Assuming the Bible is literally true, nothing in the universe had ever died when he gave this warning.
And while "you will surely die" is literally correct since it meant they would become mortal, it in no way even remotely approached the level of true consequences of the action. God didn't say "you will condemn a million generations of your offspring to torment and punishment, separating them from me and having them wither of old age, suffer from illness, violence, childbirth, etc", he said "you will surely die", which arguably was as meaningless to Adam and Eve as the word "day" before the sun and earth existed.
It would be like warning a child not to detonate an atomic bomb because then he wouldn't be able to ride his bike after school. Literally true, but not really the appropriate warning for the situation.
Just think, if God had the common sense of your average teenage unwed mother and put dangerous things where the kids couldn't get at it, the whole universe would be different.
I have to correct you here: God did tell them what the consequences were: he said that if they ate from the tree they would die. Pretty straightforward. Actually ironic though, because the end of the story of the Garden of Eden is with God (in the odd plural) saying that should Adam&Eve eat from the tree of Life (and not just of Knowledge) then they would live forever. So it seems that they would die anyhow, whether they eat from the tree of Knowledge or not.
Well, no, while "you will surely die" is literally correct since it meant they would become mortal, it in no way even remotely approached the level of true consequences of the action. God didn't say "you will condemn a million generations of your offspring to torment and punishment, separating them from me and having them wither of old age, suffer from illness, violence, childbirth, etc", he said "you will surely die", which arguably was as meaningless to Adam and Eve as the word "day" before the sun and earth existed. Assuming the Bible is literally correct, they would have no notion of death since nothing in the universe had ever died, much less would they understand any of the arguably much greater but more far-reaching consequences. God might as well have spoken gibberish to them and punished them for not understanding.
And I have been eternally baffled why the knowledge of Good and Evil would lead Adam and Eve to cover their nudity. If God made them naked, and everything was perfect, how was nudity evil? And if it was evil, then why did God let them run around naked in the first place? I keep hearing how morality is not relative, yet in the very first important story of the Bible, the morality of a situation changes completely just because of human perception of the situation. Presumably God did not change his mind about the morality of nudity in the ten seconds after they ate the fruit.
there would be plenty of people complaining that he didn't give us free will
I thought both we and the garden were perfect, why would anyone complain about anything? And how is it a matter of taking responsibility for our own actions? I wasn't in the garden, Adam and Eve were. Original sin only corrupted the whole race in perpetuity because that's the rule God made. God certainly had the power to pull the fertilized eggs from Eve's womb before they were born and have them grow up in the Garden and make their own choices. Satan's betrayal didn't condemn all the other angels, why did our race (which was supposed to be in His own image, no less!) get such a lousy deal? It's God's choice to be such an egotistical, prideful and vindictive jerk that we're all suffering for. Even us lowly imperfect humans eventually figured out it was unfair to make children pay for the mistakes of their parents.
It just doesn't make any sense except as a metaphor or morality tale, which is of course how the Jews always interpreted it until some fundamentalist Christian came along and decided retroactively that it was supposed to be literally about a garden and a serpent.
No real evidence... i.e. a fish giving birth to a frog
Such an event would, in fact, completely disprove evolutionary theory, so I can only assume you've been mislead as to what Evolutionary Theory really is. There are literally trillions of billions of events that would disprove Evolution as a theory beyond any capability of repair, yet none of those things has happened.
Evolution would be the simplest thing in the universe to disprove if it were untrue, since reproduction is one of the few things that happens whether scientists are starting the experiment or not. Think how easy it would be to disprove gravity if it had turned out to only be a local phenomena to our planet or galaxy -- the instant we had good telescopes and launched spacecraft we would have seen how wrong we were. Evolution is even easier -- there are species that reproduce in minutes, where you can fit billions of them in a container in your hand. The planet is running quadrillions of experiments every hour of every day and has been for thousands of times longer than man has walked upright, and you only have to stumble across ONE of them that disproves evolution and it would be completely discredited.
Everything you claim impossible has in fact been seen, measured, and reproduced. Speciation has occurred and been documented many times in laboratories and the wild. Sorry that mammalian evolution has not been observed, that's simply the nature of our lifespans. It's far more convenient to observe firsthand things that reproduce quickly. Locking 4,000 cats in a lab for a few centuries just is not as practical as it sounds (though no doubt it would be damn entertaining).
When you're discussing geological timescales and massive changes, all we can go on is the geological record. Note for the record, my mom is a geologist so I have more than a casual acquaintance with geology, and your dismissal of the science of dating is laughingly incorrect. The idea that it is circular logic to correlate multiple pieces of evidence to build confidence is absurd. We have written documentation of the ages of some locations, we have experimental proof of the decay of every element and every common material used by human civilizations, we have independent physical evidence of the age of major strata, we have experimental proof of the timespans required for geological and chemical actions taking place, if every one of those things agrees across multiple experiments then you've proven as well as anything can be proven that geological dating is reliable. It predicts where things will be well before we ever start digging or drilling, so if it is mistaken, it is mistaken in a bizarrely consistent manner.
Most importantly, like evolution, nothing has ever been discovered in a geological dig that showed such dating techniques were wrong. Again, this would be a simple thing to disprove, you just find a single iron axe that is 6,000 years old buried in stable rock from 20,000,000 years ago and geology as a science would have a MAJOR problem.
By your "circular" reasoning, both gravity and the speed of light are suspect because we use each to verify measurements of the other in many cosmological experiments.
"Missing links"? I don't even know what that is supposed to refer to. There is no such thing as a "missing link" except in Creationist books. In real science there are simply different species, and they all change over time, the greater the timespan, the greater the change. I find it is simpler to imagine evolution working vast change over vast time than it is to imagine why so many species would be so morphologically similar, so genetically similar, and yet have no actual commonality.
I appreciate the sincerity of your belief, but it really does appear to be based in large part on either a misunderstanding of what evolution is and says, or a misunderstanding of what the state and practice of science is. Unfortunately there are a great many people out there pub
Okay, but how is that a moral choice or a sin or a decision to reject what God gave them? You can say it was a mistake or a bad choice, but unless you simply assume the tautology "God==Moral==Good", there was no reason whatsoever for man to believe he was doing anything more complex than eating a fruit. He was not informed of the consequences, nor of the nature of the challenge, nor of the fact that it even was a challenge, nor that the universe's most powerful and persuasive predator was lurking nearby and had all eternity in which to tempt.
It seems to me that God was being colossally dickish if the story is to be taken literally. It would be like locking an immortal six year old in a prison for immortal pedophiles and then telling him never to let them touch him in any way for all eternity, but they're allowed to do anything they like to change his mind and you won't lift a finger to stop them.
As a metaphor, of course, it works wonderfully as a way to describe the complexity of human life as we grew into self-aware, curious beings and abandoned our animal innocence and simplicity of life.
The catholic church is NOT mainstream Christian thought. The catholic church on many occasions killed anyone who opposed them, their teachings are not Christian and aren't considered so by anyone other than themselves.
You do realize that the vast majority of Christians outside the USA are Catholic, right? They're not exactly some obscure sect of Christianity. Protestantism is, by any reasonable definition of "mainstream", NOT mainstream Christian except in the USA and a few other places.
He made us capable of making moral choices, but we're not punished for being able to sin--we're punished for sin.
What sin? She ate a fruit when it was offered to her, by a being that God _allowed_ into the Garden. Yes, she was told not to eat the fruit, but was never told why or what the consequences were, despite God being omniscient enough to know he had created man with curiosity.
Leaving completely ignorant and unsophisticated children alone with the greatest predator in the universe does not seem like a wise parenting decision.
There is a place for creationism in schools - in the Religious Education lessons.
Unfortunately here in the States the idea of comparative religion below college level is very controversial, precisely because our vocal evangelical minority considers the very existence of other faiths and exposure to them to be morally troublesome. Which is a shame, because I've yet to meet more than a handful of people who've ever taken a comparative religion class and didn't find it fascinating and enjoyable.
Even those of strong faith who took classes generally found it strengthened their devotion, as they understand God seems to have spoken to every society in a different way, but with a surprisingly common message once you remove the cultural and historical traditions that seem to indicate some great theological or philosophical gulf.
Oh, I certainly don't disparage anyone who does enjoy the show, and I'd agree that (ironically) it is a more family-friendly show than Heroes. It's just that with a premise that involves nuclear terrorism and basically a post-apocalyptic survival scenario, a lot of us were expecting it to be a bit more hard edged and mature than it turned out to be. My expectations for the story were certainly a lot more intense and morally frustrating, I went into it understanding CBS was trying to attract 18-35 males to the network.
It may be that CBS thought they were in a bit of a pickle in terms of viewership -- the demographics of those who could enjoy it as broadcast may have included a lot of folks who found the premise not suitable for family TV and weren't willing to give it a chance.
I'm not sure this will be a safe place to bring children.
After all, Gravity is only a theory, so there's no reason for builders of faith to follow those state-enforced secular building codes describing what kind of load bearing supports are required.
even though nobody has ever observed it (observation = science) life came about on its own.
Um, you should probably read a bit about evolution before deciding to disbelieve it. The Theory of Evolution makes no statements about abiogenesis, and anyone saying it does is someone who doesn't understand evolution. A supernatural creator endowing life on unliving matter is perfectly compatible with evolution as taught in any science curriculum. The mechanisms of Evolution are easily repeatable in any experiment, and the larger theory provides numerous predictions that have all proven correct. That's science, and that is all that is taught in anything below advanced college-level science courses.
There are many theories about both abiogenesis and the creation of the universe. Its unlikely we'll ever know with any significant scientific certainty which theories are correct (though we'll certainly narrow down which ones are possible). It may be appropriate for a science text to talk about those theories which are being most closely studied (the man versions of the Big Bang, for example), but it would be incorrect for any student to be told "the universe started with a Big Bang". It is 100% scientifically correct to tell a student that Evolution is as proven as Gravity or the speed of light.
What happens when a town is completely cut off in the middle of such a disaster?
That's a great premise for a show, and why we tuned in. Where were the tough moral choices? Nobody in the entire town seemed to sacrifice anything more significant than electricity, and even that is hardly noticed or noted on. They all still have clean clothes, there's no disease other than radiation sickness. How is the local accountant going to contribute to such a society? How is he going to earn his food, take care of his family? If there was some new guy in town who seemed to mysteriously know everything that was going on, don't you think a few folks with pitchforks and torches would show up on his front lawn demanding answers?
Sorry if you don't like it being compared to LOST, but to everyone else the comparison seems pretty obvious. You could swap Hawkins and Locke and I doubt anyone would notice, their only jobs are to be mysterious and make people think there is some vast interesting story that might someday be told if only the viewers put up with 7 or 8 seasons of pretty young actors having love affairs.
Remember those two or three 'alien' shows? They had some promising development, and then they fell flat...
Oh, God, I remember watching Invasion and realizing halfway through the season that I had no more idea what was happening in this world than I did 20 minutes into the first episode. Jericho is a carbon copy of that situation -- let's a take an inherently interesting premise and then never bother to actually see what's happening, just add lots of mysterious behavior and see who has sex.
I'm guessing you didn't notice the show was canceled. And the number one breakout hit of the season is Heroes, which was written exactly the way Jericho SHOULD have been written -- taking an exciting premise and actually exploring it. Putting normal people we can recognize and identify with and throwing intensely crazy situations at them to see how they handle it. Characters developed over time, reacted to the amazing situation they were in, adapted, acted to try and change things (both for good and ill) and became drivers of the story at some times wile being pulled along by events larger than themselves at others. That's how you write compelling fiction.
I can't think of any character in Jericho that actually had a decent character arc of any kind, that changed in any significant way. It's a town full of stoic men and women who rise to the situation and have lots of mysterious military training that allows them to solve any problem without having to do any particularly hard work or make any tough choices. We're told through flashbacks that many of them were different people BEFORE the story we're seeing now, but that isn't the same thing as getting to know a character as one thing (and liking or hating them for it) and then watching them grow into something else due to the circumstances and their own choices.
And yes, I have written fiction professionally before (and will again). I went to school for, among other things, writing. I love purely character-based stories. But you can't spend so much time navel-gazing that you lose track of the actual plot for huge portions of the screen time. You can't sell a story as "The world is going to end in nuclear war! How will America survive?" and then deliver Green Acres crossed with 90210.
He shouldn't have. Unfortunately, the restrictions against people who have seizures are so strict, that many people who occasionally have minor seizures fail to report them, because it can be ruinous to lose your driver's license. (Lose license = lose job, lose house, etc.) There's very little middle ground.
Correct. My girlfriend had a period of about a year in college where she would occasionally get minor seizures on the left side of her body. She could tell one was coming a few minutes before they occurred, and because they were on the left even if one had come on suddenly it didn't really affect her ability to operate the gas/brake or steer out of traffic to wait for them to end. She didn't report it precisely because she needed to drive to get to work and knew she'd lose her license, have to drop out of school, etc.
That's part of why I love the BBC lately -- they're not afraid to just have a show and say "it will end on this date" right at the beginning. I wouldn't have watched Life on Mars if it had been an American show, because I would have assumed it would just get more convoluted and never really go anywhere. But the creators said "we're doing this for two seasons, and at the end of the last episode, you'll know what happened".
It was a great show, highly entertaining, well-written, and best of all still leaves room for a lot of personal interpretation (and friendly debate) of the show's "reality", precisely because they didn't tie themselves up with needless complications dragging it out across 5+ seasons.
The second half of the season didn't deal much with love triangles, rather it focused on the Hawkins character, who was much more interesting than the Jake character.
See, I had the exact opposite reaction -- I thought the Hawkins character really made the show so silly and artificial that it distracted the writers from the core concept. It's like they had the show ready to go and then they said "But we need a mysterious cryptic character like Locke from LOST!"
Hawkins seemed to function as a Deus Ex Machina whenever the writers couldn't solve a problem or wanted to throw in a curve ball. Nuclear bombs destroying the country and the survivors having to figure out what to do is really plenty interesting as a premise -- we don't need some guy with super-duper hacking powers, a nuclear bomb and ninja skills (who speaks Chinese and works for the Trilateral Commission) to move into town the day before it all happens.
And his whole ex-wife and kids drama was just as dull and uninteresting to me as Jake's girl troubles. Adding a ninja ex-girlfriend back from the dead who may be trying to double-cross him while working for the Man in Black is not interesting, it's unnecessary.
If the writers from Jericho had been in charge of Heroes, they would have spent 7 episodes dealing with Claire and an ex-boyfriend, a pregnancy scare, her mom having an affair, etc. Hiro discovers he can stop time but instead of trying to save the world he spends the first 22 episodes going back to his childhood and crying while watching his father learn to ride a bicycle and wondering why his Mom didn't breast feed him. Syler would have shown up in the last half of the last episode of the season, and the writers would wonder why the show was being canceled.
Aargh, the more I sit and think the more annoyed I get all over again.
I just can't imagine sitting around a table in the writer's room and listening to somebody say "Okay, we've blown up all the major cities in the USA, the country is in Civil War, looting and riots are rampant, normal citizens are totally isolated, thrown back into the 19th century ways of living overnight -- but what people want to know is, will Jake hook up with the blonde or the brunette? And what impact would post-apocalyptic panic have on rural thanksgiving celebrations?"
I agree -- it was an intruiging premise that kept me watching for about 9 episodes, when it became clear they were basically a LOST-style show that was never going to bother answeing anything and just keep adding more and more complicated conspiracies and romances and subplots rather than focus on the thing that actually, you know, INTRUIGED us about the story in the first place.
I did watch the finale just to see what if anything had been resolved, and have to admit I was somewhat interested in what would happen, since it was actually about the freaking story the whole show was supposed to be about. But no, they decided to leave viewers with a completely unsatisfying show by wasting episode after episode on farmer love triangles while civil war, military coups, and nuclear terrorism in the continental United States were apparently too boring to be dealt with until well after many people had given up on the issues ever being talked about again.
You know the old joke about IBM marketing would sell sushi by calling it "cold, raw dead fish". CBS apparently hired IBM marketing to write this show because they started with an inherently story-filled premise and managed to fill hour after hour with dull flashbacks on generic midwestern family crap that could have been lifted from episodes of Seventh Heaven.
I actually wrote a bit acknowledging this in my original message, but felt it was tangential to my point so deleted it.
Yes, science fiction in general is about "what if this thing changed", and indeed if genetic testing was perfected I have no doubt that incest would be no big deal in time. It doesn't bother me that he considered that implication of genetic knowledge and extrapolated.
What bothered me was that it seemed to be a recurring theme, not a simple "hmm, this would be an interesting cultural change in sexual mores". Stranger in a Strange Land certainly explored more sexually taboo things than most people accept (certainly at the time of publication, but even still today for most of society) and did so in a way that fit the story, that simply accepted them as the situation and explored what it meant to the people involved and society at large.
His overly-frequent references to incest are not handled in anywhere near the same way -- they comes out of nowhere in some of his stories and are treated with great glee by the characters in a way that doesn't make much sense in context, don't have any real purpose in the story, yet get a great deal of loving attention in the storytelling.
I just remember reading about 20-30 books of is in the period of a few months, and stopping when I got to the third or fourth book in which there was a scene of "gosh daddy, we can have sex I love you so much! I know daughter, isn't it great that today we can have sex when those barbarians in the past wouldn't have let us love each other the way we want? people in the past were stupid daddy, let's make love!"
I just got the impression that he just spent a little too much time pondering that particular topic. I doubt I would have noticed if I hadn't read so much of his work in such a short period of time.
No, we do. Do not judge who are qualified by yourself.
I'm not judging anyone by myself.
If you offered a million dollars a day for someone to do the job you can't fill, do you think you could find a qualified applicant? I sure do, and I don't care what position it is, what sector, what country. You will find plenty of qualified applicants willing to move to you and do the job for a million dollars a day.
So the real problem you have is not "nobody is qualified and willing to apply for this job", it is that you can't get someone for what you're offering to pay them. Or you're not communicating with the qualified applicants.
No you aren't if you aren't getting any qualified applicants. Or else you aren't advertising the available positions enough for the qualified applicants to know they exist.
Good = someday being able to have sex with your own daughter and other relatives
Seriously, I know he's an important author, but after reading half his books I simply got a little creeped out by his constant excitement over the idea that once we have the art of genetic testing down perfectly, we'll all finally be able to sleep with our sisters and daughters!
Consider yourself lucky that you were on a jury with a different experience.
Perhaps you should consider yourself unlucky to have had a bad experience?
I've served on several juries in my life, as have multiple family members and friends. Every one of us enjoyed the process, found it interesting and served with jurors who were very serious about what we were all doing. Yes, it can be an inconvenience but I think you underestimate how much people like novelty and the feeling of doing something different and important and making a difference in the world -- and serving on a jury is one of the few times in most people's lives where they know without any doubt that their decision will dramatically, directly affect several people's lives.
Every study I know if about jury attitudes has shown that my experience was typical, and that most people take it very seriously.
That said, yes you can bore the hell out of jurors, but that isn't because they're uninterested, in my experience it's because attorneys and witnesses were so poorly prepared they spent hours circling around issues on fishing expeditions instead of getting to the damn point and moving on.
As someone who's got a storage room full of ADC 15" flat panels at work, I would disagree with that.
But Apple never cared if anyone else picked up ADC, all they wanted to do was eliminate cables on their own systems. Of course once they started the move towards commodity hardware, they switched to DVI and moved to just using a special cable instead. But the ADC was always intended as a proprietary Apple connector that nobody else would have -- it was an "advantage" to buying an all-apple system that you didn't have to deal with extra cables.
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Assuming the Bible is literally true, nothing in the universe had ever died when he gave this warning.
And while "you will surely die" is literally correct since it meant they would become mortal, it in no way even remotely approached the level of true consequences of the action. God didn't say "you will condemn a million generations of your offspring to torment and punishment, separating them from me and having them wither of old age, suffer from illness, violence, childbirth, etc", he said "you will surely die", which arguably was as meaningless to Adam and Eve as the word "day" before the sun and earth existed.
It would be like warning a child not to detonate an atomic bomb because then he wouldn't be able to ride his bike after school. Literally true, but not really the appropriate warning for the situation.
Just think, if God had the common sense of your average teenage unwed mother and put dangerous things where the kids couldn't get at it, the whole universe would be different.
Well, no, while "you will surely die" is literally correct since it meant they would become mortal, it in no way even remotely approached the level of true consequences of the action. God didn't say "you will condemn a million generations of your offspring to torment and punishment, separating them from me and having them wither of old age, suffer from illness, violence, childbirth, etc", he said "you will surely die", which arguably was as meaningless to Adam and Eve as the word "day" before the sun and earth existed. Assuming the Bible is literally correct, they would have no notion of death since nothing in the universe had ever died, much less would they understand any of the arguably much greater but more far-reaching consequences. God might as well have spoken gibberish to them and punished them for not understanding.
And I have been eternally baffled why the knowledge of Good and Evil would lead Adam and Eve to cover their nudity. If God made them naked, and everything was perfect, how was nudity evil? And if it was evil, then why did God let them run around naked in the first place? I keep hearing how morality is not relative, yet in the very first important story of the Bible, the morality of a situation changes completely just because of human perception of the situation. Presumably God did not change his mind about the morality of nudity in the ten seconds after they ate the fruit.
I thought both we and the garden were perfect, why would anyone complain about anything? And how is it a matter of taking responsibility for our own actions? I wasn't in the garden, Adam and Eve were. Original sin only corrupted the whole race in perpetuity because that's the rule God made. God certainly had the power to pull the fertilized eggs from Eve's womb before they were born and have them grow up in the Garden and make their own choices. Satan's betrayal didn't condemn all the other angels, why did our race (which was supposed to be in His own image, no less!) get such a lousy deal? It's God's choice to be such an egotistical, prideful and vindictive jerk that we're all suffering for. Even us lowly imperfect humans eventually figured out it was unfair to make children pay for the mistakes of their parents.
It just doesn't make any sense except as a metaphor or morality tale, which is of course how the Jews always interpreted it until some fundamentalist Christian came along and decided retroactively that it was supposed to be literally about a garden and a serpent.
Such an event would, in fact, completely disprove evolutionary theory, so I can only assume you've been mislead as to what Evolutionary Theory really is. There are literally trillions of billions of events that would disprove Evolution as a theory beyond any capability of repair, yet none of those things has happened.
Evolution would be the simplest thing in the universe to disprove if it were untrue, since reproduction is one of the few things that happens whether scientists are starting the experiment or not. Think how easy it would be to disprove gravity if it had turned out to only be a local phenomena to our planet or galaxy -- the instant we had good telescopes and launched spacecraft we would have seen how wrong we were. Evolution is even easier -- there are species that reproduce in minutes, where you can fit billions of them in a container in your hand. The planet is running quadrillions of experiments every hour of every day and has been for thousands of times longer than man has walked upright, and you only have to stumble across ONE of them that disproves evolution and it would be completely discredited.
Everything you claim impossible has in fact been seen, measured, and reproduced. Speciation has occurred and been documented many times in laboratories and the wild. Sorry that mammalian evolution has not been observed, that's simply the nature of our lifespans. It's far more convenient to observe firsthand things that reproduce quickly. Locking 4,000 cats in a lab for a few centuries just is not as practical as it sounds (though no doubt it would be damn entertaining).
When you're discussing geological timescales and massive changes, all we can go on is the geological record. Note for the record, my mom is a geologist so I have more than a casual acquaintance with geology, and your dismissal of the science of dating is laughingly incorrect. The idea that it is circular logic to correlate multiple pieces of evidence to build confidence is absurd. We have written documentation of the ages of some locations, we have experimental proof of the decay of every element and every common material used by human civilizations, we have independent physical evidence of the age of major strata, we have experimental proof of the timespans required for geological and chemical actions taking place, if every one of those things agrees across multiple experiments then you've proven as well as anything can be proven that geological dating is reliable. It predicts where things will be well before we ever start digging or drilling, so if it is mistaken, it is mistaken in a bizarrely consistent manner.
Most importantly, like evolution, nothing has ever been discovered in a geological dig that showed such dating techniques were wrong. Again, this would be a simple thing to disprove, you just find a single iron axe that is 6,000 years old buried in stable rock from 20,000,000 years ago and geology as a science would have a MAJOR problem.
By your "circular" reasoning, both gravity and the speed of light are suspect because we use each to verify measurements of the other in many cosmological experiments.
"Missing links"? I don't even know what that is supposed to refer to. There is no such thing as a "missing link" except in Creationist books. In real science there are simply different species, and they all change over time, the greater the timespan, the greater the change. I find it is simpler to imagine evolution working vast change over vast time than it is to imagine why so many species would be so morphologically similar, so genetically similar, and yet have no actual commonality.
I appreciate the sincerity of your belief, but it really does appear to be based in large part on either a misunderstanding of what evolution is and says, or a misunderstanding of what the state and practice of science is. Unfortunately there are a great many people out there pub
Okay, but how is that a moral choice or a sin or a decision to reject what God gave them? You can say it was a mistake or a bad choice, but unless you simply assume the tautology "God==Moral==Good", there was no reason whatsoever for man to believe he was doing anything more complex than eating a fruit. He was not informed of the consequences, nor of the nature of the challenge, nor of the fact that it even was a challenge, nor that the universe's most powerful and persuasive predator was lurking nearby and had all eternity in which to tempt.
It seems to me that God was being colossally dickish if the story is to be taken literally. It would be like locking an immortal six year old in a prison for immortal pedophiles and then telling him never to let them touch him in any way for all eternity, but they're allowed to do anything they like to change his mind and you won't lift a finger to stop them.
As a metaphor, of course, it works wonderfully as a way to describe the complexity of human life as we grew into self-aware, curious beings and abandoned our animal innocence and simplicity of life.
You do realize that the vast majority of Christians outside the USA are Catholic, right? They're not exactly some obscure sect of Christianity. Protestantism is, by any reasonable definition of "mainstream", NOT mainstream Christian except in the USA and a few other places.
What sin? She ate a fruit when it was offered to her, by a being that God _allowed_ into the Garden. Yes, she was told not to eat the fruit, but was never told why or what the consequences were, despite God being omniscient enough to know he had created man with curiosity.
Leaving completely ignorant and unsophisticated children alone with the greatest predator in the universe does not seem like a wise parenting decision.
Unfortunately here in the States the idea of comparative religion below college level is very controversial, precisely because our vocal evangelical minority considers the very existence of other faiths and exposure to them to be morally troublesome. Which is a shame, because I've yet to meet more than a handful of people who've ever taken a comparative religion class and didn't find it fascinating and enjoyable.
Even those of strong faith who took classes generally found it strengthened their devotion, as they understand God seems to have spoken to every society in a different way, but with a surprisingly common message once you remove the cultural and historical traditions that seem to indicate some great theological or philosophical gulf.
Oh, I certainly don't disparage anyone who does enjoy the show, and I'd agree that (ironically) it is a more family-friendly show than Heroes. It's just that with a premise that involves nuclear terrorism and basically a post-apocalyptic survival scenario, a lot of us were expecting it to be a bit more hard edged and mature than it turned out to be. My expectations for the story were certainly a lot more intense and morally frustrating, I went into it understanding CBS was trying to attract 18-35 males to the network.
It may be that CBS thought they were in a bit of a pickle in terms of viewership -- the demographics of those who could enjoy it as broadcast may have included a lot of folks who found the premise not suitable for family TV and weren't willing to give it a chance.
I'm not sure this will be a safe place to bring children.
After all, Gravity is only a theory, so there's no reason for builders of faith to follow those state-enforced secular building codes describing what kind of load bearing supports are required.
Um, you should probably read a bit about evolution before deciding to disbelieve it. The Theory of Evolution makes no statements about abiogenesis, and anyone saying it does is someone who doesn't understand evolution. A supernatural creator endowing life on unliving matter is perfectly compatible with evolution as taught in any science curriculum. The mechanisms of Evolution are easily repeatable in any experiment, and the larger theory provides numerous predictions that have all proven correct. That's science, and that is all that is taught in anything below advanced college-level science courses.
There are many theories about both abiogenesis and the creation of the universe. Its unlikely we'll ever know with any significant scientific certainty which theories are correct (though we'll certainly narrow down which ones are possible). It may be appropriate for a science text to talk about those theories which are being most closely studied (the man versions of the Big Bang, for example), but it would be incorrect for any student to be told "the universe started with a Big Bang". It is 100% scientifically correct to tell a student that Evolution is as proven as Gravity or the speed of light.
That's a great premise for a show, and why we tuned in. Where were the tough moral choices? Nobody in the entire town seemed to sacrifice anything more significant than electricity, and even that is hardly noticed or noted on. They all still have clean clothes, there's no disease other than radiation sickness. How is the local accountant going to contribute to such a society? How is he going to earn his food, take care of his family? If there was some new guy in town who seemed to mysteriously know everything that was going on, don't you think a few folks with pitchforks and torches would show up on his front lawn demanding answers?
Sorry if you don't like it being compared to LOST, but to everyone else the comparison seems pretty obvious. You could swap Hawkins and Locke and I doubt anyone would notice, their only jobs are to be mysterious and make people think there is some vast interesting story that might someday be told if only the viewers put up with 7 or 8 seasons of pretty young actors having love affairs.
Oh, God, I remember watching Invasion and realizing halfway through the season that I had no more idea what was happening in this world than I did 20 minutes into the first episode. Jericho is a carbon copy of that situation -- let's a take an inherently interesting premise and then never bother to actually see what's happening, just add lots of mysterious behavior and see who has sex.
I'm guessing you didn't notice the show was canceled. And the number one breakout hit of the season is Heroes, which was written exactly the way Jericho SHOULD have been written -- taking an exciting premise and actually exploring it. Putting normal people we can recognize and identify with and throwing intensely crazy situations at them to see how they handle it. Characters developed over time, reacted to the amazing situation they were in, adapted, acted to try and change things (both for good and ill) and became drivers of the story at some times wile being pulled along by events larger than themselves at others. That's how you write compelling fiction.
I can't think of any character in Jericho that actually had a decent character arc of any kind, that changed in any significant way. It's a town full of stoic men and women who rise to the situation and have lots of mysterious military training that allows them to solve any problem without having to do any particularly hard work or make any tough choices. We're told through flashbacks that many of them were different people BEFORE the story we're seeing now, but that isn't the same thing as getting to know a character as one thing (and liking or hating them for it) and then watching them grow into something else due to the circumstances and their own choices.
And yes, I have written fiction professionally before (and will again). I went to school for, among other things, writing. I love purely character-based stories. But you can't spend so much time navel-gazing that you lose track of the actual plot for huge portions of the screen time. You can't sell a story as "The world is going to end in nuclear war! How will America survive?" and then deliver Green Acres crossed with 90210.
Correct. My girlfriend had a period of about a year in college where she would occasionally get minor seizures on the left side of her body. She could tell one was coming a few minutes before they occurred, and because they were on the left even if one had come on suddenly it didn't really affect her ability to operate the gas/brake or steer out of traffic to wait for them to end. She didn't report it precisely because she needed to drive to get to work and knew she'd lose her license, have to drop out of school, etc.
That's part of why I love the BBC lately -- they're not afraid to just have a show and say "it will end on this date" right at the beginning. I wouldn't have watched Life on Mars if it had been an American show, because I would have assumed it would just get more convoluted and never really go anywhere. But the creators said "we're doing this for two seasons, and at the end of the last episode, you'll know what happened".
It was a great show, highly entertaining, well-written, and best of all still leaves room for a lot of personal interpretation (and friendly debate) of the show's "reality", precisely because they didn't tie themselves up with needless complications dragging it out across 5+ seasons.
See, I had the exact opposite reaction -- I thought the Hawkins character really made the show so silly and artificial that it distracted the writers from the core concept. It's like they had the show ready to go and then they said "But we need a mysterious cryptic character like Locke from LOST!"
Hawkins seemed to function as a Deus Ex Machina whenever the writers couldn't solve a problem or wanted to throw in a curve ball. Nuclear bombs destroying the country and the survivors having to figure out what to do is really plenty interesting as a premise -- we don't need some guy with super-duper hacking powers, a nuclear bomb and ninja skills (who speaks Chinese and works for the Trilateral Commission) to move into town the day before it all happens.
And his whole ex-wife and kids drama was just as dull and uninteresting to me as Jake's girl troubles. Adding a ninja ex-girlfriend back from the dead who may be trying to double-cross him while working for the Man in Black is not interesting, it's unnecessary.
If the writers from Jericho had been in charge of Heroes, they would have spent 7 episodes dealing with Claire and an ex-boyfriend, a pregnancy scare, her mom having an affair, etc. Hiro discovers he can stop time but instead of trying to save the world he spends the first 22 episodes going back to his childhood and crying while watching his father learn to ride a bicycle and wondering why his Mom didn't breast feed him. Syler would have shown up in the last half of the last episode of the season, and the writers would wonder why the show was being canceled.
Aargh, the more I sit and think the more annoyed I get all over again.
I just can't imagine sitting around a table in the writer's room and listening to somebody say "Okay, we've blown up all the major cities in the USA, the country is in Civil War, looting and riots are rampant, normal citizens are totally isolated, thrown back into the 19th century ways of living overnight -- but what people want to know is, will Jake hook up with the blonde or the brunette? And what impact would post-apocalyptic panic have on rural thanksgiving celebrations?"
I agree -- it was an intruiging premise that kept me watching for about 9 episodes, when it became clear they were basically a LOST-style show that was never going to bother answeing anything and just keep adding more and more complicated conspiracies and romances and subplots rather than focus on the thing that actually, you know, INTRUIGED us about the story in the first place.
I did watch the finale just to see what if anything had been resolved, and have to admit I was somewhat interested in what would happen, since it was actually about the freaking story the whole show was supposed to be about. But no, they decided to leave viewers with a completely unsatisfying show by wasting episode after episode on farmer love triangles while civil war, military coups, and nuclear terrorism in the continental United States were apparently too boring to be dealt with until well after many people had given up on the issues ever being talked about again.
You know the old joke about IBM marketing would sell sushi by calling it "cold, raw dead fish". CBS apparently hired IBM marketing to write this show because they started with an inherently story-filled premise and managed to fill hour after hour with dull flashbacks on generic midwestern family crap that could have been lifted from episodes of Seventh Heaven.
I actually wrote a bit acknowledging this in my original message, but felt it was tangential to my point so deleted it.
Yes, science fiction in general is about "what if this thing changed", and indeed if genetic testing was perfected I have no doubt that incest would be no big deal in time. It doesn't bother me that he considered that implication of genetic knowledge and extrapolated.
What bothered me was that it seemed to be a recurring theme, not a simple "hmm, this would be an interesting cultural change in sexual mores". Stranger in a Strange Land certainly explored more sexually taboo things than most people accept (certainly at the time of publication, but even still today for most of society) and did so in a way that fit the story, that simply accepted them as the situation and explored what it meant to the people involved and society at large.
His overly-frequent references to incest are not handled in anywhere near the same way -- they comes out of nowhere in some of his stories and are treated with great glee by the characters in a way that doesn't make much sense in context, don't have any real purpose in the story, yet get a great deal of loving attention in the storytelling.
I just remember reading about 20-30 books of is in the period of a few months, and stopping when I got to the third or fourth book in which there was a scene of "gosh daddy, we can have sex I love you so much! I know daughter, isn't it great that today we can have sex when those barbarians in the past wouldn't have let us love each other the way we want? people in the past were stupid daddy, let's make love!"
I just got the impression that he just spent a little too much time pondering that particular topic. I doubt I would have noticed if I hadn't read so much of his work in such a short period of time.
I'm not judging anyone by myself.
If you offered a million dollars a day for someone to do the job you can't fill, do you think you could find a qualified applicant? I sure do, and I don't care what position it is, what sector, what country. You will find plenty of qualified applicants willing to move to you and do the job for a million dollars a day.
So the real problem you have is not "nobody is qualified and willing to apply for this job", it is that you can't get someone for what you're offering to pay them. Or you're not communicating with the qualified applicants.
No you aren't if you aren't getting any qualified applicants. Or else you aren't advertising the available positions enough for the qualified applicants to know they exist.
You also forgot:
Good = someday being able to have sex with your own daughter and other relatives
Seriously, I know he's an important author, but after reading half his books I simply got a little creeped out by his constant excitement over the idea that once we have the art of genetic testing down perfectly, we'll all finally be able to sleep with our sisters and daughters!
Perhaps you should consider yourself unlucky to have had a bad experience?
I've served on several juries in my life, as have multiple family members and friends. Every one of us enjoyed the process, found it interesting and served with jurors who were very serious about what we were all doing. Yes, it can be an inconvenience but I think you underestimate how much people like novelty and the feeling of doing something different and important and making a difference in the world -- and serving on a jury is one of the few times in most people's lives where they know without any doubt that their decision will dramatically, directly affect several people's lives.
Every study I know if about jury attitudes has shown that my experience was typical, and that most people take it very seriously.
That said, yes you can bore the hell out of jurors, but that isn't because they're uninterested, in my experience it's because attorneys and witnesses were so poorly prepared they spent hours circling around issues on fishing expeditions instead of getting to the damn point and moving on.
But Apple never cared if anyone else picked up ADC, all they wanted to do was eliminate cables on their own systems. Of course once they started the move towards commodity hardware, they switched to DVI and moved to just using a special cable instead. But the ADC was always intended as a proprietary Apple connector that nobody else would have -- it was an "advantage" to buying an all-apple system that you didn't have to deal with extra cables.