... don't exactly make a compelling social or technical argument, as far as I'm concerned.
I'm not sure what to say about the Red-baiting... other than that Bob Metcalf needs to read the GNU Manifesto, then read some Karl Marx, and then compare the two. He could even ask his editor to help him understand any big words.
Hints for those who don't already know their Marx -- KM advocates centralization of property ownership via the State, RMS does not. KM advocates armed revolution, RMS advocates writing and sharing code, and "make it do or do without." Both KM and RMS are offended by Large Corporate Power, monopolistic practices, and treating workers like automatons. I guess that must be the part that makes RMS a Communist -- except if that were the definition of Communist, the Pope is a Bolshevik as well.
As for starvation, Metcalf claims
If North America actually went back to the earth, close to 250 million people would die of starvation before you could say agribusiness.
This is utterly false. "Back to the earth" agriculture is demonstrably more productive, on a per-acre basis, with less loss of soil productivity than conventional agribusiness-style agriculture. It just doesn't lend itself as well to the high-growth, high-profit corporate model.
There is an interesting parallel between free/open-source software and a more low-input/localized/sustainable agriculture, compared to the centralized, proprietary corporate model that Metcalf seems to prefer. In both cases (software and agriculture), there is almost certainly less money to be made, total, using the "crunchy granola" approach. However, that money will be made, in software, by smaller companies (perhaps even individuals) who will not have the ability to dominate the industry in the way of Microsoft or to get as rich as Bill Gates by manipulating markets. Similarly, in agriculture, the low-input methods are better for farmers, who have a chance to make a decent and secure living, but bad for the stockholders of Monstanto and Cargill (who get rich and powerful by proprietary IP such as gene patents and by market manipulation).
For documentation of the agriculture issues, a good start is Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity by Frances Moore Lappe (out of print, according to Amazon.com) and The Unsettling of America : Culture & Agriculture by Wendell Berry. Lappe deals with the global issues of agriculture, agribusiness, and world hunger, Berry focuses on the effects of agribusiness on America.
"Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business." -- G. K. Chesterton
No, it would not be, any more than (natural) twins are the same person.
What about food supply? How would you support so many clones, assuming that you start them at an early age? Immediately 2x the number of people on the planet would obviously be a problem.
Since this is only a rich person's problem, 2x planet population isn't really a worry... I doubt the poor of Calcutta, or even the poor of urban and rural American ghettos, are going to be having their own personal clones.
I think we have an irresponsible media and sensationalist religious groups mis-educating the public on what life really is. I can imagine some mindless christians acting like the devil himself and killing people who happen to have origins of cloning, "you are not human!"
While I agree with clones being real persons, and about "irresponsible media"...
This rest is sheer FUD, of a quality that would be shouted down on/. if Microsoft were the target.
I have never heard of any religious group, sensationalist or otherwise, "miseducating the public" that cloned humans would be souless. In fact, much the opposite, and Christians are taking a lot of heat on this topic here on/. because the vast majority of Christians understand that clones are persons, and plan to act on that understanding, whether the "enlightented"[sic] science-mongers like it or not.
While (sadly) the scenario you outline is not impossible, please note that at this time it is merely theoretical. At this point, if the BBC story is true, clones have been killed, and it wasn't by torch-carrying peasants. I am willing to bet that the lab scientists and clinicians will have a higher body count by several orders of magnitude for the forseeable future.
Anyone interested in looking up patron saints should try saints.catholic.org -- it contains an index of the officially-recognized patron saints, plus some good background information.
I will quote their explaination of patron saints here:
What is a patron saint?
Patron saints are chosen as special protectors or guardians over areas of life. These areas can include occupations, illnesses, churches, countries, causes -- anything that is important to us.
The earliest records show that people and churches were named after apostles and martyrs as early as the fourth century. Recently, the popes have named patron saints but patrons can be chosen by other individuals or groups as well.
Patron saints are often chosen today because an interest, talent, or event in their lives overlaps with the special area. For example, Francis of Assisi loved nature and so he is patron of ecologists. Francis de Sales was a writer and so he is patron of journalists and writers. Clare of Assisi was named patron of television because one Christmas when she was too ill to leave her bed she saw and heard Christmas Mass -- even though it was taking place miles away. Angels can also be named as patron saints.
A patron saint can help us when we follow the example of that saint's life and when we ask for that saint's intercessory prayers to God.
Some things to note -- the news article simply mentioned a popular movement to have the Vatican declare St. Isidore the patron saint of the Internet. These popular movements happen all the time within the Roman Catholic Church. Some receive official approval, some do not.
Of course, any Catholic (or anyone else) can request the intercession of any saint in any matter. No one needs to wait for Vatican approval.
Personally, while I can see why St. Isidore would show an interest in the Internet, there are some other saints I would nominate:
St. Gabriel (already mentioned) -- the patron of communications workers
St. Jude -- patron of hopeless causes:^)
St. Jerome -- my favorite candidate for patron of the Internet. He is the patron saint of librarians. He was also a prolific writer of letters and tracts, and was a... vigorous... debator. He had flaming down to an art form centuries before the Internet was invented, and I believe he would be very much at home here.
And just how can an angel be a saint? Angels != Dead People no matter what "Touched by an Angel" may lead you to believe...
The Catholic Church counts the angels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael as saints. I don't think any other angels have received official canonization.
Since a saint is simply a person who is believed by the Church to be in heaven, and is held up as an example to the faithful and as a person whose prayerful intercessions are effective, there is no reason to limit the canonized saints to human persons. Angelic persons can be saints, too. Heaven is not a humans-only club.
Technical theology note #1 -- you are right that angels are not dead humans. They are separate created races.
Technical theology note #2 -- notice I said "canonized" saints. There are many, many more saints than the officialy recoginized ones. (In fact, that's one of the points about "All Saint's Day".) In fact, all of the un-Fallen angels would qualify as saints. But, since Scripture only mentions Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael by name, they are the only ones the Church has recognized via canonization as saints.
(weird synchronicity... the AIBO banner add is at the top of my screen as I reply...)
Assuming that strong AI is possible, for the moment, then like any technology, it will be implemented eventually, so it's beside the point to say "oh, but we shouldn't."
Says who? I don't recall signing up for technological determinism. It is precisely the point that, assuming strong AI is possible, we should be able to say "oh, but we shouldn't." Technology isn't like gravity, that happens without anyone willing it. If strong AI is possible, it will be people who choose to research and fund it, people who choose to build it, and people who choose to use and abuse it.
To then say "oh, look at the inevitable march of technology" is an utter abandonment of moral responsibility, and complete abdication of human freedom.
Moravec? What a crank. The man obviously detests being human. He reminds me of the lunar inhabitants in C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, who were so delicato that they couldn't stand biological reproduction, and found sterile, mechanical means instead to propagate themselves in their quest to eliminate biological life on their globe.
Ah, good old Scientific Triumphalism! I thought it had mostly died out in this cynical age, but apparantly there are still some proponents.
You write:
Science is not a destination; it's not an Answer. Science is a means of travelling, so that you can find your own answers. Science is a journey.
Actually, science is not a means for finding your own answers. It is a means for everyone to come up with the same answers. Thus the need for testing and independant verification of results.
And in reality, while those who do science can be said to be on some sort of Journey Toward Truth, the rest of the folks who are not part of the scientific priesthood are supposed to "journey" by simply soaking up the popularized consensus of currently-fashionable theories, and then treating this popularization as "true" and somehow meaning something (until scientific fashion changes, and there's a new "truth" that one would be "ignorant" to not take seriously).
But yet, time and again new knowledge surfaces that directly contradicts a firmly entrenched religious dogma. The earth is round, the sun is the center of the solar system, the universe is older than 6000 years.
I don't know what religion you're referring to, unless it's a caricature of some flavor of Fundamentalist Christianity. Yes, you can find some (not all) Fundamentalists who will argue that a young-earth, literal 7x24-hour Creation is dogma. This has never been so for the majority of Christianity. In Catholicism, Orthodoxy, mainline Protestantism, and even much of Fundamentalism, none of the things you mention as "dogma" are, in fact, held as dogma.
The defining dogmas of Christianity are hardly secret, and are most completely summarized in the Nicene Creed. Here are the relevant lines from the Creed:
We believe in one God
the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.
Hmm. Nothing in there about the earth being flat vs. round, or what revolves around what, or how long ago the Father did all of this.
Of course, in the spirit of scientific objectivity and inquiry, I expect you to not simply take my word for this, but to do your own investigation into the truth of this matter, and discover what is and is not dogma within Christianity. And, of course, to revise your opinion based upon the data you uncover that might contradict your presuppositions and prejudices. But I won't hold my breath in the meantime.
Science, on the other hand, discards the arrogance of religion. There is no dogma in science.
You then contradict yourself utterly by listing some pretty arrogant dogmas.
All things are knowable.
This is a humble attitude? As compared to the arrogance of saying "my reason is flawed and finite; I need Divine help to make sense of myself and the mysteries of life." You must mean different things by the words "humble" and "arrogant" than I'm used to.
Knowledge is colorblind
While I agree with this statement, I don't agree with the subtle ad hominem. Racism is not inherent to Christianity. "Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all." (Colossians 3:11, RSV) Our saints, martyrs, and theologians have been of every race and color since the beginning of Christianity. Nor has science somehow magically been free of racism. Examples here are numerous, and the obvious one in this century invokes Godwin's Law, so I won't mention it.
The sense of wonder at the universe that you describe the the cornerstone of science! How great and wonderful is the universe! How great and wonderful the journey to try and understand it!
Indeed! It's so great that even a rationalist can hardly help but get caught up in it.:^)
I am mystified, however, by the idea that the "scientific" way of looking at the universe as a meaningless object that just happened to happen, and our understanding of that universe as a journey leading nowhere, should enhance one's sense of wonder, whilst the religious perspective that the journey has a destination, and that this universe did not simply happen, but is the work of a great Artist, would decrease one's sense of wonder at the marvelous world around us.
But scientists, who ought to know Assure us that it must be so. Oh, let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about. -- Hilaire Belloc
Ah, I hadn't seen that thread. Makes things a bit more clear... Thanks! People need to realize that this isn't an offer of $20k for somebody to hack up a HOWTO, they're talking about something on the order of an O'Reilly book...
Exactly.
In fact, Tim O'Reilly himself participates actively in the free-docs list that Miguel kicked off with this message, and has given a lot of great feedback and reality-checking. He has also stated that O'Reilly would be willing to consider publishing more free/open-source books, although with the caveat that authors should expect the royalty payments to total out less than for traditional books.
As for the reasonableness of the $20,000 figure, that was batted around as what an author might expect to receive in total for a sucessful book. The O'Reilly writers guide says that the typical O'Reilly advance is $5,000 to $10,000, with author royalties at 10%.
So, which would you rather have, $20,000 up front, or $7,500 and hope that a GNOME programming manual sells at least 250 copies at $50? Hmm... O'Reilly is looking pretty good -- unless you feel very strongly about free documentation and the FSF, in which case $20,000 for work you would have done for free is a pretty great deal.
Of course, there's the question of whether writing a modest-selling O'Reilly book pays more than minimum wage on an hourly basis, when all is said and done. It seems like most authors do have day jobs.
Do some reasonable people believe that these things exist?
M. Scott Peck. See The People of the Lie. Peck is a trained, licensed, and practicing psychiatrist who claims to have encountered demonic activity and participated in exorcisms. And yes, he distinguishes between demonic activity, imbalanced brain chemistry, and simple cussedness.
Of course, I suspect this is a sucker question. Would anyone who does believe in and claim to have witnessed these things qualify as "reasonable" in your book? I doubt it. Very tight, clean, closed, self-consistant logic there.:^)
One last thing, I believe that Quantum Mechanics fairly well demolished objectivity a while back.
Bah, humbug. Nobody really believes this, on a practical, day-to-day level, on matters they really care about. If you doubt me, let's try a thought experiment: say your bank statement comes and your savings account has an unexplained $2,000 missing. Do you (a) chalk it up to quantum uncertainty (all hail Heisenburg), or (b) get all moralistic about objective reality and right and wrong and proceed with your bank on the basis of there being one true objective answer to the question "what is the balance in this account"?
"Now you and I have, I hope, this advantage over all those clever new philosophers, that we happen not to be mad." -- G. K. Chesterton
Re:What do you think Littleton WAS?
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An attempt to direct the conversation into an appropriate forum. You'll notice that I have exactly no power to force the discussion - it was only a request. The fact that you regard a request that you don't like as censorship says a lot more about you than about me.
*sigh*
My point was, folks are oh-so-sensitive to WB's decision to delay (not cancel) broadcast of an episode that they scream CENSORSHIP! and expend thousands of words of angst over this shocking, tragic, nay brutal suppression of free speech, yet somehow declaring that religious-based viewpoints are verboten (check that monotheistic faith at the door, only pagans, techno-gnostic mystics, and athiests need enter/.) is met with nary a whimper from the free-speech advocates.
Sure looks to me like it matters whose toes are getting stepped on.
And you're right -- you have no power to enforce a ban, therefore you're not a censor in that sense.
But tell me this -- I see topics with religious dimensions on/. all the time. Todays topics include a review of a book discussion the relationship of magick to technology. Katz waxes mystical all the time. ThiemeWorks is/was explicitly religious content. It's nearly impossible to discuss Littleton without confronting the problem of evil. And every AI/artificial life topics gets some techno-mystic or athiestic/secular philosophizing in on the questions of "what does it mean to be human?" and "what is a person?"
So, do you tell these folks to take their religion elsewhere, or is it just particular folks whose religion is "inappropriate" for this forum?
"There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions." -- G. K. Chesterton
Re:What do you think Littleton WAS?
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(Not much about WB any more...)
Dehumanizing these high school murderers is only going to bring us farther from figuring out what is going on and how we can stop it.
Looks to me like Harris and Klebold did a great job of dehumanizing themselves...
(Side note -- I honestly hope those two were demon-possessed at the time, for their sakes. Which do you think would go better for a person at Judgement, to be able to legitimately say "the devil made me do it," or to have to stand before Almighty God in the presense of your victims and have to admit "of my own free will I did this evil"?)
Of course, by "figuring out what is going on and how we can stop it" you have just started to address the whole problem of human evil. Try to keep that to be a technical discussion of "news for nerds." Although it certainly is "stuff that matters."
Are we just going to burn them and their demon friends at the steak? What about the parents of these hellspawn? Dehumanizing people is wrong and leads to infringements on their rights. There are countless examples of this.
Careful, you can put an eye out slinging ignorant stereotypes like that around.
I don't know where you get your information, but in classic Christian thought the demon-possesed are victims, not "hellspawn." Try reading the Gospels sometime, and checking out how Jesus treated the demon-possessed, and instructed his disciples to do the same, before you start jumping to conclusions.
Are we going to have priests do excorcisms after the metal detectors at school?!
While it's an amusing image, I certainly hope not. See Matthew 12:43-45 for why.
Re:What do you think Littleton WAS?
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Um, okay. I suppose the authority on demonology has spoken. Good thing we had C.S. Lewis to get us good counter-intel on the demonic strategy, huh?
First of all, CSL never intended The Screwtape Letters to be any sort of demonology textbook, or to be taken as how demons "really" operate. Read the preface; he explictly disclaims any such purpose (or knowledge).
That said, why the sneer? I think CSL had a pretty good handle on the "demonic strategy" (this is nothing esoteric; he simply applied classic Christian theology to his observations of human nature and contemporary society).
As CSL said in TSL, there are two classic errors that one can fall into regarding demons. One is to disbelieve in their existance. The other is to show an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They don't really care which error you fall into.
"I like bats better than bureaucrats." -- C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Re:What do you think Littleton WAS?
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Not without a lot more discussion of whether or not there's a god, which is inappropriate for this board. Take it to alt.religion.christian or the like.
Does anyone else notice the irony here?
In the middle of much moaning about censorship, we have a cry to "take it to a.r.c!" If it's censorship for WB to delay the timing of an episode, what do you call an attempt to make fundamental discussions of reality off-topic?
Ah, well. I guess we mustn't risk offending the delicate sensibilites of/.'s pagan or athiest readers. That, or we mustn't rock the secularist paradigm.
(For a great discussion about how secularist culture plus some bone-headed legal decisions serve to constrain debate in the USA at least as much as any corporate CYA manouvers, see Stephen Carter's excellent The Culture of Disbelief.)
"Weblogs" inferior to USENET and mail lists ...
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... at least as far as building "online community." I've been thinking about this for a bit, and I think this is simply a property of the interface. Follow a healthy USENET group or mail list on a topic you care about for a while, and notice the percentage of posts that actually engage what another person has written. It's so high that USENET developed the (sometimes software-enforced) protocol that you ought to provide at least as much original as quoted text. Now, look at the comment threads on slashdot. See the difference? And/. has a higher percentage of interaction than other sites such as freshmeat or themes.org.
Now, "weblogs" (awful name) are superior to USENET groups and mail lists in (1) filtering noise and highlighting useful information, and (2) providing archiving and search capabilities. But that's not the same as building "community", unless you simply mean a group of people with similar interests and viewpoints. But it doesn't get people interacting at the person-to-person levels that old-fashioned NNTP and SMTP (or the even more old-fashioned face-to-face) do.
I also find that newsgroups and mail lists can provide an opportunity for more thoughtful discussion. I've many times sat on a USENET or mail message for a day or two before responding, in order to give some thought or do some research before responding. With slashdot? Why bother responding to a toping that's no longer on the splash page?
As for the closed vs. open debate -- both are good in there own way. There are times that I want to mix it up in the rough-and-tumble marketplace of ideas. There are times I want to quietly discuss issues with folks who are moderately like-minded. It is wonderful that both kinds of fora (open to the world and unmoderated, limited subscription and moderated) can exist.
Forget all the hype about GNOME being window manager neutral. It requires Enlightenment to operate fully.
This is simply not true. GNOME does not require Enlightenment. (Caveat: the RPMs released by Red Hat do have a dependancy on Enlightenment as an RPM -- but per Dr. Mike himself, this was a packaging simplification, and you don't actually need to run E.)
I suppose it's possible that Enlightenment implements more of the GNOME WM specification than WindowMaker or any other WM -- Raster states that as one of his goals with E. So? WindowMaker current versions claim GNOME compliance, and I haven't heard that this was broken, and lots of people seem to use the GNOME+WindowMaker commbination. I've tried it myself, went back to Enlightenment, may give WindowMaker another try someday.
Enlightenment is officially part of GNOME now.
Funny, there's been no notice to that effect on the GNOME web site, the Enlightenment web site, or the gnome-announce list.
Despite the fact that WindowMaker is gnome-compliant, GNOME still pops up with messages suggesting you run Enlightenment instead.
Never saw them while I was trying GNOME+WindowMaker. Are you sure you were using a recent enough version of WindowMaker? The GNOME-compliance didn't happen until at least 0.50.0+ -- the version of WindowMaker that came with Red Hat 5.2 (0.20) hadn't implemented GNOME-compliance, and you will get GNOME hinting that you should use a GNOME-compliant WM if you try that combo.
And if you are using a recent version, that sounds like a bug. Do the right thing. Report it. It might even get fixed that way.
So what exactly are you trying to say here? Humans have souls just because we are human? That's utterly ridiculous!
Yes, that is exactly what I am trying to say.
Humans are just a synthesis of billions of years of natural evolution. Nothing more. Nothing less.
While that is a popular belief, it's not one that I plan to adopt based on your say-so.
At exactly which point along the line do you think humans, or proto-humans were "magically" granted souls?
At exactly the point that God made it so. As I was not there, I don't know the exact details. Why don't you ask Him if it matters to you?
You really think that God just decided to pick us, of all species, to have souls?
Yes.
Fact is, the only thing that makes us *human* is that we think better than all the other animals! DUH!!
Your assertion that it is so does not make it a "fact."
If what makes us human is the ability to think better than a gorilla, is a severely retarded homo sapiens human?
Hence, the argument is over intelligence and NOT souls.
Part of what I wanted to point out was the fact that this argument is over intelligence and not soul or personhood is due to the definition of "human" as "intelligent animal", and materialistic philosphy. Thanks for helping.
In your original post, you imply that since it is a crime to kill a fetus but not a dog that somehow we (humans) have some divine gift.
Actually, I didn't specify "unborn child," as I didn't want to engage the topic of abortion.
If I implied what you say, I was being unclear. To say it simply, it's not that we have a divine gift because it's wrong to kill humans, it's wrong to kill humans because we have the divine gift of personhood in the image of God. Dogs, while they can be wonderful creatures, don't have the same gift, so putting your pet Lassie "to sleep" does not have the same moral character as putting your Uncle George "to sleep" would.
While you assume that our laws are a manifestation of our God-imposed morality (which for all I know may be true), it is certainly not a sound foundation upon which to make a point, having little basis in fact.
At least you admit the possibility that I might be right.:^)
As for "little basis in fact," I think it's quite factual that the laws of Western cultures have been heavily influenced over the last 1500+ years by Christian thought. Whether you consider this good, bad, or indifferent is another matter, but I think it's hardly debatable that this has occured.
You mistakenly use this fact to "prove" divine intervention. Is it not possible that cutures that did not outlaw murder simply killed themselves off? That would result in a world in which murder is illegal, without the influence of God.
You are right, it's possible -- although I think the fact (as you correctly note) that virtue works out in the long run is hardly disproof of the divine...
I think we're getting hung up on the multiple senses of the word "murder." Unfortunately, I didn't think of a better example when I wrote. I meant "murder" == "morally wrong killing", where you are focusing on "murder" == "illegal killing." These are not necessarily the same thing.
It appears that your point is that humans feeling pain over loss of human life proves that God has instilled within us a sense of what is sacred. This is simply mystification of something we do not yet fully comprehend. I do not have another explaination, but masking it with God simply keeps you from seeking the truth. Why would a complex system somehow not evince the behavior you describe? Can you tell me why? Do humans understand every interaction within our tiny twisted little heads?
So, you don't understand how it could be so, but you're sure that it can't be God? You have at least as much faith as I do.
And yes, I do think this demonstrates the sense of the sacred.
As I write this it is becoming clearer to me that you may be projecting your understanding of complex systems (ie artifical life) onto your own erroneously. We make the rules in AI. We know the basic unit of change: the bit. Currently we do not know what that bit is in humans therefore, unless you posess this knowledge, you have no way of conclusively proving that it is not possible for a complex system to "feel".
You're missing the point. Yes, I have no way of proving that a complex system will never be able to "feel." But that's irrelevant. Dogs can certainly feel, but that doesn't make them persons in the sense of participating in the Divine Image. Demonstrating that a computer could be made to feel would not, therefore, make me conclude that the computer is a person.
So you propose that universal truths are derived from the laws and morals that we impose on the rest of the world?
No. I propose that the killing of a child is murder, while the killing of a dog is not. It's a happy coincidence that our laws reflect this.
The point is not that we derive truth from laws, but that we ought to be deriving laws from truth. The reason it's (currently) illegal to kill your child, but perfectly legal to kill your dog, is that our laws are based on this notion that it's morally wrong to kill children, but permissible to kill animals. A faith-based superstition, of course, which in this "enlightened" society, we will no doubt overcome someday.
If something is really a universal truth, it's not "derived" from anything.
You don't say who the "we" is that's doing the "imposing" on "the rest of the world", so I'm not certain of your meaning. But, it sounds like you're in the camp that thinks the distinction between a dog and a child is simply an arbitrary social judgement, "imposed" on people.
In centuries past, when people considered the question of non-human intelligences, the question of whether something was "intelligent," or what "intelligence" was, wasn't even the question. The question was "does X have a soul?" In other words, are we morally obligated to treat X as a person, or as an animal or a thing?
Of course, no one thinks about "soul" or "personhood" anymore except those regressive religious types, donchaknow. So instead, we talk about "intelligence," as if that defined personhood.
(Side note -- as to the silly idea that intelligent, or intelligent-seeming, computers would somehow "demolish" Christianity or other faiths, I hardly think so. Certainly, assertions about how the mind works, and triumphalistic predictions of strong AI soon, should give Christianity no more trouble than the older philosphical question of whether non-human and semi-human intelligences such as centaurs and satyrs had souls. As one early theologian (St. Augustine, if I remember correctly) put it, we can puzzle that out once somebody shows that centaurs and satyrs really exist, and until then, it's hardly a serious objection to the faith. Similary with Commander Data of the Starship Enterprise -- I don't think he/it presents a moral or philosophical challenge to any faith at least until a positive feasibility study comes back. See C. S. Lewis's "Religion and Rocketry" essay.)
This does come down to the questions of "what is human?" and "what is a person?" Are we something special, or (if you like Darwin) just animals with opposible thumbs and big craniums, or (if you like Minsky) just complex, carbon-based computation engines?
As you have probably guessed by now, I fall into the camp of believing that our personhood comes as a gift from God and is presented to us by virtue of being human, nothing more. I do not believe it comes from being clever animals or massively parallel computers. If that were true, is a hydrocephalic baby less of a person than Lassie? Yet killing the baby is murder, and killing a dog is not.
I submit that most/.'ers do, at heart, agree with the moral and spiritual truth that humans are persons, whose personhood is a sacred thing, even while arguing against the idea. Otherwise, why such anguish over the events in Columbine? If we are simply complex, parallel automata, there there's no need to be any more upset about what Harris and Klebold did than if they had walked into a Circuit City and trashed it, or about a router going bad and flooding the Internet with bad packets.
I suppose it's too much to ask Jon Katz and the/. readership to actually consider the idea that Doom, Quake, etc. might in reality desensitize people to violence and gore, and be dangerous to the psyche of folks who are already too close to the edge?
Boneheaded, fascistic responses by school administrators (probably lawyer-driven) do not exonorate anything. It's not an either-or, zero-sum equation -- it's quite possible that school is hell, administrators are fascists and Doom and Quake help set those kids at Columbine off.
I fully expect to hear "But I play Quake, and so to my friends, and we're OK." That may be true. But that makes about as much sense as arguing that alcoholism must not exist because you yourself are a moderate drinker.
Oh, well. Better to moan about clueless parents and administrators, get a thrill from reliving one's own high-school angst, and feel noble by validating the the angst of current high-schoolers, than to actually reflect on one's own life to see if anything should change on acount of this tragedy.
Do I want to see Internet censorship and banning of shooter games? No. But exactly what to you Doom/Quake players think you're accomplishing by burning in those particular neural pathways?
As for what could be done, here are some thoughts rattling around in my brain:
Take a deep breath. Consider what a miracle that was. Take another. Contemplate the mystery and sacredness of life. Ask that the Giver of Life point out to you anything that you may be doing to diminish that sacredness.
Take one more deep breath. Now, what if that was your last? Reflect on your own mortality. If that bothers you, you've got a problem that you need to deal with. Because I've got news for you, you are going to die, and you don't know when. So take the time now to prepare.
If you have room in your heart and mind after these steps to play "us-them" games with Geek Kids vs. Clueless Grownups, then I don't know what more to say.
But if you still want something action-oriented and not contemplative to pursue, then pick something and work on making the world a better place so that public schools are not such a twisted hell. Consider volunteering. Befriend a high-schooler or three. Help out your church's youth group. Think about homeschooling, support those who do it. Advocate the breakup of these mega-highschools into smaller schools that allow a more human face. Figure out your own action item and pursue it.
Those in the Church who rise above their baser instincts are truly a credit to the Institution as a whole; however, that doesn't change the fact that the Institution and the Concept are flawed.
So, let me see if I have this straight: Christians doing bad things discredit Christianity, but Christians doing good things couldn't possibly credit Christianity? Sheesh.
Let me know when and where you find a creed whose adherents are all perfect people.
On a more serious note, you write of Christianity as an "Institution" and a "Concept." You are either missing the point, or choosing to ignore it, that Christianity (plus most other "organized" religions) are not simply nice philosophical concepts with an organization to promote them, they consist of a number of claims to truth, to information that accurately represents something real about the universe.
So, if Jesus of Nazareth really was the Son of God, and rose from the dead on the third day, this is true, regardless of whether some who claim to follow Christianity have done shameful things. And if Allah really did deliver His message to Mohammed, then Islam is true, regardless of atrocities comitted by Muslims. If Joseph Smith did not get his messages from God, then Mormonism is false, regardless of the good lives of Mormons. And so on through the list.
And guess what? The Internet isn't going to change that, any more than it's going to make 2+2=5, or pi a rational number...
"These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own." -- G. K. Chesterton
"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." -- G. K. Chesterton
flesh99 wrote: How can you not seperate the two when one persecuted the other, that alone would almost serve as a dividing line.
A wee bit of historical revisionism going on here. Yes, Catholics have killed Protestants. Protestants have also killed and persecuted Catholics. Look at the history of England, or America's own "Know-Nothing" party, if you don't believe me. The KKK is nearly as anti-Catholic as it is anti-black.
And, of course, both Catholic and Protestant ganged up in hunting down Anabaptists back in the crazy days of the Reformation.
Is this a disgrace and a scandal to Christianity? For sure.
I hardly believe this invalidates Christianity -- I'm a Christian myself. But we need to be honest in dealing with the historical record. And atrocities committed in the name of Christ are hardly unique to the Roman Catholic branch of Christianity.
Enlightenment->SoundBug?
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esound and libaudiofile are greedy about being the way to do sound on the system. However, there is a way (esddsp, IIRC) to make it play nicely with apps that aren't compiled for esound support.
Also, GNOME and E work just fine without sound. I run them on a PC without a sound card. Both of them have a --disable-sound option. Also, there's a nice little checkbutton to disable sound in both the GNOME and E configuration GUIs.
... or does anyone else think that this "techno-spiritual" hype is -- hype?
Certainly, computer and networking technology have created, and will create, great social and economic changes. (Good or bad changes, that is a different question.) But I am baffled as to how this changes the fundamental human spiritual condition:
We are born.
We are physical creatures.
We also seem to be spiritual creatures, possessing at least the appearance of mind, spirit, and will.
Suffering happens.
Bad things happen to good people.
Good things happen to bad people.
We seem to have these ideas of "right" and "wrong."
Living "rightly" is difficult.
Life is complex.
We all die, we can't get out of it, and it's a mystery what happens after that.
And the Internet changes all this... how?
Yes, "Web Time" is fast. Is that good?
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Generations
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The high-level summary, if I understood correctly -- "The rate of technological (and cultural) change is fast and ever increasing. This makes communication between people ever more difficult."
I have to agree with this. It seems so obvious to me I don't know how it could be argued. Not that this is a new observation -- Alvin Toffler made exactly this case decades ago with Future Shock. It's practically a truism -- witness the current buzzwords of "web time" and "internet time."
But Thieme stops there. The question that desperately needs to be asked, and thought about, and debated, is "Is this a good thing?"
Otherwise, we're stuck in the grip of a boosteristic technological determinism, where our "options" with each wave of change are simply Sink or Swim. I hear lots of rah-rah about how "enabling" the Internet is, but it rings kind of hollow if I am not "enabled" to Just Say No.
(From this perspective, the Amish are some of the most technologically enabled people around. As a group, they have a certain set of values and priorities, which do not include being current and hip and up-to-the-minute. Instead, when a technology presents itself, they ask "Is this good for the community? Does this help or hinder accomplishing our highest priorities?" If the answer is "no," then the technology is rejected. They are masters of the art of Just Saying No.)
So, is this shortening of "generations" a good or a bad thing? I'm inclined to think it's not good. What good is it to email around the world if the price is that we are cut off from our parents and our children, and even from our own "generational" peers who are outside of our particular circles of interest?
Are these drawbacks inherent in the technology of global internets, or can they be mitigated or eliminated? I don't know. Thieme either doesn't know or isn't saying. It would not bother me if he doesn't know the answer. What bothers me is that he isn't even asking the question.
Slashdot Mirror
... don't exactly make a compelling social or technical argument, as far as I'm concerned.
I'm not sure what to say about the Red-baiting ... other than that Bob Metcalf needs to read the GNU Manifesto, then read some Karl Marx, and then compare the two. He could even ask his editor to help him understand any big words.
Hints for those who don't already know their Marx -- KM advocates centralization of property ownership via the State, RMS does not. KM advocates armed revolution, RMS advocates writing and sharing code, and "make it do or do without." Both KM and RMS are offended by Large Corporate Power, monopolistic practices, and treating workers like automatons. I guess that must be the part that makes RMS a Communist -- except if that were the definition of Communist, the Pope is a Bolshevik as well.
As for starvation, Metcalf claims
This is utterly false. "Back to the earth" agriculture is demonstrably more productive, on a per-acre basis, with less loss of soil productivity than conventional agribusiness-style agriculture. It just doesn't lend itself as well to the high-growth, high-profit corporate model.
There is an interesting parallel between free/open-source software and a more low-input/localized/sustainable agriculture, compared to the centralized, proprietary corporate model that Metcalf seems to prefer. In both cases (software and agriculture), there is almost certainly less money to be made, total, using the "crunchy granola" approach. However, that money will be made, in software, by smaller companies (perhaps even individuals) who will not have the ability to dominate the industry in the way of Microsoft or to get as rich as Bill Gates by manipulating markets. Similarly, in agriculture, the low-input methods are better for farmers, who have a chance to make a decent and secure living, but bad for the stockholders of Monstanto and Cargill (who get rich and powerful by proprietary IP such as gene patents and by market manipulation).
For documentation of the agriculture issues, a good start is Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity by Frances Moore Lappe (out of print, according to Amazon.com) and The Unsettling of America : Culture & Agriculture by Wendell Berry. Lappe deals with the global issues of agriculture, agribusiness, and world hunger, Berry focuses on the effects of agribusiness on America.
"Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business." -- G. K. Chesterton
No, it would not be, any more than (natural) twins are the same person.
Since this is only a rich person's problem, 2x planet population isn't really a worry ... I doubt the poor of Calcutta, or even the poor of urban and rural American ghettos, are going to be having their own personal clones.
While I agree with clones being real persons, and about "irresponsible media" ...
This rest is sheer FUD, of a quality that would be shouted down on /. if Microsoft were the target.
I have never heard of any religious group, sensationalist or otherwise, "miseducating the public" that cloned humans would be souless. In fact, much the opposite, and Christians are taking a lot of heat on this topic here on /. because the vast majority of Christians understand that clones are persons, and plan to act on that understanding, whether the "enlightented"[sic] science-mongers like it or not.
While (sadly) the scenario you outline is not impossible, please note that at this time it is merely theoretical. At this point, if the BBC story is true, clones have been killed, and it wasn't by torch-carrying peasants. I am willing to bet that the lab scientists and clinicians will have a higher body count by several orders of magnitude for the forseeable future.
Anyone interested in looking up patron saints should try saints.catholic.org -- it contains an index of the officially-recognized patron saints, plus some good background information.
I will quote their explaination of patron saints here:
Some things to note -- the news article simply mentioned a popular movement to have the Vatican declare St. Isidore the patron saint of the Internet. These popular movements happen all the time within the Roman Catholic Church. Some receive official approval, some do not.
Of course, any Catholic (or anyone else) can request the intercession of any saint in any matter. No one needs to wait for Vatican approval.
Personally, while I can see why St. Isidore would show an interest in the Internet, there are some other saints I would nominate:
The Catholic Church counts the angels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael as saints. I don't think any other angels have received official canonization.
Since a saint is simply a person who is believed by the Church to be in heaven, and is held up as an example to the faithful and as a person whose prayerful intercessions are effective, there is no reason to limit the canonized saints to human persons. Angelic persons can be saints, too. Heaven is not a humans-only club.
Technical theology note #1 -- you are right that angels are not dead humans. They are separate created races.
Technical theology note #2 -- notice I said "canonized" saints. There are many, many more saints than the officialy recoginized ones. (In fact, that's one of the points about "All Saint's Day".) In fact, all of the un-Fallen angels would qualify as saints. But, since Scripture only mentions Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael by name, they are the only ones the Church has recognized via canonization as saints.
(weird synchronicity ... the AIBO banner add is at the top of my screen as I reply ...)
Says who? I don't recall signing up for technological determinism. It is precisely the point that, assuming strong AI is possible, we should be able to say "oh, but we shouldn't." Technology isn't like gravity, that happens without anyone willing it. If strong AI is possible, it will be people who choose to research and fund it, people who choose to build it, and people who choose to use and abuse it.
To then say "oh, look at the inevitable march of technology" is an utter abandonment of moral responsibility, and complete abdication of human freedom.
Moravec? What a crank. The man obviously detests being human. He reminds me of the lunar inhabitants in C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, who were so delicato that they couldn't stand biological reproduction, and found sterile, mechanical means instead to propagate themselves in their quest to eliminate biological life on their globe.
Ah, good old Scientific Triumphalism! I thought it had mostly died out in this cynical age, but apparantly there are still some proponents.
You write:
Actually, science is not a means for finding your own answers. It is a means for everyone to come up with the same answers. Thus the need for testing and independant verification of results.
And in reality, while those who do science can be said to be on some sort of Journey Toward Truth, the rest of the folks who are not part of the scientific priesthood are supposed to "journey" by simply soaking up the popularized consensus of currently-fashionable theories, and then treating this popularization as "true" and somehow meaning something (until scientific fashion changes, and there's a new "truth" that one would be "ignorant" to not take seriously).
I don't know what religion you're referring to, unless it's a caricature of some flavor of Fundamentalist Christianity. Yes, you can find some (not all) Fundamentalists who will argue that a young-earth, literal 7x24-hour Creation is dogma. This has never been so for the majority of Christianity. In Catholicism, Orthodoxy, mainline Protestantism, and even much of Fundamentalism, none of the things you mention as "dogma" are, in fact, held as dogma.
The defining dogmas of Christianity are hardly secret, and are most completely summarized in the Nicene Creed. Here are the relevant lines from the Creed:
Hmm. Nothing in there about the earth being flat vs. round, or what revolves around what, or how long ago the Father did all of this.
Of course, in the spirit of scientific objectivity and inquiry, I expect you to not simply take my word for this, but to do your own investigation into the truth of this matter, and discover what is and is not dogma within Christianity. And, of course, to revise your opinion based upon the data you uncover that might contradict your presuppositions and prejudices. But I won't hold my breath in the meantime.
You then contradict yourself utterly by listing some pretty arrogant dogmas.
This is a humble attitude? As compared to the arrogance of saying "my reason is flawed and finite; I need Divine help to make sense of myself and the mysteries of life." You must mean different things by the words "humble" and "arrogant" than I'm used to.
While I agree with this statement, I don't agree with the subtle ad hominem. Racism is not inherent to Christianity. "Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all." (Colossians 3:11, RSV) Our saints, martyrs, and theologians have been of every race and color since the beginning of Christianity. Nor has science somehow magically been free of racism. Examples here are numerous, and the obvious one in this century invokes Godwin's Law, so I won't mention it.
Indeed! It's so great that even a rationalist can hardly help but get caught up in it. :^)
I am mystified, however, by the idea that the "scientific" way of looking at the universe as a meaningless object that just happened to happen, and our understanding of that universe as a journey leading nowhere, should enhance one's sense of wonder, whilst the religious perspective that the journey has a destination, and that this universe did not simply happen, but is the work of a great Artist, would decrease one's sense of wonder at the marvelous world around us.
But scientists, who ought to know
Assure us that it must be so.
Oh, let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about.
-- Hilaire Belloc
Ah, I hadn't seen that thread. Makes things a bit more clear... Thanks! People need to realize that this isn't an offer of $20k for somebody to hack up a HOWTO, they're talking about something on the order of an O'Reilly book...
Exactly.
In fact, Tim O'Reilly himself participates actively in the free-docs list that Miguel kicked off with this message, and has given a lot of great feedback and reality-checking. He has also stated that O'Reilly would be willing to consider publishing more free/open-source books, although with the caveat that authors should expect the royalty payments to total out less than for traditional books.
As for the reasonableness of the $20,000 figure, that was batted around as what an author might expect to receive in total for a sucessful book. The O'Reilly writers guide says that the typical O'Reilly advance is $5,000 to $10,000, with author royalties at 10%.
So, which would you rather have, $20,000 up front, or $7,500 and hope that a GNOME programming manual sells at least 250 copies at $50? Hmm ... O'Reilly is looking pretty good -- unless you feel very strongly about free documentation and the FSF, in which case $20,000 for work you would have done for free is a pretty great deal.
Of course, there's the question of whether writing a modest-selling O'Reilly book pays more than minimum wage on an hourly basis, when all is said and done. It seems like most authors do have day jobs.
Do some reasonable people believe that these things exist?
M. Scott Peck. See The People of the Lie . Peck is a trained, licensed, and practicing psychiatrist who claims to have encountered demonic activity and participated in exorcisms. And yes, he distinguishes between demonic activity, imbalanced brain chemistry, and simple cussedness.
Of course, I suspect this is a sucker question. Would anyone who does believe in and claim to have witnessed these things qualify as "reasonable" in your book? I doubt it. Very tight, clean, closed, self-consistant logic there. :^)
One last thing, I believe that Quantum Mechanics fairly well demolished objectivity a while back.
Bah, humbug. Nobody really believes this, on a practical, day-to-day level, on matters they really care about. If you doubt me, let's try a thought experiment: say your bank statement comes and your savings account has an unexplained $2,000 missing. Do you (a) chalk it up to quantum uncertainty (all hail Heisenburg), or (b) get all moralistic about objective reality and right and wrong and proceed with your bank on the basis of there being one true objective answer to the question "what is the balance in this account"?
"Now you and I have, I hope, this advantage over all those clever new philosophers, that we happen not to be mad." -- G. K. Chesterton
An attempt to direct the conversation into an appropriate forum. You'll notice that I have exactly no power to force the discussion - it was only a request. The fact that you regard a request that you don't like as censorship says a lot more about you than about me.
*sigh*
My point was, folks are oh-so-sensitive to WB's decision to delay (not cancel) broadcast of an episode that they scream CENSORSHIP! and expend thousands of words of angst over this shocking, tragic, nay brutal suppression of free speech, yet somehow declaring that religious-based viewpoints are verboten (check that monotheistic faith at the door, only pagans, techno-gnostic mystics, and athiests need enter /.) is met with nary a whimper from the free-speech advocates.
Sure looks to me like it matters whose toes are getting stepped on.
And you're right -- you have no power to enforce a ban, therefore you're not a censor in that sense.
But tell me this -- I see topics with religious dimensions on /. all the time. Todays topics include a review of a book discussion the relationship of magick to technology. Katz waxes mystical all the time. ThiemeWorks is/was explicitly religious content. It's nearly impossible to discuss Littleton without confronting the problem of evil. And every AI/artificial life topics gets some techno-mystic or athiestic/secular philosophizing in on the questions of "what does it mean to be human?" and "what is a person?"
So, do you tell these folks to take their religion elsewhere, or is it just particular folks whose religion is "inappropriate" for this forum?
"There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions." -- G. K. Chesterton
(Not much about WB any more ...)
Dehumanizing these high school murderers is only going to bring us farther from figuring out what is going on and how we can stop it.
Looks to me like Harris and Klebold did a great job of dehumanizing themselves ...
(Side note -- I honestly hope those two were demon-possessed at the time, for their sakes. Which do you think would go better for a person at Judgement, to be able to legitimately say "the devil made me do it," or to have to stand before Almighty God in the presense of your victims and have to admit "of my own free will I did this evil"?)
Of course, by "figuring out what is going on and how we can stop it" you have just started to address the whole problem of human evil. Try to keep that to be a technical discussion of "news for nerds." Although it certainly is "stuff that matters."
Are we just going to burn them and their demon friends at the steak? What about the parents of these hellspawn? Dehumanizing people is wrong and leads to infringements on their rights. There are countless examples of this.
Careful, you can put an eye out slinging ignorant stereotypes like that around.
I don't know where you get your information, but in classic Christian thought the demon-possesed are victims, not "hellspawn." Try reading the Gospels sometime, and checking out how Jesus treated the demon-possessed, and instructed his disciples to do the same, before you start jumping to conclusions.
Are we going to have priests do excorcisms after the metal detectors at school?!
While it's an amusing image, I certainly hope not. See Matthew 12:43-45 for why.
Um, okay. I suppose the authority on demonology has spoken. Good thing we had C.S. Lewis to get us good counter-intel on the demonic strategy, huh?
First of all, CSL never intended The Screwtape Letters to be any sort of demonology textbook, or to be taken as how demons "really" operate. Read the preface; he explictly disclaims any such purpose (or knowledge).
That said, why the sneer? I think CSL had a pretty good handle on the "demonic strategy" (this is nothing esoteric; he simply applied classic Christian theology to his observations of human nature and contemporary society).
As CSL said in TSL, there are two classic errors that one can fall into regarding demons. One is to disbelieve in their existance. The other is to show an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They don't really care which error you fall into.
"I like bats better than bureaucrats." -- C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Not without a lot more discussion of whether or not there's a god, which is inappropriate for this board. Take it to alt.religion.christian or the like.
Does anyone else notice the irony here?
In the middle of much moaning about censorship, we have a cry to "take it to a.r.c!" If it's censorship for WB to delay the timing of an episode, what do you call an attempt to make fundamental discussions of reality off-topic?
Ah, well. I guess we mustn't risk offending the delicate sensibilites of /.'s pagan or athiest readers. That, or we mustn't rock the secularist paradigm.
(For a great discussion about how secularist culture plus some bone-headed legal decisions serve to constrain debate in the USA at least as much as any corporate CYA manouvers, see Stephen Carter's excellent The Culture of Disbelief .)
... at least as far as building "online community." I've been thinking about this for a bit, and I think this is simply a property of the interface. Follow a healthy USENET group or mail list on a topic you care about for a while, and notice the percentage of posts that actually engage what another person has written. It's so high that USENET developed the (sometimes software-enforced) protocol that you ought to provide at least as much original as quoted text. Now, look at the comment threads on slashdot. See the difference? And /. has a higher percentage of interaction than other sites such as freshmeat or themes.org.
Now, "weblogs" (awful name) are superior to USENET groups and mail lists in (1) filtering noise and highlighting useful information, and (2) providing archiving and search capabilities. But that's not the same as building "community", unless you simply mean a group of people with similar interests and viewpoints. But it doesn't get people interacting at the person-to-person levels that old-fashioned NNTP and SMTP (or the even more old-fashioned face-to-face) do.
I also find that newsgroups and mail lists can provide an opportunity for more thoughtful discussion. I've many times sat on a USENET or mail message for a day or two before responding, in order to give some thought or do some research before responding. With slashdot? Why bother responding to a toping that's no longer on the splash page?
As for the closed vs. open debate -- both are good in there own way. There are times that I want to mix it up in the rough-and-tumble marketplace of ideas. There are times I want to quietly discuss issues with folks who are moderately like-minded. It is wonderful that both kinds of fora (open to the world and unmoderated, limited subscription and moderated) can exist.
Forget all the hype about GNOME being window manager neutral. It requires Enlightenment to operate fully.
This is simply not true. GNOME does not require Enlightenment. (Caveat: the RPMs released by Red Hat do have a dependancy on Enlightenment as an RPM -- but per Dr. Mike himself, this was a packaging simplification, and you don't actually need to run E.)
I suppose it's possible that Enlightenment implements more of the GNOME WM specification than WindowMaker or any other WM -- Raster states that as one of his goals with E. So? WindowMaker current versions claim GNOME compliance, and I haven't heard that this was broken, and lots of people seem to use the GNOME+WindowMaker commbination. I've tried it myself, went back to Enlightenment, may give WindowMaker another try someday.
Enlightenment is officially part of GNOME now.
Funny, there's been no notice to that effect on the GNOME web site, the Enlightenment web site, or the gnome-announce list.
Despite the fact that WindowMaker is gnome-compliant, GNOME still pops up with messages suggesting you run Enlightenment instead.
Never saw them while I was trying GNOME+WindowMaker. Are you sure you were using a recent enough version of WindowMaker? The GNOME-compliance didn't happen until at least 0.50.0+ -- the version of WindowMaker that came with Red Hat 5.2 (0.20) hadn't implemented GNOME-compliance, and you will get GNOME hinting that you should use a GNOME-compliant WM if you try that combo.
And if you are using a recent version, that sounds like a bug. Do the right thing. Report it. It might even get fixed that way.
So what exactly are you trying to say here? Humans have souls just because we are human? That's utterly ridiculous!
Yes, that is exactly what I am trying to say.
Humans are just a synthesis of billions of years of natural evolution. Nothing more. Nothing less.
While that is a popular belief, it's not one that I plan to adopt based on your say-so.
At exactly which point along the line do you think humans, or proto-humans were "magically" granted souls?
At exactly the point that God made it so. As I was not there, I don't know the exact details. Why don't you ask Him if it matters to you?
You really think that God just decided to pick us, of all species, to have souls?
Yes.
Fact is, the only thing that makes us *human* is that we think better than all the other animals! DUH!!
Your assertion that it is so does not make it a "fact."
If what makes us human is the ability to think better than a gorilla, is a severely retarded homo sapiens human?
Hence, the argument is over intelligence and NOT souls.
Part of what I wanted to point out was the fact that this argument is over intelligence and not soul or personhood is due to the definition of "human" as "intelligent animal", and materialistic philosphy. Thanks for helping.
In your original post, you imply that since it is a crime to kill a fetus but not a dog that somehow we (humans) have some divine gift.
Actually, I didn't specify "unborn child," as I didn't want to engage the topic of abortion.
If I implied what you say, I was being unclear. To say it simply, it's not that we have a divine gift because it's wrong to kill humans, it's wrong to kill humans because we have the divine gift of personhood in the image of God. Dogs, while they can be wonderful creatures, don't have the same gift, so putting your pet Lassie "to sleep" does not have the same moral character as putting your Uncle George "to sleep" would.
While you assume that our laws are a manifestation of our God-imposed morality (which for all I know may be true), it is certainly not a sound foundation upon which to make a point, having little basis in fact.
At least you admit the possibility that I might be right. :^)
As for "little basis in fact," I think it's quite factual that the laws of Western cultures have been heavily influenced over the last 1500+ years by Christian thought. Whether you consider this good, bad, or indifferent is another matter, but I think it's hardly debatable that this has occured.
You mistakenly use this fact to "prove" divine intervention. Is it not possible that cutures that did not outlaw murder simply killed themselves off? That would result in a world in which murder is illegal, without the influence of God.
You are right, it's possible -- although I think the fact (as you correctly note) that virtue works out in the long run is hardly disproof of the divine ...
I think we're getting hung up on the multiple senses of the word "murder." Unfortunately, I didn't think of a better example when I wrote. I meant "murder" == "morally wrong killing", where you are focusing on "murder" == "illegal killing." These are not necessarily the same thing.
It appears that your point is that humans feeling pain over loss of human life proves that God has instilled within us a sense of what is sacred. This is simply mystification of something we do not yet fully comprehend. I do not have another explaination, but masking it with God simply keeps you from seeking the truth. Why would a complex system somehow not evince the behavior you describe? Can you tell me why? Do humans understand every interaction within our tiny twisted little heads?
So, you don't understand how it could be so, but you're sure that it can't be God? You have at least as much faith as I do.
And yes, I do think this demonstrates the sense of the sacred.
As I write this it is becoming clearer to me that you may be projecting your understanding of complex systems (ie artifical life) onto your own erroneously. We make the rules in AI. We know the basic unit of change: the bit. Currently we do not know what that bit is in humans therefore, unless you posess this knowledge, you have no way of conclusively proving that it is not possible for a complex system to "feel".
You're missing the point. Yes, I have no way of proving that a complex system will never be able to "feel." But that's irrelevant. Dogs can certainly feel, but that doesn't make them persons in the sense of participating in the Divine Image. Demonstrating that a computer could be made to feel would not, therefore, make me conclude that the computer is a person.
So you propose that universal truths are derived from the laws and morals that we impose on the rest of the world?
No. I propose that the killing of a child is murder, while the killing of a dog is not. It's a happy coincidence that our laws reflect this.
The point is not that we derive truth from laws, but that we ought to be deriving laws from truth. The reason it's (currently) illegal to kill your child, but perfectly legal to kill your dog, is that our laws are based on this notion that it's morally wrong to kill children, but permissible to kill animals. A faith-based superstition, of course, which in this "enlightened" society, we will no doubt overcome someday.
If something is really a universal truth, it's not "derived" from anything.
You don't say who the "we" is that's doing the "imposing" on "the rest of the world", so I'm not certain of your meaning. But, it sounds like you're in the camp that thinks the distinction between a dog and a child is simply an arbitrary social judgement, "imposed" on people.
In centuries past, when people considered the question of non-human intelligences, the question of whether something was "intelligent," or what "intelligence" was, wasn't even the question. The question was "does X have a soul?" In other words, are we morally obligated to treat X as a person, or as an animal or a thing?
Of course, no one thinks about "soul" or "personhood" anymore except those regressive religious types, donchaknow. So instead, we talk about "intelligence," as if that defined personhood.
(Side note -- as to the silly idea that intelligent, or intelligent-seeming, computers would somehow "demolish" Christianity or other faiths, I hardly think so. Certainly, assertions about how the mind works, and triumphalistic predictions of strong AI soon, should give Christianity no more trouble than the older philosphical question of whether non-human and semi-human intelligences such as centaurs and satyrs had souls. As one early theologian (St. Augustine, if I remember correctly) put it, we can puzzle that out once somebody shows that centaurs and satyrs really exist, and until then, it's hardly a serious objection to the faith. Similary with Commander Data of the Starship Enterprise -- I don't think he/it presents a moral or philosophical challenge to any faith at least until a positive feasibility study comes back. See C. S. Lewis's "Religion and Rocketry" essay.)
This does come down to the questions of "what is human?" and "what is a person?" Are we something special, or (if you like Darwin) just animals with opposible thumbs and big craniums, or (if you like Minsky) just complex, carbon-based computation engines?
As you have probably guessed by now, I fall into the camp of believing that our personhood comes as a gift from God and is presented to us by virtue of being human, nothing more. I do not believe it comes from being clever animals or massively parallel computers. If that were true, is a hydrocephalic baby less of a person than Lassie? Yet killing the baby is murder, and killing a dog is not.
I submit that most /.'ers do, at heart, agree with the moral and spiritual truth that humans are persons, whose personhood is a sacred thing, even while arguing against the idea. Otherwise, why such anguish over the events in Columbine? If we are simply complex, parallel automata, there there's no need to be any more upset about what Harris and Klebold did than if they had walked into a Circuit City and trashed it, or about a router going bad and flooding the Internet with bad packets.
I suppose it's too much to ask Jon Katz and the /. readership to actually consider the idea that Doom, Quake, etc. might in reality desensitize people to violence and gore, and be dangerous to the psyche of folks who are already too close to the edge?
Boneheaded, fascistic responses by school administrators (probably lawyer-driven) do not exonorate anything. It's not an either-or, zero-sum equation -- it's quite possible that school is hell, administrators are fascists and Doom and Quake help set those kids at Columbine off.
I fully expect to hear "But I play Quake, and so to my friends, and we're OK." That may be true. But that makes about as much sense as arguing that alcoholism must not exist because you yourself are a moderate drinker.
Oh, well. Better to moan about clueless parents and administrators, get a thrill from reliving one's own high-school angst, and feel noble by validating the the angst of current high-schoolers, than to actually reflect on one's own life to see if anything should change on acount of this tragedy.
Do I want to see Internet censorship and banning of shooter games? No. But exactly what to you Doom/Quake players think you're accomplishing by burning in those particular neural pathways?
As for what could be done, here are some thoughts rattling around in my brain:
Those in the Church who rise above their baser instincts are truly a credit to the Institution as a whole; however, that doesn't change the fact that the Institution and the Concept are flawed.
So, let me see if I have this straight: Christians doing bad things discredit Christianity, but Christians doing good things couldn't possibly credit Christianity? Sheesh.
Let me know when and where you find a creed whose adherents are all perfect people.
On a more serious note, you write of Christianity as an "Institution" and a "Concept." You are either missing the point, or choosing to ignore it, that Christianity (plus most other "organized" religions) are not simply nice philosophical concepts with an organization to promote them, they consist of a number of claims to truth, to information that accurately represents something real about the universe.
So, if Jesus of Nazareth really was the Son of God, and rose from the dead on the third day, this is true, regardless of whether some who claim to follow Christianity have done shameful things. And if Allah really did deliver His message to Mohammed, then Islam is true, regardless of atrocities comitted by Muslims. If Joseph Smith did not get his messages from God, then Mormonism is false, regardless of the good lives of Mormons. And so on through the list.
And guess what? The Internet isn't going to change that, any more than it's going to make 2+2=5, or pi a rational number ...
"These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own." -- G. K. Chesterton
"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." -- G. K. Chesterton
flesh99 wrote:
How can you not seperate the two when one persecuted the other, that alone would almost serve as a dividing line.
A wee bit of historical revisionism going on here. Yes, Catholics have killed Protestants. Protestants have also killed and persecuted Catholics. Look at the history of England, or America's own "Know-Nothing" party, if you don't believe me. The KKK is nearly as anti-Catholic as it is anti-black.
And, of course, both Catholic and Protestant ganged up in hunting down Anabaptists back in the crazy days of the Reformation.
Is this a disgrace and a scandal to Christianity? For sure.
I hardly believe this invalidates Christianity -- I'm a Christian myself. But we need to be honest in dealing with the historical record. And atrocities committed in the name of Christ are hardly unique to the Roman Catholic branch of Christianity.
esound and libaudiofile are greedy about being the way to do sound on the system. However, there is a way (esddsp, IIRC) to make it play nicely with apps that aren't compiled for esound support.
Also, GNOME and E work just fine without sound. I run them on a PC without a sound card. Both of them have a --disable-sound option. Also, there's a nice little checkbutton to disable sound in both the GNOME and E configuration GUIs.
Certainly, computer and networking technology have created, and will create, great social and economic changes. (Good or bad changes, that is a different question.) But I am baffled as to how this changes the fundamental human spiritual condition:
And the Internet changes all this ... how?
The high-level summary, if I understood correctly -- "The rate of technological (and cultural) change is fast and ever increasing. This makes communication between people ever more difficult."
I have to agree with this. It seems so obvious to me I don't know how it could be argued. Not that this is a new observation -- Alvin Toffler made exactly this case decades ago with Future Shock. It's practically a truism -- witness the current buzzwords of "web time" and "internet time."
But Thieme stops there. The question that desperately needs to be asked, and thought about, and debated, is "Is this a good thing?"
Otherwise, we're stuck in the grip of a boosteristic technological determinism, where our "options" with each wave of change are simply Sink or Swim. I hear lots of rah-rah about how "enabling" the Internet is, but it rings kind of hollow if I am not "enabled" to Just Say No.
(From this perspective, the Amish are some of the most technologically enabled people around. As a group, they have a certain set of values and priorities, which do not include being current and hip and up-to-the-minute. Instead, when a technology presents itself, they ask "Is this good for the community? Does this help or hinder accomplishing our highest priorities?" If the answer is "no," then the technology is rejected. They are masters of the art of Just Saying No.)
So, is this shortening of "generations" a good or a bad thing? I'm inclined to think it's not good. What good is it to email around the world if the price is that we are cut off from our parents and our children, and even from our own "generational" peers who are outside of our particular circles of interest?
Are these drawbacks inherent in the technology of global internets, or can they be mitigated or eliminated? I don't know. Thieme either doesn't know or isn't saying. It would not bother me if he doesn't know the answer. What bothers me is that he isn't even asking the question.
Zach