I don't disagree. We need a balance. Committed atheists will start with the presupposition that God does not exist and therefore could not possibly have been involved, even if it is hard to explain. People like that have no hope of finding God.
On the other hand, just because something unusual happened doesn't mean we should automatically call it a miracle proving God.
I was not making a specific claim as to what happened in this guy's story, only observing the attitude of committed atheists.
> I'm a biology person so maybe I can offer some insight.
This statement, I believe, says a great deal about non-theists. Even if someone WAS raised from the dead, you apparently have already decided that it couldn't possibly be God. Faced with even an apparent (possibly real) resurrection, and you'll start with the pre-supposition that it could not possibly be God, and work back from that and try to find a "scientific" answer.
Even assuming that God exists and does miracles, "scientists" like you have no hope of finding Him!
Re:No such thing as a "virtual church"
on
SimChurch
·
· Score: 1
Purpose Driven Life is "junk theology?"
I think it has a lot of good things to say, but is probably overrated. It would be great for new Christians but it amuses me that people who have been Christians for decades are studying it. They should already know this stuff!
My Sunday School class at home was studying it. Then I moved to Ecuador and the churches here are starting to study it too! Good grief...
Like Hebrews 6:1-2 says, it's time to move beyond the basics, people...
Setting the record straight on tithing
on
SimChurch
·
· Score: 1
Just to set the record straight:
> until you can hand over your credit card and income details so they can conveniently extract 10% of your pre-tax income out of you.
1. I've never known a church to do that!
2. The Old Testament command for tithing was that they give a tenth of their INCREASE. So if you started the year with 500 cattle and ended with 700 cattle, you'd give (700-500)*10% or 20 cattle to the temple/Levites. So it's not your "pre-tax income."
3. The New Testament church, of which today's Christians are a part, has no formal giving requirement. Some churches tout the 10% figure but I believe they are not being theologically accurate. The principle in the NT church is that we are simply to be generous, for "God loves a cheerful giver."
Actually, the Bible has a LOT of accurate information about the formation of the universe. I'll go as far as to say it taught the Big Bang 2500 years before science discovered it.
>>> However there's a whole world of intensely physically limited people, those with agorophobic disorders, panic/anxiety/social phobias, people who're unwell and incapacitated, the people who just CAN'T get out for some period of time in their life. I'm no churchgoer myself, but it keeps many people comforted. I see those groups benefitting.
That, and people in some countries in North Africa and the Middle East who are literally the only Christian they know. I could see this helping them, as long as they had a secure way to connect to the "site" without being traced by the government.
LOL. You haven't been in my church! Almost any casual wear goes, as long as it's not ridiculously showy. Our pastors NEVER wear ties.
There was a report from my parent's Sunday school class that one of the older leaders of the class always wore a tie. One day they literally ripped it off him!:)
As the previous poster said, there are quite a few churches that cater to odd schedules. My church back home has a 5:00PM service, which was always great because I'm a hardcore night person and hate getting up early. Sometimes even getting up in time for their 11:15 service was torture.:)
But there's a deeper problem. If your church is solely online, you will be missing out on a lot. Jesus never intended for Christians to be isolated apart from each other. Sure, you can get your Bible study and preaching over the Net or TV, and you can worship in your house to a Sonicflood or Third Day or Petra CD, but you don't have people to check up on you when you're sick, invite over for dinner, keep you accountable, pray for you, discuss the Bible with, etc.
You NEED other flesh-and-blood believers near you. Note that that doesn't necessarily need to be a formal church. A group of people simply committing to follow Christ where they are and keep each other accountable is good enough.
Ok, several people have mentioned thinking about starting a tax prep software project for Linux.
Question: why does it have to be that hard? Take it in stages, with low goals.
For next year, make a program that can fill out a 1040EZ. That should be dirt simple, and useful for a few people.
For the next year, make it able to fill out and calculate a 1040A.
For the next year, make it do a 1040 with one or two of the most common schedules. I'd recommand Schedule D for stock transactions, since several of us geeks do that on occasion.
Even a basic 1040 and schedule D is not rocket science, though the D calculations on paper can be a pain in the arse. Still, I've done it by hand several years. It's not that big a deal, but a little Linux program to help would be great.
Oh, and do it in Python. That would make it even easier. There is NO reason to do this kind of stuff in C or C++. And be sure to store all values in integer variables, probably as the value * 100, or maybe * 1000, so that all calculations use integer arithmetic.
That's good to know. Maybe I should give it a try.
By "cache managers" do you mean content caching? That was one of my ideas. The application server would cache, for example in a Slashdot style application, the entire tree of comments for recently viewed stories. That would make browsing the comments do-able without a single DB hit! Does Zope do something like that?
And how is it memory-wise? Could it easily fit in an inexpensive virtual server that gives you 256MB RAM (or less)?
I used to commercially host Slashcode, and the memory requirements were insane. Allowing 256MB per site is a bare minimum.
I'm guessing it should be better, as mod_perl in multiple Apache processes, plus the separate "slashd" is the major problem.
But still, Python will take significantly more memory than a similar C app. I want the RAM to be used for caching content, not wasted, or even required (huge amounts, that is).
The state of Open Source CMS's has been driving me nuts for quite some time.
Specifically, nearly all are written in PHP. I have nothing against PHP in general -- it is a fine language for some things.
But it is not inherently persistant -- code has to be parsed and any objects recreated for every HTTP request. I've been watching projects like Xaraya and Drupal, but they are alower than they should be. Last time I tried Xaraya, it was positively glacial. Drupal is somewhat better.
A few of us had a similar problem a while ago when trying to develop a Linux knowledge-base type application. A complex OOP solution in PHP absolutely killed performance. It didn't work.
I've tried the Zend Optimizer with Xaraya but wasn't too impressed.
I think that CMS's should be self-contained application servers. Any objects created should be persistant, not needing to be re-created for every HTTP request.
I have a wild idea floating around in my head about a C++ CMS. I don't promise anything, especially since I'm not super-strong in C++. But I'm in the "tinkering" phase and maybe something interesting will come out of it. I guarantee it would be the fastest CMS on the face of the earth.:) Oh yeah, and it would be optimized for PostgreSQL. My other major CMS annoyance is that MySQL is always the preferred DB. If anyone wants to talk about this idea, feel free to email me: micah AT yoderdev DOT com
Python/Plone/Zope could be an OK platform, but I'm still a bit concerned about performance. It seems as though applications that should reasonably written in scripting languages, like little desktop utilities, are written in C/C++, and things that run on performance critical servers are written in scripting languages, when they should be written in C/C++.
Excellent post! I think we need to start running after those sort of ideas, and I'm a conservative!
My main point of disagreement is that saying food, shelter, etc. are rights even if you don't work. I think that for someone to collect on those rights, they (if able bodied) should do SOMETHING for the government. But there should ALWAYS be some kind of job available, so no one would be truly unemployed.
Ultimately, the economy and society should exist to bring the maximum quality of life to all of its citizens. What we in the western world tend to forget and ignore is that the quality of life is best when we are doing things we enjoy with other people, and are not frantically running around always busy.
I think an economic system can be built around these ideas that solves most of the problems of capitalism. Give every able-bodied person who works at SOMETHING what he/she needs, and beyond that reward them well when they come up with innovative ideas that society as a whole can benefit from.
I also agree with the automation bit, but don't think I'd go as far as you. The quality of life is better the less boring work we have to do and stupid beauracracy is in the way. If we could find a way to automate most things for the benefit of society, the amount of work people would have to do would plummet, and we would be able to spend more time with friends. That is, after all, what life is about (well, part of it anyway).
Socialism has some of these ideas right, but it got out of hand by putting too much power in the hands of too few corrupt people. Finding a way to fix that solution is absolutely essential before we can dump capitalism.
At the risk of a flamewar, the other area where Communism failed miserably is its banning of religion. Most people want to believe in God, period. Any economic system should allow for religious freedom.
Don't have time or energy to debate this in-depth with an AC, but suffice to say that the first two links 1) are based on old versions of the book, 2) miss many of Ross's points, and 3) are written by people who simply don't WANT to believe in God and wouldn't belive in Him unless He materialized in front of them and whacked them upside the head.
The third link, AiG, is an organization funded by ultra-fundy Baptist types with an irrational need to take Genesis 1 hyper-literally, which the Biblical text does not require. Their intentions are good, and I admire their faith, but they are simply off-base on this one. The fact is, the Bible as a whole fits very, very well with the Big Bang.
> OSS is missing a niche here between a SQL server and a flat file database.
It has an engine that is probably comparable to Access' engine: SQLite. Seems like there should be an OSS project to build an Access-like app on top of this puppy. Anyone know of one that is starting?
I've never used SuSE, but for those who have used both, how does YaST compare to all the redhat-config-* packages? In my experience they are pretty good.
What I can't figure out is that relatively simple GUI-based desktop applications that spend most of their time waiting for the user, something that Python could handle perfectly, tend to be written in C. At the same time, websites on high load webservers are written in PHP, which is horribly inefficient compared to C in processor use.
And writting web apps in C shouldn't be any harder than writting end user apps.
Actually what I *really* want to see (and am sort of thinking along the lines of starting a project to do it) is a new super-high-level Web app language, with a (probably Python) program to translate it into an Apache module in C, taking advantage of threading in Apache 2 to cache virtually all data in RAM, and optimize the DB access for PostgreSQL. Even the display templates would be translated to C functions to eliminate the need for their runtime interpretation. Yeah, you'd have to recompile the thing for even simple changes to the site, but think of how fast it would be!
For a site like Slashdot, PHP would kill performance. mod_perl caches psuedo-compiled code in the webserver. PHP has to be re-interpreted for every page hit. You can install the Zend Optimizer, but from my limited trials with Xaraya running under it I wasn't all that impressed.
Personally, I think Slashdot needs to be re-written in C. See my journal for the complete idea.
Create a relatively high end Linux PC that anyone would love to own. Test hardware combos till the cows come home to be sure you have the best possible setup. Pick out everything -- choose one model of every type of device.
Negotiate with the makers of said hardware. Insist on a volume discount on products that will not include their Windows drivers (unless the manufacturer contributed to Linux drivers).
Create a custom Linux distribution that is very specifically taylored to said hardware. Have everything work perfectly out of the box. Make an install CD that will restore it to the factory defaults.
Load said distro with every single piece of potentially useful Open Source software. But be sure it all works. If you can't get something to work nearly perfectly, don't include it.
Include custom documentation. Lots of it. Sure, some people don't like to read docs, but if they're good, they are very useful. And some people like to page through manuals on their rocking chair. Document as much of the software as you can. Taylor the steps to your specific computer setup where applicable.
Heck, even include some programming tutorials, probbly using Python. Computers used to include that kind of stuff. They don't anymore, which is why few users know squat about programming. This should not be required reading, of course, but it should be there should a customer (or his 8 year old nephew) wishes to try their hand at it.
Basically, include enough documentation about interesting things to keep the user hooked for a long time!
Let the computer and distro be ready for an LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) implementation. And, of course, sell the terminals pre-configured. So tell people they can buy one monster box from you and a few cheap terminals for everyone else in the house!
I seriously wish I were in a position to start a company to do this. But I'm not, so I'm throwing out the idea in the hopes that it will inspire someone else to do so.:) Or hopefully inspire more than one person to do so -- competition in this market would make everyones' systems better!
Linux does NOT take that much RAM. Not even close. I'm guessing you're looking at the total memory usage, including cache. Linux aggressively uses free RAM as disk cache, so it will usually appear that most of your RAM is in use.
I have run Kernel 2.6.2 on a 486 with 16MB RAM. It wasn't doing a lot, mind you, but it had a few megs free. (It was NOT running X.)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't disagree. We need a balance. Committed atheists will start with the presupposition that God does not exist and therefore could not possibly have been involved, even if it is hard to explain. People like that have no hope of finding God.
On the other hand, just because something unusual happened doesn't mean we should automatically call it a miracle proving God.
I was not making a specific claim as to what happened in this guy's story, only observing the attitude of committed atheists.
I wouldn't mind hearing the story either, but...
> I'm a biology person so maybe I can offer some insight.
This statement, I believe, says a great deal about non-theists. Even if someone WAS raised from the dead, you apparently have already decided that it couldn't possibly be God. Faced with even an apparent (possibly real) resurrection, and you'll start with the pre-supposition that it could not possibly be God, and work back from that and try to find a "scientific" answer.
Even assuming that God exists and does miracles, "scientists" like you have no hope of finding Him!
Purpose Driven Life is "junk theology?"
I think it has a lot of good things to say, but is probably overrated. It would be great for new Christians but it amuses me that people who have been Christians for decades are studying it. They should already know this stuff!
My Sunday School class at home was studying it. Then I moved to Ecuador and the churches here are starting to study it too! Good grief...
Like Hebrews 6:1-2 says, it's time to move beyond the basics, people...
Just to set the record straight:
> until you can hand over your credit card and income details so they can conveniently extract 10% of your pre-tax income out of you.
1. I've never known a church to do that!
2. The Old Testament command for tithing was that they give a tenth of their INCREASE. So if you started the year with 500 cattle and ended with 700 cattle, you'd give (700-500)*10% or 20 cattle to the temple/Levites. So it's not your "pre-tax income."
3. The New Testament church, of which today's Christians are a part, has no formal giving requirement. Some churches tout the 10% figure but I believe they are not being theologically accurate. The principle in the NT church is that we are simply to be generous, for "God loves a cheerful giver."
Actually, the Bible has a LOT of accurate information about the formation of the universe. I'll go as far as to say it taught the Big Bang 2500 years before science discovered it.
Read Hugh Ross' "The Creator and the Cosmos."
>>> However there's a whole world of intensely physically limited people, those with agorophobic disorders, panic/anxiety/social phobias, people who're unwell and incapacitated, the people who just CAN'T get out for some period of time in their life. I'm no churchgoer myself, but it keeps many people comforted. I see those groups benefitting.
That, and people in some countries in North Africa and the Middle East who are literally the only Christian they know. I could see this helping them, as long as they had a secure way to connect to the "site" without being traced by the government.
> such as wearing a short-sleeved shirt
:)
LOL. You haven't been in my church! Almost any casual wear goes, as long as it's not ridiculously showy. Our pastors NEVER wear ties.
There was a report from my parent's Sunday school class that one of the older leaders of the class always wore a tie. One day they literally ripped it off him!
As the previous poster said, there are quite a few churches that cater to odd schedules. My church back home has a 5:00PM service, which was always great because I'm a hardcore night person and hate getting up early. Sometimes even getting up in time for their 11:15 service was torture. :)
But there's a deeper problem. If your church is solely online, you will be missing out on a lot. Jesus never intended for Christians to be isolated apart from each other. Sure, you can get your Bible study and preaching over the Net or TV, and you can worship in your house to a Sonicflood or Third Day or Petra CD, but you don't have people to check up on you when you're sick, invite over for dinner, keep you accountable, pray for you, discuss the Bible with, etc.
You NEED other flesh-and-blood believers near you. Note that that doesn't necessarily need to be a formal church. A group of people simply committing to follow Christ where they are and keep each other accountable is good enough.
Cool, that's certainly a reasonable way to do it!
Now, let's get it ported to OpenOffice!!!
Ok, several people have mentioned thinking about starting a tax prep software project for Linux.
Question: why does it have to be that hard? Take it in stages, with low goals.
For next year, make a program that can fill out a 1040EZ. That should be dirt simple, and useful for a few people.
For the next year, make it able to fill out and calculate a 1040A.
For the next year, make it do a 1040 with one or two of the most common schedules. I'd recommand Schedule D for stock transactions, since several of us geeks do that on occasion.
Even a basic 1040 and schedule D is not rocket science, though the D calculations on paper can be a pain in the arse. Still, I've done it by hand several years. It's not that big a deal, but a little Linux program to help would be great.
Oh, and do it in Python. That would make it even easier. There is NO reason to do this kind of stuff in C or C++. And be sure to store all values in integer variables, probably as the value * 100, or maybe * 1000, so that all calculations use integer arithmetic.
That's good to know. Maybe I should give it a try.
By "cache managers" do you mean content caching? That was one of my ideas. The application server would cache, for example in a Slashdot style application, the entire tree of comments for recently viewed stories. That would make browsing the comments do-able without a single DB hit! Does Zope do something like that?
And how is it memory-wise? Could it easily fit in an inexpensive virtual server that gives you 256MB RAM (or less)?
I used to commercially host Slashcode, and the memory requirements were insane. Allowing 256MB per site is a bare minimum.
I'm guessing it should be better, as mod_perl in multiple Apache processes, plus the separate "slashd" is the major problem.
But still, Python will take significantly more memory than a similar C app. I want the RAM to be used for caching content, not wasted, or even required (huge amounts, that is).
... "Use multiple camels for faster wireless networking" ??? *rolls eyes*
The state of Open Source CMS's has been driving me nuts for quite some time.
:) Oh yeah, and it would be optimized for PostgreSQL. My other major CMS annoyance is that MySQL is always the preferred DB. If anyone wants to talk about this idea, feel free to email me: micah AT yoderdev DOT com
Specifically, nearly all are written in PHP. I have nothing against PHP in general -- it is a fine language for some things.
But it is not inherently persistant -- code has to be parsed and any objects recreated for every HTTP request. I've been watching projects like Xaraya and Drupal, but they are alower than they should be. Last time I tried Xaraya, it was positively glacial. Drupal is somewhat better.
A few of us had a similar problem a while ago when trying to develop a Linux knowledge-base type application. A complex OOP solution in PHP absolutely killed performance. It didn't work.
I've tried the Zend Optimizer with Xaraya but wasn't too impressed.
I think that CMS's should be self-contained application servers. Any objects created should be persistant, not needing to be re-created for every HTTP request.
I have a wild idea floating around in my head about a C++ CMS. I don't promise anything, especially since I'm not super-strong in C++. But I'm in the "tinkering" phase and maybe something interesting will come out of it. I guarantee it would be the fastest CMS on the face of the earth.
Python/Plone/Zope could be an OK platform, but I'm still a bit concerned about performance. It seems as though applications that should reasonably written in scripting languages, like little desktop utilities, are written in C/C++, and things that run on performance critical servers are written in scripting languages, when they should be written in C/C++.
What's with that? Do computer-type devices tend to not work at higher altitudes?
I've used my digital camera (which is sort of a computer and has a compact flash card) at 16000 feet. No problems.
Excellent post! I think we need to start running after those sort of ideas, and I'm a conservative!
My main point of disagreement is that saying food, shelter, etc. are rights even if you don't work. I think that for someone to collect on those rights, they (if able bodied) should do SOMETHING for the government. But there should ALWAYS be some kind of job available, so no one would be truly unemployed.
Ultimately, the economy and society should exist to bring the maximum quality of life to all of its citizens. What we in the western world tend to forget and ignore is that the quality of life is best when we are doing things we enjoy with other people, and are not frantically running around always busy.
I think an economic system can be built around these ideas that solves most of the problems of capitalism. Give every able-bodied person who works at SOMETHING what he/she needs, and beyond that reward them well when they come up with innovative ideas that society as a whole can benefit from.
I also agree with the automation bit, but don't think I'd go as far as you. The quality of life is better the less boring work we have to do and stupid beauracracy is in the way. If we could find a way to automate most things for the benefit of society, the amount of work people would have to do would plummet, and we would be able to spend more time with friends. That is, after all, what life is about (well, part of it anyway).
Socialism has some of these ideas right, but it got out of hand by putting too much power in the hands of too few corrupt people. Finding a way to fix that solution is absolutely essential before we can dump capitalism.
At the risk of a flamewar, the other area where Communism failed miserably is its banning of religion. Most people want to believe in God, period. Any economic system should allow for religious freedom.
Don't have time or energy to debate this in-depth with an AC, but suffice to say that the first two links 1) are based on old versions of the book, 2) miss many of Ross's points, and 3) are written by people who simply don't WANT to believe in God and wouldn't belive in Him unless He materialized in front of them and whacked them upside the head.
The third link, AiG, is an organization funded by ultra-fundy Baptist types with an irrational need to take Genesis 1 hyper-literally, which the Biblical text does not require. Their intentions are good, and I admire their faith, but they are simply off-base on this one. The fact is, the Bible as a whole fits very, very well with the Big Bang.
> OSS is missing a niche here between a SQL server and a flat file database.
It has an engine that is probably comparable to Access' engine: SQLite. Seems like there should be an OSS project to build an Access-like app on top of this puppy. Anyone know of one that is starting?
Sigh.... hate to reply to off-topic posts, but...
:-)
> Not to mention scientific cosmology in Galileo's and Kepler's day wasn't even remotely advanced as it is today.
Correct. It is much more advanced. And all the latest cosmological evidence points solidly to the existence of God.
If you doubt that, please read Creator and the Cosmos. I triple dog dare you to read that book and remain an atheist. Don't think you can.
You can click "Start here" in Red Hat and get a folder with all the config programs in it. Pretty slick.
I've never used SuSE, but for those who have used both, how does YaST compare to all the redhat-config-* packages? In my experience they are pretty good.
LOL.
What I can't figure out is that relatively simple GUI-based desktop applications that spend most of their time waiting for the user, something that Python could handle perfectly, tend to be written in C. At the same time, websites on high load webservers are written in PHP, which is horribly inefficient compared to C in processor use.
And writting web apps in C shouldn't be any harder than writting end user apps.
Actually what I *really* want to see (and am sort of thinking along the lines of starting a project to do it) is a new super-high-level Web app language, with a (probably Python) program to translate it into an Apache module in C, taking advantage of threading in Apache 2 to cache virtually all data in RAM, and optimize the DB access for PostgreSQL. Even the display templates would be translated to C functions to eliminate the need for their runtime interpretation. Yeah, you'd have to recompile the thing for even simple changes to the site, but think of how fast it would be!
For a site like Slashdot, PHP would kill performance. mod_perl caches psuedo-compiled code in the webserver. PHP has to be re-interpreted for every page hit. You can install the Zend Optimizer, but from my limited trials with Xaraya running under it I wasn't all that impressed.
Personally, I think Slashdot needs to be re-written in C. See my journal for the complete idea.
Create a relatively high end Linux PC that anyone would love to own. Test hardware combos till the cows come home to be sure you have the best possible setup. Pick out everything -- choose one model of every type of device.
:) Or hopefully inspire more than one person to do so -- competition in this market would make everyones' systems better!
Negotiate with the makers of said hardware. Insist on a volume discount on products that will not include their Windows drivers (unless the manufacturer contributed to Linux drivers).
Create a custom Linux distribution that is very specifically taylored to said hardware. Have everything work perfectly out of the box. Make an install CD that will restore it to the factory defaults.
Load said distro with every single piece of potentially useful Open Source software. But be sure it all works. If you can't get something to work nearly perfectly, don't include it.
Include custom documentation. Lots of it. Sure, some people don't like to read docs, but if they're good, they are very useful. And some people like to page through manuals on their rocking chair. Document as much of the software as you can. Taylor the steps to your specific computer setup where applicable.
Heck, even include some programming tutorials, probbly using Python. Computers used to include that kind of stuff. They don't anymore, which is why few users know squat about programming. This should not be required reading, of course, but it should be there should a customer (or his 8 year old nephew) wishes to try their hand at it.
Basically, include enough documentation about interesting things to keep the user hooked for a long time!
Let the computer and distro be ready for an LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) implementation. And, of course, sell the terminals pre-configured. So tell people they can buy one monster box from you and a few cheap terminals for everyone else in the house!
I seriously wish I were in a position to start a company to do this. But I'm not, so I'm throwing out the idea in the hopes that it will inspire someone else to do so.
For the record, it takes my Gentoo box about 18 hours to compile it. I have a dual P3-850.
But, you can start mourning for my 64kbps cable modem (I'm in Ecuador).
Linux does NOT take that much RAM. Not even close. I'm guessing you're looking at the total memory usage, including cache. Linux aggressively uses free RAM as disk cache, so it will usually appear that most of your RAM is in use.
I have run Kernel 2.6.2 on a 486 with 16MB RAM. It wasn't doing a lot, mind you, but it had a few megs free. (It was NOT running X.)