> It's great for cases such as manslaughter, but coupled with GPS, it could be used to enforce speed limits. [...] Use it for serious cases, fine. But don't ticket me!
That's the predictable outcome. It won't be used for routine tickets because governments thrive on the cat-n-mouse game of cops and speeders. If it ever gets to the point that people who speed are ticketed with high probability, then people will stop speeding - and city/county/state revenues will plummet.
Camera-based ticketing has been feasible for 30 years or so. Why do you suppose it has never caught on?
Re: it's just a commercialization
on
Remember The Wizard?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
> Compare it to videos that exist in their own right, rather than just to sell toys. Examples include Power Rangers, Transformers, Pokemon...
> I also don't see where SCO gets the idea that people will pay them for a license to use Linux. The developer community will simply strip out the offending code and will ship the kernel out as a fork.
I'm starting to zoom in on a picture where SCO thinks they can take IBM to court and win the case without anyone but IBM's lawyers ever seeing the code in question, and then hold Linux in perpetual thralldom by levying a license fee on use of the code in Linux without ever telling any of the kernel hackers what the offending code is.
Yeah, there's lots of holes in that... but it's McBride's fantasy, not mine.
> You obviously have not read Lubenow's book. As usual, TalkOrigins did a fairly shoddy job of reviewing it and completely missed the major points.
Since you're so familiar with the book maybe you'd like to summarize its major claims for us, along with a brief listing of the major evidence for each of its major claims.
> A bit of a puzzle here tho. Cromagnon Man replaced the Neanderthals and became our, supposed, ancestor. But, the Cromagnons had even larger brains than the Neanderthals. And Modern Man has a smaller brain than the Neanderthals.
> You proved the point I was making: study with the attitude that you're seeking to understand the Bible before you make bold statements about its veracity.
Been there; done that; found it wanting.
> > Meanwhile, if you try to evaluate the Bible objectively by comparing it to what we know from history, archaeology, geology, etc., it is found often to be very, very wrong.
> Back up your bold assertion with some facts! Come on - read a little archaeological history. Read about the Hittites. Before the 19th century, skeptics said that the Bible was wrong because the Bible mentioned Hittites, and yet they weren't found in archaelogical history. Years later, their existence was discovered and the critics ate crow. Google for it, or read "The Discovery of the Hittites" at this page.
By happy chance I have read up on the Hittites. And not merely at a casual level either - I've actually read a bit of the language, much more in translation, and lots of supporting scholarly documents. I would guess that my hoarde of books and papers about the Hittites amounts to a stack about 5" deep, all of it scholarly rather than pop, New Age, etc.
And the interesting thing is... the Hittites weren't actually "Hittites". The great empire that was discovered should actually be called the Nessites (or perhaps Knessites - there are some issues here). They were mis-labeled as "Hittites" by their discoverers because - you guessed it - they were trying to read the Bible into what they found. Scholars wring their hands over that fact, but all recognize that it's too late to change it now due to the amount of material that has been published and the confusion that would result from a name correction after all these years.
In fact, if you want to map the Bible's Hittites onto history/archaeology you have to assume that the Bible uses "Hit" (or HÃt, IIRC) to refer to three different tribes/kingdoms in the region, namely (IIRC!) (a) an otherwise unattested tribe in Caanan or perhaps along the south/southeastern border, (b) that Hattites, the kingdom with capital at Hatti in Anatolia on the site where the Nessites later established their kingdom and empire, and finally (c) some other kingdom in Syria, very possibly one of the so-called "Neo-Hittite successor states".
If you try to interpret the biblical word to mean the same thing everywhere you get too many "Hittites" in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But back to the bigger picture. Sure, the Bible has some facts in it. So does the Illiad. Scholars were astonished when Troy turned out to be real, astonished again when they discovered that you really could see it from the highest point of one of the Aegean islands (as claimed in the Illiad), astonished again when excavations of Bronze Age Greece turned up a boar's tusk helmet as described in the Illiad, and astonished yet again when the "Hittite" imperial archives gave the names of cities and regions that correspond with the geography in the Illiad. And all this was revealed in the last ~100 years, after being forgotten for 2-3 millenia (depending on which fact).
Should we therefore conclude that the Illiad is a factual depiction of events in the Bronze Age? A divine revelation? And should we start making sacrifices to the Greek gods because the archaeology "proves that the Illiad is true" and the Illiad tells us that those gods existed?
Now back once more to your -
> Back up your bold assertion with some facts!
We need go no further than the nominal topic of this thread: humans living 160,000 years ago falsify any interpretation of the Bible as being both (a) literal and (b) correct. Or we could talk about the flood. Or about confusion over who was who in Persia. Or the ordering of events during "creation". How many times does the Bible have to be wrong before you conclude that it's not all true?
> And also the same "time" not being given to Saddam to imprison and kill children, rape women, and terrorize his own people.
Ah, so we invaded as a humanitarian intervention? I wonder why that's not the case the Administration tried to make to the US public and to the United Nations?
Moreover, if we're into humanitarian interventions I wonder why we intervened in Iraq rather than in the Congo, where 3,000,000 people have been killed over the past four years?
Seems to me that the parsimonious explanation is that the Administration seized a convenient excuse because the real reason wouldn't fly before the public.
> I don't know what Bible you are reading, but mine says nothing about any staircase or rope breaking.
Whoops - spank me for the staircase; that's what I get for relying on memory rather than looking it up. But if you delete the staircase and procede from there, my post should still make sense.
And yes, the broken rope is an extra-biblical fiction. That was part of my point. (I suspect the staircase was also an extra-biblical fiction that I was taught as a child, with some Sunday School teacher thinking he needed somewhere to "fall headlong".)
> As for the Bible contradicting archeology, this is simply not true. For example, just recently, the a city was unearthed that fits perfectly with the Bible's description of Jericho, and even the walls were still intact, with one section of them broken down. What they found in the structures fit with the Jews taking over the city.
Ah, Jericho has long been excavated; even as a child I was fed nonsense about the archaeologists finding that "the walls had fallen outward, rather than inward as would have happened in an ordinary seige".
And BTW, the oldest walls a Jericho are older than the universe, at least according to the dates derived from the Bible.
But more to the point, finding archaeological sites that correspond to Bible stories does nothing to validate the bigger claims of the Bible. I mentioned elsewhere in this thread earlier that The Illiad guided an archaeologist to historical Troy, but no one concludes from that fact that The Illiad is a true story.
> The scientific community is just as guilty of trying to disprove the Bible as the so-called "Christian scientists"
There may be some scientists pursuing such a grudge, but by and large that's not what's going on at all. Scientists (by and large) are just trying to find out about the universe. That endeavor fell afoul of the Bible over two centuries ago, even though the scientists of the day were (by and large) religious men.
The Bible no longer falls within the goals of science in general, although recent political pushes to have it substituted for a real science curriculum are causing more and more scientists to speak out on that topic.
"Christian scientists", OTOH, correctly understand that over the last couple of centuries the facts have refuted their religious beliefs over and over again, so they busy themselves with discrediting mainstream science, or at least forcing open a small gap that they can hide their God in, because they perceive that their religion would be falsified otherwise. (Notice that most Christians outside Fundamentalist sects simply take the findings of science in stride. It's only those who take biblical literalism as an article of faith who have problems with science.)
> There will always be people who believe in God because when you see REAL miracles in response to prayer, speculation over a skull in Africa seems irrelevant.
"REAL miricales in response to prayer" suffer the same problem that unconstrained biblical interpretations do. People pray for rain and they get it, so they credit God with it; other people pray for rain and don't, and they conclude that God is trying to teach them patience. I.e., people think they get "REAL miricales in response to prayer" whether anything actually happens or not. Substitute peace, health, etc. for rain, and the same observation still holds.
> There is plenty of evidence that the places refered to in the Bible exist(ed), archelogical evidence shows this to be true.
The same can be said of The Illiad, or for that matter, of any historical novel ever written. There is not legitimate inductive leap from "says some true things" to "everything it says is true".
> I apologize that my original post is really just in the context of the person I replied to rather than in context of the article.
No apology needed - this whole thread has become a context minefield, and I think I've stepped off the path several times myself.
> I have a big problem with creationists as probably you do (imagine that and I'm a Christian too!) because the Bible is not (and never was intended to be) a science book.
That is indeed the tragedy of creationism: what they promote and what they demote in their religious beliefs.
> Hoping RH pushes updated kernels for RH9. Piss-poor IDE disk performance is my one big gripe with my Linux boxen at the moment; whole machine feels like shit when something heavy is running the disk in the background.:(
\AOL{meetoo}. Actually, even if I just had lots of windows open and not much CPU or disk traffic my UI felt like Windows 95, repeatedly coming to a screeching halt for several seconds at a time, usually when switching from one window or desktop to another.
I finally failed back to an older kernel I still had around, and the problem went away. I don't know whether the problem was with the 2.4.20 series kernels (I tried three) or the rumored Red Hack kernel hack that they purportedly distribute for RH9 (all three I tried were from RH RPMs). I'm just glad I was able to make it go away.
> Mr. Parrot, since you grew up in a Baptist home you should understand that Jonestown and Heavens' gate cultists had distorted and perverted the bible. Why are you engaging in trolling by claiming that they were Christian when you know better?
Who's claiming that they were Christian? I'm just pointing out that a willingness to make sacrifices for a belief has no bearing on whether or not that belief is actually true.
Heck, I didn't even know that the Heaven's Gate cult was Bible-based.
> And why are you letting stand claims that medieval Roman Catholicism had anything (other than using some of the same terminology) to do with true biblical Christianity?
For that matter, I don't think any Christian sect in existence today has much to do with "true biblical Christianity". For that matter, it could hardly be more plain from reading the New Testament that the "true biblical Christianity" of Paul didn't have anything to do with the "true biblical Christianity" of James, other than a few shared names and memes.
> Again, from your Baptist upbringing, you were made aware of the facts in your youth.
I'm pretty sure I didn't obtain any "facts" from the Baptists or any other fundamentalist sect.
> The point is that the saints I mentioned were among the rulers of the time, and so if Christianity, as was suggested in one of the parent posts, were being used by the aristocracy merely as a means of control of the rest of the population, then these saints would have known about it. Clearly that isn't the case.
As best I can tell we've got two parties talking past each other in the thread. One party is saying (ISTM) "Christianity has been exploited for political ends", but the other party is hearing (ISTM) "all Christian leaders were con men", and responding to that.
I think the first statement is true and the second is false. What do you think?
> Howcomes nobody in the media is asking: > 1. Assuming Saddam really did have WMD > 2. We can't find them now, even with free run of the country > 3. So who has them?
I think everybody - or rather, the few who care - are backing up and re-evaluating #1, since everything depends on that, and it was never established convincingly in the first place.
> Earlier Republicans were supporters of anti-trust laws.
Was it a sudden change or a gradual change?
There was a major shift in the ethos of the Republican Party between 1976 and 1980, as witnessed by the switch from laughing at Jimmy Carter's "born again" platform to jumping in bed with religious conservatives themselves.
I wonder whether the two changes are reflexes of a broader change-of-guard phenomenon, or whether they're independent happenstance.
Of course, our government is^w seems to be run by lobbyists to an unprecedented and growing degree, so that might be what's up with the anti-trust stance.
> Like sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom and pardons-for-cash?
Clue for the clueless: not everyone who criticises the Bush Administration thinks of Clinton or the Democrats in general as paragons of moral excellence.
> > Yes, science is practiced by humans and therefore all the usual human follies can be observed among scientists. However, scientists are well aware of that fact...
> So, religous people aren't aware of the fact that they're human, too?
What I find interesting about your post is that you cut my sentence off where you did, including the part that agreed scientists have the same weaknesses as religious believers but excluding the part that explains what scientists do about it.
The difference isn't in the people; it's in the methods they employ (or don't employ) to keep them from fooling themselves.
> I would like to see some credible evidence before I'll believe that contradictions exist in the Bible. I would agree that apparent contradictions exist, but I haven't seen a legitimate one yet in any accurate translation
That's because the interpretation is underconstrained. Theologians can cough up any "explanation" at all, so long as they preserve the claim that the Bible is true.
For example, the New Testament variously reports that Judas hanged himself or that he threw himself down a stairway and burst open. In Sunday School I was taught that he hung himself at the top of a stairway, the rope broken, and he tumbled down the stairway.
Fairy tales and the fairy-tale logic used to explain away the obvious contradictions in them simply aren't falsifiable. You could give Homer or Raiders of the Lost Ark the same treatment.
Meanwhile, if you try to evaluate the Bible objectively by comparing it to what we know from history, archaeology, geology, etc., it is found often to be very, very wrong. Once you grok that fact you suddenly lose interest in adding extra-biblical epicycles to reconcile the contradictions, because you see the book for what it is: a centuries-long accumulation and repeated re-editing of traditional stories, all done at the hands of superstitious and falible men.
Though there's still some wisdom mixed in with the fiction and nonsense, for those who care to look for it.
> Oh yeah?! Then why is Jesus white in almost every painting?
FWIW, from centuries ago until around 1970 Jesus was almost always portrayed with long hair, but to avoid the obvious hippie associations a lot of short-haired portrayals started showing up around then. (In the Early Christian Era he was always portrayed as a "philosopher king", beardless and with hair of moderate length.)
Also, supposedly on one of the Pacific islands a sect emerged which claimed that the White Man had torn out the first page of the Bible, which held the preface explaining that Jesus was a Polynesian...
> However there over 10,000 documents that have been discovered in the ancient world and they all agree with each other, to the point where the only differences are slight word choices and small mistakes (where an author may have left out a word etc.) That's very remarkable, it seems a lot of people took very great care over several thousand years to copy the documents word for word.
Which has jack-all to do with the veracity of the document. The demonstrably false claims in the Bible were copied with every bit as much loving care as the rest, for all those centuries. And are still copied now, even though we know they are wrong.
> 10,000 is more than any other ancient work. For instance there are less than 10 documents that refer to the Trojen War in Greece but most historians believe that war happened.
They know there was a city called Illion that was sacked several times. No one but a kook believes that Akhilleus fought gods mano a mano on the plain before the city.
Slashdot Mirror
> It's great for cases such as manslaughter, but coupled with GPS, it could be used to enforce speed limits. [...] Use it for serious cases, fine. But don't ticket me!
That's the predictable outcome. It won't be used for routine tickets because governments thrive on the cat-n-mouse game of cops and speeders. If it ever gets to the point that people who speed are ticketed with high probability, then people will stop speeding - and city/county/state revenues will plummet.
Camera-based ticketing has been feasible for 30 years or so. Why do you suppose it has never caught on?
> Compare it to videos that exist in their own right, rather than just to sell toys. Examples include Power Rangers, Transformers, Pokemon...
> If the files show no information about anything odd happening, then of course it means they were cleaned to hide the truth.
Some will take the lack of mention of aliens as proof that the aliens are real.
I think I'm going to have to lurk on sci.skeptic for a few days. This should be good.
Your luggage is ready, sir.
> I also don't see where SCO gets the idea that people will pay them for a license to use Linux. The developer community will simply strip out the offending code and will ship the kernel out as a fork.
I'm starting to zoom in on a picture where SCO thinks they can take IBM to court and win the case without anyone but IBM's lawyers ever seeing the code in question, and then hold Linux in perpetual thralldom by levying a license fee on use of the code in Linux without ever telling any of the kernel hackers what the offending code is.
Yeah, there's lots of holes in that... but it's McBride's fantasy, not mine.
> You obviously have not read Lubenow's book. As usual, TalkOrigins did a fairly shoddy job of reviewing it and completely missed the major points.
Since you're so familiar with the book maybe you'd like to summarize its major claims for us, along with a brief listing of the major evidence for each of its major claims.
> Have you ever heard of metaphore or alogory?
No.
> A bit of a puzzle here tho. Cromagnon Man replaced the Neanderthals and became our, supposed, ancestor. But, the Cromagnons had even larger brains than the Neanderthals. And Modern Man has a smaller brain than the Neanderthals.
Maybe we're just denser.
> You proved the point I was making: study with the attitude that you're seeking to understand the Bible before you make bold statements about its veracity.
Been there; done that; found it wanting.
> > Meanwhile, if you try to evaluate the Bible objectively by comparing it to what we know from history, archaeology, geology, etc., it is found often to be very, very wrong.
> Back up your bold assertion with some facts! Come on - read a little archaeological history. Read about the Hittites. Before the 19th century, skeptics said that the Bible was wrong because the Bible mentioned Hittites, and yet they weren't found in archaelogical history. Years later, their existence was discovered and the critics ate crow. Google for it, or read "The Discovery of the Hittites" at this page.
By happy chance I have read up on the Hittites. And not merely at a casual level either - I've actually read a bit of the language, much more in translation, and lots of supporting scholarly documents. I would guess that my hoarde of books and papers about the Hittites amounts to a stack about 5" deep, all of it scholarly rather than pop, New Age, etc.
And the interesting thing is... the Hittites weren't actually "Hittites". The great empire that was discovered should actually be called the Nessites (or perhaps Knessites - there are some issues here). They were mis-labeled as "Hittites" by their discoverers because - you guessed it - they were trying to read the Bible into what they found. Scholars wring their hands over that fact, but all recognize that it's too late to change it now due to the amount of material that has been published and the confusion that would result from a name correction after all these years.
In fact, if you want to map the Bible's Hittites onto history/archaeology you have to assume that the Bible uses "Hit" (or HÃt, IIRC) to refer to three different tribes/kingdoms in the region, namely (IIRC!) (a) an otherwise unattested tribe in Caanan or perhaps along the south/southeastern border, (b) that Hattites, the kingdom with capital at Hatti in Anatolia on the site where the Nessites later established their kingdom and empire, and finally (c) some other kingdom in Syria, very possibly one of the so-called "Neo-Hittite successor states".
If you try to interpret the biblical word to mean the same thing everywhere you get too many "Hittites" in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But back to the bigger picture. Sure, the Bible has some facts in it. So does the Illiad. Scholars were astonished when Troy turned out to be real, astonished again when they discovered that you really could see it from the highest point of one of the Aegean islands (as claimed in the Illiad), astonished again when excavations of Bronze Age Greece turned up a boar's tusk helmet as described in the Illiad, and astonished yet again when the "Hittite" imperial archives gave the names of cities and regions that correspond with the geography in the Illiad. And all this was revealed in the last ~100 years, after being forgotten for 2-3 millenia (depending on which fact).
Should we therefore conclude that the Illiad is a factual depiction of events in the Bronze Age? A divine revelation? And should we start making sacrifices to the Greek gods because the archaeology "proves that the Illiad is true" and the Illiad tells us that those gods existed?
Now back once more to your -
> Back up your bold assertion with some facts!
We need go no further than the nominal topic of this thread: humans living 160,000 years ago falsify any interpretation of the Bible as being both (a) literal and (b) correct. Or we could talk about the flood. Or about confusion over who was who in Persia. Or the ordering of events during "creation". How many times does the Bible have to be wrong before you conclude that it's not all true?
> And also the same "time" not being given to Saddam to imprison and kill children, rape women, and terrorize his own people.
Ah, so we invaded as a humanitarian intervention? I wonder why that's not the case the Administration tried to make to the US public and to the United Nations?
Moreover, if we're into humanitarian interventions I wonder why we intervened in Iraq rather than in the Congo, where 3,000,000 people have been killed over the past four years?
Seems to me that the parsimonious explanation is that the Administration seized a convenient excuse because the real reason wouldn't fly before the public.
Here's a PoP-based song that I found earlier today; maybe you haven't seen it yet.
> I don't know what Bible you are reading, but mine says nothing about any staircase or rope breaking.
Whoops - spank me for the staircase; that's what I get for relying on memory rather than looking it up. But if you delete the staircase and procede from there, my post should still make sense.
And yes, the broken rope is an extra-biblical fiction. That was part of my point. (I suspect the staircase was also an extra-biblical fiction that I was taught as a child, with some Sunday School teacher thinking he needed somewhere to "fall headlong".)
> As for the Bible contradicting archeology, this is simply not true. For example, just recently, the a city was unearthed that fits perfectly with the Bible's description of Jericho, and even the walls were still intact, with one section of them broken down. What they found in the structures fit with the Jews taking over the city.
Ah, Jericho has long been excavated; even as a child I was fed nonsense about the archaeologists finding that "the walls had fallen outward, rather than inward as would have happened in an ordinary seige".
And BTW, the oldest walls a Jericho are older than the universe, at least according to the dates derived from the Bible.
But more to the point, finding archaeological sites that correspond to Bible stories does nothing to validate the bigger claims of the Bible. I mentioned elsewhere in this thread earlier that The Illiad guided an archaeologist to historical Troy, but no one concludes from that fact that The Illiad is a true story.
> The scientific community is just as guilty of trying to disprove the Bible as the so-called "Christian scientists"
There may be some scientists pursuing such a grudge, but by and large that's not what's going on at all. Scientists (by and large) are just trying to find out about the universe. That endeavor fell afoul of the Bible over two centuries ago, even though the scientists of the day were (by and large) religious men.
The Bible no longer falls within the goals of science in general, although recent political pushes to have it substituted for a real science curriculum are causing more and more scientists to speak out on that topic.
"Christian scientists", OTOH, correctly understand that over the last couple of centuries the facts have refuted their religious beliefs over and over again, so they busy themselves with discrediting mainstream science, or at least forcing open a small gap that they can hide their God in, because they perceive that their religion would be falsified otherwise. (Notice that most Christians outside Fundamentalist sects simply take the findings of science in stride. It's only those who take biblical literalism as an article of faith who have problems with science.)
> There will always be people who believe in God because when you see REAL miracles in response to prayer, speculation over a skull in Africa seems irrelevant.
"REAL miricales in response to prayer" suffer the same problem that unconstrained biblical interpretations do. People pray for rain and they get it, so they credit God with it; other people pray for rain and don't, and they conclude that God is trying to teach them patience. I.e., people think they get "REAL miricales in response to prayer" whether anything actually happens or not. Substitute peace, health, etc. for rain, and the same observation still holds.
> There is plenty of evidence that the places refered to in the Bible exist(ed), archelogical evidence shows this to be true.
The same can be said of The Illiad, or for that matter, of any historical novel ever written. There is not legitimate inductive leap from "says some true things" to "everything it says is true".
> I apologize that my original post is really just in the context of the person I replied to rather than in context of the article.
No apology needed - this whole thread has become a context minefield, and I think I've stepped off the path several times myself.
> I have a big problem with creationists as probably you do (imagine that and I'm a Christian too!) because the Bible is not (and never was intended to be) a science book.
That is indeed the tragedy of creationism: what they promote and what they demote in their religious beliefs.
> Hoping RH pushes updated kernels for RH9. Piss-poor IDE disk performance is my one big gripe with my Linux boxen at the moment; whole machine feels like shit when something heavy is running the disk in the background.
\AOL{meetoo}. Actually, even if I just had lots of windows open and not much CPU or disk traffic my UI felt like Windows 95, repeatedly coming to a screeching halt for several seconds at a time, usually when switching from one window or desktop to another.
I finally failed back to an older kernel I still had around, and the problem went away. I don't know whether the problem was with the 2.4.20 series kernels (I tried three) or the rumored Red Hack kernel hack that they purportedly distribute for RH9 (all three I tried were from RH RPMs). I'm just glad I was able to make it go away.
> Mr. Parrot, since you grew up in a Baptist home you should understand that Jonestown and Heavens' gate cultists had distorted and perverted the bible. Why are you engaging in trolling by claiming that they were Christian when you know better?
Who's claiming that they were Christian? I'm just pointing out that a willingness to make sacrifices for a belief has no bearing on whether or not that belief is actually true.
Heck, I didn't even know that the Heaven's Gate cult was Bible-based.
> And why are you letting stand claims that medieval Roman Catholicism had anything (other than using some of the same terminology) to do with true biblical Christianity?
For that matter, I don't think any Christian sect in existence today has much to do with "true biblical Christianity". For that matter, it could hardly be more plain from reading the New Testament that the "true biblical Christianity" of Paul didn't have anything to do with the "true biblical Christianity" of James, other than a few shared names and memes.
> Again, from your Baptist upbringing, you were made aware of the facts in your youth.
I'm pretty sure I didn't obtain any "facts" from the Baptists or any other fundamentalist sect.
> The point is that the saints I mentioned were among the rulers of the time, and so if Christianity, as was suggested in one of the parent posts, were being used by the aristocracy merely as a means of control of the rest of the population, then these saints would have known about it. Clearly that isn't the case.
As best I can tell we've got two parties talking past each other in the thread. One party is saying (ISTM) "Christianity has been exploited for political ends", but the other party is hearing (ISTM) "all Christian leaders were con men", and responding to that.
I think the first statement is true and the second is false. What do you think?
> Howcomes nobody in the media is asking:
> 1. Assuming Saddam really did have WMD
> 2. We can't find them now, even with free run of the country
> 3. So who has them?
I think everybody - or rather, the few who care - are backing up and re-evaluating #1, since everything depends on that, and it was never established convincingly in the first place.
Your #3 is worse than irrelevant if #1 is false.
> Earlier Republicans were supporters of anti-trust laws.
Was it a sudden change or a gradual change?
There was a major shift in the ethos of the Republican Party between 1976 and 1980, as witnessed by the switch from laughing at Jimmy Carter's "born again" platform to jumping in bed with religious conservatives themselves.
I wonder whether the two changes are reflexes of a broader change-of-guard phenomenon, or whether they're independent happenstance.
Of course, our government is^w seems to be run by lobbyists to an unprecedented and growing degree, so that might be what's up with the anti-trust stance.
> Like sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom and pardons-for-cash?
Clue for the clueless: not everyone who criticises the Bush Administration thinks of Clinton or the Democrats in general as paragons of moral excellence.
> > Yes, science is practiced by humans and therefore all the usual human follies can be observed among scientists. However, scientists are well aware of that fact...
> So, religous people aren't aware of the fact that they're human, too?
What I find interesting about your post is that you cut my sentence off where you did, including the part that agreed scientists have the same weaknesses as religious believers but excluding the part that explains what scientists do about it.
The difference isn't in the people; it's in the methods they employ (or don't employ) to keep them from fooling themselves.
> I would like to see some credible evidence before I'll believe that contradictions exist in the Bible. I would agree that apparent contradictions exist, but I haven't seen a legitimate one yet in any accurate translation
That's because the interpretation is underconstrained. Theologians can cough up any "explanation" at all, so long as they preserve the claim that the Bible is true.
For example, the New Testament variously reports that Judas hanged himself or that he threw himself down a stairway and burst open. In Sunday School I was taught that he hung himself at the top of a stairway, the rope broken, and he tumbled down the stairway.
Fairy tales and the fairy-tale logic used to explain away the obvious contradictions in them simply aren't falsifiable. You could give Homer or Raiders of the Lost Ark the same treatment.
Meanwhile, if you try to evaluate the Bible objectively by comparing it to what we know from history, archaeology, geology, etc., it is found often to be very, very wrong. Once you grok that fact you suddenly lose interest in adding extra-biblical epicycles to reconcile the contradictions, because you see the book for what it is: a centuries-long accumulation and repeated re-editing of traditional stories, all done at the hands of superstitious and falible men.
Though there's still some wisdom mixed in with the fiction and nonsense, for those who care to look for it.
> Oh yeah?! Then why is Jesus white in almost every painting?
FWIW, from centuries ago until around 1970 Jesus was almost always portrayed with long hair, but to avoid the obvious hippie associations a lot of short-haired portrayals started showing up around then. (In the Early Christian Era he was always portrayed as a "philosopher king", beardless and with hair of moderate length.)
Also, supposedly on one of the Pacific islands a sect emerged which claimed that the White Man had torn out the first page of the Bible, which held the preface explaining that Jesus was a Polynesian...
Religious belief is fascinating.
> No, the invasion was to *ELIMINATE* WMD. Seems to have worked...
Yes, and they also got rid of all the aliens, bigfoots, and unicorns in Iraq.
Now they're going to install democracy and ensure everyone an education, a job, and good healthcare, just like here at home.
> And the Catholic Church doesn't call it 'The Apocrypha' any longer, they use the term 'Septuagint' (from the fact that there are *7* books.)
Ah, no. "Apocrypha" just means "hidden away". ["apo" = "away", "kryph-" related to "crypto"]
"Septuagint" refers to the tradition that the Jewish scriptures were translated into Greek by 70 scribes, way back when.
> However there over 10,000 documents that have been discovered in the ancient world and they all agree with each other, to the point where the only differences are slight word choices and small mistakes (where an author may have left out a word etc.) That's very remarkable, it seems a lot of people took very great care over several thousand years to copy the documents word for word.
Which has jack-all to do with the veracity of the document. The demonstrably false claims in the Bible were copied with every bit as much loving care as the rest, for all those centuries. And are still copied now, even though we know they are wrong.
> 10,000 is more than any other ancient work. For instance there are less than 10 documents that refer to the Trojen War in Greece but most historians believe that war happened.
They know there was a city called Illion that was sacked several times. No one but a kook believes that Akhilleus fought gods mano a mano on the plain before the city.