The approach I took was to use code folding in combination with searching. With an optional number of lines of context around each search result included in the code fold.
It made refactoring so much easier... search for all "foo->bar->baz" and you instantly see all uses of that string in your code, which lets you quickly edit them all exactly the same way with a lot more accuracy (since you can see all changes together on screen). The patch was for an older version of VIM, probably not usable in the current version without updating. Was rejected by the VIM guys because they thought it'd be better as a script.
>>That your anti-science ramblings don't attract many registered users is more likely a comment about you.
Anti-science ramblings? What the fuck? Have you paid no attention to what I wrote, or are you somehow still confusing "Christian" = "somehow everything he writes is anti-science"?
The only anti-science person in this thread is you, by that measure.
>>Oh, and it's easy to tell fundamentalists. They're the ones with the integrity to attempt to believe the entire thing, not just the comfortable and easy bits.
You're buying their propaganda, then. Fundamentalists do not "attempt to believe the entire thing" - they are way worse than the cafeteria Christians in normal denominations. They actively believe things that are against the Bible, and then try to retcon everything to match their twisted view of scripture.
>>Hah. And you're one of the mainstream ones of course, not the lunatic fringe! Do you feel more comfortable thinking that others believe as you do? Is this a source of strength for you?
Troll.
>>Your 14/18th level mage theory assumes a lower-level mage, or even a lowly illusionist, couldn't have produced the same effects.
Fail. Utter D&D fail. Those were cleric spells I was referring to. You could tell because animate is a 5th level spell for arcane casters, but 3rd for clerics. And, you know, because Res and True Res are cleric only spells.
>>That's why religion has absolutely no predictive power.
Why on earth would you want to use religion for predictive power? (Except for how it explains certain kinds of human behavior, I guess.) You're still failing to understand the NOMA concept.
>>Only religious people seeking to distance themselves from other religions try to draw those lines.
That's like saying that only people seeking to distance themselves from sex try to draw the line between fellatio and necrophilia. It makes no sense.
Cults are inherently different, dangerous, and unhealthy to its members. Religions, in general, are not. It's like the difference between a normal cell and a cancerous cell.
I'm sure you could work out an equivalent car analogy, if you took the time.
So I get a degree, yet if I want to go into software, I need to re-educate myself, apparently, and make a few arbitrary or contribute to some group project that would take a while to understand before being able to have something added to say I've helped. So, on what money do I do this? If I was going for, say a grad-job where I was going to do Java, guess what, I'd expect to be able to learn it on the job.
Arbitrary? No, you're missing the point if you think that just contributing some random comment-cleanups to an open source project will matter during a job interview. What people like to see is something you're passionate about, and the work you did as a result of that passion.
Things like cache simulators are more like homework than anything else, and basically anyone in CS (at least at UCSD) will have written one by the time they graduate. This doesn't count either.
My entire point is your objection that you're "too busy doing work for the degree". People that have passion for coding will write code while you're off being "busy" watching Glee or whatever it is you're doing between school and sleep.
If you think of these sorts of things as just one more checkbox to tick off before you get hired, you won't. Well, from people that are looking for these sorts of things, at least.
By the time I got my degree, I had a variety of projects I did for school and for fun that I could show off. Bayesian. If people don't have a portfolio, they're lazy. Either because they can't be bothered to put together a portfolio, or because they haven't done anything at school except sit like a bump on a log. (Never understood that phrase...)
Any student can work on: 1) Open source projects 2) Mods for games 3) Websites for whatever interest 4) Useful utilities to make their own coding projects faster. I wrote a patch for VIM that did code folding the way I wanted it done, for example 5) Small programs for their own hobbies (I wrote an Axis & Allies combat odds calculator once while, uh, drunk as an undergraduate)...or as TFA suggests, a mobile app.
There's plenty of places where people of even the smallest curiosity will be able to find something to do that they can point at on a job interview.
>>Steam, also mentions that should they close for whatever reason, they will release a way to play steam games without needing the steam service. This is unlike EA's system, where you need to be online to play at all
Right. I agree with TFA to the point that recent developments in tying DRM to an online state have proven to be more trouble than its worth, and that no single player game should honestly demand an internet connection to function.
EA's network chokes and dies under heavy load, which means, for example, I got to play through the DA2 demo four times until their networks stayed up long enough in one stretch to register the completion of the demo (if the network dies at *any point* during the demo, it refuses to give you credit for the unlock in the full game).
Ubisoft is evil, goes without saying. I've refused to buy all of their games for the last several years for this reason alone.
Steam works pretty well - except when the internet connection suddenly goes down. If your internet suddenly cuts out (thanks, AT&T!), as it did during the DA1 release day, you can be in trouble with Steam. You see, Steam knows when there is an update to be downloaded, but it will wait until your next launch to actually conduct the update. If your internet connection suddenly dies and you try to launch the game again, it will enter an endless loop of trying to patch, and refusing to launch your game because it knows there's an update available. Steam's offline mode only works if you know in advance your internet connection is going to die, which isn't very helpful at all.
It has been this way since it first launched, and they're apparently in no rush to fix it.
>>You don't know the difference between a nationality and a religion, and yet you have the fucking nerve to call other people ignorant?
You don't know demography of the region? Fine, I'll give the long form.
80%+ of Indians are Hindus. 95%+ of the people in Pakistan are Muslims. When people look at Indians and think they are suicide bombers (because they are Muslims - don't you see the turbans!?), they're making the mistake I talked about above.
There, has your politically correct brain been satisfied, or do I need to find a Yahoo Answer on the subject, like your "reference" on the other thread? Lol.
Obviously the four people who answered the flippant response as "good" know more about the subjects than those ignorant savages with PhDs after their name.
>>God doesn't *make* things 'the right thing to do' they just are.
That's one of those interesting questions, which Socrates took up in the Euthyphro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro).
You're certainly right, that the Bible says that God loves justice and good things (which indicates there are good actions separate from God decreeing them so), but he also makes rather awkward demands from his chosen people (wear a funny hat, don't cut your hair at the corners, don't mix woolens and linens), etc., which have been interpreted several different ways: 1) You should do these arbitrary things because God tells you to do them. 2) Doing these arbitrary things sets the Orthodox Jewish people apart from other peoples, making them easy to identify, so that they can be the example to the world that God wants them to be. 3) They're just customs from an ancient time, and should be mostly ignored unless they also have some moral value. (The Reform Judaism view.)
>>And frankly if you are an Xtian and don't stand up and say that is bullshit every time a fundie opens their mouth`
It's "Xian", not Xtian. X stands for Christ, based on the Greek Chi symbol. Perhaps you're a Xtina fan? (Oh, you know you are!)
I do actually speak out against fundies every time I get the chance, and argue with them relentlessly in real life, or in fundie breeding grounds like The Blaze. I can't stand stupidity in any form, and so I argue against their banning of any alcohol (wait, didn't Jesus make wine as his first miracle) as much as I did here on/. when an atheist tried to convince me the Christians were responsible for the conquest and destruction of the Celtic Empire (Christians were apparently time traveling mercenaries that joined the Roman legions before Christ was born).
>>So for all the supposed "love and peace" of the Xtians they sure do go out of their way to find things to hate.
Agreed. I think that a lot of Christians these days have fallen victim to the same problems that Jesus spoke out against back in the day. They're so focused on not listening to Christian rock (it's evil) or drinking (it's evil) or having sex (also evil, unless it's in the dark with your wife) that they are completely missing the Main Point that Jesus was trying to convey, which was about loving God and loving one another.
That said, if you've never seen a fundie offer to adopt a kid that would be aborted, then you haven't spent much time with them. I've known Christians to take in homeless people from off the streets and feed them and give them temporary shelter for a month or three. I've seen many more acts of grace from Christians than atheists (and I'd say the majority of my friends are atheists - I live in California, not Texas).
>>Personally if I had my way I'd round up every damned bible and chunk the fuckers in the fire along with the Tora and Koran. In a couple of generations the world WOULD be a better place, no doubt in my mind at all.
The French marched all their priests into the Seine and proceeded to build a Republic based on modern atheist human rights. You tell me how well that worked out for them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror).
>>the article thesis is "Homosexuality is a social phenomenon and is most widespread among animals with a complex herd life" which for all that we know is hardly either a novel or disputed fact.
Did you read it? The point of the study was to construct normative statements for humans from the behavior of the studied animals. I'm not saying it was necessarily wrong, just using it to illustrate this fallacy in our modern world.
>>The devolopment of an ethical sense of existance *is* based on the self feelings of disgust or acceptability. What else did you thing it was?
I'm laughing because you'd set up our moral rules for society as a sort of majority-rules caucus. "All right: Who thinks homosexuality is disgusting? Text your answers to 11023 now!"
>>That *has* created the wonderful world you in fact live in.
In bizzaro-world, maybe. As the above example shows (they could even do the text poll during American Idol!), it is an incomprehensibly stupid basis for moral law. One million Frenchmen can't be wrong, right?
Our system of respect for natural rights of humanity, and humanism in general, is the result of Christian thought. Atheist humanism basically took Christian humanism and threw out the foundation while keeping the results.
>>How the people should behave is not religion, it is ethics.
There's a lot of overlap between philosophy, religion, and ethics. That's why ministers are required to study all three in order to get their degrees at most seminaries.
>>People can have no religion and be ethical and can have a religion and behave unethically.
The question of the foundation of a system of ethics is a real one. You can build an atheist code of ethics on the Categorical Imperative (though Kant would disagree). Religious codes of behavior are generally set by a system of moral imperatives delivered by a received text, so they don't have that issue, though if someone rejects the received text, the code obviously doesn't work for them.
>>Isn't it a staple of freshman English courses at university to ask what this difference is, to discover it's only in the cultural perception, or connotation, and there is no fundamental distinction?
No, there's an actual difference. If the freshman English professor wants to pretend there's no difference... well, he's probably just an ignorant no-good communist indoctrinating our youth, eh? =)
>>>>Only a fool (or a logical positivist, which is the same thing) thinks that science can study anything, and only scientifically proven things can matter. >>How do you know whether something matters, when there's not even any evidence that it's *real*?
I know that something matters to me innately. It's one of the flaws of logical positivism to hand-wave that things can't matter unless they're scientifically proven.
The route that Hannibal took over the Alps matters to me. Last summer, I was planning on heading to the Swiss Alps and hiking along the Col de Traversette and some of the other passes there. I'm reasonably confident that he took that pass (or one of the others nearby), even though there hasn't been a single scrap of scientific (i.e. archeological) evidence to prove that he did. No coins, no elephant bones, no old swords - nothing.
Logical positivism claims that this doesn't matter. But it does matter. Napoleon did the same thing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Crossing_the_Alps). So logical positivism is wrong.
>>As it should since that's a strawman first off and secondly not very good science.
It's not very good science, indeed. But it is used *everywhere*. I mean this very seriously - the reduction of man to no better than other animals is used normatively everywhere these days. It's not a strawman, either, as I've had two friends make that exact claim to me (one male, one female). Reading over evolutionary psychology papers tends to set my teeth on edge for the same reason.
>>If however science found that *HUMANS* were actually happier in non-monogamous relationships (and many are) then it would stand to reason that monogamy is not an absolute rule.
Again, science only provides the data on the happiness of non-monogamous couples, or adultery rates, or whatever. Whether or not it is "right" to commit adultery is something science cannot answer.
This is, of course, the problem with all Utilitarian philosophies. They have to special-case any "bad" results, otherwise they'd conclude that two adulterers becoming more happy outweighs the sadness of the partner being cheated on. (Since this is purely a happiness issue, then your "maximize Happiness/Success/Productivity/ETC" equation would conclude adultery is kosher.)
>>I don't remember any religion covering "Thou shalt not perform experiments on humans which will harm your subjects."
It's when we move away from the concept of the inherent worth of every human being, and move to us just being collections of cells, or just animals, that problems emerge. And the concept of natural rights was based primarily on Christianity.
>>Who is making false claims here? Of course any person can make mistaken arguments but since they are demonstrably false they won't make their way into science, not for long at least.
Yes, it is obviously a fallacy (a subset of a whole is not equivalent to the whole). And yet pick up a random SciAm or read over the comments on Slashdot, and you'll be able to find this fallacy at work. Homosexuality in animals is often used to inform debate on homosexuality in humans (http://www.news-medical.net/news/2006/10/23/20718.aspx)
>>Oh, and it within science ability to show you why you -and I, feel infecting twins with smallpox to be a bad thing: it's the realm of ethology of great primates so yes, I know why I feel in disgust about somebody infecting twins with smallpox and why somebody will try that so I should impose legal rules to avoid it -everything out of scientific knowledge.
So we're using "feelings of disgust" (which will presumably be measured scientifically) to create ethical laws?
>>Fucking victory for the funniest Jesus reference ever.
=)
>>Also, I'm an atheist, There's a difference between what you call "mainstream" and fundementalists, yes (though I bet the average is not what you're considering mainstream) but it's not a large difference. In the end, it always comes down to belief without evidence -- That's the definition of faith after all. That is not scientific, it's not logical, and it's not reasonable by any stretch of the imagination.
Faith isn't belief without evidence. It would be a very funny thing to believe in, after all, something that you felt had no evidence supporting it. To paraphrase James, who wrote a very logical and reasonable treatise on the subject, faith is something you choose to believe in that *might not* be true, but which also is not proven to be false. It would be very strange to believe in something proven false, though fundamentalists do give it a good try (there's your difference with mainstream Christians, if you wanted one).
>>Pray tell: what *is* the difference between a religion and a cult?
When I studied it in some social science class in college, it was defined generally by having three traits: 1) a cult of personality built around a charismatic leader, 2) encouraging isolation from former friends and family, 3) generally engaging in some intrusive form of control over the members social lives and/or thoughts.
As with most things in social sciences, it's not a rigid definition (the Roman Catholic Church engages in confession, for example), but most mainstream churches fail to meet the definition of cults, because members will easily move from one church to another within the same denomination, they are not required to cut ties with former friends and family, and the churches don't engage in excessive control.
By contrast, the CCC (Campus Crusade for Christ) is cult-ish, as it doesn't have the charismatic leader, per se, but it does force its members to drop non-CCC friends, and engage in heavy control over the members social lives and thoughts. You have to go to weekly meetings and confess having lustful thoughts about the opposite sex, for example, which results in a public shaming. If you don't do it, they accuse you of lying. Catch-22, and all that.
Jim Jones (of Jonestown drinking-the-koolaid fame) absolutely ran a cult. Cult of personality, moved his congregation to South America, and got them all to kill themselves. Fun Fact: Diane Feinstein thought his approach was the wave of the future for religions, since he was a big communist and multiculturalist. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peoples_Temple and http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=41263)
Likewise the Heaven's Gate guys were a cult for the same reasons.
>>Religion is probably the worst method of doing normative study, as it is based on fairy tales of ages old, arguments from authority, and stuff people make up on the spot.
Alternatively, you can read it as a set of general moral principles that have been demonstrated over the last two or three thousand years, capable of creating societies that you'd prefer to live in.
When people engage in casuist arguments, they take the set of moral principles handed down from antiquity and apply them to modern problems. As bronze-age shepards never had to worry about The Singularity or nuclear war, there's room for debate, certainly. But there's a remarkable amount of agreement over the big picture of things.
>>Ethics can be approach logically, consistently, and without any reference to a book that supposedly contains the basis of your ethics
Atheists have more trouble building an ethical code, but things like Kant's Categorical Imperative certainly work. Don't think that I believe that all atheists are rudderless, amoral, selfish individuals, though certainly a certain fraction fit this description. But all suffer from the problem of what-man-can-create-man-can-destroy, which is certainly one of the advantages of religion.
>> But you've already failed at what I suggested to do. You're using someone elses research, which you have not independently verified.... and...
You suggested I read a lot of different translations. That's what I do as a matter of course. For example, a Christian will tell me it is better to marry than to burn in hell, paraphrasing 1 Cor 7:9. Using the King James (and NKJ) it appears to say what they think it says. But there's a serious difference between "to burn" and "to burn in hell". So I pull up a parallel translation (http://bible.cc/1_corinthians/7-9.htm) and see how it got translated by different authors to try to clarify different shades of meaning.
>It's rarely a literal translation
Literal translations are available (http://yltbible.com/1_corinthians/7.htm), but they read too strangely for practical use over long passages, and usually miss shades of meaning that the other translators pick up on. So it's important to have both.
Commentaries are also very interesting, especially if you do something like reading the Talmud (collection of Jewish commentaries) and compare them against, say, Calvin's Geneva Bible, which are very different.
Using your French film analogy, think about the value of having ten different translations of it. It'll probably stop you from missing an important shading of meaning, as in the case of "to burn" above.
Already have, my friend-of-a-friend. I use Bible.cc when looking up a lot of links. Seeing how people translate certain passages differently, and then reading literal translations, provides a lot of insight on problematic passages.
If you think that the different translations means that it can't be true, well, that's a very odd conclusion to reach. 10 people can translate a work from modern French 10 different ways, without casting any doubt on the authenticity of the original text. Your corruption over time argument would have more basis for criticism, except, as I said, the Dead Sea Scrolls casts doubt on that argument as well.
>>So, 95% correct in a version written about 980 years after the events cited. Well, that's not totally accurate either. It's back to say 6,000 years ago (if we believe some of the modern claims). I barely trust that someone can accurately write an account of something that happened a year ago, much less accurately notate something that happened approximately 40 generations earlier (assuming 25 years per generation).
Well, it's closer to 600 years gap between Isaiah being written and the Qumran scroll, which means it was closer to the original source than our previously oldest copy, which was from the 10th century AD.
If your claim of significant corruption over long time periods was accurate, then we'd expect to see a great deal more differences. In other words, atheists (this became popular in the 19th Century) created a hypothesis, and it was falsified.
>>And beyond that, if the bible is suppose to be the written work as passed down from God, then why have significant portions been left out of any modern version that you can get your hands on.
If you think that "the Bible" is a book, as opposed to a collection of related books, that might explain why you think there are "significant portions left out". Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple sections where there's some disagreement over the validity of a paragraph, but I think you're probably talking about the Apocrypha, which honest people can disagree over the validity of.
Slashdot Mirror
The approach I took was to use code folding in combination with searching. With an optional number of lines of context around each search result included in the code fold.
It made refactoring so much easier... search for all "foo->bar->baz" and you instantly see all uses of that string in your code, which lets you quickly edit them all exactly the same way with a lot more accuracy (since you can see all changes together on screen). The patch was for an older version of VIM, probably not usable in the current version without updating. Was rejected by the VIM guys because they thought it'd be better as a script.
You can download it here if you feel like looking at it.
http://www.distanceeducationconsultants.com/vim_fold.tar.gz
>>That your anti-science ramblings don't attract many registered users is more likely a comment about you.
Anti-science ramblings? What the fuck? Have you paid no attention to what I wrote, or are you somehow still confusing "Christian" = "somehow everything he writes is anti-science"?
The only anti-science person in this thread is you, by that measure.
>>Oh, and it's easy to tell fundamentalists. They're the ones with the integrity to attempt to believe the entire thing, not just the comfortable and easy bits.
You're buying their propaganda, then. Fundamentalists do not "attempt to believe the entire thing" - they are way worse than the cafeteria Christians in normal denominations. They actively believe things that are against the Bible, and then try to retcon everything to match their twisted view of scripture.
>>Hah. And you're one of the mainstream ones of course, not the lunatic fringe! Do you feel more comfortable thinking that others believe as you do? Is this a source of strength for you?
Troll.
>>Your 14/18th level mage theory assumes a lower-level mage, or even a lowly illusionist, couldn't have produced the same effects.
Fail. Utter D&D fail. Those were cleric spells I was referring to. You could tell because animate is a 5th level spell for arcane casters, but 3rd for clerics. And, you know, because Res and True Res are cleric only spells.
>>That's why religion has absolutely no predictive power.
Why on earth would you want to use religion for predictive power? (Except for how it explains certain kinds of human behavior, I guess.) You're still failing to understand the NOMA concept.
>>Only religious people seeking to distance themselves from other religions try to draw those lines.
That's like saying that only people seeking to distance themselves from sex try to draw the line between fellatio and necrophilia. It makes no sense.
Cults are inherently different, dangerous, and unhealthy to its members. Religions, in general, are not. It's like the difference between a normal cell and a cancerous cell.
I'm sure you could work out an equivalent car analogy, if you took the time.
I think that whooshing sound you're hearing right now is you not clicking on the reference link I provided above on Gould's NOMA philosophy.
Have you ever double-blind tested for the existence of Julius Caesar? You have a time machine, perhaps?
Arbitrary? No, you're missing the point if you think that just contributing some random comment-cleanups to an open source project will matter during a job interview. What people like to see is something you're passionate about, and the work you did as a result of that passion.
Things like cache simulators are more like homework than anything else, and basically anyone in CS (at least at UCSD) will have written one by the time they graduate. This doesn't count either.
My entire point is your objection that you're "too busy doing work for the degree". People that have passion for coding will write code while you're off being "busy" watching Glee or whatever it is you're doing between school and sleep.
If you think of these sorts of things as just one more checkbox to tick off before you get hired, you won't. Well, from people that are looking for these sorts of things, at least.
By the time I got my degree, I had a variety of projects I did for school and for fun that I could show off. Bayesian. If people don't have a portfolio, they're lazy. Either because they can't be bothered to put together a portfolio, or because they haven't done anything at school except sit like a bump on a log. (Never understood that phrase...)
Any student can work on: ...or as TFA suggests, a mobile app.
1) Open source projects
2) Mods for games
3) Websites for whatever interest
4) Useful utilities to make their own coding projects faster. I wrote a patch for VIM that did code folding the way I wanted it done, for example
5) Small programs for their own hobbies (I wrote an Axis & Allies combat odds calculator once while, uh, drunk as an undergraduate)
There's plenty of places where people of even the smallest curiosity will be able to find something to do that they can point at on a job interview.
>>Steam, also mentions that should they close for whatever reason, they will release a way to play steam games without needing the steam service. This is unlike EA's system, where you need to be online to play at all
Right. I agree with TFA to the point that recent developments in tying DRM to an online state have proven to be more trouble than its worth, and that no single player game should honestly demand an internet connection to function.
EA's network chokes and dies under heavy load, which means, for example, I got to play through the DA2 demo four times until their networks stayed up long enough in one stretch to register the completion of the demo (if the network dies at *any point* during the demo, it refuses to give you credit for the unlock in the full game).
Ubisoft is evil, goes without saying. I've refused to buy all of their games for the last several years for this reason alone.
Steam works pretty well - except when the internet connection suddenly goes down. If your internet suddenly cuts out (thanks, AT&T!), as it did during the DA1 release day, you can be in trouble with Steam. You see, Steam knows when there is an update to be downloaded, but it will wait until your next launch to actually conduct the update. If your internet connection suddenly dies and you try to launch the game again, it will enter an endless loop of trying to patch, and refusing to launch your game because it knows there's an update available. Steam's offline mode only works if you know in advance your internet connection is going to die, which isn't very helpful at all.
It has been this way since it first launched, and they're apparently in no rush to fix it.
>>You don't know the difference between a nationality and a religion, and yet you have the fucking nerve to call other people ignorant?
You don't know demography of the region? Fine, I'll give the long form.
80%+ of Indians are Hindus. 95%+ of the people in Pakistan are Muslims. When people look at Indians and think they are suicide bombers (because they are Muslims - don't you see the turbans!?), they're making the mistake I talked about above.
There, has your politically correct brain been satisfied, or do I need to find a Yahoo Answer on the subject, like your "reference" on the other thread? Lol.
>>Garbage. A cult is a religion that a) is small, and b) you're not a member of.
Oh, wait, I take back my above post.
The doctorates at the Institute for Cultic Studies disagrees with you. Characteristics of a cult:
http://www.csj.org/infoserv_cult101/checklis.htm
or
http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/info_clergy.asp?Subject=Religion+Versus+Cult
>>I did, and I found this.
Holy fuck! Yahoo Answers!
Sir, I take back everything I said about cults!
Obviously the four people who answered the flippant response as "good" know more about the subjects than those ignorant savages with PhDs after their name.
>>God doesn't *make* things 'the right thing to do' they just are.
That's one of those interesting questions, which Socrates took up in the Euthyphro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro).
You're certainly right, that the Bible says that God loves justice and good things (which indicates there are good actions separate from God decreeing them so), but he also makes rather awkward demands from his chosen people (wear a funny hat, don't cut your hair at the corners, don't mix woolens and linens), etc., which have been interpreted several different ways:
1) You should do these arbitrary things because God tells you to do them.
2) Doing these arbitrary things sets the Orthodox Jewish people apart from other peoples, making them easy to identify, so that they can be the example to the world that God wants them to be.
3) They're just customs from an ancient time, and should be mostly ignored unless they also have some moral value. (The Reform Judaism view.)
>>And frankly if you are an Xtian and don't stand up and say that is bullshit every time a fundie opens their mouth`
It's "Xian", not Xtian. X stands for Christ, based on the Greek Chi symbol. Perhaps you're a Xtina fan? (Oh, you know you are!)
I do actually speak out against fundies every time I get the chance, and argue with them relentlessly in real life, or in fundie breeding grounds like The Blaze. I can't stand stupidity in any form, and so I argue against their banning of any alcohol (wait, didn't Jesus make wine as his first miracle) as much as I did here on /. when an atheist tried to convince me the Christians were responsible for the conquest and destruction of the Celtic Empire (Christians were apparently time traveling mercenaries that joined the Roman legions before Christ was born).
>>So for all the supposed "love and peace" of the Xtians they sure do go out of their way to find things to hate.
Agreed. I think that a lot of Christians these days have fallen victim to the same problems that Jesus spoke out against back in the day. They're so focused on not listening to Christian rock (it's evil) or drinking (it's evil) or having sex (also evil, unless it's in the dark with your wife) that they are completely missing the Main Point that Jesus was trying to convey, which was about loving God and loving one another.
That said, if you've never seen a fundie offer to adopt a kid that would be aborted, then you haven't spent much time with them. I've known Christians to take in homeless people from off the streets and feed them and give them temporary shelter for a month or three. I've seen many more acts of grace from Christians than atheists (and I'd say the majority of my friends are atheists - I live in California, not Texas).
>>Personally if I had my way I'd round up every damned bible and chunk the fuckers in the fire along with the Tora and Koran. In a couple of generations the world WOULD be a better place, no doubt in my mind at all.
The French marched all their priests into the Seine and proceeded to build a Republic based on modern atheist human rights. You tell me how well that worked out for them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror).
>>the article thesis is "Homosexuality is a social phenomenon and is most widespread among animals with a complex herd life" which for all that we know is hardly either a novel or disputed fact.
Did you read it? The point of the study was to construct normative statements for humans from the behavior of the studied animals. I'm not saying it was necessarily wrong, just using it to illustrate this fallacy in our modern world.
>>The devolopment of an ethical sense of existance *is* based on the self feelings of disgust or acceptability. What else did you thing it was?
I'm laughing because you'd set up our moral rules for society as a sort of majority-rules caucus. "All right: Who thinks homosexuality is disgusting? Text your answers to 11023 now!"
>>That *has* created the wonderful world you in fact live in.
In bizzaro-world, maybe. As the above example shows (they could even do the text poll during American Idol!), it is an incomprehensibly stupid basis for moral law. One million Frenchmen can't be wrong, right?
Our system of respect for natural rights of humanity, and humanism in general, is the result of Christian thought. Atheist humanism basically took Christian humanism and threw out the foundation while keeping the results.
>>How the people should behave is not religion, it is ethics.
There's a lot of overlap between philosophy, religion, and ethics. That's why ministers are required to study all three in order to get their degrees at most seminaries.
>>People can have no religion and be ethical and can have a religion and behave unethically.
The question of the foundation of a system of ethics is a real one. You can build an atheist code of ethics on the Categorical Imperative (though Kant would disagree). Religious codes of behavior are generally set by a system of moral imperatives delivered by a received text, so they don't have that issue, though if someone rejects the received text, the code obviously doesn't work for them.
>>Isn't it a staple of freshman English courses at university to ask what this difference is, to discover it's only in the cultural perception, or connotation, and there is no fundamental distinction?
No, there's an actual difference. If the freshman English professor wants to pretend there's no difference... well, he's probably just an ignorant no-good communist indoctrinating our youth, eh? =)
I answered this question here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2134890&cid=36061416
>>>>Only a fool (or a logical positivist, which is the same thing) thinks that science can study anything, and only scientifically proven things can matter.
>>How do you know whether something matters, when there's not even any evidence that it's *real*?
I know that something matters to me innately. It's one of the flaws of logical positivism to hand-wave that things can't matter unless they're scientifically proven.
The route that Hannibal took over the Alps matters to me. Last summer, I was planning on heading to the Swiss Alps and hiking along the Col de Traversette and some of the other passes there. I'm reasonably confident that he took that pass (or one of the others nearby), even though there hasn't been a single scrap of scientific (i.e. archeological) evidence to prove that he did. No coins, no elephant bones, no old swords - nothing.
Logical positivism claims that this doesn't matter. But it does matter. Napoleon did the same thing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Crossing_the_Alps). So logical positivism is wrong.
>>For if you give them a trail of gold, they will follow it believing that at the end is the riches of the world
If you gave me a trail of gold, I'd walk along the trail picking up the gold, and not really worrying about the riches of the world elsewhere. =)
Probably not your best analogy. =)
>>As it should since that's a strawman first off and secondly not very good science.
It's not very good science, indeed. But it is used *everywhere*. I mean this very seriously - the reduction of man to no better than other animals is used normatively everywhere these days. It's not a strawman, either, as I've had two friends make that exact claim to me (one male, one female). Reading over evolutionary psychology papers tends to set my teeth on edge for the same reason.
>>If however science found that *HUMANS* were actually happier in non-monogamous relationships (and many are) then it would stand to reason that monogamy is not an absolute rule.
Again, science only provides the data on the happiness of non-monogamous couples, or adultery rates, or whatever. Whether or not it is "right" to commit adultery is something science cannot answer.
This is, of course, the problem with all Utilitarian philosophies. They have to special-case any "bad" results, otherwise they'd conclude that two adulterers becoming more happy outweighs the sadness of the partner being cheated on. (Since this is purely a happiness issue, then your "maximize Happiness/Success/Productivity/ETC" equation would conclude adultery is kosher.)
>>I don't remember any religion covering "Thou shalt not perform experiments on humans which will harm your subjects."
You think so? The general principles of Christianity easily apply here: http://www.twopaths.com/greatest.htm
It's when we move away from the concept of the inherent worth of every human being, and move to us just being collections of cells, or just animals, that problems emerge. And the concept of natural rights was based primarily on Christianity.
>>Who is making false claims here? Of course any person can make mistaken arguments but since they are demonstrably false they won't make their way into science, not for long at least.
Yes, it is obviously a fallacy (a subset of a whole is not equivalent to the whole). And yet pick up a random SciAm or read over the comments on Slashdot, and you'll be able to find this fallacy at work. Homosexuality in animals is often used to inform debate on homosexuality in humans (http://www.news-medical.net/news/2006/10/23/20718.aspx)
>>Oh, and it within science ability to show you why you -and I, feel infecting twins with smallpox to be a bad thing: it's the realm of ethology of great primates so yes, I know why I feel in disgust about somebody infecting twins with smallpox and why somebody will try that so I should impose legal rules to avoid it -everything out of scientific knowledge.
So we're using "feelings of disgust" (which will presumably be measured scientifically) to create ethical laws?
LOL. That'll create a wonderful world to live in.
>>Fucking victory for the funniest Jesus reference ever.
=)
>>Also, I'm an atheist, There's a difference between what you call "mainstream" and fundementalists, yes (though I bet the average is not what you're considering mainstream) but it's not a large difference. In the end, it always comes down to belief without evidence -- That's the definition of faith after all. That is not scientific, it's not logical, and it's not reasonable by any stretch of the imagination.
Faith isn't belief without evidence. It would be a very funny thing to believe in, after all, something that you felt had no evidence supporting it. To paraphrase James, who wrote a very logical and reasonable treatise on the subject, faith is something you choose to believe in that *might not* be true, but which also is not proven to be false. It would be very strange to believe in something proven false, though fundamentalists do give it a good try (there's your difference with mainstream Christians, if you wanted one).
Give it a good read, it's fairly short and easy to understand:
http://educ.jmu.edu/~omearawm/ph101willtobelieve.html
>>Pray tell: what *is* the difference between a religion and a cult?
When I studied it in some social science class in college, it was defined generally by having three traits: 1) a cult of personality built around a charismatic leader, 2) encouraging isolation from former friends and family, 3) generally engaging in some intrusive form of control over the members social lives and/or thoughts.
As with most things in social sciences, it's not a rigid definition (the Roman Catholic Church engages in confession, for example), but most mainstream churches fail to meet the definition of cults, because members will easily move from one church to another within the same denomination, they are not required to cut ties with former friends and family, and the churches don't engage in excessive control.
By contrast, the CCC (Campus Crusade for Christ) is cult-ish, as it doesn't have the charismatic leader, per se, but it does force its members to drop non-CCC friends, and engage in heavy control over the members social lives and thoughts. You have to go to weekly meetings and confess having lustful thoughts about the opposite sex, for example, which results in a public shaming. If you don't do it, they accuse you of lying. Catch-22, and all that.
Jim Jones (of Jonestown drinking-the-koolaid fame) absolutely ran a cult. Cult of personality, moved his congregation to South America, and got them all to kill themselves. Fun Fact: Diane Feinstein thought his approach was the wave of the future for religions, since he was a big communist and multiculturalist. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peoples_Temple and http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=41263)
Likewise the Heaven's Gate guys were a cult for the same reasons.
>>Religion is probably the worst method of doing normative study, as it is based on fairy tales of ages old, arguments from authority, and stuff people make up on the spot.
Alternatively, you can read it as a set of general moral principles that have been demonstrated over the last two or three thousand years, capable of creating societies that you'd prefer to live in.
When people engage in casuist arguments, they take the set of moral principles handed down from antiquity and apply them to modern problems. As bronze-age shepards never had to worry about The Singularity or nuclear war, there's room for debate, certainly. But there's a remarkable amount of agreement over the big picture of things.
>>Ethics can be approach logically, consistently, and without any reference to a book that supposedly contains the basis of your ethics
Atheists have more trouble building an ethical code, but things like Kant's Categorical Imperative certainly work. Don't think that I believe that all atheists are rudderless, amoral, selfish individuals, though certainly a certain fraction fit this description. But all suffer from the problem of what-man-can-create-man-can-destroy, which is certainly one of the advantages of religion.
>> But you've already failed at what I suggested to do. You're using someone elses research, which you have not independently verified. ... and ...
You suggested I read a lot of different translations. That's what I do as a matter of course. For example, a Christian will tell me it is better to marry than to burn in hell, paraphrasing 1 Cor 7:9. Using the King James (and NKJ) it appears to say what they think it says. But there's a serious difference between "to burn" and "to burn in hell". So I pull up a parallel translation (http://bible.cc/1_corinthians/7-9.htm) and see how it got translated by different authors to try to clarify different shades of meaning.
>It's rarely a literal translation
Literal translations are available (http://yltbible.com/1_corinthians/7.htm), but they read too strangely for practical use over long passages, and usually miss shades of meaning that the other translators pick up on. So it's important to have both.
Commentaries are also very interesting, especially if you do something like reading the Talmud (collection of Jewish commentaries) and compare them against, say, Calvin's Geneva Bible, which are very different.
Using your French film analogy, think about the value of having ten different translations of it. It'll probably stop you from missing an important shading of meaning, as in the case of "to burn" above.
>>I invite you to research this yourself
Already have, my friend-of-a-friend. I use Bible.cc when looking up a lot of links. Seeing how people translate certain passages differently, and then reading literal translations, provides a lot of insight on problematic passages.
http://bible.cc/john/1-1.htm
If you think that the different translations means that it can't be true, well, that's a very odd conclusion to reach. 10 people can translate a work from modern French 10 different ways, without casting any doubt on the authenticity of the original text. Your corruption over time argument would have more basis for criticism, except, as I said, the Dead Sea Scrolls casts doubt on that argument as well.
>>So, 95% correct in a version written about 980 years after the events cited. Well, that's not totally accurate either. It's back to say 6,000 years ago (if we believe some of the modern claims). I barely trust that someone can accurately write an account of something that happened a year ago, much less accurately notate something that happened approximately 40 generations earlier (assuming 25 years per generation).
Well, it's closer to 600 years gap between Isaiah being written and the Qumran scroll, which means it was closer to the original source than our previously oldest copy, which was from the 10th century AD.
If your claim of significant corruption over long time periods was accurate, then we'd expect to see a great deal more differences. In other words, atheists (this became popular in the 19th Century) created a hypothesis, and it was falsified.
>>And beyond that, if the bible is suppose to be the written work as passed down from God, then why have significant portions been left out of any modern version that you can get your hands on.
If you think that "the Bible" is a book, as opposed to a collection of related books, that might explain why you think there are "significant portions left out". Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple sections where there's some disagreement over the validity of a paragraph, but I think you're probably talking about the Apocrypha, which honest people can disagree over the validity of.