Paine wasn't an atheist at all; he strongly believed in God and wrote The Age of Reason in defense of religion. He merely believed that the Christian religion and the Bible had become corrupted. And personally, I'm an "atheist" only in that I reject theism (mainly, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) as false, but I don't reject religion.
You are suffering from confirmation bias associated with your lack of comprehension of the bible... Many of the point to Dr. Strong's concordance for accurate and meaningful translations which sort of stop Paine's interpretations cold.
If my understanding of the Bible is incorrect, then so is the understanding of one of the largest Protestant denominations: I grew up Protestant, went to Sunday school and was confirmed. I've read KJV, NIV, Luther (in German), and the Catholic Bible (in Latin). I reject the teachings of the church and the Bible because I consider many of them morally wrong and reprehensible, in addition to being logically inconsistent. And those Christian and biblical teachings that I agree with are not unique to Christianity.
Besides, Protestantism has the doctrine of "sola scriptura", which includes the claim that the veracity of the Bible ought to be self evident and does not require complicated interpretation. Well, it is self-evident to me (just like it was to Paine, Jefferson and many others) that the Bible is corrupt and that the lunatic and vengeful God it describes just doesn't make sense.
I did respond to your point: I do not think that a little inconsistency in a religion is reason enough to give it up. But Christianity is totally inconsistent, in its history, theology, actions, and moral teachings. It preaches love but has condoned acts of unspeakable cruelty and intolerance, and its theology has changed again and again over the past 2000 years.
Furthermore, I pointed out that your analogy with mathematics is dead wrong. In mathematics, you only have a choice to include an axiom as long as it is not known to make the theory inconsistent. As soon as an inconsistency is discovered in a theory, the theory is rejected. In mathematics (unlike religion), even a tiny inconsistency must lead to rejection.
I'm not sure how you can claim some assertive rules from that news article.
I'm not claiming anything "from that news article", I'm just pointing you to it because it summarizes the facts. You can get those facts in lots of other places, but are apparently too intellectually lazy to do so.
And the facts are that WBC did not "disrupt" the funeral, they did not interfere with the funeral, and they were not on private property. Snyder himself testified that he couldn't see the WBC protesters from the funeral.
You do have a right to conduct your life and not be bothered by other people regardless of their right to free speech. This is supported by legal noise ordinances that have been completely upheld by the courts as well as zoning laws and rules requiring strip clubs and bars to be located so many feet away from schools, parks and other public places of interest and even zoning regulations requiring commercial businesess and other non-residential entities, and even the practice of that to be conducted in zones other then strict residential zoning.
Yes, and the WBC complied with all ordinances. They did not disrupt the funeral. At issue is their public speech away from the funeral, that is their statements about the funeral.
The point of contention here with this case is whether the dead soldier's funeral was a default place of public interest or a private matter altogether.
No, that is not a "point of contention" since they weren't even visible from the soldier's funeral. The point of contention is whether their speech was so offensive and vulgar that it didn't fall under the First Amendment, and whether people may use someone's personal (if publicly known) events as part of political and religious speech. "Invasion of privacy" here doesn't refer to a physical invasion of some event, it refers to publishing something related to a (supposedly) private event.
Please do not pretend that something is absolutely true when that very truth is being decided in the courts as of right now.
Bullshit. The courts are not deciding what you are claiming they are deciding. You apparently read a few headlines and jumped to conclusions without getting the facts, and in the process, you don't hesitate to trample on fundamental Constitutional principles. You're a disgrace as far as I'm concerned.
Always hard to always stay up to date on the current common wisdom of Slashdot.
The GPL is an attempt to use copyright against itself. So, GPL license holders are going to insist on having their copyrights enforced, even though they disapprove of the current copyright system. There is nothing new about this strategy, it's been the same for more than 20 years; I'm sorry you haven't been paying attention.
The top 3 are C++, C, and JavaScript, which are pretty much the three most badly designed and most frustrating languages on the list. No wonder they lead the list in profanity.
Imagine being able to do that, except between your smart phone and your laptop or desktop,
You mean like I do every day?
(A lot of that functionality has been around in other forms at least since the 1980's.)
We can do some of that already of course, but insufficient software and hardware on mobile devices, as well as deficiencies in disk and network speed (especially cellular network speed) make it impossible to really accomplish all of it now.
Hardware is more than powerful enough. However, the software doesn't work exactly the way Sun or Microsoft showed it in their videos because their "vision" doesn't make a lot of sense. What we're actually getting today is driven by how people use devices and desktops, not by slavishly sticking to some slick video.
Sometimes, you get simultaneous editing (Google Docs), sometimes remote access to a desktop session is better (VNC, RDP). Sometimes you want remote file access or automatic file synchronization (Android) with a local app. For voice, you have a choice between the forwarding and call transfer methods of Google Voice, Skype, and the cell phone network.
Of course, if you're trying to do this with MS Office Apps, you're kind of SOL, but that's just a limitation of Windows and MS Office.
You're absolutely right. Today's Roman Catholic Church accepts the Big Bang and the Theory of Evolution.
You say that as if it's a good thing. What about the millions of people who suffered under some Catholic doctrine that the new "enlightened" Catholic church has abandoned when the only alternative was irrelevancy?
Catholicism claims absolute, universal truth, and it hasn't delivered that for 2000 years. It's a sham and a bunch of lies.
Ah he does not believe in the bible as you do, so that makes him !christian.
I don't believe in the Bible at all.
That's very accepting?
Why should I be "accepting"? The Bible and Christianity are full of inconsistencies and falsehoods, and they are being used to discriminate and oppress people. And the main reason that's still happening is because most people who call themselves "Christian" and give this religion its power don't have the slightest idea of what it actually says.
there's not nearly as many contradictions as you make it seem. I'm betting most of the things you consider a contradiction comes from your lack of basic understanding of the bible.
It's not what I "consider"; these are extremely well studied and documented facts, starting with Thomas Paine's "Age fo Reason" (which I recommend) to modern historical, theological, and linguistic studies.
But by all means, your right to free speech does not carry a right to be heard or a right to a place to be heard at. Except at public (read civil, not I can see you) event and places.
They were on a public street. They didn't disrupt the funeral, in fact the funeral goes couldn't see them at all. They just saw recordings of the picketing afterwards on television and then filed their lawsuits.
And even if they had been visible from the funeral, as long as they stayed on a public street and kept a reasonable distance, it should have been OK. You do not have a right to be protected from speech that offends you, funeral or not.
Your argument seemed to be that if your beliefs are at all inconsistent with your religion
Come on, pay attention! That wasn't my argument.
I was merely pointing out that your response to it was totally bogus: Christianity and the Bible have extensive and proven linguistic, historical, and logical inconsistencies; that just isn't the case for number theory.
Fundamentally, you seem to just want to encourage people to get away from Christianity
No, I just want people to be clear about what they are. You can't claim to be a Christian but then try to come up with your own theology that differs from what Christianity stands for.
and allowed that desire to fudge your thinking in general.
Why don't you worry about your own "fudged" thinking, OK?
Sun's business was built on taking BSD UNIX and making it proprietary, then degrading it further and further. Later, they lied about Java and open source, laying the groundwork for Oracle's lawsuits.
With that history and those credentials, why would I ever trust the man responsible for open source at Sun?
Let me clear that up for you: system crashes, outages, BSODs -- fault of the operating system; bad data, bad XML, bad UI -- fault of the application programmers and application platform.
Most likely, this was Java programmers screwing up.
You have a Constitutional right to petition your government. You do NOT have the Constitutional right to petition the grieving families at a soldier's funeral.
Free speech is a separate right from the right to petition the government. And they aren't "petitioning" the family, they are making a public statement about the deceased.
They have a right to do that, even though it hurts the feelings of the family. Nobody has a Constitutional right to have their feelings protected. Free speech would be meaningless if the only things you could say were things that don't offend anybody. And, frankly, Phelps's statements are so off the wall and bizarre that it's hard to see how anybody could even be offended by them.
I would certainly pitch in a few bucks to fly some gay men to WBC for a nice love-in on the steps of the church
And that is the appropriate response to free speech that you consider offensive: you speak out against it and support the people hurt by it.
In a sense splits in religion are the same. They didn't want to throw everything out, so they just excised pieces and went on their merry way. To assume your religion has to be 100% consistent for you to believe in it is tempting, but ultimately silly.
We're not talking about 99% vs 100% consistency; the entire Bible is full of contradictions; large parts of it are clearly fabricated by people with a political agenda. And despite all that, it's still absolutely clear even from the Bible that who Jesus was and what he preached had little to do with the tenets of current Christianity.
It's unclear if number theory itself is consistent, and that's probably the best shot we humans have at a nontrivial consistent set of beliefs.
That kind of statement may be applied other religions, but as far as Christianity is concerned, it is clear that it is totally inconsistent. It's as if in number theory, people couldn't even get addition and the small multiplication table right and tried to prove things by saying "some guy told me".
Because not everybody interprets the bible the way you do. Because not everybody gives the same importance to the parts of the bible that you give. Because not everybody thinks the bible is the be all end all of what God wants, but rather the place to begin thinking about it.
If that's what you believe, then you have already stopped being a Christian, you simply don't want to give up the label.
The solution when your chosen religion conflicts with your lifestyle and biology is not to try and reinterpret and redefine that religion's beliefs to align with yours, it's to stop believing in that religion and choose another (or none at all).
You're falsely assuming that Christianity is some fixed set of beliefs, but it isn't. For 2000 years, Christianity has kept changing its dogma and beliefs for political, moral, and theological expediency, and for about a millennium before that, the Jews were doing the same. I mean, Paulus took an apocalyptic Jewish preacher ("the world is going to end within my lifetime; Jews, give away your possessions and obey Jewish law") and turned his message onto its head in order to create a new religion appealing to a wide audience.
For the simple reason that many men want to be ordained as priests: it is a quick-and-easy way to gain moral authority over others.
Christianity isn't a consistent set of beliefs, it's a symbol and placeholder that is (falsely) perceived to stand for morality and compassion in our society.
Android has had proxy support since the first release. You set it under the access point.
Now, what's pretty important in a business phone is that your VPN doesn't randomly reset to an unencrypted connection, which, sadly, it does on iPhone.
It supports both regular VPN and tunnelling with ssh (or any other command line program). The browser can be configured to go through a proxy if you like. If you want a mainstream phone, that's probably the best way to go. There are also lots of encryption solutions.
iPhone is nearly useless from a security point of view: when the VPN connection shuts down (as it does from time to time), it starts transmitting your data unencrypted; totally unacceptable!
If you want any more control, you probably need to get an N900 (while you still can).
You can get a little flexibility by using a mobile WiFi hotspot and a separate WiFi enabled internet access devices (e.g., Android tablet, Android phone, etc.).
Re:As much as I wanted Nokia to adopt Android...
on
Why Nokia Is Toast
·
· Score: 1
Going WP7 allows Nokia to differentiate itself.
Yes, Nokia can differentiate itself with WP7--by shipping an OS nobody uses and nobody develops for; that's differentiation alright, just not the kind that helps a business succeed. The cheapest Chinese Android clone has more functionality than a WP7 phone.
Non-technical users can't differentiate one Android phone from another.
Non-technical users differentiate Android phones just fine, in the usual ways non-technical users differentiate such things: shininess, coolness, speed, megapixels, size of appstore, and pre-installed software--all areas in which Nokia has traditionally been able to do well.
Now, however, Nokia is hamstrung with an inferior and bloated, terminally uncool operating system from America's most boring software company. Oh, and it doesn't have a lot of apps either and hell will freeze over before their phones talk to anything that doesn't fit into Microsoft's narrow business interests. Way to go, Nokia.
Re:Symbian is good enough for lots of people...
on
Why Nokia Is Toast
·
· Score: 1
Go on... there's still second part of his quote to address... (plus general sturdiness)
The second part is bogus too: Android phones have about the same battery life as Symbian phones if you configure them similarly.
If one is used to S40 (by far the most popular mobile platform on the planet
Most people who use S40 phones know nothing more than how to make phone calls on them.
Slashdot Mirror
Paine wasn't an atheist at all; he strongly believed in God and wrote The Age of Reason in defense of religion. He merely believed that the Christian religion and the Bible had become corrupted. And personally, I'm an "atheist" only in that I reject theism (mainly, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) as false, but I don't reject religion.
If my understanding of the Bible is incorrect, then so is the understanding of one of the largest Protestant denominations: I grew up Protestant, went to Sunday school and was confirmed. I've read KJV, NIV, Luther (in German), and the Catholic Bible (in Latin). I reject the teachings of the church and the Bible because I consider many of them morally wrong and reprehensible, in addition to being logically inconsistent. And those Christian and biblical teachings that I agree with are not unique to Christianity.
Besides, Protestantism has the doctrine of "sola scriptura", which includes the claim that the veracity of the Bible ought to be self evident and does not require complicated interpretation. Well, it is self-evident to me (just like it was to Paine, Jefferson and many others) that the Bible is corrupt and that the lunatic and vengeful God it describes just doesn't make sense.
I did respond to your point: I do not think that a little inconsistency in a religion is reason enough to give it up. But Christianity is totally inconsistent, in its history, theology, actions, and moral teachings. It preaches love but has condoned acts of unspeakable cruelty and intolerance, and its theology has changed again and again over the past 2000 years.
Furthermore, I pointed out that your analogy with mathematics is dead wrong. In mathematics, you only have a choice to include an axiom as long as it is not known to make the theory inconsistent. As soon as an inconsistency is discovered in a theory, the theory is rejected. In mathematics (unlike religion), even a tiny inconsistency must lead to rejection.
I'm not sure how you can claim some assertive rules from that news article.
I'm not claiming anything "from that news article", I'm just pointing you to it because it summarizes the facts. You can get those facts in lots of other places, but are apparently too intellectually lazy to do so.
And the facts are that WBC did not "disrupt" the funeral, they did not interfere with the funeral, and they were not on private property. Snyder himself testified that he couldn't see the WBC protesters from the funeral.
You do have a right to conduct your life and not be bothered by other people regardless of their right to free speech. This is supported by legal noise ordinances that have been completely upheld by the courts as well as zoning laws and rules requiring strip clubs and bars to be located so many feet away from schools, parks and other public places of interest and even zoning regulations requiring commercial businesess and other non-residential entities, and even the practice of that to be conducted in zones other then strict residential zoning.
Yes, and the WBC complied with all ordinances. They did not disrupt the funeral. At issue is their public speech away from the funeral, that is their statements about the funeral.
The point of contention here with this case is whether the dead soldier's funeral was a default place of public interest or a private matter altogether.
No, that is not a "point of contention" since they weren't even visible from the soldier's funeral. The point of contention is whether their speech was so offensive and vulgar that it didn't fall under the First Amendment, and whether people may use someone's personal (if publicly known) events as part of political and religious speech. "Invasion of privacy" here doesn't refer to a physical invasion of some event, it refers to publishing something related to a (supposedly) private event.
Please do not pretend that something is absolutely true when that very truth is being decided in the courts as of right now.
Bullshit. The courts are not deciding what you are claiming they are deciding. You apparently read a few headlines and jumped to conclusions without getting the facts, and in the process, you don't hesitate to trample on fundamental Constitutional principles. You're a disgrace as far as I'm concerned.
Always hard to always stay up to date on the current common wisdom of Slashdot.
The GPL is an attempt to use copyright against itself. So, GPL license holders are going to insist on having their copyrights enforced, even though they disapprove of the current copyright system. There is nothing new about this strategy, it's been the same for more than 20 years; I'm sorry you haven't been paying attention.
The top 3 are C++, C, and JavaScript, which are pretty much the three most badly designed and most frustrating languages on the list. No wonder they lead the list in profanity.
You mean like I do every day?
(A lot of that functionality has been around in other forms at least since the 1980's.)
Hardware is more than powerful enough. However, the software doesn't work exactly the way Sun or Microsoft showed it in their videos because their "vision" doesn't make a lot of sense. What we're actually getting today is driven by how people use devices and desktops, not by slavishly sticking to some slick video.
Sometimes, you get simultaneous editing (Google Docs), sometimes remote access to a desktop session is better (VNC, RDP). Sometimes you want remote file access or automatic file synchronization (Android) with a local app. For voice, you have a choice between the forwarding and call transfer methods of Google Voice, Skype, and the cell phone network.
Of course, if you're trying to do this with MS Office Apps, you're kind of SOL, but that's just a limitation of Windows and MS Office.
Why would it drive anybody nuts? Microsoft made a nice video, but they didn't come up with any of the ideas in that video.
You say that as if it's a good thing. What about the millions of people who suffered under some Catholic doctrine that the new "enlightened" Catholic church has abandoned when the only alternative was irrelevancy?
Catholicism claims absolute, universal truth, and it hasn't delivered that for 2000 years. It's a sham and a bunch of lies.
I don't believe in the Bible at all.
Why should I be "accepting"? The Bible and Christianity are full of inconsistencies and falsehoods, and they are being used to discriminate and oppress people. And the main reason that's still happening is because most people who call themselves "Christian" and give this religion its power don't have the slightest idea of what it actually says.
It's not what I "consider"; these are extremely well studied and documented facts, starting with Thomas Paine's "Age fo Reason" (which I recommend) to modern historical, theological, and linguistic studies.
They were on a public street. They didn't disrupt the funeral, in fact the funeral goes couldn't see them at all. They just saw recordings of the picketing afterwards on television and then filed their lawsuits.
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2010-10-06/news/bs-md-snyder-arguments-20101006_1_sean-e-summers-westboro-baptist-church-protests/4
And even if they had been visible from the funeral, as long as they stayed on a public street and kept a reasonable distance, it should have been OK. You do not have a right to be protected from speech that offends you, funeral or not.
Come on, pay attention! That wasn't my argument.
I was merely pointing out that your response to it was totally bogus: Christianity and the Bible have extensive and proven linguistic, historical, and logical inconsistencies; that just isn't the case for number theory.
No, I just want people to be clear about what they are. You can't claim to be a Christian but then try to come up with your own theology that differs from what Christianity stands for.
Why don't you worry about your own "fudged" thinking, OK?
If it was OS crashes, yes, it was a Windows problem.
Sun's business was built on taking BSD UNIX and making it proprietary, then degrading it further and further. Later, they lied about Java and open source, laying the groundwork for Oracle's lawsuits.
With that history and those credentials, why would I ever trust the man responsible for open source at Sun?
Let me clear that up for you: system crashes, outages, BSODs -- fault of the operating system; bad data, bad XML, bad UI -- fault of the application programmers and application platform.
Most likely, this was Java programmers screwing up.
If it didn't crash and didn't drop its network connections, Linux was doing its job.
If the application software had bugs, then the application software developers are to blame.
You have a Constitutional right to petition your government. You do NOT have the Constitutional right to petition the grieving families at a soldier's funeral.
Free speech is a separate right from the right to petition the government. And they aren't "petitioning" the family, they are making a public statement about the deceased.
They have a right to do that, even though it hurts the feelings of the family. Nobody has a Constitutional right to have their feelings protected. Free speech would be meaningless if the only things you could say were things that don't offend anybody. And, frankly, Phelps's statements are so off the wall and bizarre that it's hard to see how anybody could even be offended by them.
I would certainly pitch in a few bucks to fly some gay men to WBC for a nice love-in on the steps of the church
And that is the appropriate response to free speech that you consider offensive: you speak out against it and support the people hurt by it.
We're not talking about 99% vs 100% consistency; the entire Bible is full of contradictions; large parts of it are clearly fabricated by people with a political agenda. And despite all that, it's still absolutely clear even from the Bible that who Jesus was and what he preached had little to do with the tenets of current Christianity.
That kind of statement may be applied other religions, but as far as Christianity is concerned, it is clear that it is totally inconsistent. It's as if in number theory, people couldn't even get addition and the small multiplication table right and tried to prove things by saying "some guy told me".
If that's what you believe, then you have already stopped being a Christian, you simply don't want to give up the label.
You're falsely assuming that Christianity is some fixed set of beliefs, but it isn't. For 2000 years, Christianity has kept changing its dogma and beliefs for political, moral, and theological expediency, and for about a millennium before that, the Jews were doing the same. I mean, Paulus took an apocalyptic Jewish preacher ("the world is going to end within my lifetime; Jews, give away your possessions and obey Jewish law") and turned his message onto its head in order to create a new religion appealing to a wide audience.
For the simple reason that many men want to be ordained as priests: it is a quick-and-easy way to gain moral authority over others.
Christianity isn't a consistent set of beliefs, it's a symbol and placeholder that is (falsely) perceived to stand for morality and compassion in our society.
Android has had proxy support since the first release. You set it under the access point.
Now, what's pretty important in a business phone is that your VPN doesn't randomly reset to an unencrypted connection, which, sadly, it does on iPhone.
Tabloids wouldn't have to speculate if he disclosed his condition.
It supports both regular VPN and tunnelling with ssh (or any other command line program). The browser can be configured to go through a proxy if you like. If you want a mainstream phone, that's probably the best way to go. There are also lots of encryption solutions.
iPhone is nearly useless from a security point of view: when the VPN connection shuts down (as it does from time to time), it starts transmitting your data unencrypted; totally unacceptable!
If you want any more control, you probably need to get an N900 (while you still can).
You can get a little flexibility by using a mobile WiFi hotspot and a separate WiFi enabled internet access devices (e.g., Android tablet, Android phone, etc.).
Going WP7 allows Nokia to differentiate itself.
Yes, Nokia can differentiate itself with WP7--by shipping an OS nobody uses and nobody develops for; that's differentiation alright, just not the kind that helps a business succeed. The cheapest Chinese Android clone has more functionality than a WP7 phone.
Non-technical users can't differentiate one Android phone from another.
Non-technical users differentiate Android phones just fine, in the usual ways non-technical users differentiate such things: shininess, coolness, speed, megapixels, size of appstore, and pre-installed software--all areas in which Nokia has traditionally been able to do well.
Now, however, Nokia is hamstrung with an inferior and bloated, terminally uncool operating system from America's most boring software company. Oh, and it doesn't have a lot of apps either and hell will freeze over before their phones talk to anything that doesn't fit into Microsoft's narrow business interests. Way to go, Nokia.
Go on... there's still second part of his quote to address... (plus general sturdiness)
The second part is bogus too: Android phones have about the same battery life as Symbian phones if you configure them similarly.
If one is used to S40 (by far the most popular mobile platform on the planet
Most people who use S40 phones know nothing more than how to make phone calls on them.