Of course the folks running Hulu just want to get their site used, but the content providers, as has been discussed time and time again, have no clue about anything, for example, that it's been possible, even easy, to hook your computer up to your TV for years. And since Hulu relies on the providers for their very existence, I think it's fair that they do just about everything the providers ask.
Support for remote controls. With MythTV I can control everything from the remote, but when I go to Hulu suddenly I have to use the mouse. It's kind of annoying.
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That is a very confusing thing to those of us who see "Christians" as a giant homogeneous group.
There's also this idea that even though Christians are in control of just about everything in our country, we still have free speech. Unfortunately (from their perspective), our biggest pop-cultural influences are secular at best and downright anti-Christian at worst. When you watch TV and see casual sex, drug use, violence and other decidedly non-Christian behavior portrayed as no big deal or even encouraged as positive behavior, it's easy to feel like your way of life is under attack. Take a quick look at the TV shows out there (on mainstream TV, not on the Christian channels). There are a handful of shows (7th Heaven, etc) that have a Christian theme. But in most shows and movies any character that's Christian is only there to be an obnoxious zealot and is just a caricature of how most Christians truly act. This, too, causes them to feel under attack.
I think that looking at the entertainment industry as their main source to see how Christianity is portrayed is flawed analysis. You only need to take one look at everything outside of the entertainment industry to see that the points you make are true. But at least it makes a little more sense in this way.
Well, shit. I haven't actually been paying too close attention. I suppose the last eBook I bought was the same price as the paperback, now that I think about it. Sometimes I check out paper books from the library, download the ebooks illegally, read them electronically, and return the paper book, just so I don't feel like I'm stealing (my library doesn't have e-lending). I can't tell if that implies there's something wrong with me or the system.
I'm fairly certain the parent meant that the current "5-20% below list price" pricing structure is too high, and was agreeing with the assertion that $.99 books would be better.
That's a good point, but I think if you explain the distinction even the most hard-core pro-lifer will acknowledge that stem cell harvested from skin cells or whatever are fine (unless maybe they're part of one of those denominations that thinks all science is bad). I do agree that it's a problem when people think all stem cell research is embryonic (like I obviously just did :-) )
Where exactly does it say in the Bible "thou shalt not perform experiments involving genetics or stem cells"?
It doesn't, exactly, but it does say "Thou shalt not murder". There are many annoying ways in which Christians attempt to shove religion down our throat, but their beliefs on stem cell research and abortion are pretty fair.
As an analogy, if someone came and murdered your tall neighbors and said, "Look, it's OK, because in my belief system, people over 6'2" are not human, so it's not murder", would you stand by and let it happen, just because you don't want to "force your beliefs down others' throats"? This is kind of what you are asking Christians to do.
A pro-choice person (maybe not all of them) might argue that a 6-week old embryo is not human and so it is not murder. To a Christian, it is a human from the moment of conception, and by doing scientific research on him or aborting him, you are murdering him. Please try to understand that fact when arguing with pro-lifers, it will lead to much more productive discussions.
Also, if more people understood that it might lead to me not having to spend so much time defending pro-life Christians even though I am an atheist and find most of them to be nutjobs.
I would agree, at least in some respects. However I would go further and say that I think the real issue is that people find it easier to believe there is no God than to change their behavior to match the morals taught by whichever god in whom they would otherwise believe.
I appreciate your points about why a good God can allow an evil world. However, I take some offense to the idea put forth in the quote above. Consider the following points:
1. I do not kill, steal or commit adultery. I respect my parents. I try to love my neighbor as myself. I give to charity, I am respectful. Yet I do not believe in God. The main thing I find hard about living a "good Christian life" is the actual believing in God part.
2. There are plenty of things that many (not all) Christians and people of other religious believe that I find morally wrong (ie, withholding information about sex from children). In this sense, yes, it would be harder for me to be a Christian because I would have to do things that go against my own morals.
3. To some of us, the existence of God does NOT seem to be the most logical explanation for the world around us. Despite the protestations of many religious scholars, the fact that we don't yet understand the transition from amino acids to cells doesn't imply there is no natural explanation. If you insist that I guess I will be able to come up with a few, but "God decreed it so" will not be one of them. Both sides of this debate like to appeal to Occam's Razor. But that really is never going to work, because the concept of a "simplest explanation" is itself subjective. We both look at the evidence and are asked to guess the answer to a question that is inherently unasnwerable. You have decided that, given the evidence, God is the simplest explanation. I think that "very unlikely things become likely on a timespan of billions of years" is better. For all I know we're both wrong, But I certainly don't feel like I have to do mental gymnastics to avoid God.
4. You don't need to be an atheist to ignore the morals taught by your religion. If I was really an atheist simply to avoid the commitments religion heaps on you, I would simply join a religion that didn't expect me to do anything and say I believed in THAT god.
God may be so obvious to you that you cannot conceive that a person does not believe in him, but there are those of us that genuinely do not (although I concede we can't REALLY know and it's possible God does exist, I just find it unlikely). If you really want to find a group that is closer to what you're suggesting, look for people who claim to be "spiritual, but not religious".
Also, you may not realize that they did make Hamlet 2, and it was awesome.
Thanks very much, I'll look into that!
But in the real world, how much software DOESN'T use a database in some form as its backend, if you look at it as a percentage of all the software being written? How many jobs are out there that require C++ and Linux (like I and all my college-educated CS buddies know), vs. how ones that require Java, ASP .NET or C#, and 3-5 years experience administering a SQL or Oracle database?
I wish I would've learned databases at school, so at least I could plausibly CLAIM I knew something about databases. Now I'm just screwed unless I start writing my own websites or something, which I really just don't have time for.
I am about half self-taught and half college-taught. I am currently looking for jobs, and despite having 10 years programming experience and knowing more than a handful of languages, understanding OO and algorithms, I don't have the minimum requirements for most jobs I'm looking at. Why? I don't know SQL well. It's one thing if you're looking to work at a major, kickass place like Google or Microsoft, but a lot of the smaller shops are looking for people who can write client-server code in Java and SQL. If you don't have that, 80% of the jobs on Monster are off the table.
Oh yeah, well your mother was a woman of lose morals!
But as the swashbuckling anti-copyright types are always quick to point out, theft is when you have something, someone takes it, and now you no longer have it. These works were never in the public domain to begin with, so preventing them from ever becoming public domain can't really be theft.
How's that pirates? Doesn't feel so good when your own rebuttal rebuts you, does it? \sarcasm
I hate to be one of the "me too" posters, but I have to second this. Dancing is perfect for shy, socially inept dudes. You start by mechanically learning the moves, which should be OK, it's all about muscle memory, much like playing video games. When you're a crappy dancer then girls find it cute that you try. Then after awhile you start to get better and they find it hot that you're good. You can be the shittiest flirter/small talker in the world and it doesn't matter, because the dancing is the focus. Also, most ballroom clubs have way more girls than guys, and in all the places I've been it's considered extremely rude to turn someone down unless you have a good reason, so you don't have to worry as much about rejection.
I'm disconnected from the phone company as well, so this should work for me. Did you need to do anything special to power the signal, or did the Xlink provide enough power? (in other words, does "drive the wall jack backwards" mean I have to flip some wires or something, or is it just a figure of speech?)
Also, thanks for replying!
The coupons were payed for by the sale of freed-up pieces of the spectrum, and actually the coupon money was only a fraction of the sale price (1.34 billion out of 20 billion). The real thing you should be objecting to here is that they sold a natural resource that should be owned by the people, then paid us back in the form of $40 coupons that basically raised the price of the converters by $40 apiece. In any case, the coupons were not paid for by taxes.
Digital TV sucks for everyone.
No, digital TV sucks for people in your situation. Where I live, I only got about 3 analog stations well. Now I get all the major networks and multiple channels from each one. I received my coupons shortly after ordering them and successfully used them to buy converter boxes that work great. My TV's picture has never been better in my life.
I understand the arguments against DTV, and even agree with some of them, but I would like to present myself as a counterexample to the "sucks for everyone" claim, because it's actually pretty awesome for me. Also I agree that it sucks that all we got in return for the sale of the spectrum was the stupid $40 coupons, which only accomplished raising the price of each box by $40.
Yeah, but kids that were little when Toy Story 2 came out are teenagers now. What about kids who weren't even born in 1999?
I'm not sure if you're trolling here, and if you are I apologize to everyone else, but seriously? When the ISP's start forwarding their (supposedly) vast profits on to the internet content providers maybe you'll have an argument. A lot of people are able to give away their stuff for free, and good for them. But all you're accomplishing is getting your favorite TV shows canceled because the majority of their viewers are people like you. Or, if you consider that the question for the content providers is not "how many people are watching this show?", but "how many people are watching this show's ads?", then basically no one is watching.
al a carte is a request to take a very simple system and make it relatively very complicated
But they are already doing this to some degree. They have the Basic tier, with local channels, CNN, CSPAN, maybe the 20 most popular cable channels, then the extended package that has some of the more esoteric ones, then the different add-ons, like the "Movies Package", "Latin Package", "47 Sports Channels Package", etc. They are already charging us for levels of service, so why not make it smart enough that I can "downgrade" my service to just what I want?
Or why not give up "cable" per se for something like Hulu, where everything is on all the time, supported by ads (and not just one 30-second ad 4 times, 8 minutes per half hour, like we're subjected to on TV), only instead of shows only getting ad revenue during the 30 minutes when they air, they get it every time someone watches it until their damn copyright expires. And you could ask people for their location, age and gender, to tailor ads to them so I don't have to watch 14 denture creme and arthritis medication ads just because I like The Price is Right. Someone please explain to me what is wrong with my logic, because if I were right, Hulu would be doing this right now.
Question for someone who uses this: The descriptions seem to imply that you need to connect every land-line phone directly into the back of the device. This device hardly makes sense unless you can plug it into a phone jack on the wall and all the phones connected to the other jacks in the house will ring. Is this actually how it works?
I don't really see how this is a win (or even a loss, for that matter) for the consumer. Who owns the content that I paid for? The argument was whether it was owned by the cable company or the network, and it came up for the cable company. Who cares? It's still not me.
I don't tell people I'm against abortion, because I'm afraid they'll think I'm Pro-Life.
I don't tell people I don't think God exists, because I'm afraid they'll think I'm an Atheist.
I certainly never share both those opinions with people because they're such <sarcasm>obvious contradictions<\sarcasm>.
You're right, it's almost impossible to share your nuanced opinion with people, because they as soon as they hear certain key words they'll lump you in with the crazies associated with that viewpoint.
So, you're saying "just shut up and do all these green things we tell you to, pay your carbon taxes and offsets and inflated energy bill - and everything will be fine. We're the experts and we know what's best?"
Fair enough, but I could make the same argument from the other side: So you're saying "just close your eyes and don't worry about it, and everything will be fine. We're the experts and we can confidently tell you that climate change is nonsense put forth by greedy hippies trying to steal your money."
I guess the point of TFA is that unless you want to dedicate years of your life to learning the ins and outs of climate science, you're just going to have to trust someone. I don't know who you should trust, though, because your point is valid. The people claiming to be experts don't necessarily know what they're talking about.
I don't think Hulu does care. It's the people that provide them with content that seem to think because it's a website that it can only be run on a computer and only nerds and people slacking off from work will use it. Once they realized that Boxee was designed for running on a TV, the situation changes. Once your computer is hooked up to your TV, the only reason to watch TV over Hulu is if you can't wait until the next day.
Now, consider how many ads run on TV vs on Hulu. One 30-second ad 6 times during a show? Half of which are for charities? How much money can they really be making off of Hulu? Of course the folks running Hulu just want to get their site used, but the content providers, as has been discussed time and time again, have no clue about anything, for example, that it's been possible, even easy, to hook your computer up to your TV for years. And since Hulu relies on the providers for their very existence, I think it's fair that they do just about everything the providers ask.
Support for remote controls. With MythTV I can control everything from the remote, but when I go to Hulu suddenly I have to use the mouse. It's kind of annoying.