One of the great blessings of the onrushing Millenium is that there can't be any more movies about Armageddon, since it will either have come or gone.
I'm gonna regret this, but I've just got to comment.
I'm sure, in minutes, there will be any number of posts alleging that the "end of days" plot line somehow invalidates Christianity. I'm sure that some people will even try to assert that, when January 1, 2000 comes, Christianity will finally be proved false. In fact, it seems that that is exactly what Jon Katz is trying to imply. This is untrue.
There are a whole range of opinions on how to interpret scripture regarding the apocalypse. Believe it or not, the "left behind" approach exemplified by "end of days" was not at all popular until about the middle of the nineteenth century. St. Augustine thought that Christ's second coming had/already happened/. For those of you who don't know, St. A was hardly a lightweight (although I tend to disagree with him on many things). I'm not saying that either one of these approaches is valid or correct: I honestly don't know. What I do know is that Jesus Himself said that noone would know when he was coming again (in the first chapter of Acts: look it up yourself) -- and I am skeptical of anyone who claims to be able to narrow the time frame at all through any means. And I know that I hope to be ready whenever Jesus comes. Tomorrow or 2000 years from now.
Anyway, the point is that Christian Doctrine is far more complex than Slashdot readers give it credit for. And often, what non-Christians see are only the most extreme examples of it. After all, the slow rise of society to Godliness over the course of millenia wouldn't make a very good movie, would it?
Martin Luther said that most people are like a drunken horseback rider: they fall off the horse to the left, only to get back on and fall back off the horse to the right. This is very true: people tend to gravitate towards extreme. However, in Christian doctrine correctness most often lies in balance between two seemingly contradictory statements. E.g. Jesus being fully God and being fully man. People, through hubris, try to wittle it down to something far easier to understand. And fall off the horse. Why shouldn't God be a paradox?
Finally, let me point out some things that I, as a serious, conservative Christian, don't believe:
That there is anything wrong with drinking in moderation.
That government-employee-led prayer in public schools should be allowed.
That the the Ten Commandments should be posted in schools.
That Christians should form Political Action Committees.
That all Gay people are going to hell.
Most anything you'll hear come out of the mouths of certain televangelists (these people are, for the most part, not very doctrinally accurate).
Blue laws (I.e. stores closed on Sundays).
Many slashdot readers choose, like Katz, to confine their knowledge of Christianity to one extremist view (in his case the idea that some have that Jesus will come in y2k). And hence, they not only fall off the proverbial horse, but fall behind it, face down, and wonder how anyone could want to be involved in this horse when all they can see is it's rear end.
*sigh* I'll take my flames now. And I really wish that Rob would try for a little more balance in the philosphies and world views he allows on slashdot.
First, technology has never been the "exclusive province of geeks, nerds, and engineers". New technology has tended to congregate around those groups, but only for as long as the groups took to refine it to the point that others can use it.
Your definition of technology is too narrow. Why are computers technology, but an ox cart isn't? The obvious answer is that both are technology. One is a well understood, well developed, and frankly obsolete technology, and the other is a brand new, still immature technology.
Also, implied in your article is the expectation that technology will somehow lead to a "brave new world" where we all ain't gonna study war no war.
Permit me my cynicism.
The same thing was thought when the horse harness was invented in the first millenia AD: it was much more efficient than the traditional yoke, and I remember reading a quote from an early churchman who thought that this would mean the end of hunger. He went on to pontificate (maybe literally: I think he was a pope at some point) that the increased efficiency of agriculture would lead to a world free of hunger. Since hunger was in his opinion a primary cause of war, this technological advance was expected to lead to the celestial kingdom, where lion would lay with lamb etc.
I think my point is made: technology is not going to save us from ourselves.
B.F. Skinner, when he wasn't busy training butterflies to flutter or something, made the observation that any of the great classical philosophers (Plato, Aristotle) were still admitted as current in all our philosophical coursework. That, in 2500 years, the human state had changed so little that Plato could still speak to us, that Socrates was still current for many. Both Plato and Aristotle had been proved wrong (or at least incomplete) in science, but not in the study of humanity.
Skinner goes on to say that what is needed is a technology of the mind, which will form the nuclues of a new world order based in psychology. I can hardly agree with that: most attempts of this type have led to repression and misery.
What solution do I offer? None, or at least none you'll accept. But I do think we need to recognize the fruitlessness of all technology based approaches to societal and human problems.
That's why I wanted a chaplain, not a psychologist. I have no doubt that there are good people doing psychology, but I have found (as someone who works pretty often with psychologists, social workers, and chaplains -- I am heavily involved in charitable ministries which focus on mentorship) that people with a religious motivation are far more likely to genuinely care for the "patient" than those without.
Psychiatry is not medicine, it's our society's way of buying itself out of the obligation to care. I.e. let's call it an illness so we don't have to spend time on it. *sigh*
Please don't misunderstand: their are bad chaplains and good shrinks. But I think that the odds are better on the spiritual side. I say this as someone who has seen half a dozen shrinks and an equal number of pastors. The pastors cared, the shrinks didn't.
> Yes, Amphigory has an agenda, but that doesn't mean that what he says > isn't true.
And what is my agenda? And what I said was true. I have been "through the hellmouth".
> Remember the way that in Animal Farm after the animals had > been living under the tyrant pigs for many years they started listening > to that bird who tried to sell them the "Rock Candy Mountain" idea > again. (Their reason being that after suffering all their lives and > dying miserable, surely there had to be something afterwards.)
No... at the time I wished there wasn't a God, so that I could have killed myself. I wanted to die for good reason. But God saved me from that.
> Amphigory would probably love to see us all forced into church (his > church, not the one I attend) at gun-point, "for our own good." Of > course, it is also quite possible that he is lying, people in the > biggest cult we've got going in this country (They call themselves > Christians, but seem to find the actual text of the New Testament to > be decidedly inconvenient.) are quite capable of lying to achieve > their ends, despite the Ten Commandments.
You seem to think I'm a fundamentalist. Upon what do you base this? I'm not. I am an average, theologically conservative Christian who takes the text of the new testament/very/ seriously. Do you? How bout the part about "Brothers, do not slander one another"? (James 4:11) You impute thjat you are a Christian, well let me call you to task and say that your callous slander of me without facts or anything else is distinctively non Christian.
As far as forcing people to attend to church: how on earth could you know that? I am actually very strongly against religious involvement in government, am against prayer in public schools, and am against this posting the ten commandments idiocy. But you didn't bother to find that out, did you? You just slandered me when I dared to be vulnerable. Very Christian of you, punk.
> o you are right to question it, but I tend to think that behind all > unreasoning religious fanaticism lies a foundation of severe emotional > scarring.
Which unreasoning religious fanaticism was that? Specific example, please. Would that be my belief that religion can help people? That's the only one which you could possibly be aware of from my post.
> To be fair, I may send my own children to a religious school (of my > own choosing) rather than a public school, if they are going to get > religion at school, I'd prefer it to be the religion I was raised in > and not some wierd dogma that I find to be "cultish" in its > application. (Remember Reverend Jim of the People's Temple claimed to > be a Christian.) This is actually happening at some schools in this > country, see this article. This is what happens when educated people > don't pay attention to local politics.
Once again, you imply many nasty things about me without knowing me or anything about me; without knowing my beliefs or anything about them. Your slanders genuinely wounded me. But somehow I guess that you're not sorry. You're too busy (to refer to Animal Farm: I've read it, go figure!) being a pig.
What has been done to you is wrong. What is being done to you is wrong. It is wrong for anyone to hit you. It is wrong for you to have to live in fear of physical violence. It is wrong for you to feel hatred for yourself, and it is wrong for people to try to make you hate yourself. You are not crazy for being in pain. You do not deserve to be treated like this.
Amen. I don't know how many hours, days, whatever I have spent in counseling trying to get my father to say that.
So... Let me see if I've got this straight. Because I found God, a community of people who genuinely love me, and happiness, I'm a liar? I guess being a minister of the gospel who also does computer programming makes me even more of a liar? That is one of the stupidest and most offensive statements I've ever heard in my life.
Oh yeah... As far as your cartoons: I agree that they're stupid. But there is more in heaven, earth, and Christianity, than is dreamt of in your philosophy.
I was fascinated with cults and the occult. I was beaten at home. My family was highly disfunctional and I still, ten years later, seek counseling. I was a geek, a nerd. Whatever. I was bullied at school.
And I was dangerous. That's right: I spent most of my high school years with a tenuous grasp of "killing people is just wrong" being the only thing that kept me from blowing the join up. I knew how. I had explosives. I had no reason to love anyone. All I had was a vague realization that there was a supreme morality and if I 'killed them all' as I wanted to I would have just reduced myself to their level.
The problem is not the profiling: that's normal prudence. I desperately wish that someone had realized just how dark my world was and tried to help. I wish they would have locked me up in a mental institution and some of what was going on in my home would have come out. But it didn't. And I still pay the price in emotional anguish. I wish there had been a chaplain in my high school instead of a "guidance counselor". I wish someone had loved me enough to intervene.
But no one did.
Bottom line is that I have no problem with this "profiling" you whine about Jon. But I wish they would concentrate more on what to do with the kids once they find them. It comes down to love. And no one in our society is ready to make that kind of commitment.
I can think of lots of good uses for all that retail space that will be vacated... Several churches have bought malls and setup swinging church/crossover ministries with charitable activities, community center stuff, and even homeless shelters.
One that I'm aware of changed the name of the church to "those crazy people who bought the mall".
Hmm... And how do you explain the 178 people martyred in the last year? Or the 7 (I think) people killed in Texas last month as a man came in, screamed "This religion is bull" and started shooting?
Most of your examples are pretty spurious. For example which crusade do you object to? There were a dozen or so lasting over several hundred years. And why? Most of them were started by Kings trying to get their hands on the wealth of the east. The Church endorsed them, but only in an attempt to protect Christendom from being taken over (by force) by Islam. Let's try to bring some facts in here people. Granted, I don't think the Church should be fighting wars under any circumstances, but the picture is not nearly so black as people try to paint it.
The Inquisition was overrated. As an institution, it only killed something like 15 people. Fact. Look it up. You talk about he Salem Witch trials? How bout the far worse ones that went on in Europe over a period of centuries? Note that, in many cases, these trials were the government using the church to do their dirty work. cf. Joan of Arc. This is an argument against Christendom, not an argument against Christ. Also, C.S. Lewis very rightly pointed out that the only reason we don't hang witches today is that we don't believe they exist. If we did, we'd hang the lot of 'em.
Finally, remember that you need to look at all of these against a proper historical context. Before the church came along, one of the more popular ways of killing people was throwing them in to the lions, or pooring liquid lead down their throat, or letting them die from exposure and suffocation due to hanging out in the sun all day.
That's not what I said. I said that, if she was a Christian, she had serious problems. Odds are that she wasn't. Show me someone with a serious Christian faith that they spend time on and take seriously and I will show you someone unlikely to commit suicide.
If you want to respond, respond with a counterexample.
Your last sentence is so ridiculous it hardly merits a mention: you are saying that I can't tell if someone has a Christian faith by their actions over a period of time? The Bible disagrees with you, pretty strongly. In fact, the sentence you object to is a quote from the book of James.
First, suicide is not something that active Christians feel a need for. Secondly, have you watched SouthPark? It is a show about the corruption of children in every disgusting way possible.
If she was a Christian, then she was either a very lax one or had some serious issues. "By your works you shall be known".
I will note that my (intelligent, researched) response to the poster was marked as offtopice, but his post was not! Why? His is critical of Christianity, and mine defends it. This is a syndrome on/. -- people, get a clue.
Hear hear! Our society has a tendency to neglect evidence that doesn't meet its prejudices. We start with the assumption that all faiths and cultural constructs are equal, and then reject any evidence that would suggest that they aren't as "bashing".
Kind of like the whole microsoft vs. Linux debate, don't you think? anyone who doesn't like windows is degraded as a "Microsoft Basher" no matter what they say. At/., anyone defending NT is ignored as a "Linux basher".
I could be wrong, but I believe that most Christian churches, including the Catholic Church, agree that this is true.
Yeah... Kind of. Many people feel that the Bible's exceptional unity (you try telling a story over two thousand years) is evidence of exceptional divine involvement in its creation. I tend to agree that this is the case.
Where I tend to disagree is that many people try to reduce the Bible to a single, monolithic, God-written textbook where God is considered to have literally written each and every word (this is called "verbal inspiration"). I disagree with this pretty stronly, mostly because there is no evidence of it.
Also, you said:
What is said in Revelations, for example, may or may not fit with the intentions of the author(s) of Deuteronomy, or the Gospels, or what have you.
I would suggest that you take a look at Deuteronomy 4:2, and its cross-references in a good reference bible. Deut. 4:2 says, in part, "Do not go beyond what is written". I think there are enough incidents of this kind of language in the Bible that we can assume it is a general principle.
I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.
Wow... And one "hell" of an enforcement clause too.
Before one of the/. blowhards starts up: open source or what have you works because it/can/ be improved on by man. If you believe what the bible says, then it can only be improved on by God. So it wouldn't work well at all as open source.
Of course, the decision of what to include in the Bible was kind of a meritcocracy: those books which were considered by everyone to be divinely inspired were included. There were many that didn't quite make it. Kind of like the "Cathedral-style" free software, (e.g. BSD, Apache, even the kernel for that matter) where a board of "wise men" determines what goes in the official release.
Wow... This is such an incredible expression of the spirit of our times that I would love to frame it! Our political system works... Yeah, right! It works for the politicians! Amphigory's Law here set forth: the ability of any group to operate effectively is inversely proportional to the size of the group.
As many have pointed out, a large part of why Mindcraft contradict the anecdotal evidence is that their benchmarks are based on static pages. However, I think that there is a more important factor contributing to the anecdotal evidence that is often overlooked: the total Operating Environment.
What I mean by this is really pretty simple. In a Windows Operating Environment, people are encouraged to use very different toolsets than they are in a Linux operating environment. Instead of perl, apache, and MySQL, they tend to use ASP, IIS, and Access/Jet through ODBC.
ODBC alone is a performance and stability nightmare, especially if it is not setup perfectly. ASP is a piece of junk. IIS is (I guess) okay. In Linux, perl is (arguably) pretty good, so long as you use mod_perl, MySQL is the fastest thing under the sun for those tasks it can handle, and apache is (like IIS) pretty good if not designed for speed.
We aren't comparing operating systems, we are comparing operating environments (or at least we should be). And testing static pages only totally discounts the afects of operating environment.
Another thing to look at is "culture". Linux users tend to like carefully crafted point solutions -- that's why we're Linux users. NT users just want to get it done, stability be damned -- that's why they're NT users. I think that this difference has a lot to do with Linux reputation for speed and stability. Even a novice sysadmin, exposed to the Linux community, starts to soak up the ethos of the community. Even more important, the support (including full source code) is in place to allow him to do as well as he would like. An NT user soaks up the "get it done, screw stability, hardware is cheap" ethos of the NT community. And the resources to do it right are often/not/ easily available.
Anyway, the point is that we are/not/ just comparing kernels. If we were, then we'd all probably be running some custom TCP stack on embedded hardware.
Look guys... I'm sick of the "mozilla is dead" stories. And I will tell you why I'm sick of them: IE 6 is supposedly going to be fully standards compliant.
Why does this matter? Because Mozilla is going to fully standards compliant. To wit:
Mozilla = HTML4.0 + CSS = IE6
What that means to us is that the days of having to code for 16 different browsers, while not over, are numbered. And the ability for one browser to try to lock out other browsers with little "Netscape Now" icons will be sharply limited. Yes, there will probably be proprietary add-ons, but developers have already been burned by these in the 4.x browsers: I don't think they will use them again.
So we come to Mozilla. Yes its buggy. But speaking as a professional developer, that's OK at this stage of development. What's more important is that it is well-crafted.
Instead of a hodge-podge of shoddy code (like the old Netscape source base) it is well crafted, well designed code that is going to be extremely maintainable.
This is kind of like early versions of the Linux kernel (I ran 0.95, FTR): they weren't feature complete, weren't anywhere/near/ bug-free. But they were designed well and had a dedicated team of competent coders working on them. It didn't take long at all for Linux to become something to be reckoned with.
What we need to do is the same thing that early Linux adopters did: focus on the technology and give it time to mature. Marketing is/nothing/, technology is/everything/. Oh yeah: have a little loyalty, because its going to be a cold day in hell when Microsoft ports IE to Linux.
As others have posted, the OS, in technical terms, is really only the kernel and a few libraries. The "marketing" definition is quite a bit more expansive. I think the correct terminology would be as follows: the Kernel is the OS. The Kernel plus the bundled applications, default configurations, server daemons, etc. is the "operating environment". Sun uses this terminology when talking about Solaris, and I think they have a point. So, the Windows OS would be nothing but the kernel (not much really). The Windows Operating Environment would included the Kernel, IE, all the Win32 API's for everything from telephony to directx, Notepad, wordpad, etc. A decent argument could even be made for a definition of the Windows Operating Environment that included Office, since its so damned common. Remember, originally operating systems were nothing but a bunch of libraries that abstracted access to the hardware. The thing is that, today, the libraries bundled have gone/far/ beyond just abstracting the hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure, in minutes, there will be any number of posts alleging that the "end of days" plot line somehow invalidates Christianity. I'm sure that some people will even try to assert that, when January 1, 2000 comes, Christianity will finally be proved false. In fact, it seems that that is exactly what Jon Katz is trying to imply. This is untrue.
There are a whole range of opinions on how to interpret scripture regarding the apocalypse. Believe it or not, the "left behind" approach exemplified by "end of days" was not at all popular until about the middle of the nineteenth century. St. Augustine thought that Christ's second coming had /already happened/. For those of you who don't know, St. A was hardly a lightweight (although I tend to disagree with him on many things). I'm not saying that either one of these approaches is valid or correct: I honestly don't know. What I do know is that Jesus Himself said that noone would know when he was coming again (in the first chapter of Acts: look it up yourself) -- and I am skeptical of anyone who claims to be able to narrow the time frame at all through any means. And I know that I hope to be ready whenever Jesus comes. Tomorrow or 2000 years from now.
Anyway, the point is that Christian Doctrine is far more complex than Slashdot readers give it credit for. And often, what non-Christians see are only the most extreme examples of it. After all, the slow rise of society to Godliness over the course of millenia wouldn't make a very good movie, would it?
Martin Luther said that most people are like a drunken horseback rider: they fall off the horse to the left, only to get back on and fall back off the horse to the right. This is very true: people tend to gravitate towards extreme. However, in Christian doctrine correctness most often lies in balance between two seemingly contradictory statements. E.g. Jesus being fully God and being fully man. People, through hubris, try to wittle it down to something far easier to understand. And fall off the horse. Why shouldn't God be a paradox?
Finally, let me point out some things that I, as a serious, conservative Christian, don't believe:
- That there is anything wrong with drinking in moderation.
- That government-employee-led prayer in public schools should be allowed.
- That the the Ten Commandments should be posted in schools.
- That Christians should form Political Action Committees.
- That all Gay people are going to hell.
- Most anything you'll hear come out of the mouths of certain televangelists (these people are, for the most part, not very doctrinally accurate).
- Blue laws (I.e. stores closed on Sundays).
Many slashdot readers choose, like Katz, to confine their knowledge of Christianity to one extremist view (in his case the idea that some have that Jesus will come in y2k). And hence, they not only fall off the proverbial horse, but fall behind it, face down, and wonder how anyone could want to be involved in this horse when all they can see is it's rear end.*sigh* I'll take my flames now. And I really wish that Rob would try for a little more balance in the philosphies and world views he allows on slashdot.
If shared, then over a radios of 30 miles it's not necessarily a whole lot -- especially in the city.
If per station... err... Please mommy?
Your definition of technology is too narrow. Why are computers technology, but an ox cart isn't? The obvious answer is that both are technology. One is a well understood, well developed, and frankly obsolete technology, and the other is a brand new, still immature technology.
Also, implied in your article is the expectation that technology will somehow lead to a "brave new world" where we all ain't gonna study war no war.
Permit me my cynicism.
The same thing was thought when the horse harness was invented in the first millenia AD: it was much more efficient than the traditional yoke, and I remember reading a quote from an early churchman who thought that this would mean the end of hunger. He went on to pontificate (maybe literally: I think he was a pope at some point) that the increased efficiency of agriculture would lead to a world free of hunger. Since hunger was in his opinion a primary cause of war, this technological advance was expected to lead to the celestial kingdom, where lion would lay with lamb etc.
I think my point is made: technology is not going to save us from ourselves.
B.F. Skinner, when he wasn't busy training butterflies to flutter or something, made the observation that any of the great classical philosophers (Plato, Aristotle) were still admitted as current in all our philosophical coursework. That, in 2500 years, the human state had changed so little that Plato could still speak to us, that Socrates was still current for many. Both Plato and Aristotle had been proved wrong (or at least incomplete) in science, but not in the study of humanity.
Skinner goes on to say that what is needed is a technology of the mind, which will form the nuclues of a new world order based in psychology. I can hardly agree with that: most attempts of this type have led to repression and misery.
What solution do I offer? None, or at least none you'll accept. But I do think we need to recognize the fruitlessness of all technology based approaches to societal and human problems.
Psychiatry is not medicine, it's our society's way of buying itself out of the obligation to care. I.e. let's call it an illness so we don't have to spend time on it. *sigh*
Please don't misunderstand: their are bad chaplains and good shrinks. But I think that the odds are better on the spiritual side. I say this as someone who has seen half a dozen shrinks and an equal number of pastors. The pastors cared, the shrinks didn't.
And knowledge is no substitute for giving a shit
Let me answer your post carefully and thourougly:
/very/ seriously. Do you? How bout the part
> Yes, Amphigory has an agenda, but that doesn't mean that what he says
> isn't true.
And what is my agenda? And what I said was true. I have been "through
the hellmouth".
> Remember the way that in Animal Farm after the animals had
> been living under the tyrant pigs for many years they started listening
> to that bird who tried to sell them the "Rock Candy Mountain" idea
> again. (Their reason being that after suffering all their lives and
> dying miserable, surely there had to be something afterwards.)
No... at the time I wished there wasn't a God, so that I could have
killed myself. I wanted to die for good reason. But God saved me from
that.
> Amphigory would probably love to see us all forced into church (his
> church, not the one I attend) at gun-point, "for our own good." Of
> course, it is also quite possible that he is lying, people in the
> biggest cult we've got going in this country (They call themselves
> Christians, but seem to find the actual text of the New Testament to
> be decidedly inconvenient.) are quite capable of lying to achieve
> their ends, despite the Ten Commandments.
You seem to think I'm a fundamentalist. Upon what do you base this? I'm
not. I am an average, theologically conservative Christian who takes the
text of the new testament
about "Brothers, do not slander one another"? (James 4:11) You impute
thjat you are a Christian, well let me call you to task and say that your
callous slander of me without facts or anything else is distinctively non
Christian.
As far as forcing people to attend to church: how on earth could you know
that? I am actually very strongly against religious involvement in
government, am against prayer in public schools, and am against this
posting the ten commandments idiocy. But you didn't bother to find that
out, did you? You just slandered me when I dared to be vulnerable. Very
Christian of you, punk.
> o you are right to question it, but I tend to think that behind all
> unreasoning religious fanaticism lies a foundation of severe emotional
> scarring.
Which unreasoning religious fanaticism was that? Specific example,
please. Would that be my belief that religion can help people? That's
the only one which you could possibly be aware of from my post.
> To be fair, I may send my own children to a religious school (of my
> own choosing) rather than a public school, if they are going to get
> religion at school, I'd prefer it to be the religion I was raised in
> and not some wierd dogma that I find to be "cultish" in its
> application. (Remember Reverend Jim of the People's Temple claimed to
> be a Christian.) This is actually happening at some schools in this
> country, see this article. This is what happens when educated people
> don't pay attention to local politics.
Once again, you imply many nasty things about me without knowing me or
anything about me; without knowing my beliefs or anything about them.
Your slanders genuinely wounded me. But somehow I guess that you're not
sorry. You're too busy (to refer to Animal Farm: I've read it, go
figure!) being a pig.
Don't be a fool -- you don't know me or anything about me, yet you slander me.
Oh yeah... As far as your cartoons: I agree that they're stupid. But there is more in heaven, earth, and Christianity, than is dreamt of in your philosophy.
And I was dangerous. That's right: I spent most of my high school years with a tenuous grasp of "killing people is just wrong" being the only thing that kept me from blowing the join up. I knew how. I had explosives. I had no reason to love anyone. All I had was a vague realization that there was a supreme morality and if I 'killed them all' as I wanted to I would have just reduced myself to their level.
The problem is not the profiling: that's normal prudence. I desperately wish that someone had realized just how dark my world was and tried to help. I wish they would have locked me up in a mental institution and some of what was going on in my home would have come out. But it didn't. And I still pay the price in emotional anguish. I wish there had been a chaplain in my high school instead of a "guidance counselor". I wish someone had loved me enough to intervene.
But no one did.
Bottom line is that I have no problem with this "profiling" you whine about Jon. But I wish they would concentrate more on what to do with the kids once they find them. It comes down to love. And no one in our society is ready to make that kind of commitment.
One that I'm aware of changed the name of the church to "those crazy people who bought the mall".
Shalom.
Most of your examples are pretty spurious. For example which crusade do you object to? There were a dozen or so lasting over several hundred years. And why? Most of them were started by Kings trying to get their hands on the wealth of the east. The Church endorsed them, but only in an attempt to protect Christendom from being taken over (by force) by Islam. Let's try to bring some facts in here people. Granted, I don't think the Church should be fighting wars under any circumstances, but the picture is not nearly so black as people try to paint it.
The Inquisition was overrated. As an institution, it only killed something like 15 people. Fact. Look it up. You talk about he Salem Witch trials? How bout the far worse ones that went on in Europe over a period of centuries? Note that, in many cases, these trials were the government using the church to do their dirty work. cf. Joan of Arc. This is an argument against Christendom, not an argument against Christ. Also, C.S. Lewis very rightly pointed out that the only reason we don't hang witches today is that we don't believe they exist. If we did, we'd hang the lot of 'em.
Finally, remember that you need to look at all of these against a proper historical context. Before the church came along, one of the more popular ways of killing people was throwing them in to the lions, or pooring liquid lead down their throat, or letting them die from exposure and suffocation due to hanging out in the sun all day.
If you want to respond, respond with a counterexample.
Your last sentence is so ridiculous it hardly merits a mention: you are saying that I can't tell if someone has a Christian faith by their actions over a period of time? The Bible disagrees with you, pretty strongly. In fact, the sentence you object to is a quote from the book of James.
If she was a Christian, then she was either a very lax one or had some serious issues. "By your works you shall be known".
I will note that my (intelligent, researched) response to the poster was marked as offtopice, but his post was not! Why? His is critical of Christianity, and mine defends it. This is a syndrome on /. -- people, get a clue.
Kind of like the whole microsoft vs. Linux debate, don't you think? anyone who doesn't like windows is degraded as a "Microsoft Basher" no matter what they say. At /., anyone defending NT is ignored as a "Linux basher".
Unequivocally: any "Christian" who could rejoice over a (presumably) non-Christian dying is seriously warped and I will not claim.
Yeah... Kind of. Many people feel that the Bible's exceptional unity (you try telling a story over two thousand years) is evidence of exceptional divine involvement in its creation. I tend to agree that this is the case.
Where I tend to disagree is that many people try to reduce the Bible to a single, monolithic, God-written textbook where God is considered to have literally written each and every word (this is called "verbal inspiration"). I disagree with this pretty stronly, mostly because there is no evidence of it.
Also, you said:
I would suggest that you take a look at Deuteronomy 4:2, and its cross-references in a good reference bible. Deut. 4:2 says, in part, "Do not go beyond what is written". I think there are enough incidents of this kind of language in the Bible that we can assume it is a general principle.Before one of the /. blowhards starts up: open source or what have you works because it /can/ be improved on by man. If you believe what the bible says, then it can only be improved on by God. So it wouldn't work well at all as open source.
Of course, the decision of what to include in the Bible was kind of a meritcocracy: those books which were considered by everyone to be divinely inspired were included. There were many that didn't quite make it. Kind of like the "Cathedral-style" free software, (e.g. BSD, Apache, even the kernel for that matter) where a board of "wise men" determines what goes in the official release.
Wow... This is such an incredible expression of the spirit of our times that I would love to frame it! Our political system works... Yeah, right! It works for the politicians! Amphigory's Law here set forth: the ability of any group to operate effectively is inversely proportional to the size of the group.
- Their web server is running Linux.
- They hired Linus.
- Linus has been talking more and more about small computers being the future lately.
- One of the big thrusts in kernel development has been pda's and small environments.
- The Transmeta web site promises new hardware and software for mobile computing.
- Transmeta have been very tolerant of Linus' foibles as far as spending time on Linux at the office.
Boys and girls... I will leave the conclusion to the student. Hint: processor's are cool... But the did say and softwarewoohoo!
What I mean by this is really pretty simple. In a Windows Operating Environment, people are encouraged to use very different toolsets than they are in a Linux operating environment. Instead of perl, apache, and MySQL, they tend to use ASP, IIS, and Access/Jet through ODBC.
ODBC alone is a performance and stability nightmare, especially if it is not setup perfectly. ASP is a piece of junk. IIS is (I guess) okay. In Linux, perl is (arguably) pretty good, so long as you use mod_perl, MySQL is the fastest thing under the sun for those tasks it can handle, and apache is (like IIS) pretty good if not designed for speed.
We aren't comparing operating systems, we are comparing operating environments (or at least we should be). And testing static pages only totally discounts the afects of operating environment.
Another thing to look at is "culture". Linux users tend to like carefully crafted point solutions -- that's why we're Linux users. NT users just want to get it done, stability be damned -- that's why they're NT users. I think that this difference has a lot to do with Linux reputation for speed and stability. Even a novice sysadmin, exposed to the Linux community, starts to soak up the ethos of the community. Even more important, the support (including full source code) is in place to allow him to do as well as he would like. An NT user soaks up the "get it done, screw stability, hardware is cheap" ethos of the NT community. And the resources to do it right are often /not/ easily available.
Anyway, the point is that we are /not/ just comparing kernels. If we were, then we'd all probably be running some custom TCP stack on embedded hardware.
Why does this matter? Because Mozilla is going to fully standards compliant. To wit:
What that means to us is that the days of having to code for 16 different browsers, while not over, are numbered. And the ability for one browser to try to lock out other browsers with little "Netscape Now" icons will be sharply limited. Yes, there will probably be proprietary add-ons, but developers have already been burned by these in the 4.x browsers: I don't think they will use them again.So we come to Mozilla. Yes its buggy. But speaking as a professional developer, that's OK at this stage of development. What's more important is that it is well-crafted.
Instead of a hodge-podge of shoddy code (like the old Netscape source base) it is well crafted, well designed code that is going to be extremely maintainable.
This is kind of like early versions of the Linux kernel (I ran 0.95, FTR): they weren't feature complete, weren't anywhere /near/ bug-free. But they were designed well and had a dedicated team of competent coders working on them. It didn't take long at all for Linux to become something to be reckoned with.
What we need to do is the same thing that early Linux adopters did: focus on the technology and give it time to mature. Marketing is /nothing/, technology is /everything/. Oh yeah: have a little loyalty, because its going to be a cold day in hell when Microsoft ports IE to Linux.
As others have posted, the OS, in technical terms, is really only the kernel and a few libraries. The "marketing" definition is quite a bit more expansive. I think the correct terminology would be as follows: the Kernel is the OS. The Kernel plus the bundled applications, default configurations, server daemons, etc. is the "operating environment". Sun uses this terminology when talking about Solaris, and I think they have a point. So, the Windows OS would be nothing but the kernel (not much really). The Windows Operating Environment would included the Kernel, IE, all the Win32 API's for everything from telephony to directx, Notepad, wordpad, etc. A decent argument could even be made for a definition of the Windows Operating Environment that included Office, since its so damned common. Remember, originally operating systems were nothing but a bunch of libraries that abstracted access to the hardware. The thing is that, today, the libraries bundled have gone /far/ beyond just abstracting the hardware.
I'll assume that you are going from greek, which would mean:
So kleptocracy would be rule of the thieves?
Shalom.