If I understate difference of doctorine it is because I believe most of them to be kind of unimportant. Even the Roman Catholic rites which were clearly borrowed from Roman paganism. I find myself becommong more and more eccumenical as I get older.
I can't cite chapter and verse off the top of my head, but Paul was once asked about the practice of eating meat that had been sacrificed to altars (a common practive in some areas of early Christianity) instead of sticking to Khosher food. Paul replied that there's really nothing wrong with doing so, because through Christ's grace such rites of purity practiced by Orthodox Jews are not really needed. However, he also warned that if you do permit yourself the practice, you ought not flaunt it to those that still consider it a pressing moral dilemma. He felt, very strongly, that people should not consider themselves followers of Paul or Peter, but as followers of Jesus.
Personally, I consider that to be very good advice. The Pope (the current one) is a compelling spiritual authority whom I respect a lot, even as a non-Catholic... But I think that one should be a Christian first, and not get too caught up in sectarian differences.
As for the issue about Anglican priests... Yea, most followers still believe in Christ's divinity, but the Anglican church has atracted non-believers to their priesthood at an alarming rate, just as many feel the Catholic priesthood had become an attractive option for men who have trouble "connecting" with adult women (if ya know what I mean), leading to the troubling scandals of the past couple years. I suspect both problems will sort themselves out eventually, one way or another.
Most protestant views are accomodations of Catholic ones, as nearly all Western churches are splinter groups of Roman Catholicism. C.S. Lewis, perhaps the most well-known 20th Century apologist for evangelical Christianity, held a very similar view.
Don't mistake the majority of/. posters as a representative sample of any group. Half of them are probably don't even actually believe what they are writing anyway, and are just trolling to jerk people around.
He dismissively claims there's evidence if you look -- the most substantive thing he says -- but he brushes by it as though it weren't that important, probably because it's patently false.
Or perhaps because nobody can be persuaded by the statement "there's evidence if you look", unless they have already looked and found said evidence. Religion is a somewhat personal thing, and faith is a very personal experience.
To use myself as an example, nothing that any evangelist ever said or wrote ever managed to persuade me to convert. I converted when my own observation of the world, my self, and those around me, convinced me of the truth of Christianity, in a way that would probably not persuade anybody else of it. There are those who use logic to defend Christianity, but few who were brought to Christianity by logic.
Perhaps a more truthful statement would be, "when I looked, I saw evidence. YMMV."
Good hearted agnostics have one virtue above all others, humility.
As opposed to the bad hearted agnostics, who are arrogant jerks, who insist that anybody with an opinion about the existance (or non-existance) of God is a moron who must not be capable of their enlightened view. (In other words, "the existance or non-existance of God is an unknown to me, therefore it must be unknowable, because nobody could possibly understand something I don't. They must lack my broader perspective.")
There's assholes who claim every perspective, including yours.
I shall stop short of calling you one of them, in spite of your very rude and arrogant generalizations, as you might be a much nicer guy most of the time, and felt a little provoked by the discussion here into more inflamitory rhetoric that you would normally use. Happens all the time in discussions of conflicting philosophies.
I think you misunderstand the evangelical view at least as much as most evangelicals misunderstand Catholicism. Your explanation of "baptism by desire" is a good one, but couldn't you have just left it at that without ignorantly lashing out at those who belong to other churches?
I constantly hear that you must have faith that God exists. Therefore, God does not exist without faith.
You should not lecture on logic if your own logic is broken.
You have been told that you must have faith that God exists.
It does not follow that God's existence depends on your faith.
The notion that God can not exist without people believing him is not, and never has been a claim of of Christianity.
There are Christians who insist that God, by nature, can not be completely understood or known to mortals, but that would be a shortcoming of our existance, not his.
I may belong to the "God exists" camp, but I don't think you need to believe in an absolute truth to define "order". Order is: predictible repition. The Earth keeps spinning at a rate of once per 24 hours... that's orderly. During certain types of storms, a tornado may or may not be generated... that's chaos.
Besides, it is possible to believe that there is an objective truth while also believing that you don't know what it is.
I found it very easy to understand, and a refreshing change from most of the muddled writing you usually see on Slashdot.
I suspect he wrote everything with the assumption that the only people reading a Larry Wall interview would be code hackers who would understand the subjects he's talking about. If you know nothing about Perl 5, I can see why the discussion would confuse you... but why would anybody who's not at least passively interested in Perl want to know what the creator of Perl says in response to mostly very picky technical questions about the scope of the language?
There are really no "reds" left to be "pink" about, other than China and Cuba (and maybe Canada, if my right-wing nut friends are to be believed), so calling a left-wing nut a "pinko" is a harmelss enough jab.
I've also been known to use the word "gear" as an adjective, although I have yet to use "23 skidoo" in a sentence.
Good for you. I've stopped bothering to cite my sources, mainly out of laziness. If you care enough to look it up, feel free to get to googlin'. If you don't, then fine. I also don't care enough. IMHO, Slashdot is a place for casual geek conversation and little else; bibliographies are not required, nor should they be.
Only after carefully considering the many methods of generating HTML with Perl that already exist. After all, There's More That One Way To Do It.:)
Samuel Johnson once said brevity is the soul of wit. (Or was it Shakespere?)
In any case, Commander Taco contradicted this view by saying "Slow Down, Cowboy!"
Actually, a simple audit of tax statements will show that, on average, wealthy conservatives generally tend to donate a larger percentage of their money to charity than equally wealthy liberals. (For a stunning example, see Al Gore's returns from before he entered politics.)
What makes them lefties is not their somewhat admirable policy of giving to the needy (although some of their chosen "charities" were nothing more than thinly veiled left-wing PAC's), but rather it's the many pro-socialist statements they have made over the years. To steal a line from my old Poli-Sci prof, they are both so far to the left that they have lost radio contact with the lunatic fringe.
If you read Ben & Jerry case studies, you'll see they've burst through distribution monopolies and other obstacles. I don't see any purely business-oriented companies doing that easily.
Not really. They just followed the trail blazed by Hagen Daas, a big scandanavian company that nosed its way into US markets a few years before Ben & Jerry's came along.
The same thing happened with beer. American micro-brewers started getting a foothold in US liquer stores after the premium import beers established a market for specialty brews. In both cases, bigger companies had to prove that people would pay more for good stuff from small distributers before the small guys could play.
It would have taken only one media magnate, back in the 1970s, to envision the possibilities, and start taking interest in, investing in, and ultimately controlling the evolution of the technology, and the internet today (and the world) would have been a totally different place.
That actually happened though. Not in the 70's, but in the late 80's and early 90's. Several companies attempted to own j00. Compuserve was the one everybody was betting on, along with AOL and few other players.
Good ol' market forces saved us from that. University students missed the open networks when they graduated from school, and Compuserve was not what they wanted. Mom & Pop stores filled in the gap, and the closed networks lost. Compuserve was bought out by AOL, then AOL dropped their network and became a vanilla ISP (which is still searching for a way to make money off all this.)
I don't think the media moguls could have pre-empted this, even if they were clueful back in the 70's. To introduce a technology, you need early adopters, in the case of the emerging Internet, that means geeks. Since the geeks prefer open networks, there was little chance of a more closed system emerging on top.
While I agree that it's not really charity to give away somebody else's money, and I was never a fan of the pinko duo running Ben & Jerry's, I am compelled to point out two points:
1. Lots of companies give generously to charity and/or the arts. It's good PR, and therefore it's like an advertising expense that you can write off your taxes, so it's not really all that irresponsible.
2. Ben & Jerry's had the policy of charitable donations in place before they became a publicly traded company, so every investor who bought shares knew, going int, that they were buying into a company that gave money away. Pretty tough to argue that they were making the donations without shareholder consent under those circumstances.
I like seeing Ecclesiastes quoted once in a while. It's an incredible work that most Western Christians (or even people who are neither Christian nor Jewish, but interested in theology) don't seem to pay nearly as much attention to as it deserves. It's fairly short, so you can get through it the first time in one sitting.
I find that you get a lot out of it if you read it in the context of the order that Old Testament books are usually placed. It comes right after Proverbs, a long-ish book that hammers home the importance of wisdom; a wise man does FOO, a foolish man does BAR, etc. Right after all this preaching about wisdom, Ecclesiastes comes right out of the gate by basically saying that all of man's "wisdom" is pretty much all bullshit, as a means of driving home the point that there are more important things. Very interesting reading.
YMMV, obvoiusly... I'm not out to start a huge religious debate thread. Just admiring good writing.
Seriously, the price comparisons between a top-end HiFi system vs. hiring an orchestra to play at your house were were frequently raised by smart-asses throughout the 70's. What you need to realize is that HiFi geeks were not really obsessing over the performance itself nearly as much as the quest for audio perfection. Why would anybody spend $25 in 1978 for a Lincoln Mayorga LP? Certainly not because you were eager to hear a bunch of southern-California session guys covering Stevie Wonder songs without vocals. It was because when that bass trombone in the horn section hit it, you knew in your gut that the full potential of the thousands of dollars you spent on your stereo were, at last, being realized.
Advances in electronics have kind of ruined the hobby. There are now $99 receivers by no-name companies out there that sound better than many of the "high-end" stand-alone amps from the 70's ever could.
In fact there is an European internet project called SATI@home, or Search for American Territories Intelligence, that is listening for intelligent life in North America.
I wish them lots of luck. I've lived in America my whole life, and have yet to encounter conclusive evidence of any Intelligence here. I mean, "Will and Grace" is a hit show in the US. That tells you about as much as you need to know.
On the other hand, I'm told that the English actually buy Kylie Minogue's audio recordings, instead of just watching her on TV with the sound off. Also, the French consider Jerry Lewis to be a comedy genius. So maybe active brain synapses are few and far between on both sides of the pond.
Yes, but the parent post was suggesting having the major league champion team face the champions from the leagues in other countries. In other words, having the New York Yankees face champion teams from Japan, Central America, etc.
Yes. Some American players end up in Japan. Usually they are players who are both unable to play at the US major league level, and unlikely to develop into major league ballplayers. If you are a AAA-quality left fielder, who is probably never going to get that fat MLB contract, you could spend your career in the minor league system making a few thousand dollars a year (while being bounced around to make room for rookies the majors are trying to develop), or you can go to Japan and maybe make a couple million. Pretty easy call for most guys in that position. Tom Selick made a mildly amusing "B" movie about it called "Mr. Baseball" in the 90's.
Also, a lot of border-line NBA players find they can get more playing time and more money in European leagues, while most of the best European players join the NBA (except for Sabonis, who stayed in Europe until he was well past his prime... some say he was the best European basketball player ever, but he was slow and old by the time he got here).
Except the US World Series champion will almost always have a couple Central/South American players, and might have a Japanese pitcher in their bullpen. Those guys would probably want to play representing their own countries, which would mean breaking the US team up, and juggling the rosters of every other team to shoe-horn their expatriot superstars back into the line-up. It would be a mess.
What would be awesome to see, now that Mexico has cleaned up a lot of their government corruption, is a Major League Baseball team in Mexico City. Think of the great sports rivalries it could create with the various Texas and Southern California teams. Mexico City is a huge and populous place, so ticket sales alone would be massive. They would probably also become a favorite team for many Central American nations, so the potential TV revenue would also be impressive. I would not be at all surprised to see it happen within the next couple decades.
Now if 100 people go Wardriving at the same time the awaireness of WarDriving and Wireless networks etc.. will go up, even if only a small amount.
Yes, but wouldn't 1000 people wardriving on an ongoing basis get even more attention? That's why I think a loose-knit organization with a blog site would probably be the better way to go, if one wanted to do such a thing.
Does anyone know the origin of the term WarDriving?
In the BBS days of yore (when most people and companies did not have an Internet connection), randomly dialing phone numbers to find tty signals used to be refered to as "war dialing". Once you had a list of numbers where you found signals, you would go back and hack around to see what the systems were.
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I can't cite chapter and verse off the top of my head, but Paul was once asked about the practice of eating meat that had been sacrificed to altars (a common practive in some areas of early Christianity) instead of sticking to Khosher food. Paul replied that there's really nothing wrong with doing so, because through Christ's grace such rites of purity practiced by Orthodox Jews are not really needed. However, he also warned that if you do permit yourself the practice, you ought not flaunt it to those that still consider it a pressing moral dilemma. He felt, very strongly, that people should not consider themselves followers of Paul or Peter, but as followers of Jesus.
Personally, I consider that to be very good advice. The Pope (the current one) is a compelling spiritual authority whom I respect a lot, even as a non-Catholic... But I think that one should be a Christian first, and not get too caught up in sectarian differences.
As for the issue about Anglican priests... Yea, most followers still believe in Christ's divinity, but the Anglican church has atracted non-believers to their priesthood at an alarming rate, just as many feel the Catholic priesthood had become an attractive option for men who have trouble "connecting" with adult women (if ya know what I mean), leading to the troubling scandals of the past couple years. I suspect both problems will sort themselves out eventually, one way or another.
Don't mistake the majority of /. posters as a representative sample of any group. Half of them are probably don't even actually believe what they are writing anyway, and are just trolling to jerk people around.
Or perhaps because nobody can be persuaded by the statement "there's evidence if you look", unless they have already looked and found said evidence. Religion is a somewhat personal thing, and faith is a very personal experience.
To use myself as an example, nothing that any evangelist ever said or wrote ever managed to persuade me to convert. I converted when my own observation of the world, my self, and those around me, convinced me of the truth of Christianity, in a way that would probably not persuade anybody else of it. There are those who use logic to defend Christianity, but few who were brought to Christianity by logic.
Perhaps a more truthful statement would be, "when I looked, I saw evidence. YMMV."
As opposed to the bad hearted agnostics, who are arrogant jerks, who insist that anybody with an opinion about the existance (or non-existance) of God is a moron who must not be capable of their enlightened view. (In other words, "the existance or non-existance of God is an unknown to me, therefore it must be unknowable, because nobody could possibly understand something I don't. They must lack my broader perspective.")
There's assholes who claim every perspective, including yours.
I shall stop short of calling you one of them, in spite of your very rude and arrogant generalizations, as you might be a much nicer guy most of the time, and felt a little provoked by the discussion here into more inflamitory rhetoric that you would normally use. Happens all the time in discussions of conflicting philosophies.
I think you misunderstand the evangelical view at least as much as most evangelicals misunderstand Catholicism. Your explanation of "baptism by desire" is a good one, but couldn't you have just left it at that without ignorantly lashing out at those who belong to other churches?
I guess I've heard the "easy things easy, hard things possible" mantra so many times, that I've become numb to it, and missed the joke.
You should not lecture on logic if your own logic is broken.
You have been told that you must have faith that God exists.
It does not follow that God's existence depends on your faith.
The notion that God can not exist without people believing him is not, and never has been a claim of of Christianity.
There are Christians who insist that God, by nature, can not be completely understood or known to mortals, but that would be a shortcoming of our existance, not his.
Besides, it is possible to believe that there is an objective truth while also believing that you don't know what it is.
I suspect he wrote everything with the assumption that the only people reading a Larry Wall interview would be code hackers who would understand the subjects he's talking about. If you know nothing about Perl 5, I can see why the discussion would confuse you... but why would anybody who's not at least passively interested in Perl want to know what the creator of Perl says in response to mostly very picky technical questions about the scope of the language?
There are really no "reds" left to be "pink" about, other than China and Cuba (and maybe Canada, if my right-wing nut friends are to be believed), so calling a left-wing nut a "pinko" is a harmelss enough jab.
I've also been known to use the word "gear" as an adjective, although I have yet to use "23 skidoo" in a sentence.
Good for you. I've stopped bothering to cite my sources, mainly out of laziness. If you care enough to look it up, feel free to get to googlin'. If you don't, then fine. I also don't care enough. IMHO, Slashdot is a place for casual geek conversation and little else; bibliographies are not required, nor should they be.
Samuel Johnson once said brevity is the soul of wit. (Or was it Shakespere?)
In any case, Commander Taco contradicted this view by saying "Slow Down, Cowboy!"
What makes them lefties is not their somewhat admirable policy of giving to the needy (although some of their chosen "charities" were nothing more than thinly veiled left-wing PAC's), but rather it's the many pro-socialist statements they have made over the years. To steal a line from my old Poli-Sci prof, they are both so far to the left that they have lost radio contact with the lunatic fringe.
Not really. They just followed the trail blazed by Hagen Daas, a big scandanavian company that nosed its way into US markets a few years before Ben & Jerry's came along.
The same thing happened with beer. American micro-brewers started getting a foothold in US liquer stores after the premium import beers established a market for specialty brews. In both cases, bigger companies had to prove that people would pay more for good stuff from small distributers before the small guys could play.
That actually happened though. Not in the 70's, but in the late 80's and early 90's. Several companies attempted to own j00. Compuserve was the one everybody was betting on, along with AOL and few other players.
Good ol' market forces saved us from that. University students missed the open networks when they graduated from school, and Compuserve was not what they wanted. Mom & Pop stores filled in the gap, and the closed networks lost. Compuserve was bought out by AOL, then AOL dropped their network and became a vanilla ISP (which is still searching for a way to make money off all this.)
I don't think the media moguls could have pre-empted this, even if they were clueful back in the 70's. To introduce a technology, you need early adopters, in the case of the emerging Internet, that means geeks. Since the geeks prefer open networks, there was little chance of a more closed system emerging on top.
1. Lots of companies give generously to charity and/or the arts. It's good PR, and therefore it's like an advertising expense that you can write off your taxes, so it's not really all that irresponsible.
2. Ben & Jerry's had the policy of charitable donations in place before they became a publicly traded company, so every investor who bought shares knew, going int, that they were buying into a company that gave money away. Pretty tough to argue that they were making the donations without shareholder consent under those circumstances.
I like seeing Ecclesiastes quoted once in a while. It's an incredible work that most Western Christians (or even people who are neither Christian nor Jewish, but interested in theology) don't seem to pay nearly as much attention to as it deserves. It's fairly short, so you can get through it the first time in one sitting.
I find that you get a lot out of it if you read it in the context of the order that Old Testament books are usually placed. It comes right after Proverbs, a long-ish book that hammers home the importance of wisdom; a wise man does FOO, a foolish man does BAR, etc. Right after all this preaching about wisdom, Ecclesiastes comes right out of the gate by basically saying that all of man's "wisdom" is pretty much all bullshit, as a means of driving home the point that there are more important things. Very interesting reading.
YMMV, obvoiusly... I'm not out to start a huge religious debate thread. Just admiring good writing.
Seriously, the price comparisons between a top-end HiFi system vs. hiring an orchestra to play at your house were were frequently raised by smart-asses throughout the 70's. What you need to realize is that HiFi geeks were not really obsessing over the performance itself nearly as much as the quest for audio perfection. Why would anybody spend $25 in 1978 for a Lincoln Mayorga LP? Certainly not because you were eager to hear a bunch of southern-California session guys covering Stevie Wonder songs without vocals. It was because when that bass trombone in the horn section hit it, you knew in your gut that the full potential of the thousands of dollars you spent on your stereo were, at last, being realized.
Advances in electronics have kind of ruined the hobby. There are now $99 receivers by no-name companies out there that sound better than many of the "high-end" stand-alone amps from the 70's ever could.
I wish them lots of luck. I've lived in America my whole life, and have yet to encounter conclusive evidence of any Intelligence here. I mean, "Will and Grace" is a hit show in the US. That tells you about as much as you need to know.
On the other hand, I'm told that the English actually buy Kylie Minogue's audio recordings, instead of just watching her on TV with the sound off. Also, the French consider Jerry Lewis to be a comedy genius. So maybe active brain synapses are few and far between on both sides of the pond.
2. Using wrong plurals like boxen and virii; always funny.
3. You're both wrong. "Auction" is obviously the plural form of Auct. Duh.
Yes. Some American players end up in Japan. Usually they are players who are both unable to play at the US major league level, and unlikely to develop into major league ballplayers. If you are a AAA-quality left fielder, who is probably never going to get that fat MLB contract, you could spend your career in the minor league system making a few thousand dollars a year (while being bounced around to make room for rookies the majors are trying to develop), or you can go to Japan and maybe make a couple million. Pretty easy call for most guys in that position. Tom Selick made a mildly amusing "B" movie about it called "Mr. Baseball" in the 90's.
Also, a lot of border-line NBA players find they can get more playing time and more money in European leagues, while most of the best European players join the NBA (except for Sabonis, who stayed in Europe until he was well past his prime... some say he was the best European basketball player ever, but he was slow and old by the time he got here).
What would be awesome to see, now that Mexico has cleaned up a lot of their government corruption, is a Major League Baseball team in Mexico City. Think of the great sports rivalries it could create with the various Texas and Southern California teams. Mexico City is a huge and populous place, so ticket sales alone would be massive. They would probably also become a favorite team for many Central American nations, so the potential TV revenue would also be impressive. I would not be at all surprised to see it happen within the next couple decades.
Try reading in "nested" or "threaded" format instead of "flat" so you can follow the discussion.
Yes, but wouldn't 1000 people wardriving on an ongoing basis get even more attention? That's why I think a loose-knit organization with a blog site would probably be the better way to go, if one wanted to do such a thing.
In the BBS days of yore (when most people and companies did not have an Internet connection), randomly dialing phone numbers to find tty signals used to be refered to as "war dialing". Once you had a list of numbers where you found signals, you would go back and hack around to see what the systems were.