No. You are misguided and wrong. There is nothing in the New Testament that absolves the follower from the rules of the Old Testament. Therefore, any Christian parent who does not stone their children to death for disobedience is not a TrueChristian(TM).
What a smarmy, self-righteous, nasty thing to say. I know you may even think that you are being nice, but you are really only being astonishingly disrespectful.
My alleged "knowledge" of Christianity is growing up in a Christian household and calling myself a Christian for the first two decades of my life. I have read the Bible numerous times, and it is really an awful book. The Gospels are indeed a small part of the Bible, especially when you consider that most of the material is rehashed from one to the other. Your challenge for the day; read the part of the New Testament that absolves you from following the Old Testament. You can't find it, because it isn't in there. You are still told to hate gays, and treat women as property. Furthermore, the New Testament that you so adore explicitly condones the ownership of human beings. If God couldn't even get the answer to the slavery question right, how are we to trust his moral judgement on anything else?
So the only reason that you are good to other people is that you don't want to go to Hell? Do you really have such a low opinion of yourself? Do you really have that little self-respect?
And Hitler was a Catholic -- so what? Stalin and Mao are another thing entirely. While both were explicitly atheistic, they were both completely hostile to all notions of free-thought. While they both banned any other form of religion, it could be said that they in turn made themselves into gods. Free-thought is the key. While ridding ourselves of the shackles of religion is not sufficient to establishing a free thinking world, it is a necessary step.
Yes. This is human nature. This is why when religion can have its go we are all subject to the innate moral sense of the clerics. This is why in Afghanistan girls have acid thrown in their faces for trying to get an education, and why witches were burned in the Middle Ages. This is why we all need to try to work together and try to balance all of our moral senses against one another, and find the best possible middle ground. It adds nothing to the situation to make a man-made work of fiction the ultimate moral arbiter for all of these matters. Nothing will change the fact that we are primates; we are not capable of perfectly logical or rational thought. We can, however, move forward by recognizing this and moving forward, rather than imposing a silly, barbaric code of conduct that was written by bronze-age goatherders.
Are you fucking kidding me? You don't think that we have any innate sense of right and wrong? You don't think that we have any sense of solidarity with one another? Are you really willing to debase yourself that thoroughly? The fact that we don't have perfect, clean cut, black and white answers to every moral question is no proof against this; that is simply NOT how reality works! You have provided a perfect example of the destructive effect that religion has on our collective consciousness; this sort of binary, black and white, good and evil thinking is what causes the religious to make such bad decisions that are antithetical to reality. In real life, the vast majority of moral decisions are gray and murky, mired in context and implications. I think we can, however, all agree that when religion is given the only say, that the results are uniformly horrifying.
I know you are a troll, but I see this idiotic point made often enough, and I feel that there are enough non-trolls on/. who hold similar views that I would like to address it. While I am sure there exist atheists who want to attack religious freedom, 99.999% of what religious nut-jobs call attacks on religious freedoms are really just a defense of secularism, which is the source of ALL religious freedom.
It is NOT infringing on your religious freedom to abolish a National Day of Prayer, it is simply re-establishing a secular government, which is the only type of government that can truly defend religious freedom. The same goes for getting organized prayer out of school or trying to get "Under God" out of the pledge.
The point it, nobody has the "freedom" to subject others to their point of view. You would not like it if we did it to you, and thankfully, we are not. We are not trying to get the schools to teach that there is no God. We aren't trying to get "Under God" replaced with "Under No God". We simply want the establishment to stop infringing on OUR religious freedom, or more specifically, our freedom to choose not to have a religion.
Is that really so much to ask? I mean, sure, I know that there will be a whole lot more atheists if we take religion out of the public sphere a bit, but what does that say about your cause? People stop believing it if it's not shoved down their throats 24/7? This is a tired, destructive meme that needs to be taken out back, shot, burned, and turned into fertilizer.
Whether or not you agree with his stance on the Iraq War, it is a grotesque oversimplification to say that he was a shameless shill. His views on the war were extremely well reasoned and definitely worth listening to; differentiating him from the brainless talking heads on Fox News. While I never happened to agree with his stance on the war, I always found his thoughts on it to be extremely informative, thought-provoking, and challenging. This man was there, he saw what was really happening. He went out of his way to seek out and confront totalitarianism throughout his career. For you to sit back from the comfort of your parent's basement and say that he can rot in Hell for expressing an opinion that is different from yours is disgusting and shameful. Fuck you, and fuck the people who modded you up.
Why? Wouldn't a believer have more to worry about? I mean, in that silly little bit of D&D fiction referred to colloquially as "The Bible", believers are told that their body is a temple. Wouldn't a believer, then, have more to worry about should they die by self-inflicted damage? A non-believer such as Hitch need only worry that they will slip quietly into the night, whereas a believer has to worry about being condemned to eternal Hellfire.
Even at that, Zen Buddhism has been used to justify a great deal of nastiness; off the top of my head I can tell you that, despite being nominally Shinto, the army of the Empire of Japan was heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism. The whole kamikaze thing, while nowhere near as widespread as some would have you believe, was nevertheless directly influenced by the teachings of Zen Buddhism.
The whole "be nice to people" is a small part of Christianity. Furthermore, it is not in any way necessary to have Christianity (or any religion at all) to want to "be nice to people". While Christianity might implore you to be nice, it also carries with it severe baggage; homophobia, misogyny, intolerance, and fear. Seriously; if you told your child that you were going to throw her in the furnace for being bad, it would be child abuse; tell your child that God will throw her in a furnace for all eternity and all of a sudden it's OK. Christianity is a festering sore on our moral development, the sooner we can be rid of it, the better. I will close by passing on Hitch's legacy in the form of a question that he was fond of asking believers: Name one good, moral action that could not have been conceived of by a person of no faith. Tough question, right? Ok, here's an easier one: Name me one wicked action that was committed in the name of religion. Chew on that one for a little bit, and the cognitive dissonance might wake you up from your intellectual coma.
This is the right way to make a tablet UI; keep the desktop UI, and create an entirely new one for touch screens. The methods of input are so different that there is no silver bullet cure for unifying the two interfaces. The way users interact with and use such devices is fundamentally different, and the workflow for one is UNUSABLE on the other. Ever try using Windows 7 with a touchscreen? It's an absolute nightmare. Why would anyone think that it would work better in the other direction?
It must be nice to be so naive and optimistic. The truth of the matter is that the DMCA is already being abused broadly to silence legitimate speech. Having broad laws and enforcing them selectively ensures that almost anyone is in violation of the law and can simply be grabbed out of the crowd as soon as they say something that you don't like. Whether or not a site in particular is going to be directly taken down, it will harm the whole Internet by providing a chilling effect on all forms of speech.
You have the analogy backwards -- the punching in the face thing was an example of how the presumption of innocence works; in that example the crime was the assault, meaning that it must be assumed that the assault did not occur until it can be proven otherwise. If you were to say that I punched you in the face, it would not require assuming that your statements were true to assume that your statement was non-libelous; the only thing that it implies is that the burden of proof would be on me to show that the statement was false. As a free speech advocate, I think that the bar ought to be even higher; I think that the plaintiff should be required to prove that a) the statement is false b) the defendant knew that it was false and c) it was done with intent to cause harm. Would this make it harder to prosecute for libel? Yes. But I think that the right to speak freely is WAY more important than the right to not be libelled.
Why should you need to have evidence to support your claim? What happened to innocent until proven guilty? I think it should be up to the slandered to prove that the statement was indeed false. If the statement cannot be proven false, there should be no libel. If I were accused of punching you in the face, it would be on the prosecutor to prove that I did it, I would not have to prove that I didn't.
WHY? This is what I want to know, why the fuck are they so concerned about people ripping Netflix streams? Everything on Netflix is already on TPB, Demonoid, Rapidshare, Megavideo, etc, etc, etc... Why are they so concerned about securing every stream? I mean, if the material was still secure and had not yet been pirated and uploaded, I would still think that it was a shitty thing to do, but there would still be some semblance of logic behind it. Once the cat is out of the bag, what good could it possibly do?
And WTF would we do against an alien civilization with technology so far ahead of ours that they are able to cross interstellar space to come here? Are you kidding me? There would not be any fight, there would not be a war. We don't even have the technology to leave this planet! We can't even retreat! If the aliens wanted to wipe us out, it would not be War of the Worlds, it would be an extermination. Literally the only thing we can do is hope that this doesn't happen and that any potential advanced life forms have progressed far enough as a society that they wouldn't want to kill us; which I think is honestly more likely the case anyway. I think a civilization that would have those tendencies (like, you know, ours) would wipe itself out way before going interstellar. The reasoning for this is simple; the vast amounts of energy required for interstellar travel could also be used to make weapons that would instantly destroy the species. All it takes is one psychopath/mistake/any other reason. It would likely take a rather peaceful society to make it past this stage (which is consequently, while we won't). Even if they are just kind of jerks, there is very little that they could want from us. Slave labor/food? With the technology they have, both of those concerns would likely be irrelevant. Resources? The Earth has nothing that can't be found in greater quantities elsewhere. The only thing we would really have to worry about is if they just wanted to kill us for fun, at which point we might as well not worry about it.
You can't even leave out the possibility that they would be pointlessly malevolent; they could just find it amusing to fly around the galaxy and wipe out life as they find it. I mean, come on, they're fscking aliens. Do we really think that we can possibly predict what alien logic would look like?
It's the military having foresight, produence, and due diligence. Their main job is to defend us, and one of the major part of that is accessing new threats wherever they are.
If we were to find life on this planet, would you rather us to in completely blind about them?
Are you kidding me? The military's main job is to defend us? Have you been living under a rock? The military's main job is to support the political aims of the people in power. If the people in power were looking to defend us, those two goals would be aligned and there would be no conflict. Unfortunately, this is not even remotely the case. I am not even going to give you examples because honestly, at this point, if you need me to provide examples of how the people in power aren't looking out for us then there is nothing I can say to sway you from your naive optimism.
I've got news for you; if the aliens have the technology to come here, and they wanted to kill us off, there is nothing that we could do. All of the movies you see are a total joke; we would be the proverbial fish in a barrel to them. Actually, we wouldn't; it's way harder to kill fish in a barrel than it would be for them to wipe us out instantly. Just imagine the United States military going to war with a tribe of hunter gatherers, and the hunter gatherers have nowhere to hide.
Slashdot Mirror
...how do they... pose threats to children? I don't want to talk to a scientist, though... those motherfuckers are lying and getting me pissed...
No. You are misguided and wrong. There is nothing in the New Testament that absolves the follower from the rules of the Old Testament. Therefore, any Christian parent who does not stone their children to death for disobedience is not a TrueChristian(TM).
Thor, for sure. Valhalla > Heaven
What a smarmy, self-righteous, nasty thing to say. I know you may even think that you are being nice, but you are really only being astonishingly disrespectful.
My alleged "knowledge" of Christianity is growing up in a Christian household and calling myself a Christian for the first two decades of my life. I have read the Bible numerous times, and it is really an awful book. The Gospels are indeed a small part of the Bible, especially when you consider that most of the material is rehashed from one to the other. Your challenge for the day; read the part of the New Testament that absolves you from following the Old Testament. You can't find it, because it isn't in there. You are still told to hate gays, and treat women as property. Furthermore, the New Testament that you so adore explicitly condones the ownership of human beings. If God couldn't even get the answer to the slavery question right, how are we to trust his moral judgement on anything else?
So the only reason that you are good to other people is that you don't want to go to Hell? Do you really have such a low opinion of yourself? Do you really have that little self-respect?
And Hitler was a Catholic -- so what? Stalin and Mao are another thing entirely. While both were explicitly atheistic, they were both completely hostile to all notions of free-thought. While they both banned any other form of religion, it could be said that they in turn made themselves into gods. Free-thought is the key. While ridding ourselves of the shackles of religion is not sufficient to establishing a free thinking world, it is a necessary step.
Yes. This is human nature. This is why when religion can have its go we are all subject to the innate moral sense of the clerics. This is why in Afghanistan girls have acid thrown in their faces for trying to get an education, and why witches were burned in the Middle Ages. This is why we all need to try to work together and try to balance all of our moral senses against one another, and find the best possible middle ground. It adds nothing to the situation to make a man-made work of fiction the ultimate moral arbiter for all of these matters. Nothing will change the fact that we are primates; we are not capable of perfectly logical or rational thought. We can, however, move forward by recognizing this and moving forward, rather than imposing a silly, barbaric code of conduct that was written by bronze-age goatherders.
Are you fucking kidding me? You don't think that we have any innate sense of right and wrong? You don't think that we have any sense of solidarity with one another? Are you really willing to debase yourself that thoroughly? The fact that we don't have perfect, clean cut, black and white answers to every moral question is no proof against this; that is simply NOT how reality works! You have provided a perfect example of the destructive effect that religion has on our collective consciousness; this sort of binary, black and white, good and evil thinking is what causes the religious to make such bad decisions that are antithetical to reality. In real life, the vast majority of moral decisions are gray and murky, mired in context and implications. I think we can, however, all agree that when religion is given the only say, that the results are uniformly horrifying.
I know you are a troll, but I see this idiotic point made often enough, and I feel that there are enough non-trolls on /. who hold similar views that I would like to address it. While I am sure there exist atheists who want to attack religious freedom, 99.999% of what religious nut-jobs call attacks on religious freedoms are really just a defense of secularism, which is the source of ALL religious freedom.
It is NOT infringing on your religious freedom to abolish a National Day of Prayer, it is simply re-establishing a secular government, which is the only type of government that can truly defend religious freedom. The same goes for getting organized prayer out of school or trying to get "Under God" out of the pledge.
The point it, nobody has the "freedom" to subject others to their point of view. You would not like it if we did it to you, and thankfully, we are not. We are not trying to get the schools to teach that there is no God. We aren't trying to get "Under God" replaced with "Under No God". We simply want the establishment to stop infringing on OUR religious freedom, or more specifically, our freedom to choose not to have a religion.
Is that really so much to ask? I mean, sure, I know that there will be a whole lot more atheists if we take religion out of the public sphere a bit, but what does that say about your cause? People stop believing it if it's not shoved down their throats 24/7? This is a tired, destructive meme that needs to be taken out back, shot, burned, and turned into fertilizer.
Whether or not you agree with his stance on the Iraq War, it is a grotesque oversimplification to say that he was a shameless shill. His views on the war were extremely well reasoned and definitely worth listening to; differentiating him from the brainless talking heads on Fox News. While I never happened to agree with his stance on the war, I always found his thoughts on it to be extremely informative, thought-provoking, and challenging. This man was there, he saw what was really happening. He went out of his way to seek out and confront totalitarianism throughout his career. For you to sit back from the comfort of your parent's basement and say that he can rot in Hell for expressing an opinion that is different from yours is disgusting and shameful. Fuck you, and fuck the people who modded you up.
Why? Wouldn't a believer have more to worry about? I mean, in that silly little bit of D&D fiction referred to colloquially as "The Bible", believers are told that their body is a temple. Wouldn't a believer, then, have more to worry about should they die by self-inflicted damage? A non-believer such as Hitch need only worry that they will slip quietly into the night, whereas a believer has to worry about being condemned to eternal Hellfire.
And now we find out whether or not... you are a self-righteous asshole. (Spoiler: You are.)
Even at that, Zen Buddhism has been used to justify a great deal of nastiness; off the top of my head I can tell you that, despite being nominally Shinto, the army of the Empire of Japan was heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism. The whole kamikaze thing, while nowhere near as widespread as some would have you believe, was nevertheless directly influenced by the teachings of Zen Buddhism.
The whole "be nice to people" is a small part of Christianity. Furthermore, it is not in any way necessary to have Christianity (or any religion at all) to want to "be nice to people". While Christianity might implore you to be nice, it also carries with it severe baggage; homophobia, misogyny, intolerance, and fear. Seriously; if you told your child that you were going to throw her in the furnace for being bad, it would be child abuse; tell your child that God will throw her in a furnace for all eternity and all of a sudden it's OK. Christianity is a festering sore on our moral development, the sooner we can be rid of it, the better. I will close by passing on Hitch's legacy in the form of a question that he was fond of asking believers: Name one good, moral action that could not have been conceived of by a person of no faith. Tough question, right? Ok, here's an easier one: Name me one wicked action that was committed in the name of religion. Chew on that one for a little bit, and the cognitive dissonance might wake you up from your intellectual coma.
This is the right way to make a tablet UI; keep the desktop UI, and create an entirely new one for touch screens. The methods of input are so different that there is no silver bullet cure for unifying the two interfaces. The way users interact with and use such devices is fundamentally different, and the workflow for one is UNUSABLE on the other. Ever try using Windows 7 with a touchscreen? It's an absolute nightmare. Why would anyone think that it would work better in the other direction?
It must be nice to be so naive and optimistic. The truth of the matter is that the DMCA is already being abused broadly to silence legitimate speech. Having broad laws and enforcing them selectively ensures that almost anyone is in violation of the law and can simply be grabbed out of the crowd as soon as they say something that you don't like. Whether or not a site in particular is going to be directly taken down, it will harm the whole Internet by providing a chilling effect on all forms of speech.
You have the analogy backwards -- the punching in the face thing was an example of how the presumption of innocence works; in that example the crime was the assault, meaning that it must be assumed that the assault did not occur until it can be proven otherwise. If you were to say that I punched you in the face, it would not require assuming that your statements were true to assume that your statement was non-libelous; the only thing that it implies is that the burden of proof would be on me to show that the statement was false. As a free speech advocate, I think that the bar ought to be even higher; I think that the plaintiff should be required to prove that a) the statement is false b) the defendant knew that it was false and c) it was done with intent to cause harm. Would this make it harder to prosecute for libel? Yes. But I think that the right to speak freely is WAY more important than the right to not be libelled.
Why should you need to have evidence to support your claim? What happened to innocent until proven guilty? I think it should be up to the slandered to prove that the statement was indeed false. If the statement cannot be proven false, there should be no libel. If I were accused of punching you in the face, it would be on the prosecutor to prove that I did it, I would not have to prove that I didn't.
WHY? This is what I want to know, why the fuck are they so concerned about people ripping Netflix streams? Everything on Netflix is already on TPB, Demonoid, Rapidshare, Megavideo, etc, etc, etc... Why are they so concerned about securing every stream? I mean, if the material was still secure and had not yet been pirated and uploaded, I would still think that it was a shitty thing to do, but there would still be some semblance of logic behind it. Once the cat is out of the bag, what good could it possibly do?
Are you serious? I must assume that you are trolling because your argument can be refuted in one word -- Vietnam.
And WTF would we do against an alien civilization with technology so far ahead of ours that they are able to cross interstellar space to come here? Are you kidding me? There would not be any fight, there would not be a war. We don't even have the technology to leave this planet! We can't even retreat! If the aliens wanted to wipe us out, it would not be War of the Worlds, it would be an extermination. Literally the only thing we can do is hope that this doesn't happen and that any potential advanced life forms have progressed far enough as a society that they wouldn't want to kill us; which I think is honestly more likely the case anyway. I think a civilization that would have those tendencies (like, you know, ours) would wipe itself out way before going interstellar. The reasoning for this is simple; the vast amounts of energy required for interstellar travel could also be used to make weapons that would instantly destroy the species. All it takes is one psychopath/mistake/any other reason. It would likely take a rather peaceful society to make it past this stage (which is consequently, while we won't). Even if they are just kind of jerks, there is very little that they could want from us. Slave labor/food? With the technology they have, both of those concerns would likely be irrelevant. Resources? The Earth has nothing that can't be found in greater quantities elsewhere. The only thing we would really have to worry about is if they just wanted to kill us for fun, at which point we might as well not worry about it.
You can't even leave out the possibility that they would be pointlessly malevolent; they could just find it amusing to fly around the galaxy and wipe out life as they find it. I mean, come on, they're fscking aliens. Do we really think that we can possibly predict what alien logic would look like?
It's the military having foresight, produence, and due diligence. Their main job is to defend us, and one of the major part of that is accessing new threats wherever they are.
If we were to find life on this planet, would you rather us to in completely blind about them?
Are you kidding me? The military's main job is to defend us? Have you been living under a rock? The military's main job is to support the political aims of the people in power. If the people in power were looking to defend us, those two goals would be aligned and there would be no conflict. Unfortunately, this is not even remotely the case. I am not even going to give you examples because honestly, at this point, if you need me to provide examples of how the people in power aren't looking out for us then there is nothing I can say to sway you from your naive optimism.
I've got news for you; if the aliens have the technology to come here, and they wanted to kill us off, there is nothing that we could do. All of the movies you see are a total joke; we would be the proverbial fish in a barrel to them. Actually, we wouldn't; it's way harder to kill fish in a barrel than it would be for them to wipe us out instantly. Just imagine the United States military going to war with a tribe of hunter gatherers, and the hunter gatherers have nowhere to hide.