I assume you mean to say your morality. Please don't presume to speak for anyone but yourself. There are plenty of people with different viewpoints than your own. These people are just as "moral" as you.
Indeed? How does one define morality? Are all viewpoints moral, or are some more moral than others? And if some are more moral, who gets to decide why they're more moral?
The idea that everybody gets to pick their own morality is a common and attractive one in today's intellecutal milieu. Yet, it ultimately reduces the meaning of morality to absolutely nothing. There absolutely must be some common definition that people can work from in determining what is and is not moral. It's like trying to do math where everybody gets to pick their own values for different numbers - some people might come close to each other's results when solving a few problems, but the system will break down extremely quickly. Is morality defined by consensus? How much of a consensus is necessary? Are we able to declare immoral the behavior of any group that ever had a consensus?
I'm curious where you're coming from here, and how you make your definition of morality stand.
Those little Kyoceras running PalmOS looked interesting. I almost got one last time around, but didn't feel like spending quite that much money, and it was kind of huge for a cell phone. I think Sprint has a device like this out too, or something. I'd love to see a true Palm combo device, though, especially if they could make it about the size of an m505, or even a III body.
First, let me say this: If you're looking for love on Slashdot, you are looking in the completely wrong place.
Second, they've probably got more glory than they care to deal with, and now they just want money. Or, at the very least, they don't want to be losing money. Kinda like our office - we feel good about what we do (sometimes, anyway), but the paycheck doesn't show it.
My question is, if people start subscribing, would this potentially make ad space on the pages less desirable for the advertisers? Those who subscribe will be those who care enough to spend the money, who have the money to spend (not that $5 is going to kill anybody), and who bother to spend it. If a lot of people subscribe, will the advertisers be left showing ads to people who can't / don't want to spend money? Or are the advertisers going for raw product-recognition building? It would be interesting to see the click-through and purchasing statistics before and after subscriptions, and see what impact it has on the actual effectiveness of the ads.
Dont get me wrong, I do believe the US is a more free society than many other countries in the world. (not all etc). But just because its good, doesnt mean it cant be improved, and that it cant slide down to bad.
Ok, I think we agree on this. I'm glad to read the clarification. Yes, censorship does happen in the US, and probably more than it should. But, I think we have the best overall thing going right now. And, if someone does care to question a government action (censorship or otherwise), they generally are able to do so.
Censorship of free speech has no purpose at any time. This is distinct from say not allowing the media to broadcast the plans of invasion before it happens.
I'm genuinely curious about your definitions here. Where does the line between censorship and, I guess you would call it, "broadcasting military information" lie?
How would someone questioning the govt's involvement in the war (specifically WWI and II) allow the conquest of Europe?
The act of questioning in itself would not lead to defeat. Of course, if everybody had decided we shouldn't fight the war, we probably wouldn't have. And for that matter, we didn't until Japan kicked us directly in the back side. I guess my concern more is with reporting strategies, troop locations, etc during this middle of the war. Which places me at my previous question. WWI was just stupid. WWII almost certainly would have been lost if the US wouldn't have gotten involved. Hence, Europe probably would have been conquered.
Yikes. The censorship executed by the Chinese is so far and away beyond that of the US that it's almost ludicrous to compare the two. You pulled up/., right? People on here criticize the US government all the time, right? People criticize Bush, Ashcroft, the CIA, the FBI, the DMCA, and just about anything else they can think of. Does anybody get stopped? Anybody arrested? (Ok, ok, Dmitry Skylarov and all that, and I agree some of the IP laws are a little extreme, but nobody's been arrested for simply _complaining_ about the laws.) Yes, the FBI has carnivore, and that's not necessarily a good thing, but there are many ways around that, and we pretty much have the right to connect to any computer we want on any port and send any kind of traffic, as long as it isn't illegal otherwise or does damage to the computer.
You want to have a rally in a park? It's really simple. Go down to the city parks department, tell them when and where, pay them the $25 or whatever, and if you're not going to destroy the park in the process, they'll give you a little perimt, and you can go to town. If you don't have the $25, skip McDonalds for a couple weeks and save it. Or collect a buck from each of your friends. There's nothing great stopping you.
And yes, we do have censorship during war time. But that doesn't happen very often, and when it does, it always gets lifted. That's the difference. We don't live under the onerous restrictions every day. And for that matter, censorship during wartime has a very legitimate purpose. Do you seriously think the world would be a better place if Stalin or Hitler had conquered Europe? We all agreed people should keep their mouths shut for a few years, and it turned out much better than it would have otherwise.
Hey, just curious, I signed up for the Biblical Errancy list you suggested, but I have yet to see any traffic from it. Seems like something should have come through by now. Should I be getting anything? Respond here, or please drop me an email at mattth@yahoo.com (my semi-spam box, but I'll look for you). I'm not interested in any flamewars, but if there's intelligent discussion on the list, I'd like to hear what y'all have to say. Thanks.
No, actually what got him killed was his claim to deity. His enemies didn't start to get really ticked off until he claimed to be able to forgive sins, which was something only God could do.
No, there is a book that says people saw this.
There is little, if any, evidence outside of the bible that there was ever a person Jesus, let alone a deity.
There are books that say Plato and Aristotle ran around Greece, too. Do you doubt that Siddharta Gautama walked the earth? Or Confucius? Or, for that matter Mohammed? The evidence that we have for any of these people living is what they and those around them wrote. Relatively speaking, there is a ton more manuscript evidence that Jesus was here than any of the above (save maybe Mohammed, as he was more recent, and I would think Islamic scholars would put a lot more focus on preserving the writings. Could be wrong, genuinely not sure).
It's not hard to understand. Anything at all can follow once you accept the "magic man in the sky" idea.
And, you put yourself in quite a box once you postulate that Physics is the only thing in the universe. Not to mention opening yourself up to becoming incredibly arrogant.
You can dismiss it after evaluating the evidence and seeing that there is almost none for the "truth" of the book, and lots of evidence to the contrary.
I wouldn't find it surprising if there wasn't so much attention to oral detail outside the Israelite community. The attention to detail was a cultural thing that was induced with the southern kingdom was taken into exile in Babylon. Prior to the exile, the focus of Hebrew worship had been sacrifices made in the Temple; however, with no more access to the Temple, strict observance of the Mosaic law became the "substitute" form of worship. The Rabbis discussed the Law at excruciating length, and then discussed it some more. They analyzed every commandment from every possible angle in every possible situation. For a brief example, see here. The Rabbis were used to discussing things at great length, and learning the sayings of their teachers. To see how much they discussed such things, check out Jacob Neusner's translations - they fill up a long bookshelf quite nicely.
On the discovery of the tomb: off the top of my head, I don't know. Admittedly, that is one of the more difficult passages to synchronize. Bear in mind, however, that the story is being told from four different perspectives. If they diverge, they aren't necessarily contradictory (though I fully expect that you will produce a list of contradiction in the account). I'll do some more looking tonight.
On the lineage of Christ: There are two geneaologies listed in the Gospels, Luke's and Matthew's. It is probable that (and forgive me, I may have this reversed here) Matthew listed the genealogy for Joseph's side, while Luke listed the genealogy for Mary's side, removing any doubt that Jesus was in fact descended from David (at least, removing doubt from the perspective of the Jewish reader, not necessarily from your mind). Remind me if I'm missing something here.
I sent in the subscription request to the Biblical Errancy list. I hope they take me, as the email addy is from a Bible college. I'm hoping you're on the list. The username portion of my email addy is mthomass. Looking forward to seeing you there.
Correction: The authors of portions of the Bible claim that there were people who observed Jesus walking around after he died.
The authors themselves claimed to have seen Jesus walking around after he died. So on this question specifically, it pretty much becomes a "men don't come back to life, therefore they couldn't have seen him walking around after he died" circular argument.
Imagine writing about someone who died thirty years ago. Imagine not having the online and print resources available to you - but instead relying upon word of mouth.
You're applying a 21st-Century perspective to the times of the Roman Empire. The Jews lived on oral tradition. They were quite accustomed to listening to Rabbis, remembering what they said, and repeating those things to each other, with an extremely high degree of accuracy. Jesus was a very prominent teacher, so it's not surprising in the least that a strong community would have arisen who would have preserved the traditions orally. It's also not unlikely that somebody bothered to write some things down, which were later compiled into the Gospels.
Imagine further, that you're writing about someone living in another country who spoke another language.
Paul was from Tarsus, but he received a large portion of his education in at the feet of Gamaliel, one of the great Rabbis of all time. So, Judaism was not unfamiliar to him in the slighthest. In fact, he had distinguished himself within the Pharisee branch. Also, consider that most of the Gospel writers were Jews. Matthew's Gospel is very, very Jewish. Mark and John's are, also. Luke is more Hellenistic.
Most of the New Testament books were written in Greek, remember.
I remember it very well. I'm currently in my sixth semester of New Testament Greek. The interesting thing about that is that there's a fair amount of Hebraic Greek (if such a thing is possible). Hebrew thought patterns bleed through the Greek. For example, the periphrastic use of participles occurs with much greater frequency in NT Greek than Attic. It's not really proper Greek, so much as a Hebrew word pattern with Greek words put onto it. So, if anything, the authors were Jewish who chose to write in Greek to open up a larger audience.
It's easy to see why the account of Christ looks so manufactured from fantasy and cobbled together from previous myths. It's a level of journalism that the National Enquirer wouldn't even aspire to,
Specifically to which myths do you refer?
From what we've been able to dig up archaeologically, the biblical authors were pretty much dead-on. Where they talk about cities, we find cities. The book of Acts traces a number of trips covering everywhere from Israel to Turkey to Rome, and when you follow the places they went on a map, they travel exactly as you would expect a normal person to travel around those places. References to rulers in other countries, historical customs, etc are all as we would expect them to be based on archaeological findings. Can we go back and observe someone getting healed? No. But we can go back and verify that there were cities named Rhodes, Patara, Tyre, Ptolemais, Caesarea, and if you were going to visit all of them, you'd probably visit them in that order (with a boat ride between Patara and Tyre). The book of Acts, chapter 21 in this case, is interesting to follow with a map. We can also verify that the ancient Hittites used a standard form of treaty when they conquered a city, and that this pattern was familiar to all the people in that area. This happened to be the pattern that was used in the writing of some of the OT covenants, particularly that of Moses.
So, on the things that we have physical evidence for, we have strong reason to believe they were telling the truth. Admittedly, the supernatural things are difficult to deal with. But, if they got the historical stuff right, does that not suggest there's at least a possibility they got the supernatural stuff right, too?
I don't know that the Egyptians were know for their journalistic integrity in recording their own history. (And I honestly may be wrong here, if anybody has evidence to the contrary, please clue me in on it.)
And yes, the resurrection is a nasty can of worms to deal with. But so is relativity. Time moving at different rates? Yet, it can be measured, and explains a lot, so you have to deal with it even if it's tough to understand. Whether you choose to believe them or not, people observed Jesus walking around after he died.
You can't just dismiss it becasue it might be hard to understand.
And no, FWIW, I don't believe that God made the earth look old when it is, in fact young. Personally, I go for a looser interpretation of 'yom' (day, or sometimes period or era).
It's called Significant Figures. They only listed the numbers down to one SF. So, according to that, pi could be anywhere from >=2.5 to <3.5. Which, in fact, it is.
Besides, Chronicles is a theology book, not a math book. The point is that it's big, not that Solomon knew how to do geometry (which he probably did, anyway).
I read that whole interview, and it made me incredibly angry at the previous administration. I heard about such things in high school, and that the research had been cancelled, but I didn't know the details. Thanks for the link. Ugh. Some people are so concerned about looking good irrespective of any facts... aargh...
-Matt
Re:Let's all pretend it ended after season 7 (II)
on
The End of The X-Files
·
· Score: 1
Forgot to say this in my previous post...
The other reason it would have been great to end it after that season was that Mulder had finally gotten his wish and been sucked up into an alien spaceship, and Skinner was there to watch the whole thing.
I agree. I pretty much lost interest in it a couple years ago. It was a great show, but the whole point was seeing extremely weird situations and trying to figure out what in the world (or out of the world) was going on.
I have a friend who's pretty into the show. Whenever we talk about it, I always say that the show should have ended with the seventh season. The perfect ending to the show, which was all about questions and very little about answers, would have been Scully's announcement that she was pregnant. Everybody would have been wondering if the baby was human, alien, Mulder's, or what? It would have been such a great cliffhanger.
Also, beneath all the stuff he did, I still think Krychek was a good guy.
Ok, first, I'm trusting that you wrote that post in all seriousness. It could be flamebait, but I'll take it in good faith and work from the supposition that it's not.
Many volumes have been written discussing precisely the topics raised here. I couldn't hope to cover the whole topic in one post. Also, it's late here and I'm not finding the mental energy to take on your whole post. I'd love to discuss this more, though, and I thank you for responding
First, I would posit that it is possible for a rational person to accept religion as something other than a delusion. I'm guessing that for this to be true, you would simply require some kind of evidence verifying the statements of the religion. As an example, let's look briefly at one of the common assertions of religion: There is a God. (I'm going to argue from the perspective of Christianity, since that is what I'm most familiar with, and also happen to believe to be true). I would argue that there is substantial evidence that there is a God. To start, there is a universe. One is left with two options: either the universe is a brute fact, or the universe has a cause. Brute facts are incredibly cludgy to deal with; therefore, the more elegant explanation (to be excessively brief) is that there is a God. Now, you will ask where did God come from? God is self-existent. So, we are left with either assuming a universe or assuming God. The universe, being entirely composed of matter and governed by the laws of physics, has no mechanism for creating matter/energy. God, on the other hand, being supernatural and working above the laws of physics, has mechanism for creating matter/energy. Hence, the assertion that there is a God is at least as rational as the assertion that there is not.
I'm wishing I could write more, and I thank you for your effort in responding. If you're interested in continuing the discussion, please reply, and if necessary we could move it to email. I'll try to take on some of your other points as I get a chance.
Um, no. The parent post is pure flamebait. Any negative moderation is simply fulfilling its purpose of increasing the signal-to-noise ratio. You make several blanket statements ("religion is complete bs") with no supporting evidence. Sure, some religion is bogus, and yes, it has been used as a tool to oppress people through the years. Lumping all people with any religious inclination into one monolithic group though, is absurd. So yes, the post is flamebait. And I guess I just bit on it.
One of the key points of the ruling was the judgment that non-English speakers might confuse the domain name with Vivendi trademark. The fear is that someone would stumble onto the website and think that it's Vivendi, when it's actually not. However, it seems to me that a nonanglophone would find the page utterly unintelligible, assuming the thing was written entirely in English. It would be equivalent to a nonfrancophone stumbling onto a page with a domain name of whatever "vivendisucks" is in French. The nonfrancophone might not make the distinction, but if the page were written entirely in French, it would also be quite meaningless to that person. Thus, the supposedly infringing domain should not cause the slightest harm to the trademark holder, unless if the person viewing the page somehow thought the graphics layout of the page to be unworthy of an international corporation. All of which is to say, the primary premise of the ruling seems utterly ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't acceptable to not know how to spell in third grade, and it isn't now.
Nor has it ever been acceptable to split infinitives.
I admittedly only have one semester of college philosophy. Please, enlighten me, and point out the nature and relevance of the distinction.
I assume you mean to say your morality. Please don't presume to speak for anyone but yourself. There are plenty of people with different viewpoints than your own. These people are just as "moral" as you.
Indeed? How does one define morality? Are all viewpoints moral, or are some more moral than others? And if some are more moral, who gets to decide why they're more moral?
The idea that everybody gets to pick their own morality is a common and attractive one in today's intellecutal milieu. Yet, it ultimately reduces the meaning of morality to absolutely nothing. There absolutely must be some common definition that people can work from in determining what is and is not moral. It's like trying to do math where everybody gets to pick their own values for different numbers - some people might come close to each other's results when solving a few problems, but the system will break down extremely quickly. Is morality defined by consensus? How much of a consensus is necessary? Are we able to declare immoral the behavior of any group that ever had a consensus?
I'm curious where you're coming from here, and how you make your definition of morality stand.
Those little Kyoceras running PalmOS looked interesting. I almost got one last time around, but didn't feel like spending quite that much money, and it was kind of huge for a cell phone. I think Sprint has a device like this out too, or something. I'd love to see a true Palm combo device, though, especially if they could make it about the size of an m505, or even a III body.
First, let me say this: If you're looking for love on Slashdot, you are looking in the completely wrong place.
Second, they've probably got more glory than they care to deal with, and now they just want money. Or, at the very least, they don't want to be losing money. Kinda like our office - we feel good about what we do (sometimes, anyway), but the paycheck doesn't show it.
Of course, this would start to give genuine, commercial value to the practice of "karma whoring." Scary.
My question is, if people start subscribing, would this potentially make ad space on the pages less desirable for the advertisers? Those who subscribe will be those who care enough to spend the money, who have the money to spend (not that $5 is going to kill anybody), and who bother to spend it. If a lot of people subscribe, will the advertisers be left showing ads to people who can't / don't want to spend money? Or are the advertisers going for raw product-recognition building? It would be interesting to see the click-through and purchasing statistics before and after subscriptions, and see what impact it has on the actual effectiveness of the ads.
Dont get me wrong, I do believe the US is a more free society than many other countries in the world. (not all etc). But just because its good, doesnt mean it cant be improved, and that it cant slide down to bad.
Ok, I think we agree on this. I'm glad to read the clarification. Yes, censorship does happen in the US, and probably more than it should. But, I think we have the best overall thing going right now. And, if someone does care to question a government action (censorship or otherwise), they generally are able to do so.
Censorship of free speech has no purpose at any time. This is distinct from say not allowing the media to broadcast the plans of invasion before it happens.
I'm genuinely curious about your definitions here. Where does the line between censorship and, I guess you would call it, "broadcasting military information" lie?
How would someone questioning the govt's involvement in the war (specifically WWI and II) allow the conquest of Europe?
The act of questioning in itself would not lead to defeat. Of course, if everybody had decided we shouldn't fight the war, we probably wouldn't have. And for that matter, we didn't until Japan kicked us directly in the back side. I guess my concern more is with reporting strategies, troop locations, etc during this middle of the war. Which places me at my previous question. WWI was just stupid. WWII almost certainly would have been lost if the US wouldn't have gotten involved. Hence, Europe probably would have been conquered.
Yikes. The censorship executed by the Chinese is so far and away beyond that of the US that it's almost ludicrous to compare the two. You pulled up /., right? People on here criticize the US government all the time, right? People criticize Bush, Ashcroft, the CIA, the FBI, the DMCA, and just about anything else they can think of. Does anybody get stopped? Anybody arrested? (Ok, ok, Dmitry Skylarov and all that, and I agree some of the IP laws are a little extreme, but nobody's been arrested for simply _complaining_ about the laws.) Yes, the FBI has carnivore, and that's not necessarily a good thing, but there are many ways around that, and we pretty much have the right to connect to any computer we want on any port and send any kind of traffic, as long as it isn't illegal otherwise or does damage to the computer.
You want to have a rally in a park? It's really simple. Go down to the city parks department, tell them when and where, pay them the $25 or whatever, and if you're not going to destroy the park in the process, they'll give you a little perimt, and you can go to town. If you don't have the $25, skip McDonalds for a couple weeks and save it. Or collect a buck from each of your friends. There's nothing great stopping you.
And yes, we do have censorship during war time. But that doesn't happen very often, and when it does, it always gets lifted. That's the difference. We don't live under the onerous restrictions every day. And for that matter, censorship during wartime has a very legitimate purpose. Do you seriously think the world would be a better place if Stalin or Hitler had conquered Europe? We all agreed people should keep their mouths shut for a few years, and it turned out much better than it would have otherwise.
Hey, just curious, I signed up for the Biblical Errancy list you suggested, but I have yet to see any traffic from it. Seems like something should have come through by now. Should I be getting anything? Respond here, or please drop me an email at mattth@yahoo.com (my semi-spam box, but I'll look for you). I'm not interested in any flamewars, but if there's intelligent discussion on the list, I'd like to hear what y'all have to say. Thanks.
No, actually what got him killed was his claim to deity. His enemies didn't start to get really ticked off until he claimed to be able to forgive sins, which was something only God could do.
But was there ever a town Nasaret, where Jesus supposedly was from? Or did that word in fact mean something quite different, not a birth place at all?
Help me out here. To what are you referring?
No, there is a book that says people saw this.
There is little, if any, evidence outside of the bible that there was ever a person Jesus, let alone a deity.
There are books that say Plato and Aristotle ran around Greece, too. Do you doubt that Siddharta Gautama walked the earth? Or Confucius? Or, for that matter Mohammed? The evidence that we have for any of these people living is what they and those around them wrote. Relatively speaking, there is a ton more manuscript evidence that Jesus was here than any of the above (save maybe Mohammed, as he was more recent, and I would think Islamic scholars would put a lot more focus on preserving the writings. Could be wrong, genuinely not sure).
It's not hard to understand. Anything at all can follow once you accept the "magic man in the sky" idea.
And, you put yourself in quite a box once you postulate that Physics is the only thing in the universe. Not to mention opening yourself up to becoming incredibly arrogant.
You can dismiss it after evaluating the evidence and seeing that there is almost none for the "truth" of the book, and lots of evidence to the contrary.
Specifically?
I wouldn't find it surprising if there wasn't so much attention to oral detail outside the Israelite community. The attention to detail was a cultural thing that was induced with the southern kingdom was taken into exile in Babylon. Prior to the exile, the focus of Hebrew worship had been sacrifices made in the Temple; however, with no more access to the Temple, strict observance of the Mosaic law became the "substitute" form of worship. The Rabbis discussed the Law at excruciating length, and then discussed it some more. They analyzed every commandment from every possible angle in every possible situation. For a brief example, see here. The Rabbis were used to discussing things at great length, and learning the sayings of their teachers. To see how much they discussed such things, check out Jacob Neusner's translations - they fill up a long bookshelf quite nicely.
On the discovery of the tomb: off the top of my head, I don't know. Admittedly, that is one of the more difficult passages to synchronize. Bear in mind, however, that the story is being told from four different perspectives. If they diverge, they aren't necessarily contradictory (though I fully expect that you will produce a list of contradiction in the account). I'll do some more looking tonight.
On the lineage of Christ: There are two geneaologies listed in the Gospels, Luke's and Matthew's. It is probable that (and forgive me, I may have this reversed here) Matthew listed the genealogy for Joseph's side, while Luke listed the genealogy for Mary's side, removing any doubt that Jesus was in fact descended from David (at least, removing doubt from the perspective of the Jewish reader, not necessarily from your mind). Remind me if I'm missing something here.
I sent in the subscription request to the Biblical Errancy list. I hope they take me, as the email addy is from a Bible college. I'm hoping you're on the list. The username portion of my email addy is mthomass. Looking forward to seeing you there.
Correction: The authors of portions of the Bible claim that there were people who observed Jesus walking around after he died.
The authors themselves claimed to have seen Jesus walking around after he died. So on this question specifically, it pretty much becomes a "men don't come back to life, therefore they couldn't have seen him walking around after he died" circular argument.
Imagine writing about someone who died thirty years ago. Imagine not having the online and print resources available to you - but instead relying upon word of mouth.
You're applying a 21st-Century perspective to the times of the Roman Empire. The Jews lived on oral tradition. They were quite accustomed to listening to Rabbis, remembering what they said, and repeating those things to each other, with an extremely high degree of accuracy. Jesus was a very prominent teacher, so it's not surprising in the least that a strong community would have arisen who would have preserved the traditions orally. It's also not unlikely that somebody bothered to write some things down, which were later compiled into the Gospels.
Imagine further, that you're writing about someone living in another country who spoke another language.
Paul was from Tarsus, but he received a large portion of his education in at the feet of Gamaliel, one of the great Rabbis of all time. So, Judaism was not unfamiliar to him in the slighthest. In fact, he had distinguished himself within the Pharisee branch. Also, consider that most of the Gospel writers were Jews. Matthew's Gospel is very, very Jewish. Mark and John's are, also. Luke is more Hellenistic.
Most of the New Testament books were written in Greek, remember.
I remember it very well. I'm currently in my sixth semester of New Testament Greek. The interesting thing about that is that there's a fair amount of Hebraic Greek (if such a thing is possible). Hebrew thought patterns bleed through the Greek. For example, the periphrastic use of participles occurs with much greater frequency in NT Greek than Attic. It's not really proper Greek, so much as a Hebrew word pattern with Greek words put onto it. So, if anything, the authors were Jewish who chose to write in Greek to open up a larger audience.
It's easy to see why the account of Christ looks so manufactured from fantasy and cobbled together from previous myths. It's a level of journalism that the National Enquirer wouldn't even aspire to,
Specifically to which myths do you refer?
From what we've been able to dig up archaeologically, the biblical authors were pretty much dead-on. Where they talk about cities, we find cities. The book of Acts traces a number of trips covering everywhere from Israel to Turkey to Rome, and when you follow the places they went on a map, they travel exactly as you would expect a normal person to travel around those places. References to rulers in other countries, historical customs, etc are all as we would expect them to be based on archaeological findings. Can we go back and observe someone getting healed? No. But we can go back and verify that there were cities named Rhodes, Patara, Tyre, Ptolemais, Caesarea, and if you were going to visit all of them, you'd probably visit them in that order (with a boat ride between Patara and Tyre). The book of Acts, chapter 21 in this case, is interesting to follow with a map. We can also verify that the ancient Hittites used a standard form of treaty when they conquered a city, and that this pattern was familiar to all the people in that area. This happened to be the pattern that was used in the writing of some of the OT covenants, particularly that of Moses.
So, on the things that we have physical evidence for, we have strong reason to believe they were telling the truth. Admittedly, the supernatural things are difficult to deal with. But, if they got the historical stuff right, does that not suggest there's at least a possibility they got the supernatural stuff right, too?
I don't know that the Egyptians were know for their journalistic integrity in recording their own history. (And I honestly may be wrong here, if anybody has evidence to the contrary, please clue me in on it.)
And yes, the resurrection is a nasty can of worms to deal with. But so is relativity. Time moving at different rates? Yet, it can be measured, and explains a lot, so you have to deal with it even if it's tough to understand. Whether you choose to believe them or not, people observed Jesus walking around after he died.
You can't just dismiss it becasue it might be hard to understand.
And no, FWIW, I don't believe that God made the earth look old when it is, in fact young. Personally, I go for a looser interpretation of 'yom' (day, or sometimes period or era).
Apparently nobody else has notices the acronym on their primary product, the Bio-Hazard Alert Detector.
BHAD
B HAD
Or is it just me?
It's called Significant Figures. They only listed the numbers down to one SF. So, according to that, pi could be anywhere from >=2.5 to <3.5. Which, in fact, it is.
Besides, Chronicles is a theology book, not a math book. The point is that it's big, not that Solomon knew how to do geometry (which he probably did, anyway).
I read that whole interview, and it made me incredibly angry at the previous administration. I heard about such things in high school, and that the research had been cancelled, but I didn't know the details. Thanks for the link. Ugh. Some people are so concerned about looking good irrespective of any facts... aargh...
-Matt
Forgot to say this in my previous post...
The other reason it would have been great to end it after that season was that Mulder had finally gotten his wish and been sucked up into an alien spaceship, and Skinner was there to watch the whole thing.
Been too long since I thought about this.
I agree. I pretty much lost interest in it a couple years ago. It was a great show, but the whole point was seeing extremely weird situations and trying to figure out what in the world (or out of the world) was going on.
I have a friend who's pretty into the show. Whenever we talk about it, I always say that the show should have ended with the seventh season. The perfect ending to the show, which was all about questions and very little about answers, would have been Scully's announcement that she was pregnant. Everybody would have been wondering if the baby was human, alien, Mulder's, or what? It would have been such a great cliffhanger.
Also, beneath all the stuff he did, I still think Krychek was a good guy.
I know Jobs has a GV (http://www.airliners.net/open.file?id=182101 ), but what does Billg have?
Ok, first, I'm trusting that you wrote that post in all seriousness. It could be flamebait, but I'll take it in good faith and work from the supposition that it's not.
Many volumes have been written discussing precisely the topics raised here. I couldn't hope to cover the whole topic in one post. Also, it's late here and I'm not finding the mental energy to take on your whole post. I'd love to discuss this more, though, and I thank you for responding
First, I would posit that it is possible for a rational person to accept religion as something other than a delusion. I'm guessing that for this to be true, you would simply require some kind of evidence verifying the statements of the religion. As an example, let's look briefly at one of the common assertions of religion: There is a God. (I'm going to argue from the perspective of Christianity, since that is what I'm most familiar with, and also happen to believe to be true). I would argue that there is substantial evidence that there is a God. To start, there is a universe. One is left with two options: either the universe is a brute fact, or the universe has a cause. Brute facts are incredibly cludgy to deal with; therefore, the more elegant explanation (to be excessively brief) is that there is a God. Now, you will ask where did God come from? God is self-existent. So, we are left with either assuming a universe or assuming God. The universe, being entirely composed of matter and governed by the laws of physics, has no mechanism for creating matter/energy. God, on the other hand, being supernatural and working above the laws of physics, has mechanism for creating matter/energy. Hence, the assertion that there is a God is at least as rational as the assertion that there is not.
I'm wishing I could write more, and I thank you for your effort in responding. If you're interested in continuing the discussion, please reply, and if necessary we could move it to email. I'll try to take on some of your other points as I get a chance.
Take care,
Matt
Um, no. The parent post is pure flamebait. Any negative moderation is simply fulfilling its purpose of increasing the signal-to-noise ratio. You make several blanket statements ("religion is complete bs") with no supporting evidence. Sure, some religion is bogus, and yes, it has been used as a tool to oppress people through the years. Lumping all people with any religious inclination into one monolithic group though, is absurd. So yes, the post is flamebait. And I guess I just bit on it.
One of the key points of the ruling was the judgment that non-English speakers might confuse the domain name with Vivendi trademark. The fear is that someone would stumble onto the website and think that it's Vivendi, when it's actually not. However, it seems to me that a nonanglophone would find the page utterly unintelligible, assuming the thing was written entirely in English. It would be equivalent to a nonfrancophone stumbling onto a page with a domain name of whatever "vivendisucks" is in French. The nonfrancophone might not make the distinction, but if the page were written entirely in French, it would also be quite meaningless to that person. Thus, the supposedly infringing domain should not cause the slightest harm to the trademark holder, unless if the person viewing the page somehow thought the graphics layout of the page to be unworthy of an international corporation. All of which is to say, the primary premise of the ruling seems utterly ridiculous.