By "many" I mean "many". If I'd meant "most," I'd have written "most." I chose my words correctly.
And yes, I do know it for a fact that many Christians believe it. If you'd take ten seconds to do a Google search, you'd see it to be an accurate statement that many believe it. Some of the most respected and well-known Bible teachers believe it, and give speeches about it.
Beleive it or not, I agree with you 100%. Being Christian doesn't automatically turn one's brain off, in spite of what everyone says.
I am not a Bible prophecy expert; I'm barely informed enough to make a general statement. There are quite a number of works that focus strictly on prophecy and keep score of the accuracy.
As for the meddling that was done with the source materials, many Old Testament books are way older than the rest, and the ancient copies agree with the new. At least those are known to have survived without alteration, because we can actually look at copies written before the events they prophesy.
Given the number of surviving copies of both Judaic and Christian texts, and their agreement on prophecies (at least), it appears to lower the likelihood of post-event manipulation of the older texts, i.e. they couldn't have gone back and changed all the existing copies that were scattered all over the place.
As you pointed out, the concept of ET life is not a new idea to Christianity. The majority of the comments here making fun of what they think Christian views of ETs to be don't know the first thing about Christianity or its history, so they're really not qualified to comment. But this is Slashdot, so I shouldn't be surprised.
"Most christians", as you put it, have never read the Bible, so how could they really have an opinion on it? Since there were so many specific predictions (and not the flaky Nostradamus guesswork sort of predictions) made in the Old Testament that were fulfilled hundreds or thousands of years later, and documented in the New Testament, that kind of kills the allegory argument. If someone consider himself Christian, he would do good to at least read the text that defines what he claims to believe.
Just because you never heard it doesn't mean that it's not a belief many Christians have. I know for a fact that many Christians beleive that to be the case.
Most Christians are Christian in name or "inheritance" only, and have never even bothered to learn what that means to be Christian. They confuse religion with faith. Going to church on Sunday doesn't make you a Christian. The surface actions you perform, including church-going, etc., aren't what defines Christianity. The Bible is very clear about that.
No, according to the Bible, works ("living a good life" in your words) don't count, no matter how great and wonderful you think you're being. Faith, and only faith gets the job done. It's an incredibly simple requirement: profess your faith in Jesus as your savior, accept the gift of redemption offered by his death (and proven valid by his resurrection). That's it. Nothing else to it. It's in black and white in the Bible. You'd have to actually read it to know that, though.
There's no ass-kissing involved. There's no difficult list of rules, either. The majority of the New Testament is philosophical explanation of Jesus' words, and guidelines for behavior given by the early apostles, not the direct handing down of a list of rules by God (like the Ten Commandments). The implication is that if you have faith, you will do your best to do God's will, as best as you're able.
The Bible reflects over and over that the default behavior of man is evil, not good. From person 1 straight on down, everyone screwed up. Person 2 disobeyed God, Person 1 colluded, Person 3 killed Person 4, etc. As simple as the list of Ten Commandments seems, have you kept them? Everyone says what an excellent set of rules they are, but I don't know anyone that has managed to keep them.
You obviously haven't been reading Christian publications. It's a belief among many Christians, that "aliens" are fallen angels and/or demons. There are plenty of web sites, radio shows, and speeches given on the subject. The same things written about fallen angels thousands of years ago (kidnapping, cross-breeding, trading technology for access) is supposedly the same things the "aliens" are doing even now. If you beleive in both, it's an easy parallel to make.
I don't have the exact quote handy, but I'm reminded of something Professor Arturo on Sliders said: "That may be good enough if you want to work in some third world country, like NASA, but it will not do in my class."
NASA... credibility... BAHAHAH!!!! Really, you kill me. Sniff. Chuckle.
Microsoft spends so much time fighting OSS and badmouthing it, but I haven't heard them get a hint on the obvious: Their customers want it. I personally use Windows and have been employed for a decade as a Windows programmer. However, with every passing season, I trust MS less and use OSS more on my own. At some point I will break away from them for one reason: MS has not responded to me as a customer.
MS adds features that their large clients want, so why can't they respond with the source as well? Rather than fighting OSS so much, they should realize they're not losing so much based on the price of the product, but on the license and the source. As a customer that has spent thousands on MS software, I have lately done it grudgingly because I do not yet know enough to migrate everything I do to an open-source OS.
At my office, many new machines go up as Linux or BSD boxes because we fear the recent Windows licensing terms. Rather than making us, their customers, nervous about MS and the impact their licenses have on our business, MS should respond with a soft hand rather than the iron gauntlet. Some licenses we've read even make us nervous to have our own source code on a Windows box. I know I haven't said anything that hasn't been said a million times before, but if my OS vendor of choice -- Microsoft -- would get a clue and be responsive to me and the business I work for, I'd consider the alternatives much less than I do now.
Great. Then get your favorite artist to produce his own CDs and make them available. Until then, if you're using the system, you have to pay for the system.
But in my case, the scammed companies "verified" that it was indeed me who opened the accounts, so the credit agency won't remove them until I "prove" they're fraudulent.
I am a victim of identity theft, and it is hell dealing with the fallout of it. Someone opened store credit accounts in my name, ran up huge charges, and never paid them. It doesn't take an AFDB to be worried about this. It happens, and it's not easy to fix.
I have been round and round with the companies that were scammed with my identity. I am just now learning how to make sure my credit reports are annotated that the bad accounts are from identity theft. The bad info stays on the accounts, which as far as scoring goes, is just as bad if they weren't annotated.
The difficult part in dealing with this is you can't prove a negative. The companies love to say "prove you didn't open the account." There is no protection for this, and plans I've had for home ownership are ruined, at least for the past couple years, thanks to identity theft.
To those of you saying the poster needs an AFDB, think about what you'd do if you found false information, using your SSN, on your credit report tomorrow. That is what has happened to me.
This was modded funny, but it can be taken as a serious question. Sentences are already unfairly long, and the whole system seems to beleive that "once a crook, always a crook," and that people do not learn from their mistakes and move forward in their lives (Example: Death Row killer's redemption song.)
So would putting people in prison for 70, 80, 150 years become the norm? That's probably a bigger crime that whatever they did to get there.
I own them both, and wish there were more coming. They have a very old-school feel and gameplay, but the gorgeous looks of modern games.
Mutant Storm will make you go and buy a dual-stick joystick, like the Thrustmaster Firestorm. It's a lot more fun than Crimsonland. Much more action, and it always shoots where you point, just like Robotrom -- no separate fire-button action needed.
I knew someone would miss the point. Tobacco is not a food plant. But let's say it was. Which is worse -- the occasional person dying from rabies, or entire groups of people eating rabies vaccine? They're growing cow antibiotics in corn. Do you want to eat that? What will it do to your body?
Sure, everyone jokes about smoking and tobacco on this story, but they're using corn and other edible crops as well. I don't give a damn how careful they are with the crops, they will not be able to remove all chance that the altered plants will propagate outside the "controlled" crop areas.
What kind of effects will that have on food crops? What does it do to a human body to eat too much of the given drugs being grown in plants? The companies growing it don't even know. They whine because it's so much cheaper to do this way than with the traditional lab methods, and that it would cost too much to stop doing it. I don't care how much it costs them -- I don't want the chance of this stuff jumping into the food supply. I'd rather get sick of whatever they're trying to cure.
I know there will be replies calling me a biology luddite, but I'm not. I don't want this stuff in our food. It's too much like pissing near the well.
This is a serious question: Who do you mention "cash" to? The seller gets all their money up front anyway, even when you've borrowed, don't they? Who is motivated by the cash purchase to lower the price?
It feels like we've been fed buggy apps for two decades, and now we're told the solution for unreliable software is restriction of our abilites and freedoms. It almost sounds like they've intentionally created the problem, having had the solution in mind the whole time. What happened to the concept of solving buggy apps by getting rid of the bugs in the code?
You've missed the point, which is that we shouldn't have to fear the misunderstanding, the change of context, or the coincidences of our innocent actions. Your argument is akin to saying that someone can break into your house and steal your stuff no matter what, so you should just leave everything out on the front porch anyway.
Let's say a suspected terrorist stayed at a given hotel the same night you did. They think he met someone there, and it turns out that you and he were the only people in the hotel dining room at a given hour, purely by coincidence. Now you're under investigation. Anything and everything you've now done will be compared against a list of things the terrorists could have used to plot their next attack. Any cash you withdrew from your account to make the trip with would make you suspect to.
The problem is that all these tracking methods subtly take away liberty, even if our freedom is not limited -- we still have the freedom to do things we like, but we are scared of persecution for however our innocent actions might appear in a certain situation.
I think Bruce Willis only dies in one movie: 12 Monkeys. I don't think he "trades his life" for anything else in any of his other movies. I could be wrong though; I haven't seen them all.
It's too bad your post isn't being modded up. You make a good point. You apparently have the same fears about it that I do. You can now be forced to listen to something. You can be harrassed, driven crazy, made scared, made sick, even injured, have no defense against it, and it might not even be possible to tell who is doing it. You can guarantee the cops will use this against protestors, even the peaceful ones (witness the forced pepper solution videos against peaceful demonstrators where the cops held their eyes open and dabbed it in with Q-Tips, fairly easy to find with Google). I'm seeing uses like the sick-stick in Minority Report, but now it can be done to a whole crowd. The beneficial uses -- all apparently convenience -- can never match the dangers this technology presents.
Slashdot Mirror
By "many" I mean "many". If I'd meant "most," I'd have written "most." I chose my words correctly.
And yes, I do know it for a fact that many Christians believe it. If you'd take ten seconds to do a Google search, you'd see it to be an accurate statement that many believe it. Some of the most respected and well-known Bible teachers believe it, and give speeches about it.
Beleive it or not, I agree with you 100%. Being Christian doesn't automatically turn one's brain off, in spite of what everyone says.
I am not a Bible prophecy expert; I'm barely informed enough to make a general statement. There are quite a number of works that focus strictly on prophecy and keep score of the accuracy.
As for the meddling that was done with the source materials, many Old Testament books are way older than the rest, and the ancient copies agree with the new. At least those are known to have survived without alteration, because we can actually look at copies written before the events they prophesy.
Given the number of surviving copies of both Judaic and Christian texts, and their agreement on prophecies (at least), it appears to lower the likelihood of post-event manipulation of the older texts, i.e. they couldn't have gone back and changed all the existing copies that were scattered all over the place.
As you pointed out, the concept of ET life is not a new idea to Christianity. The majority of the comments here making fun of what they think Christian views of ETs to be don't know the first thing about Christianity or its history, so they're really not qualified to comment. But this is Slashdot, so I shouldn't be surprised.
"Most christians", as you put it, have never read the Bible, so how could they really have an opinion on it? Since there were so many specific predictions (and not the flaky Nostradamus guesswork sort of predictions) made in the Old Testament that were fulfilled hundreds or thousands of years later, and documented in the New Testament, that kind of kills the allegory argument. If someone consider himself Christian, he would do good to at least read the text that defines what he claims to believe.
Just because you never heard it doesn't mean that it's not a belief many Christians have. I know for a fact that many Christians beleive that to be the case.
Most Christians are Christian in name or "inheritance" only, and have never even bothered to learn what that means to be Christian. They confuse religion with faith. Going to church on Sunday doesn't make you a Christian. The surface actions you perform, including church-going, etc., aren't what defines Christianity. The Bible is very clear about that.
No, according to the Bible, works ("living a good life" in your words) don't count, no matter how great and wonderful you think you're being. Faith, and only faith gets the job done. It's an incredibly simple requirement: profess your faith in Jesus as your savior, accept the gift of redemption offered by his death (and proven valid by his resurrection). That's it. Nothing else to it. It's in black and white in the Bible. You'd have to actually read it to know that, though.
There's no ass-kissing involved. There's no difficult list of rules, either. The majority of the New Testament is philosophical explanation of Jesus' words, and guidelines for behavior given by the early apostles, not the direct handing down of a list of rules by God (like the Ten Commandments). The implication is that if you have faith, you will do your best to do God's will, as best as you're able.
The Bible reflects over and over that the default behavior of man is evil, not good. From person 1 straight on down, everyone screwed up. Person 2 disobeyed God, Person 1 colluded, Person 3 killed Person 4, etc. As simple as the list of Ten Commandments seems, have you kept them? Everyone says what an excellent set of rules they are, but I don't know anyone that has managed to keep them.
You obviously haven't been reading Christian publications. It's a belief among many Christians, that "aliens" are fallen angels and/or demons. There are plenty of web sites, radio shows, and speeches given on the subject. The same things written about fallen angels thousands of years ago (kidnapping, cross-breeding, trading technology for access) is supposedly the same things the "aliens" are doing even now. If you beleive in both, it's an easy parallel to make.
I don't have the exact quote handy, but I'm reminded of something Professor Arturo on Sliders said: "That may be good enough if you want to work in some third world country, like NASA, but it will not do in my class."
NASA... credibility... BAHAHAH!!!! Really, you kill me. Sniff. Chuckle.
Microsoft spends so much time fighting OSS and badmouthing it, but I haven't heard them get a hint on the obvious: Their customers want it. I personally use Windows and have been employed for a decade as a Windows programmer. However, with every passing season, I trust MS less and use OSS more on my own. At some point I will break away from them for one reason: MS has not responded to me as a customer.
MS adds features that their large clients want, so why can't they respond with the source as well? Rather than fighting OSS so much, they should realize they're not losing so much based on the price of the product, but on the license and the source. As a customer that has spent thousands on MS software, I have lately done it grudgingly because I do not yet know enough to migrate everything I do to an open-source OS.
At my office, many new machines go up as Linux or BSD boxes because we fear the recent Windows licensing terms. Rather than making us, their customers, nervous about MS and the impact their licenses have on our business, MS should respond with a soft hand rather than the iron gauntlet. Some licenses we've read even make us nervous to have our own source code on a Windows box. I know I haven't said anything that hasn't been said a million times before, but if my OS vendor of choice -- Microsoft -- would get a clue and be responsive to me and the business I work for, I'd consider the alternatives much less than I do now.
Great. Then get your favorite artist to produce his own CDs and make them available. Until then, if you're using the system, you have to pay for the system.
I seriously like your attitude. Thanks. I think I needed that.
But in my case, the scammed companies "verified" that it was indeed me who opened the accounts, so the credit agency won't remove them until I "prove" they're fraudulent.
I am a victim of identity theft, and it is hell dealing with the fallout of it. Someone opened store credit accounts in my name, ran up huge charges, and never paid them. It doesn't take an AFDB to be worried about this. It happens, and it's not easy to fix.
I have been round and round with the companies that were scammed with my identity. I am just now learning how to make sure my credit reports are annotated that the bad accounts are from identity theft. The bad info stays on the accounts, which as far as scoring goes, is just as bad if they weren't annotated.
The difficult part in dealing with this is you can't prove a negative. The companies love to say "prove you didn't open the account." There is no protection for this, and plans I've had for home ownership are ruined, at least for the past couple years, thanks to identity theft.
To those of you saying the poster needs an AFDB, think about what you'd do if you found false information, using your SSN, on your credit report tomorrow. That is what has happened to me.
This was modded funny, but it can be taken as a serious question. Sentences are already unfairly long, and the whole system seems to beleive that "once a crook, always a crook," and that people do not learn from their mistakes and move forward in their lives (Example: Death Row killer's redemption song.)
So would putting people in prison for 70, 80, 150 years become the norm? That's probably a bigger crime that whatever they did to get there.
I own them both, and wish there were more coming. They have a very old-school feel and gameplay, but the gorgeous looks of modern games.
Mutant Storm will make you go and buy a dual-stick joystick, like the Thrustmaster Firestorm. It's a lot more fun than Crimsonland. Much more action, and it always shoots where you point, just like Robotrom -- no separate fire-button action needed.
I knew someone would miss the point. Tobacco is not a food plant. But let's say it was. Which is worse -- the occasional person dying from rabies, or entire groups of people eating rabies vaccine? They're growing cow antibiotics in corn. Do you want to eat that? What will it do to your body?
Sure, everyone jokes about smoking and tobacco on this story, but they're using corn and other edible crops as well. I don't give a damn how careful they are with the crops, they will not be able to remove all chance that the altered plants will propagate outside the "controlled" crop areas.
What kind of effects will that have on food crops? What does it do to a human body to eat too much of the given drugs being grown in plants? The companies growing it don't even know. They whine because it's so much cheaper to do this way than with the traditional lab methods, and that it would cost too much to stop doing it. I don't care how much it costs them -- I don't want the chance of this stuff jumping into the food supply. I'd rather get sick of whatever they're trying to cure.
I know there will be replies calling me a biology luddite, but I'm not. I don't want this stuff in our food. It's too much like pissing near the well.
... and Mark Famiglietti is the actor's name.
This is a serious question: Who do you mention "cash" to? The seller gets all their money up front anyway, even when you've borrowed, don't they? Who is motivated by the cash purchase to lower the price?
It feels like we've been fed buggy apps for two decades, and now we're told the solution for unreliable software is restriction of our abilites and freedoms. It almost sounds like they've intentionally created the problem, having had the solution in mind the whole time. What happened to the concept of solving buggy apps by getting rid of the bugs in the code?
You've missed the point, which is that we shouldn't have to fear the misunderstanding, the change of context, or the coincidences of our innocent actions. Your argument is akin to saying that someone can break into your house and steal your stuff no matter what, so you should just leave everything out on the front porch anyway.
Let's say a suspected terrorist stayed at a given hotel the same night you did. They think he met someone there, and it turns out that you and he were the only people in the hotel dining room at a given hour, purely by coincidence. Now you're under investigation. Anything and everything you've now done will be compared against a list of things the terrorists could have used to plot their next attack. Any cash you withdrew from your account to make the trip with would make you suspect to.
The problem is that all these tracking methods subtly take away liberty, even if our freedom is not limited -- we still have the freedom to do things we like, but we are scared of persecution for however our innocent actions might appear in a certain situation.
I second the vote. Hudson Hawk is fantastic.
I think Bruce Willis only dies in one movie: 12 Monkeys. I don't think he "trades his life" for anything else in any of his other movies. I could be wrong though; I haven't seen them all.
It's too bad your post isn't being modded up. You make a good point. You apparently have the same fears about it that I do. You can now be forced to listen to something. You can be harrassed, driven crazy, made scared, made sick, even injured, have no defense against it, and it might not even be possible to tell who is doing it. You can guarantee the cops will use this against protestors, even the peaceful ones (witness the forced pepper solution videos against peaceful demonstrators where the cops held their eyes open and dabbed it in with Q-Tips, fairly easy to find with Google). I'm seeing uses like the sick-stick in Minority Report, but now it can be done to a whole crowd. The beneficial uses -- all apparently convenience -- can never match the dangers this technology presents.