The FDA has a "in-house" exemption for things like software-based medical solutions (for example, the software that calculates the best way to deliver a radiation blast to your tumor, or the software that identifies tumors in MRI results, or whatever). In essence, to share software you've developed, you have to go through a lengthy and expensive approval process. Once you've written something, no matter how nice it is, there's a huge threshold of liability, expense, and hassle you have to overcome in order to be legally allowed to give it to other institutions.
Maybe it's because I grew up there, but I've always had a soft spot for Cincinnati's Union Terminal. It's a collection of museums: they have a Children's Museum in the basement (lots of fun with balls, water, and a nice big tree-like playground thingy), a Cincinnati Historical Society Museum (starts with a giant miniature recreation of Cincinnati, lots of WWII history, and includes a full-size recreation of Cincinnati's steamboat days), and a Natural History Museum (some very excellent versions of pretty standard exhibits, including a very nice walk-through cave, walk-through glacier, and some neat human-body exhibits designed for kids (but that I find fun nevertheless)). And, of course, there's the full-on old-style spherical OmniMAX theatre that just can't be beat for giving you vertigo. Add to all that the fact that Union Terminal itself is pretty interesting---it's an old train station with huge murals and an enormous lobby.
I'm not saying it's the greatest museum ever; but it's well-done, has three museums in a single building, and I always have a good time when I go.
There are several things wrong with your argument. First if the situation every gets so bad again that civilians take up arms in mass against the Federal government you can bet that the military will be divided.
Maybe so, but if significant portions of the military refuse to follow the orders of the tyrant/chain-of-command, then you have *military* fighting *military*. The guns that the civilians have are less important than the choice that the folks in the military make at that point. This is no surprise, really - the success of most coups in history have relied on the disposition of the standing military. For example, the Shah in Iran was deposed in 1979 because the military decided to remain neutral---at that point, all you need is a sufficiently large mob to topple the government. Musharraf, in Pakistan, gained power by having the military behind him (a so-called "bloodless coup"). Wikipedia has a whole list, but my point is still that when you have a big military, success of any government-toppling-initiative rests in their hands rather than in the hands of the somewhat-armed populace.
Given the emphasis on "just following orders" not being a valid defense since the end of WWII expect many to think long and hard about how they react.
Heh, well, you can thank Bush for having changed that. Folks in the CIA get absolute immunity for having created a secret prison system in other countries specifically for the purpose of torturing those they had in custody. Folks in the telecom industry get absolute immunity for having followed the orders of the government. I don't see why a soldier would actually think long and hard about how they react---following orders has become a valid excuse again.
but at the same time we can not allow the 2nd Amendment to be attacked and weakened.
I think you are misunderstanding me. I strongly support the 2nd Amendment; and at the same time, I believe it is not intended as a "here you go, now you can topple the government if need be" clause (or, if it was, it's not an effective one). It is there for the defense of a person's *individual* liberty.
We do, in fact, have the 2nd amendment (right to bear arms) specifically so we can unseat any tyrant who tries to take our rights away.
Oh puhleeez. Seriously? You think the weapons that civilians have on hand can take on the best-funded military the world has ever seen? You know, the one that has more resources than the next five biggest militaries COMBINED? I don't think you've thought about this very seriously. Yes, I know that's the same thing "they" said about facing down the British back in 1775, but we're living in a different world. How many civilians have access to Abrams tanks and Apache helicopters? Cruise missiles? Not to mention: in what terrain has the US military been *training* for the last two hundred years? To paraphrase an awful movie, "When the day comes that we have to go to war against Utah, we're [the US military] really gonna kick ass".
The 2nd Amendment right puts guns in the hands of civilians. Thick-headed civilians who can't think very far ahead work like gang members who get their first chrome-plated.45: they immediately feel invincible, and that leads to the assumption that the guns are for the purpose of standing watch over the government. Don't kid yourself that any politician in the history of the US has ever thought (or will ever think) to themselves "well, I WANT to do X, but since the citizens have so many guns, maybe that wouldn't be a good idea."
If you want to know what the 2nd Amendment is really for, look no further than St. George Tucker, a lawyer, Revolutionary War militia officer, legal scholar, and a U.S. District Court judge (appointed in 1813), who wrote about the amendment: This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty... The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. It is a right to defend yourself from the government, not an establishment of the power to overthrow the government. It's an important distinction.
And as someone pointed out to that other poster, they DID include the Firefox 3.5 Beta in the tests (it clocked in at slightly better than Safari 3). This just wasn't mentioned in the Futuremark article, that's all.
Seriously, they're trying to make multilanguage projects possible (if not easy). Ever want a Java object to inherit from both a Python object and a C++ object? Then Babel is your tool. https://computation.llnl.gov/casc/components/babel.html
You don't need browser-support to block ads. Check out Privoxy (www.privoxy.org); it's an ad-filtering proxy. As long as your browser supports proxies (they *all* do), you can prevent advertising nastiness from even getting to your browser.
The Vatican gets at least 0.5% of Italy's tax revenue through the Otto per mille, a way to publicly finance religion in Italy. Through that channel alone, the Vatican got one billion euros (not dollars) last year.
Where you are mistaken is in the idea that the Catholic Church is the same thing as the Vatican. It is not. Every Catholic parish is a separate financial entity from every other Catholic parish, and each parish is a separate financial entity from the diocese to which it belongs, which is in turn a separate financial entity from the ecclesiastical province to which it belongs, and on up the chain. (Many Catholic Churches have borrowed money from their Diocese for various building projects and are required to pay it back with interest.) Those who view the Catholic Church in an uncharitable light often see this as a way to protect the Church from large legal settlements against priests or bishops who protected pedophiles. Others who view the Church more charitably see it as a way for each parish to guarantee that donations will work at improving the local community rather than go to some far away group. Money that is sent to the Vatican itself is referred to as "Peter's Pence", and there is typically a once-a-year fundraising drive for it.
In any case, just because the Italian government gave money to various Catholic Churches does not mean that it gave the money to the Vatican. The same goes for whatever illegal tax-breaks that you feel qualify as revenue. Institutionalized greed notwithstanding, you haven't demonstrated that the Vatican itself received billions of dollars in revenue.
... and, by the way, Harvard university's budget is in the range of billions of dollars [pdf], 2.6 in 2005 to be precise.
As long as we're quoting from the Bible, why not disband the whole church system using Matthew 6?
For one thing, because Christ himself established the church system. (Matthew 16:18)
In Matthew 5, he says this:
You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house. Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.
The obvious reconciliation of these two passages is that of INTENT. You are ignoring the second half of the sentence. "Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before men, to be seen by them." He's not telling people to avoid doing acts of righteousness, he's telling them to avoid doing them solely for the sake of being seen (i.e. for the purpose of glorifying themselves).
The funny thing is that the Vatican probably has billions in capital at its disposal.
The Vatican's finances are a matter of public record, so you don't have to guess about its financial resources. You can look it up. The short answer is: no, they don't have billions in capital at their disposal. Their annual budget is less than that of Harvard University.
Hardly photographs. Nobody knows what people like Jesus looked like
The point is that you use them to bring to mind the real people, not to worship the items themselves.
and there isn't really any need to have pictures of him being crucified.
Sure, there's no need for any pictures of any family members. It's not as if everyone's life was barely worth living before Kodak came along. They are absolutely a luxury, and always have been. That doesn't mean that pictures of people you think highly of are a bad thing. Besides, we're talking about a picture of Jesus in His greatest moment! What exactly are protestants trying to avoid, here?
Those don't sounds very reformed to me. One of the first bullet points even refers to a Roman Catholic scripture...
The name of the section is Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox understanding of the use of images. Of course it'll talk about Catholics too.
Oh FFS. Mary is not your mother. I don't even believe in the things I used to, so it shouldn't really matter to me anymore, but from a biblical point of view, I don't think it makes sense. Maybe if you add in the Apocrypha it does, I don't know.
What, you skipped over Luke 1:48? All generations (including this one) will call her blessed, and those who seek to imitate Christ shouldn't be excluding parts of Christ's life as unsuitable for imitation.
God says not to make graven images, it can be interpreted many ways, and one of the main ways is not to worship anything other than God. The cross can be a symbol/reminder, but depicting Jesus would seem to me to be making a graven image of a god *shrug*
Graven images for the purpose of idolatry were forbidden. God didn't forbid images of himself (which, considering Man is made in the image of God, could be a problem). What matters is what you do with them. For example, the golden calf that the Jews worshipped briefly was not an image of a god, but rather was considered TO BE a god. That's idolatry.
If the Jews had worshipped the magic cow god in the sky and merely used the sculpture of a cow as a reminder of the cow god, then it wouldn't be idolatry (it would just be "having another god before the *real* God").
Consider, for instance, that in Colossians 1:15, Jesus is described as "the image of the invisible God". If your interpretation is correct, then that would be the first time God ever broke his own laws (by creating an image of himself).
But like I said, I consider the whole thing bollocks now, and the whole fact that people still argue so much about different interpretations of the bible etc just shows how tribal people are, they'll argue about anything.
Pot, meet kettle.
If on the other hand Christianity is true, then I still stand by the fact that the Roman Catholic church is trying to take control of it where it shouldn't be. Confessing to priests doesn't make much sense when you can confess direct to Jesus,
Why would Jesus give the apostles the power to forgive sins (John 20:23) if he didn't expect them to use it? He explicitly said that as he was sent by the Father, so he then sends the apostles. God breathes on man only two times in the entire Bible: once to give life to clay, and once to give that life the power of forgiving sins. That's how important it is. We're even directed, in James 5:16, explicitly: Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. So if you've been commanded to confess your sins to other humans, who would you rather confess to: a priest who has been given God's power to forgive sins, or someone who hasn't?
likewise with praying to Mary as if she is going to intercede for you with Jesus, wh
My favorite uncomfortable question for people espousing the "bible only" viewpoint is as follows: What is the pillar and foundation of truth?
1st Timothy, 3:15:...if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of truth.
The Church is the foundation of truth, not the Bible.
Makes a lot of sense when you consider that most folks at the time couldn't read!
No, they don't. First of all, they only worship God---the way to worship something is to make sacrifices to it. Second, they have images of important people (e.g. saints) and they use them like photographs (i.e. you recognize that the image is merely a representation of the actual thing).
reformed/protestant churches still think of that as wrong.
Nope. Check out the Anglican/Episcopalian church, the Lutheran church, the Orthodox church. Maybe read some basic information before spreading this kind of ignorance.
When I was a Christian I regarded the catholic church to be an attempt by the Roman government to water down Christianity and actually turn it into an organisation under human control (the pope) rather than one that considers God as its leader.
And now that you're not a Christian, you've given up that viewpoint, right? Oh, wait, nevermind, you still believe all the old lies about Catholics.
Yes, whole sections of OT law are obviously superseded by the new testament (that's kind of the point), but that doesn't mean they aren't included in the bible.
The term you're looking for is "fulfilled", not "superseded".
The reformed church was a genuine attempt to get everything back as purely as possible to the way Jesus intended the church to be.
Jesus established his church upon the rock that is Peter. The "reformed" church has nothing to do with Peter, or with apostolic succession (as established by Peter himself).
The Roman Catholic church does a whole bunch of weird stuff that I've always considered decidedly un-christian:p Praying to Mary
Jesus, as a good Jew, honored his mother. Should a person seeking to be like Christ not do the same?
and confessing to priests,
Jesus gave the apostles the power to forgive sins (John 20:22-23), but not the ability to read minds. And in 2nd Corinthians 5:18-20, Paul points out that Christ gave him the "ministry of reconciliation", adding that God is "appealing through us" when this action of reconciling sinners is carried out.
etc.. the Roman Catholic church just tries to take Jesus out of the picture and gain control/money.
Reallllllly? Is that why Catholics are the ones that use a crucifix (with Jesus on it) and protestants use a plain crucifix?
I think the grandfather comment was a reminder of how the Catholic Church has been known to react toward "open sourcing" their knowledges. One of the big differences between Catholics and Protestants was that Catholics were not allowed to read the bible. In fact it was illegal to own a Bible at home (in XVIIth century France at least)
"Ignorance of the Scripture is ignorance of Christ," declares the Catholic Church in Dei Verbum (the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation). In fact, those who *could* read Latin during the Middle Ages (and not everybody could - I know, it's shocking that there wasn't universal literacy during the Middle Ages) were highly encouraged to read the Bible. But it wasn't just latin. People as early as 680 AD (e.g. Caedmon) were translating portions of Scripture into the vernacular. Aelfric (~1000 AD), one of the best known Old English authors, paraphrased large portions of scripture in English. Gutenberg himself was a Catholic, and the first thing he used his printing press to do was print copies of The Bible. Even Martin Luther himself wrote: "We are compelled to concede to the Papists that they have the Word of God, that we received it from them, and that without them we should have no knowledge of it at all."
You're just full of anti-Catholic bile, is all. Try actually learning some history.
The Index (of forbidden books) was updated until the Vatican II council (1966) and is still considered by the Holy See to have a moral value as a list of the books one should prevent oneself from reading.
And I'm not surprised at all that you've gotten your details wrong here too. It was only updated until 1948 (having started in 1529, giving it roughly a 400 year run). 1966 was when it stopped being *published* - there's a difference. In any case, the stance of the Catholic Church on the matter is that people have a moral obligation to avoid circulating things that will endanger morals and faith (not just books - that's songs, movies, behaviors, whatever). Essentially, you're not supposed to knowingly convince people (including yourself) to abandon their faith. It's akin to saying: don't spread lies. If you believe X to be the truth, then distributing things that contradict it would be distributing lies. If it's a particularly important truth, then it's particularly important not to convince people of a contradiction of that truth.
The general feeling is that the Roman Catholic Church's main dogma is the "the doctrine is the truth" so if something seems to be the truth outside of the doctrine, it is dangerous and should be fought.
The "general feeling"? Of who, misinformed anti-Catholic bigots? The stance of the Catholic Church is essentially what Pope John Paul II said in a speech in 1996: Truth cannot contradict truth. If something seems to be truth outside of the doctrine, then cool! If it seems to contradict doctrine, then something has been misunderstood (either the doctrine has been misunderstood or the external evidence has been misunderstood). As another example, back in November of 2005, the AP reported the following:
A Vatican cardinal said Thursday the faithful should listen to what secular modern science has to offer, warning that religion risks turning into âoefundamentalismâ if it ignores scientific reason. Cardinal Paul Poupard, who heads the Pontifical Council for Culture, made the comments at a news conference on a Vatican project to help end the âoemutual prejudiceâ between religion and science that has long bedeviled the Roman Catholic Church and is part of the evolution debate in the United States.
The Church is not known for its research centers trying to find archaeological proofs of the Bible or to correct it
There's always satellite internet. It isn't the greatest (long latencies), but it exists. Try HughesNet (http://www.hughesnet.com/) and WildBlue (http://www.wildblue.com/); I think there's another one out there, but I don't remember their name.
Thus, by trivial application of evolution, we see that the human race is biased towards being stupid. Over a long enough interval, intelligence will be relegated more and more to a genetic disease that prevents reproduction (add on the fact that high IQs also correlate with autism, which lowers your chance of reproduction as well). It's no wonder the public is fascinated by stupidity!
Your argument can be easily demonstrated to be false. In particular: Apache is currently (and has been for a while) the most popular web server on the market. It has something approaching 70-80% market share. However it does not suffer from 70-80% of the vulnerabilities and exploits that are out there. What web server *does* suffer from 70-80% of the exploits? Microsoft IIS. For some reason, it's more exploited despite having significantly less market share. Thus: arguing that Microsoft's problem is simply one of exposure is a totally bogus argument.
The difference is that with x86 hardware, most things have published API's, and massive numbers of coders and hackers out there to try and beat on the code. Linux on the PPC suffers from a company that staunchly refuses to tell them how everything works, and from a very short supply of coders - especially since Apple started it's Darwin project, and has been sucking otherwise interested and talented coders away from Linux into making Darwin better. Just to help make it harder, lots of linux hardware code is poorly written - in that it's very x86 specific. One of the main differences is byte-order (the hex number 0x123456 is stored in memory in x86 machines as 0x563412 - and if you use shortcuts in your logic (which many people do) or hardcode byte-swapping into your code (which many people do) the driver has to be checked very carefully or in some cases entirely rewritten - and it's tricky because many times a driver will mostly work, but one or two byteswaps weren't found, which may cause unexpected behavior in some instances). And it's not as if Apple only offers one video card and one airport card, etc. Between models, they usually change quite a bit without telling anyone - because what do they care? So the fact that it works on one model means nothing on another model - so each one has to be checked. Which means someone who contributes code has to have access to each and every model. This isn't so difficult on the vast PC market - but on the Mac market? It's rare.
You should take a look at the way Apple has done the permission setup in MacOS X. The root user is disabled by default, and on top of that there are "Admin" users - which have permissions to install applications, apply system upgrades, and change hardware configurations/preferences (including network and anything else you'd want to be able to do).
The G4 differs from the G3 in a lot of piddly little ways, and one great big, huge way. The G4 has the AltiVec engine (a vector computation unit, alongside the Integer and Floating Point Units). However, it's a little specialized and (afaik) there aren't any compilers that automatically generate AltiVec-optimized code. On the other hand, programmers can use AltiVec (vector engine) accellerated functions, which will then be much faster on G4's than on G3's.
As an example of an AltiVec accellerated function, look up the man page for writev(). Basically, it's a vectorized (and thus accellerated) version of write().
Slashdot Mirror
Medical imaging is a special case.
The FDA has a "in-house" exemption for things like software-based medical solutions (for example, the software that calculates the best way to deliver a radiation blast to your tumor, or the software that identifies tumors in MRI results, or whatever). In essence, to share software you've developed, you have to go through a lengthy and expensive approval process. Once you've written something, no matter how nice it is, there's a huge threshold of liability, expense, and hassle you have to overcome in order to be legally allowed to give it to other institutions.
Maybe it's because I grew up there, but I've always had a soft spot for Cincinnati's Union Terminal. It's a collection of museums: they have a Children's Museum in the basement (lots of fun with balls, water, and a nice big tree-like playground thingy), a Cincinnati Historical Society Museum (starts with a giant miniature recreation of Cincinnati, lots of WWII history, and includes a full-size recreation of Cincinnati's steamboat days), and a Natural History Museum (some very excellent versions of pretty standard exhibits, including a very nice walk-through cave, walk-through glacier, and some neat human-body exhibits designed for kids (but that I find fun nevertheless)). And, of course, there's the full-on old-style spherical OmniMAX theatre that just can't be beat for giving you vertigo. Add to all that the fact that Union Terminal itself is pretty interesting---it's an old train station with huge murals and an enormous lobby.
I'm not saying it's the greatest museum ever; but it's well-done, has three museums in a single building, and I always have a good time when I go.
There are several things wrong with your argument. First if the situation every gets so bad again that civilians take up arms in mass against the Federal government you can bet that the military will be divided.
Maybe so, but if significant portions of the military refuse to follow the orders of the tyrant/chain-of-command, then you have *military* fighting *military*. The guns that the civilians have are less important than the choice that the folks in the military make at that point. This is no surprise, really - the success of most coups in history have relied on the disposition of the standing military. For example, the Shah in Iran was deposed in 1979 because the military decided to remain neutral---at that point, all you need is a sufficiently large mob to topple the government. Musharraf, in Pakistan, gained power by having the military behind him (a so-called "bloodless coup"). Wikipedia has a whole list, but my point is still that when you have a big military, success of any government-toppling-initiative rests in their hands rather than in the hands of the somewhat-armed populace.
Given the emphasis on "just following orders" not being a valid defense since the end of WWII expect many to think long and hard about how they react.
Heh, well, you can thank Bush for having changed that. Folks in the CIA get absolute immunity for having created a secret prison system in other countries specifically for the purpose of torturing those they had in custody. Folks in the telecom industry get absolute immunity for having followed the orders of the government. I don't see why a soldier would actually think long and hard about how they react---following orders has become a valid excuse again.
but at the same time we can not allow the 2nd Amendment to be attacked and weakened.
I think you are misunderstanding me. I strongly support the 2nd Amendment; and at the same time, I believe it is not intended as a "here you go, now you can topple the government if need be" clause (or, if it was, it's not an effective one). It is there for the defense of a person's *individual* liberty.
The data carriers MUST stop thinking in kilobytes and start thinking in customers."
Aaaaaah! Get out of my head! You're not allowed to think in me! ... why do I have a sudden urge to buy Lightspeed Briefs?
We do, in fact, have the 2nd amendment (right to bear arms) specifically so we can unseat any tyrant who tries to take our rights away.
Oh puhleeez. Seriously? You think the weapons that civilians have on hand can take on the best-funded military the world has ever seen? You know, the one that has more resources than the next five biggest militaries COMBINED? I don't think you've thought about this very seriously. Yes, I know that's the same thing "they" said about facing down the British back in 1775, but we're living in a different world. How many civilians have access to Abrams tanks and Apache helicopters? Cruise missiles? Not to mention: in what terrain has the US military been *training* for the last two hundred years? To paraphrase an awful movie, "When the day comes that we have to go to war against Utah, we're [the US military] really gonna kick ass".
The 2nd Amendment right puts guns in the hands of civilians. Thick-headed civilians who can't think very far ahead work like gang members who get their first chrome-plated .45: they immediately feel invincible, and that leads to the assumption that the guns are for the purpose of standing watch over the government. Don't kid yourself that any politician in the history of the US has ever thought (or will ever think) to themselves "well, I WANT to do X, but since the citizens have so many guns, maybe that wouldn't be a good idea."
If you want to know what the 2nd Amendment is really for, look no further than St. George Tucker, a lawyer, Revolutionary War militia officer, legal scholar, and a U.S. District Court judge (appointed in 1813), who wrote about the amendment: This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty... The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. It is a right to defend yourself from the government, not an establishment of the power to overthrow the government. It's an important distinction.
And as someone pointed out to that other poster, they DID include the Firefox 3.5 Beta in the tests (it clocked in at slightly better than Safari 3). This just wasn't mentioned in the Futuremark article, that's all.
If only they had thought of the Anti-Anti-Anti-Fanboi! The fools! When will they ever learn?!?
Seriously, they're trying to make multilanguage projects possible (if not easy). Ever want a Java object to inherit from both a Python object and a C++ object? Then Babel is your tool. https://computation.llnl.gov/casc/components/babel.html
You don't need browser-support to block ads. Check out Privoxy (www.privoxy.org); it's an ad-filtering proxy. As long as your browser supports proxies (they *all* do), you can prevent advertising nastiness from even getting to your browser.
The Vatican gets at least 0.5% of Italy's tax revenue through the Otto per mille, a way to publicly finance religion in Italy. Through that channel alone, the Vatican got one billion euros (not dollars) last year.
Where you are mistaken is in the idea that the Catholic Church is the same thing as the Vatican. It is not. Every Catholic parish is a separate financial entity from every other Catholic parish, and each parish is a separate financial entity from the diocese to which it belongs, which is in turn a separate financial entity from the ecclesiastical province to which it belongs, and on up the chain. (Many Catholic Churches have borrowed money from their Diocese for various building projects and are required to pay it back with interest.) Those who view the Catholic Church in an uncharitable light often see this as a way to protect the Church from large legal settlements against priests or bishops who protected pedophiles. Others who view the Church more charitably see it as a way for each parish to guarantee that donations will work at improving the local community rather than go to some far away group. Money that is sent to the Vatican itself is referred to as "Peter's Pence", and there is typically a once-a-year fundraising drive for it.
In any case, just because the Italian government gave money to various Catholic Churches does not mean that it gave the money to the Vatican. The same goes for whatever illegal tax-breaks that you feel qualify as revenue. Institutionalized greed notwithstanding, you haven't demonstrated that the Vatican itself received billions of dollars in revenue.
... and, by the way, Harvard university's budget is in the range of billions of dollars [pdf], 2.6 in 2005 to be precise.
Fair enough.
As long as we're quoting from the Bible, why not disband the whole church system using Matthew 6?
For one thing, because Christ himself established the church system. (Matthew 16:18)
In Matthew 5, he says this:
You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house. Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.
The obvious reconciliation of these two passages is that of INTENT. You are ignoring the second half of the sentence. "Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before men, to be seen by them." He's not telling people to avoid doing acts of righteousness, he's telling them to avoid doing them solely for the sake of being seen (i.e. for the purpose of glorifying themselves).
The funny thing is that the Vatican probably has billions in capital at its disposal.
The Vatican's finances are a matter of public record, so you don't have to guess about its financial resources. You can look it up. The short answer is: no, they don't have billions in capital at their disposal. Their annual budget is less than that of Harvard University.
Hardly photographs. Nobody knows what people like Jesus looked like
The point is that you use them to bring to mind the real people, not to worship the items themselves.
and there isn't really any need to have pictures of him being crucified.
Sure, there's no need for any pictures of any family members. It's not as if everyone's life was barely worth living before Kodak came along. They are absolutely a luxury, and always have been. That doesn't mean that pictures of people you think highly of are a bad thing. Besides, we're talking about a picture of Jesus in His greatest moment! What exactly are protestants trying to avoid, here?
Those don't sounds very reformed to me. One of the first bullet points even refers to a Roman Catholic scripture...
The name of the section is Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox understanding of the use of images. Of course it'll talk about Catholics too.
Oh FFS. Mary is not your mother. I don't even believe in the things I used to, so it shouldn't really matter to me anymore, but from a biblical point of view, I don't think it makes sense. Maybe if you add in the Apocrypha it does, I don't know.
What, you skipped over Luke 1:48? All generations (including this one) will call her blessed, and those who seek to imitate Christ shouldn't be excluding parts of Christ's life as unsuitable for imitation.
God says not to make graven images, it can be interpreted many ways, and one of the main ways is not to worship anything other than God. The cross can be a symbol/reminder, but depicting Jesus would seem to me to be making a graven image of a god *shrug*
Graven images for the purpose of idolatry were forbidden. God didn't forbid images of himself (which, considering Man is made in the image of God, could be a problem). What matters is what you do with them. For example, the golden calf that the Jews worshipped briefly was not an image of a god, but rather was considered TO BE a god. That's idolatry.
If the Jews had worshipped the magic cow god in the sky and merely used the sculpture of a cow as a reminder of the cow god, then it wouldn't be idolatry (it would just be "having another god before the *real* God").
Consider, for instance, that in Colossians 1:15, Jesus is described as "the image of the invisible God". If your interpretation is correct, then that would be the first time God ever broke his own laws (by creating an image of himself).
But like I said, I consider the whole thing bollocks now, and the whole fact that people still argue so much about different interpretations of the bible etc just shows how tribal people are, they'll argue about anything.
Pot, meet kettle.
If on the other hand Christianity is true, then I still stand by the fact that the Roman Catholic church is trying to take control of it where it shouldn't be. Confessing to priests doesn't make much sense when you can confess direct to Jesus,
Why would Jesus give the apostles the power to forgive sins (John 20:23) if he didn't expect them to use it? He explicitly said that as he was sent by the Father, so he then sends the apostles. God breathes on man only two times in the entire Bible: once to give life to clay, and once to give that life the power of forgiving sins. That's how important it is. We're even directed, in James 5:16, explicitly: Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. So if you've been commanded to confess your sins to other humans, who would you rather confess to: a priest who has been given God's power to forgive sins, or someone who hasn't?
likewise with praying to Mary as if she is going to intercede for you with Jesus, wh
Indeed! My mistake; though your correction only strengthens my point. :)
My favorite uncomfortable question for people espousing the "bible only" viewpoint is as follows: What is the pillar and foundation of truth?
1st Timothy, 3:15: ...if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of truth.
The Church is the foundation of truth, not the Bible.
Makes a lot of sense when you consider that most folks at the time couldn't read!
While the Roman Catholic church worships images,
No, they don't. First of all, they only worship God---the way to worship something is to make sacrifices to it. Second, they have images of important people (e.g. saints) and they use them like photographs (i.e. you recognize that the image is merely a representation of the actual thing).
reformed/protestant churches still think of that as wrong.
Nope. Check out the Anglican/Episcopalian church, the Lutheran church, the Orthodox church. Maybe read some basic information before spreading this kind of ignorance.
When I was a Christian I regarded the catholic church to be an attempt by the Roman government to water down Christianity and actually turn it into an organisation under human control (the pope) rather than one that considers God as its leader.
And now that you're not a Christian, you've given up that viewpoint, right? Oh, wait, nevermind, you still believe all the old lies about Catholics.
Yes, whole sections of OT law are obviously superseded by the new testament (that's kind of the point), but that doesn't mean they aren't included in the bible.
The term you're looking for is "fulfilled", not "superseded".
The reformed church was a genuine attempt to get everything back as purely as possible to the way Jesus intended the church to be.
Jesus established his church upon the rock that is Peter. The "reformed" church has nothing to do with Peter, or with apostolic succession (as established by Peter himself).
The Roman Catholic church does a whole bunch of weird stuff that I've always considered decidedly un-christian :p Praying to Mary
Jesus, as a good Jew, honored his mother. Should a person seeking to be like Christ not do the same?
and confessing to priests,
Jesus gave the apostles the power to forgive sins (John 20:22-23), but not the ability to read minds. And in 2nd Corinthians 5:18-20, Paul points out that Christ gave him the "ministry of reconciliation", adding that God is "appealing through us" when this action of reconciling sinners is carried out.
etc.. the Roman Catholic church just tries to take Jesus out of the picture and gain control/money.
Reallllllly? Is that why Catholics are the ones that use a crucifix (with Jesus on it) and protestants use a plain crucifix?
Just how many televangelists are Catholics?
I think the grandfather comment was a reminder of how the Catholic Church has been known to react toward "open sourcing" their knowledges. One of the big differences between Catholics and Protestants was that Catholics were not allowed to read the bible. In fact it was illegal to own a Bible at home (in XVIIth century France at least)
"Ignorance of the Scripture is ignorance of Christ," declares the Catholic Church in Dei Verbum (the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation). In fact, those who *could* read Latin during the Middle Ages (and not everybody could - I know, it's shocking that there wasn't universal literacy during the Middle Ages) were highly encouraged to read the Bible. But it wasn't just latin. People as early as 680 AD (e.g. Caedmon) were translating portions of Scripture into the vernacular. Aelfric (~1000 AD), one of the best known Old English authors, paraphrased large portions of scripture in English. Gutenberg himself was a Catholic, and the first thing he used his printing press to do was print copies of The Bible. Even Martin Luther himself wrote: "We are compelled to concede to the Papists that they have the Word of God, that we received it from them, and that without them we should have no knowledge of it at all."
You're just full of anti-Catholic bile, is all. Try actually learning some history.
The Index (of forbidden books) was updated until the Vatican II council (1966) and is still considered by the Holy See to have a moral value as a list of the books one should prevent oneself from reading.
And I'm not surprised at all that you've gotten your details wrong here too. It was only updated until 1948 (having started in 1529, giving it roughly a 400 year run). 1966 was when it stopped being *published* - there's a difference. In any case, the stance of the Catholic Church on the matter is that people have a moral obligation to avoid circulating things that will endanger morals and faith (not just books - that's songs, movies, behaviors, whatever). Essentially, you're not supposed to knowingly convince people (including yourself) to abandon their faith. It's akin to saying: don't spread lies. If you believe X to be the truth, then distributing things that contradict it would be distributing lies. If it's a particularly important truth, then it's particularly important not to convince people of a contradiction of that truth.
The general feeling is that the Roman Catholic Church's main dogma is the "the doctrine is the truth" so if something seems to be the truth outside of the doctrine, it is dangerous and should be fought.
The "general feeling"? Of who, misinformed anti-Catholic bigots? The stance of the Catholic Church is essentially what Pope John Paul II said in a speech in 1996: Truth cannot contradict truth. If something seems to be truth outside of the doctrine, then cool! If it seems to contradict doctrine, then something has been misunderstood (either the doctrine has been misunderstood or the external evidence has been misunderstood). As another example, back in November of 2005, the AP reported the following:
A Vatican cardinal said Thursday the faithful should listen to what secular modern science has to offer, warning that religion risks turning into âoefundamentalismâ if it ignores scientific reason. Cardinal Paul Poupard, who heads the Pontifical Council for Culture, made the comments at a news conference on a Vatican project to help end the âoemutual prejudiceâ between religion and science that has long bedeviled the Roman Catholic Church and is part of the evolution debate in the United States.
The Church is not known for its research centers trying to find archaeological proofs of the Bible or to correct it
In everyday reading material? So that's SPERM in your eye?
:)
sorry, I couldn't resist.
There's always satellite internet. It isn't the greatest (long latencies), but it exists. Try HughesNet (http://www.hughesnet.com/) and WildBlue (http://www.wildblue.com/); I think there's another one out there, but I don't remember their name.
Thus, by trivial application of evolution, we see that the human race is biased towards being stupid. Over a long enough interval, intelligence will be relegated more and more to a genetic disease that prevents reproduction (add on the fact that high IQs also correlate with autism, which lowers your chance of reproduction as well). It's no wonder the public is fascinated by stupidity!
How long before nerds are bred out of the system?
Your argument can be easily demonstrated to be false. In particular: Apache is currently (and has been for a while) the most popular web server on the market. It has something approaching 70-80% market share. However it does not suffer from 70-80% of the vulnerabilities and exploits that are out there. What web server *does* suffer from 70-80% of the exploits? Microsoft IIS. For some reason, it's more exploited despite having significantly less market share. Thus: arguing that Microsoft's problem is simply one of exposure is a totally bogus argument.
According to IMDB, Michael Dorn owns (or used to) a T-33 and an F-86, among others. I wonder if it's him. Imdb link
The difference is that with x86 hardware, most things have published API's, and massive numbers of coders and hackers out there to try and beat on the code. Linux on the PPC suffers from a company that staunchly refuses to tell them how everything works, and from a very short supply of coders - especially since Apple started it's Darwin project, and has been sucking otherwise interested and talented coders away from Linux into making Darwin better. Just to help make it harder, lots of linux hardware code is poorly written - in that it's very x86 specific. One of the main differences is byte-order (the hex number 0x123456 is stored in memory in x86 machines as 0x563412 - and if you use shortcuts in your logic (which many people do) or hardcode byte-swapping into your code (which many people do) the driver has to be checked very carefully or in some cases entirely rewritten - and it's tricky because many times a driver will mostly work, but one or two byteswaps weren't found, which may cause unexpected behavior in some instances). And it's not as if Apple only offers one video card and one airport card, etc. Between models, they usually change quite a bit without telling anyone - because what do they care? So the fact that it works on one model means nothing on another model - so each one has to be checked. Which means someone who contributes code has to have access to each and every model. This isn't so difficult on the vast PC market - but on the Mac market? It's rare.
You should take a look at the way Apple has done the permission setup in MacOS X. The root user is disabled by default, and on top of that there are "Admin" users - which have permissions to install applications, apply system upgrades, and change hardware configurations/preferences (including network and anything else you'd want to be able to do).
Absolutely! sorta.
The G4 differs from the G3 in a lot of piddly little ways, and one great big, huge way. The G4 has the AltiVec engine (a vector computation unit, alongside the Integer and Floating Point Units). However, it's a little specialized and (afaik) there aren't any compilers that automatically generate AltiVec-optimized code. On the other hand, programmers can use AltiVec (vector engine) accellerated functions, which will then be much faster on G4's than on G3's.
As an example of an AltiVec accellerated function, look up the man page for writev(). Basically, it's a vectorized (and thus accellerated) version of write().