Christ's teachings tell us that this life is of the utmost importance in determining whether we return to live in God's presence.
You're supporting my point: for Christianity, the "great prize" is the afterlife, whether you "return to live in God's presence" or not. This life is viewed merely a proving ground for attaining that goal. In Christianity, if you suffer in this life, that's OK, as long as you have a good afterlife. Christian churches have used that to justify many transgressions against other human beings throughout history.
It's absurd to claim Christianity is a "morbid exception" when clearly Christianity places great important on this life.
Christianity places great importance on this life only as a vehicle for attaining a desirable state in the afterlife. That is morbid and obscene. And it is at the root of Christianity's twisted and intrinsically flawed morality.
Please show me where the New Testament supports violence. (Unless you can do so, you're blowing smoke.)
The Pope himself has ordered people to be burned at the stake and he has ordered people to go into the crusades; go look at their reasoning.
Or you can simply look at the story of Paul: here we have a man who persecuted and killed prior to his conversion to Christianity, but all of that was forgiven simply because he accepted Jesus. But the church he founded then simply continued to commit the same acts of persecution and killing against non-Christians.
This is common to any group of people, whether or not those people are Christian.
Any sufficiently large group of people contains people who commit violence, but that's not the issue. Atheism, chess clubs, or debating societies don't claim to instill a sense of morality into their members, so they can't fail at doing so.
But Christianity is explicitly about morality, about right and wrong. Therefore, how Christians behave tells us whether Christianity is effective as a moral philosophy.
Furthermore, when we examine Christian dogma in more detail, it becomes clear why Christianity fails to instill morality into its followers: with Christianity, acceptance of Christ is more important than moral behavior. That is an intrinsic moral flaw with Christianity and the reason why Christianity has a two thousand year history of violence and intolerance.
You misunderstand. The Catholic Church has been used as a tool for violence, yes; however, Christ's teachings have never supported violence. That was my point.
No, you misunderstand. The fact that you and others can cobble together a personal, pacifist religion out of bits and pieced of Christianity does not make Christianity a non-violent religion.
A religion may be used as a tool for violence and oppression as easily as atheism
Atheism isn't the opposite of religion. Christianity doesn't just claim the existence of God, it makes statements about what is wrong and how people should act. Atheism doesn't make any statements about what is right or wrong or how you should act. So, if Christians commit violence and oppression, it tells us that there is something wrong with how Christianity tells its followers to act: either Christianity tells them the wrong thing or whatever it tells them is ineffective. When atheists commit violence and oppression, it tells you nothing about atheism, since atheism simply has nothing to say about how they should act. Many atheist religions and moral systems are pacifist (e.g., Buddhism, Humanism), while others are not (e.g., socialism, communism).
Don't be ridiculous. Observing the natural consequence of $ACTION is a far cry from clamoring for the immediate deaths of everyone who attempts $ACTION.
We're not talking about an "action" here, we are talking about central Christian dogma: for salvation, it is necessary and sufficient to accept Christ as your savior. And those who do not attain salvation will suffer eternally. Christian churches logically have concluded throughout history that this means that any action they take in order to get others to accept Christ as their savior is justified, including oppression, torture, and murder, and they have frequently acted accordingly.
It is nice that Christians in Europe and the US don't do this anymore, but the reason they don't is because secular society has placed limits on them, and because Christians (fortunately!) don't just act according to Christian dogma but also according to an innate sense of decency and morality.
Christian dogma is intrinsically immoral and violent. I'm glad to see that you are one of the hundres of millions of decent, peaceful, and moral Christians in the world, but you are decent, peaceful and moral despite Christianity, not because of it.
This is like the fourth or fifth attempt by Microsoft to create a tablet, and they all sucked badly. This isn't going to be any different; Microsoft seems incapable of doing anything other than a desktop OS.
Similarly, Christians in general feel the need to warn their neighbors of impending danger.
So do (other) mentally disturbed persons. That doesn't mean that it is prudent to let them live out their disturbances.
It's silly to fault them for this
It's not a question of "fault", it's a question whether your behavior is harmful to you or harmful or disturbing to others.
this life (according to Christ's teachings) is what determines where we end up in the next life
That statement as such is misleading. According to mainstream Christian teachings, the only thing in this life that determines where you end up in the next life is whether you accept Christ as your savior. Whether you were a "good" person does not matter. That core belief makes Christianity intrinsically immoral.
Tolerance does not require that I accept $BEHAVIOR as morally acceptable regardless of my personal feelings; it only requires that I treat people who engage in $BEHAVIOR the same as I would treat anyone else.
I don't know about you personally, but mainstream (non-extremist) Christians clearly do not, otherwise they wouldn't attempt to use their views of morality as the basis for legislation.
The problem isn't the religion itself, but that the people in power exploit religion to manipulate the poor and the gullible into doing strange things.
The problem is the religion itself, in particular the specific views on salvation and the afterlife that Christianity and Islam share.
Few religions don't seem to place a higher value on the afterlife than they do on actual life.
Quite to the contrary: many religions place an emphasis on this life. Christianity and Islam are morbid exceptions.
Judaism is actually quite different, since it only applies to Jews and since its notion of afterlife is very different from the kind of paradise/hell dichotomy that pervades Christian and Muslim thought.
I certainly agree that some religions do teach hate, but Christ's teachings (for example) have never supported hate nor violence. (I'm not saying the Catholic Church never supported violence; that's an entirely separate issue.)
No, that is not an "entirely separate issue". You cannot pick and choose subsets of Christian teachings depending on which debate you happen to engage in. "Christianity" is a large set of teachings, plus a two thousand year history documenting how its followers have interpreted and applied those teachings.
Few religions advocate violence against those who hold different beliefs.
If your belief system includes the notion that people who do not follow your beliefs are subject to eternal damnation, then you are implicitly advocating violence against those who hold different beliefs: compared to eternal damnation, nothing you can do to a person in this life measures up. And that is why Christian churches have frequently oppressed, tortured, and killed those who hold other beliefs.
Christianity contains at its core immoral and violent dogma; the fact that it also contains some moral and non-violent beliefs does not cancel that out.
Ban religion? Don't be silly; that wouldn't solve anything. Generally speaking, people who commit violent acts in the name of religion are ignoring the teachings of the religion they claim to follow (e.g. the Crusades).
You are making the implicit assumption that there is a consistent set of teachings, but there is not. Christian teachings can be used to support both non-violence and violence, and historically they have been, and continue to be used that way to this day.
Christianity would only qualify as a non-violent religion if it was consistently and clearly non-violent in its teachings.
If religion were magically erased from existence, these people would just find some other excuse for violence.
Yes, but unlike religion, those other excuses are amenable to rational analysis.
I'm going to refer to the old axiom "correlation does not show causation".
We don't have to rely on correlation, we can just look at Christian dogma and teachings and how they have been used in history. What we find is an intrinsic lack of consistent ethics and a consistent lack of clear and consistent teachings. The consequence has been many centuries of discrimination, oppression, and violence committed by Christians against others.
I'll take the advice and thoughts over an educated sceptic like Stoll over some permanent yay-sayer anytime.
(1) I'll first make decisions based on objective studies and controlled experiments.
(2) Absent that, I'll look at what actually works in the market and what people are willing to spend money on.
(3) Only if I can't get either of those, I'll consider the opinions of experts.
For the Internet and related technologies, we have plenty of (1) and (2). Even if Stoll could be considered an "expert", that makes his opinions pretty much irrelevant to me.
Has Jaron Lanier actually ever produced anything useful? Does he have any significant skills or accomplishments? Why should I listen to him? Popularizing other people's ideas about virtual reality and a bit of so-so "classical" music doesn't really convince me.
So, Bono would like to turn the US and Europe into totalitarian states in order to make sure people like himself can keep making millions with unreasonable copyright terms and restrictions.
No, it doesn't necessarily mean that. But there is not a shred of evidence that allowing clones caused Apple any problems whatsoever, whereas Apple clearly got skewered for the technical problems and bad product strategy they had back then.
Steve Jobs doesn't "hate" using open source. For example, he tried to keep the Objective-C extensions to GCC closed source in violation of the GPL; it took a lot of legal saber rattling by GNU to get him to comply.
Apple is somewhat better now than they were 20 years ago, but they are still taking much more from the open source community than they are giving back. Without FOSS, Apple would be out of business; but even if all of Apple's contributions to FOSS disappeared overnight, people would hardly notice.
Actually, you've got it exactly backwards. Apple nearly went out of business because they went more open and allowed Mac clones. Now that they are (arguably) more closed in that respect, they are extremely successful.
Apple's woes had nothing to do with allowing clones; Apple nearly went out of business because MacOS was a bad, proprietary platform and because Apple was bleeding money at an enormous rate.
Apple is successful now because they have been piggy-backing on open source technologies (Mach, gcc, tons of libraries) and therefore been saving development costs and delivering a better product, and because they are tightly controlling expenses (including R&D expenses).
Apple has really outdone themselves in terms of disgusting patent applications. Patenting sending my location to someone else?? That has many years of prior art.
We really need a patent system in which companies like Apple can be sued for stiff punitive damages when filing bad patents like this.
The idea that an author or inventor "owns" their work is a fiction. All you ever get is a temporary monopoly on making copies of it. From day one, people can modify it, make fun of it, satirize it, and burn it if they like. It's temporary because copyright is actually intended to encourage reuse of content. That is, increasing the public domain is the objective of copyright law, and the temporary monopoly a means to that end--a necessary evil.
Many of the greatest works of human literature, art, and music were created before copyright. Not only did they get created, they frequently reused prior works liberally.
And there is no reason whatsoever why we should change that; in fact, if anything, we should reduce copyright and patent terms because they clearly are not working right.
Open source is merely reminding people of what copyright and fair use were actually intended to do: encourage creation, distribution, and reuse of content.
The price of maintaining comment-free code is well known.
No, it isn't known at all, since there are no sound studies on the subject. You're simply jumping to conclusions.
If you don't comment your code, I won't pay you for it. I'll inform the management that you neglected an important step and don't deserve a good reference.
Based on what you have written, I don't think you're a good programmer either.
The original copyright term was 14 years, with another 14 years if you bothered to renew. That's the maximum copyright any work should get. Anything longer than that is grossly unfair.
Yes it is. You can spin it all you want, but it is.
No, it is not. Physical property and copyrights are completely different things.
Also, if you are against copyright, you are against software licenses, which means you think that MS should be free to violate GPL.
The creators of the GPL are indeed against software licenses and copyright; the GPL is intended as a stopgap measure until copyright law changes and the GPL isn't needed (or enforceable) anymore.
Well, that's easy to say if it ain't your income that is being stolen... Every illegal download is a loss
As a copyright holder, you only get that income because copyright law gives you that income as a matter of public policy. Unlike physical property, society has the right to deprive you of income from copyright without compensation as it sees fit.
Copyrights are not property, they are special, temporary rights granted by the government for a limited time to encourage particular kinds of activities. Therefore, copyright violations are not theft. Furthermore, we as a society get to define what actions constitute a copyright violation.
And to truetorment; I can't stomach STUPID. Thus my sig.
Well, then go and kill yourself, please: apparently, you're too stupid to understand that whether a bunch of scientists falsified scientific data or messed with peer review has nothing to do with whether AGW is actually happening or not. What makes your sig so incredibly stupid isn't even that you doubt AGW, it's that you think that the whistle blowers "prove you right".
Slashdot Mirror
Christ's teachings tell us that this life is of the utmost importance in determining whether we return to live in God's presence.
You're supporting my point: for Christianity, the "great prize" is the afterlife, whether you "return to live in God's presence" or not. This life is viewed merely a proving ground for attaining that goal. In Christianity, if you suffer in this life, that's OK, as long as you have a good afterlife. Christian churches have used that to justify many transgressions against other human beings throughout history.
It's absurd to claim Christianity is a "morbid exception" when clearly Christianity places great important on this life.
Christianity places great importance on this life only as a vehicle for attaining a desirable state in the afterlife. That is morbid and obscene. And it is at the root of Christianity's twisted and intrinsically flawed morality.
Please show me where the New Testament supports violence. (Unless you can do so, you're blowing smoke.)
The Pope himself has ordered people to be burned at the stake and he has ordered people to go into the crusades; go look at their reasoning.
Or you can simply look at the story of Paul: here we have a man who persecuted and killed prior to his conversion to Christianity, but all of that was forgiven simply because he accepted Jesus. But the church he founded then simply continued to commit the same acts of persecution and killing against non-Christians.
This is common to any group of people, whether or not those people are Christian.
Any sufficiently large group of people contains people who commit violence, but that's not the issue. Atheism, chess clubs, or debating societies don't claim to instill a sense of morality into their members, so they can't fail at doing so.
But Christianity is explicitly about morality, about right and wrong. Therefore, how Christians behave tells us whether Christianity is effective as a moral philosophy.
Furthermore, when we examine Christian dogma in more detail, it becomes clear why Christianity fails to instill morality into its followers: with Christianity, acceptance of Christ is more important than moral behavior. That is an intrinsic moral flaw with Christianity and the reason why Christianity has a two thousand year history of violence and intolerance.
You misunderstand. The Catholic Church has been used as a tool for violence, yes; however, Christ's teachings have never supported violence. That was my point.
No, you misunderstand. The fact that you and others can cobble together a personal, pacifist religion out of bits and pieced of Christianity does not make Christianity a non-violent religion.
A religion may be used as a tool for violence and oppression as easily as atheism
Atheism isn't the opposite of religion. Christianity doesn't just claim the existence of God, it makes statements about what is wrong and how people should act. Atheism doesn't make any statements about what is right or wrong or how you should act. So, if Christians commit violence and oppression, it tells us that there is something wrong with how Christianity tells its followers to act: either Christianity tells them the wrong thing or whatever it tells them is ineffective. When atheists commit violence and oppression, it tells you nothing about atheism, since atheism simply has nothing to say about how they should act. Many atheist religions and moral systems are pacifist (e.g., Buddhism, Humanism), while others are not (e.g., socialism, communism).
Don't be ridiculous. Observing the natural consequence of $ACTION is a far cry from clamoring for the immediate deaths of everyone who attempts $ACTION.
We're not talking about an "action" here, we are talking about central Christian dogma: for salvation, it is necessary and sufficient to accept Christ as your savior. And those who do not attain salvation will suffer eternally. Christian churches logically have concluded throughout history that this means that any action they take in order to get others to accept Christ as their savior is justified, including oppression, torture, and murder, and they have frequently acted accordingly.
It is nice that Christians in Europe and the US don't do this anymore, but the reason they don't is because secular society has placed limits on them, and because Christians (fortunately!) don't just act according to Christian dogma but also according to an innate sense of decency and morality.
Christian dogma is intrinsically immoral and violent. I'm glad to see that you are one of the hundres of millions of decent, peaceful, and moral Christians in the world, but you are decent, peaceful and moral despite Christianity, not because of it.
This is like the fourth or fifth attempt by Microsoft to create a tablet, and they all sucked badly. This isn't going to be any different; Microsoft seems incapable of doing anything other than a desktop OS.
Well, it's nice if Microsoft and Apple get their desktops upgraded, but AppArmor is standard on Ubuntu and has rules for common desktop apps in place.
Similarly, Christians in general feel the need to warn their neighbors of impending danger.
So do (other) mentally disturbed persons. That doesn't mean that it is prudent to let them live out their disturbances.
It's silly to fault them for this
It's not a question of "fault", it's a question whether your behavior is harmful to you or harmful or disturbing to others.
this life (according to Christ's teachings) is what determines where we end up in the next life
That statement as such is misleading. According to mainstream Christian teachings, the only thing in this life that determines where you end up in the next life is whether you accept Christ as your savior. Whether you were a "good" person does not matter. That core belief makes Christianity intrinsically immoral.
Tolerance does not require that I accept $BEHAVIOR as morally acceptable regardless of my personal feelings; it only requires that I treat people who engage in $BEHAVIOR the same as I would treat anyone else.
I don't know about you personally, but mainstream (non-extremist) Christians clearly do not, otherwise they wouldn't attempt to use their views of morality as the basis for legislation.
The problem isn't the religion itself, but that the people in power exploit religion to manipulate the poor and the gullible into doing strange things.
The problem is the religion itself, in particular the specific views on salvation and the afterlife that Christianity and Islam share.
Few religions don't seem to place a higher value on the afterlife than they do on actual life.
Quite to the contrary: many religions place an emphasis on this life. Christianity and Islam are morbid exceptions.
Judaism is actually quite different, since it only applies to Jews and since its notion of afterlife is very different from the kind of paradise/hell dichotomy that pervades Christian and Muslim thought.
I certainly agree that some religions do teach hate, but Christ's teachings (for example) have never supported hate nor violence. (I'm not saying the Catholic Church never supported violence; that's an entirely separate issue.)
No, that is not an "entirely separate issue". You cannot pick and choose subsets of Christian teachings depending on which debate you happen to engage in. "Christianity" is a large set of teachings, plus a two thousand year history documenting how its followers have interpreted and applied those teachings.
Few religions advocate violence against those who hold different beliefs.
If your belief system includes the notion that people who do not follow your beliefs are subject to eternal damnation, then you are implicitly advocating violence against those who hold different beliefs: compared to eternal damnation, nothing you can do to a person in this life measures up. And that is why Christian churches have frequently oppressed, tortured, and killed those who hold other beliefs.
Christianity contains at its core immoral and violent dogma; the fact that it also contains some moral and non-violent beliefs does not cancel that out.
Ban religion? Don't be silly; that wouldn't solve anything. Generally speaking, people who commit violent acts in the name of religion are ignoring the teachings of the religion they claim to follow (e.g. the Crusades).
You are making the implicit assumption that there is a consistent set of teachings, but there is not. Christian teachings can be used to support both non-violence and violence, and historically they have been, and continue to be used that way to this day.
Christianity would only qualify as a non-violent religion if it was consistently and clearly non-violent in its teachings.
If religion were magically erased from existence, these people would just find some other excuse for violence.
Yes, but unlike religion, those other excuses are amenable to rational analysis.
I'm going to refer to the old axiom "correlation does not show causation".
We don't have to rely on correlation, we can just look at Christian dogma and teachings and how they have been used in history. What we find is an intrinsic lack of consistent ethics and a consistent lack of clear and consistent teachings. The consequence has been many centuries of discrimination, oppression, and violence committed by Christians against others.
But what would Jaron Lanier say about that kind of Internet? :-)
I'll take the advice and thoughts over an educated sceptic like Stoll over some permanent yay-sayer anytime.
(1) I'll first make decisions based on objective studies and controlled experiments.
(2) Absent that, I'll look at what actually works in the market and what people are willing to spend money on.
(3) Only if I can't get either of those, I'll consider the opinions of experts.
For the Internet and related technologies, we have plenty of (1) and (2). Even if Stoll could be considered an "expert", that makes his opinions pretty much irrelevant to me.
Has Jaron Lanier actually ever produced anything useful? Does he have any significant skills or accomplishments? Why should I listen to him? Popularizing other people's ideas about virtual reality and a bit of so-so "classical" music doesn't really convince me.
So, Bono would like to turn the US and Europe into totalitarian states in order to make sure people like himself can keep making millions with unreasonable copyright terms and restrictions.
Some humanitarian!
No, it doesn't necessarily mean that. But there is not a shred of evidence that allowing clones caused Apple any problems whatsoever, whereas Apple clearly got skewered for the technical problems and bad product strategy they had back then.
Steve Jobs doesn't "hate" using open source. For example, he tried to keep the Objective-C extensions to GCC closed source in violation of the GPL; it took a lot of legal saber rattling by GNU to get him to comply.
Apple is somewhat better now than they were 20 years ago, but they are still taking much more from the open source community than they are giving back. Without FOSS, Apple would be out of business; but even if all of Apple's contributions to FOSS disappeared overnight, people would hardly notice.
Actually, you've got it exactly backwards. Apple nearly went out of business because they went more open and allowed Mac clones. Now that they are (arguably) more closed in that respect, they are extremely successful.
Apple's woes had nothing to do with allowing clones; Apple nearly went out of business because MacOS was a bad, proprietary platform and because Apple was bleeding money at an enormous rate.
Apple is successful now because they have been piggy-backing on open source technologies (Mach, gcc, tons of libraries) and therefore been saving development costs and delivering a better product, and because they are tightly controlling expenses (including R&D expenses).
Apple has really outdone themselves in terms of disgusting patent applications. Patenting sending my location to someone else?? That has many years of prior art.
We really need a patent system in which companies like Apple can be sued for stiff punitive damages when filing bad patents like this.
The idea that an author or inventor "owns" their work is a fiction. All you ever get is a temporary monopoly on making copies of it. From day one, people can modify it, make fun of it, satirize it, and burn it if they like. It's temporary because copyright is actually intended to encourage reuse of content. That is, increasing the public domain is the objective of copyright law, and the temporary monopoly a means to that end--a necessary evil.
Many of the greatest works of human literature, art, and music were created before copyright. Not only did they get created, they frequently reused prior works liberally.
And there is no reason whatsoever why we should change that; in fact, if anything, we should reduce copyright and patent terms because they clearly are not working right.
Open source is merely reminding people of what copyright and fair use were actually intended to do: encourage creation, distribution, and reuse of content.
The standard comment is:
# FIXME
and it is enormously useful. It is so useful that many IDEs actually automatically extract and list such comments.
The price of maintaining comment-free code is well known.
No, it isn't known at all, since there are no sound studies on the subject. You're simply jumping to conclusions.
If you don't comment your code, I won't pay you for it. I'll inform the management that you neglected an important step and don't deserve a good reference.
Based on what you have written, I don't think you're a good programmer either.
The original copyright term was 14 years, with another 14 years if you bothered to renew. That's the maximum copyright any work should get. Anything longer than that is grossly unfair.
Yes it is. You can spin it all you want, but it is.
No, it is not. Physical property and copyrights are completely different things.
Also, if you are against copyright, you are against software licenses, which means you think that MS should be free to violate GPL.
The creators of the GPL are indeed against software licenses and copyright; the GPL is intended as a stopgap measure until copyright law changes and the GPL isn't needed (or enforceable) anymore.
Well, that's easy to say if it ain't your income that is being stolen... Every illegal download is a loss
As a copyright holder, you only get that income because copyright law gives you that income as a matter of public policy. Unlike physical property, society has the right to deprive you of income from copyright without compensation as it sees fit.
Piracy is theft
Copyrights are not property, they are special, temporary rights granted by the government for a limited time to encourage particular kinds of activities. Therefore, copyright violations are not theft. Furthermore, we as a society get to define what actions constitute a copyright violation.
And to truetorment; I can't stomach STUPID. Thus my sig.
Well, then go and kill yourself, please: apparently, you're too stupid to understand that whether a bunch of scientists falsified scientific data or messed with peer review has nothing to do with whether AGW is actually happening or not. What makes your sig so incredibly stupid isn't even that you doubt AGW, it's that you think that the whistle blowers "prove you right".