But by that standard it's all carbon neutral, as oil is just carbon that came from dead dinosaurs millions of years ago, which came from the vegetation at the time, which came from the air from back then.
But that way of looking at things isn't very useful. What matters is the effect actions have on the atmosphere that exists right now.
Also, forests persist a lot longer than 80 years. Individual trees aren't important. Forests may sequester carbon for thousands of years easily.
The whole article is silly...who depopulation native fields and cities? Europeans, right?
No, the disease the europeans brought with them
Where did they live? They made their own towns and cities. They didn't just come over on boats, kill all the natives and sail back to Europe did they?
No, but bringing millions via boats takes an awful long time. They didn't just show up and replace millions of natives with millions of europeans in one day. Natives died first, their fields got abandoned and forests grew in them, and over the centuries the europeans bred and took over the space. But meanwhile the forests were happily spreading.
No, Latin Vixen does not count as good, every bit of criteria I mentioned above is like her Hallmark.
Well, I'm not saying it's the pinnacle of the art, but it certainly doesn't look bad to me.
Still, the general point stands: some things people do with robots look like they came out of a nightmare. I figure even a half way decent furry head would look better.
Wake me up when they make heads more realistic and give them the ability to use your natural eyes.
I'm pretty sure somebody did that, but I forgot who.
Also, more realistic movements. I'm already working on one with sound-tracking ears and facial mimicry. LV doesn't have the engineering/mechanical experience to make that kind of thing.
Thus producing the OPPOSITE effect to that posited by the story.
Er, no, it's entirely consistent. The important part is the forest growing. There was an X amount of CO2 in the air, trees grew and locked up a part of it. Where do you see the opposite effect happening?
The story speculates that forest cover increased due to depopulation of North America by diseases and weapons brought by European settlers. The resulting increase in biomass was allegedly responsible for a reduction in CO2 leading to global cooling.
Right, so how is what I said the opposite of that? The forest has to grow in the first place.
Suppose initially there's no forest. Over 100 years a forest grows, absorbing quantity X of CO2. This carbon is now locked up in the trees.
Now eventually it reaches a stable phase. Trees absorb Y amount of CO2, produce leaves, leaves fall and rot, release Y amount of CO2. Trees die, but get replaced so the forest neither grows nor shrinks. I guess that's what you mean. But the carbon that went originally into making the trees is still locked up in the forest. Burning it will most definitely release carbon into the environment that wasn't free before.
IMO the biggest advantage would be that realistic fur is much easier to do than realistic skin. Most people haven't seen anything besides cats and dogs from very close, so they'd find it hard to tell when something isn't accurate. Also, unlike with skin, on a cat a good part of what you see is dead, which makes things easier.
No, I see a glorified sex doll funding interesting research. I just don't particularly mind the sex doll part. Not my thing, but hey, I have plenty weird interests of my own.
Besides lots of awesome tech is first adopted in silly toys for ridiculously rich people with nothing better to do. Then the tech gets cheaper and benefits everybody.
I think overall it ought to balance in women's favour actually. Both men and women could conceivably get a sex bot of the opposite gender. But reproduction is still actually done by women. A woman can go with artificial insemination when she wants, and problem solved. A man can't have children with his bot, he still needs to find an actual woman for that.
Though I don't know why people keep insisting on making creepy humanlike robots when they could just put it in a fursuit. There are plenty makers out there that make very good looking ones, even.
We'll probably have good humanoid robots before we have human-like intelligence. But that's okay, because you still can use the bot for telepresence. Think about being able to have a walk in a park, or help in some physical way a friend who is on the other side of the planet.
With a good enough bot and control system it could be completely revolutionary. Lots and lots of applications: making things easier for old and handicapped people, virtually visiting remote and hard to access locations, remote customer service where an operator connects to a local bot...
I'm quite happy to see people contribute to the development of such things
I think the idea is that in politization you bring up arguments like "but what about the economy?", trying to distract people from reality with emotional arguments.
In "scientization" you do the contrary: you bring up scientific sounding arguments, trying to distract people from the real political motivations.
In the end it comes down to the same thing, it's just that the angle is different. In one you emphasize politics, in the other you attempt to present a facade of rigor and impartiality.
Windows 32 and Windows 64 do not share a driver model. This is the source of your problem, not "binary drivers."
Sure it is. If there was source, porting it to 64 bit would have been straightforward enough. Hell, it might even compile fine as it is.
What if you have a device that had a well-performing Linux binary driver, that didn't "suck" (not all 3rd party drivers automatically suck you know) but the ABI changed?
Such an ocurrence indicates it's not being maintained anyway. Which means it's only a matter of time for it to break. Even if the ABI stays constant other things come up. Maybe it's a driver for PCI Express 1.0, which does something incorrectly which just happens to work, but that no longer holds true on 2.0. Then the ABI being identical won't help much. Code gets written with all kinds of assumptions, like memcpy having a defined behavior with overlapping source and destination (which according to the standard, it doesn't). What works today but makes an incorrect assumption might not tomorrow when somebody decides to optimize it and makes the assumption no longer hold.
What if you had a device that had a GLP driver in-kernel, but the Linux dictators dropped it? You're more or less fucked.
A lot less fucked than when a closed driver stops working. I have the option of fixing it myself, or paying somebody for it. There's generally very little reason for a Linux driver to get dropped.
Also drivers get dropped very rarely. My ancient Logitech Webcam Pro still works on my current modern 64 bit desktop, though there's very little point in it. That thing is like it came from the stone age. USB1, slow as heck, crap quality. Still works like back when I bought it, maybe 10 years ago or so. It's one of the first USB webcams in existence, I think.
Thanks to this I got my brother's old color laser printer and scanner, which didn't have 64 bit drivers either. They work just one on 64 bit Linux though.
However, there are tons of obscure little widgets that a more alpha geek might want to use, but now can't because somebody decided that he can choose between a modern Linux kernel, or his precious device!
Examples, please
Yes, it'd be great if there were GPL kernel drivers for every bit of obscure hardware in the world. There aren't and even you admit that your 3D driver is binary, because as we all know the current GPL kernel drivers for 3D cards suck donkey ass.
Which is why I work to change the situation by not buying anything that needs a proprietary driver. Like I said, work is being done on open card drivers, and as soon as that's done, no more binary drivers for me. If it has no driver in the kernel, I'll buy something else.
Thing is, as a Linux user I don't want third party drivers. They suck. They're written quickly, for whatever specific architecture is popular at the time, and quickly forgotten when the hardware gets old.
Hard to throw out a perfectly good laser printer because there's no 64 bit Windows driver for it. Which wasn't even that old.
What I look for is native Linux support. Native as in comes with the kernel. For that reason I don't care about all this whining about the ABI. I wouldn't use such a thing anyway. I want only hardware supported by the unpatched kernel, community maintained. Third party packages might as well not exist.
I only make an exception for 3D drivers right now, but as soon as the open drivers get good enough, I'm done with binary ones for good.
I think they made a mistake in doing it when people were going to work.
That's a bad time. Sleepy grumpy people rushing to work because they don't plan to waste any time on the way, and don't want to arrive early. Of course they won't want to arrive late either. The guy leaning against the wall was probably unemployed.
I have ocassionally passed near musicians in the underground that sounded very good, but still decided not to stop either because I was going to work, or because I couldn't wait to get home.
He should have played in a large public park or some such place, where people really can afford to stop and listen.
Kickstarter funds plenty weird projects. Say, the statue of Robocop is a pretty strange thing, but it got funded. Steve Grand's Grandroids project got funded.
About that one: Steve Grand made an A-Life game, in 1996. Then he left the company. Creatures 2 and 3, and Docking Station went progressively downhill, until the company went bankrupt in 2003. The game itself is an artificial life simulator, somewhat akin to the Sims but rather less user friendly. It heavily appeals to technical people who like to mess with the virtual genetics and chemistry.
So, the thing Grand made is 15 years old at this point, and the latest game is 8 years old. Plus it's a very niche game that appeals to a particular kind of person. He still got $57K, about twice of what he asked for.
Kickstarter also funded multiple projects related to stuff like 3D printers, CNC machines, and laser cutters. Hardly popular for the masses kind of thing.
One doesn't need to do really popular stuff to get funded on Kickstarter. In fact the reason to get funded there is that your work is not mainstream enough, and the people who pay are interested in funding things that are hard to find because they don't have such a wide appeal.
Dude, you're not getting it. Jesus was making the point to the Pharisees that they are hypocrits for enforcing one set of laws (prohibition against pork), but not others (killing those who curse their mom and dad). If the Pharisees are not going to condemn those for committing a serious crime, then why be such hardasses about bacon? It's not what you eat that makes you evil, it's your words and actions that you should be judged by.
I get it fine. What I'm saying has nothing to do with pork, though.
Jesus' complaint can be resolved in two ways: A. The Pharisees stop enforcing the pork prohibition B. The Pharisees start killing the children that curse their parents
The implication of that option B is even in the slightest a serious option is what I find utterly disgusting. In my view, the Pharisees are mostly in the right here. They're choosing not to enforce a brutal law. That's good. Jesus' view of that you should either follow all of it, or none of it doesn't impress me much.
There are societies where human sacrifice is not bad, murder? Let's make that killing and things are a lot more fuzzy. One societies murder is another's execution, population control, or solution to a problem.
Sure. Sacrifice was perfectly fine in the Maya culture.
Recently I saw somebody effectively saying that biblical morality is relative too, to explain Abraham's attempted sacrifice of his son. You see, back at the beginning, God hadn't given the commandment's yet, so all Abraham had to go on was God's orders. So complying was the right thing. And so was stopping. He couldn't attempt to refuse on moral grounds because those morals weren't passed on yet.
I never mentioned the bible so not try to narrow the focus I said an absolute morality.
Ok. Where does your absolute morality come from, and why doesn't everybody agree?
However you need to work on your logic skills. If their is no absolute morality then by definition morality is arbitrary. You may try and define it as what is best for society but what defines what is best for the society? Wouldn't that be the members of the society? Of not then who or what. Their must be some definer for what is moral and not. if their is no absolute morality then you are really only left with the members of society.
I already explained. Basically, it's complicated. It's not all absolute, nor all entirely arbitrary. There is a spectrum, and different parts of morality fall on different places in it.
Some morals exist because not having them is obviously counterproductive. Eg, allowing indiscriminate murder would quickly result in the end of the society that had such a rule.
Some are derived from our behavior and instincts. We are social animals, and we're wired to care about our friends and children, without needing to be told even.
Some are indeed arbitrary. Things like marriage related customs and what constitutes polite behavior differs between cultures, up to there being cases where in one culture the correct thing is the opposite of the correct thing in another.
And a whole bunch of rules is a consequence of other rules.
Take a building code for instance: some rules are dictated by the laws of physics, some are codified good practices, and some are arbitrary but there because having something done the same way everywhere is a good thing Take mains voltage for instance. There's no intrinsically correct voltage. What's correct depends on where you are. Then some rules are derived from those, like the correct size of conductors depending on the voltage and current used.
So no logically you can not have it both ways. You can not say that is no absolute morality and then say it is also not arbitrary.
Sure I can. Easy: it's neither black nor white, it's a spectrum.
Now I will not say that I am fully aware of what is absolutely moral and what is not. Their was a time when I was pro capitol punishment but I learned and changed my mind.
So your morality changed. You're just trying to hold on to the idea that you saw the light and found the Truth because the alternative makes you uncomfortable.
If society says you are immoral you are and you are wrong to go counter to them unless at some point you convince them you are right. Or you are moral untile society says you are not and then you are wrong. Terrible system isn't it?
There's no such thing as perfection. We can make improvements, but yes, historically that's precisely how things have worked.
We had that with universal suffrage and slavery for instance. Soon we'll have it with gay marriage. In 50 years from now people will wonder why there ever was an argument, because it's obvious there's nothing wrong with it. Somebody from a couple centuries back would have the complete certainty that the planet is ruled by Satan though.
Yet studies show that people that are religious tend to be happier and live longer.
I'm not sure about that. Sure, studies may show it, but there's hardly a precise way of measuring the amount of happiness. In my experience, religious people have many sources of stress that I don't.
Also, religion creates a bias against admitting unhappiness. Religion is supposed to show you the right way to live, and should make you happy. Admitting unhappiness would in part involve admitting to some sort of wrongdoing or that your religion doesn't work.
I disagree and gave counter examples of societies without any religion that where far more evil.
There are no known examples to my knowledge of societies that are entirely without religion where coercion wasn't used. However, there are countries like Sweden with a small percentage of believers which don't seem particularly evil to me.
It is funny but even those that will use the "scary sky god" line believe in an absolute morality when it is convent for them. If they do not then things like slavery, discrimination, and even genocide are "not evil" if the majority of the population agrees. They will say that X is wrong and society must change. However if everything is relative in morality then they are wrong. If you disagree with the society than you are wrong if you agree you are right. That is the danger of dismissing the concept of an absolut morality.
Sorry, there's no absolute morality as plainly evidenced by that nobody agrees with what the absolute morality supposed to be. Your morality doesn't agree with that of the other religions and other times. If you use a bible to "prove" that slavery is evil, then you're using the same book that was used to "prove" it's perfectly fine in the past.
However, I don't think that the inexistence of an absolute morality means that morality is entirely arbitrary. Some rules are pretty much universally agreed on (murder is bad, human sacrifices are bad). Some rules are quite arbitrary (like those relating to marriage), and some are logical consequences of other rules (like adultery, which depends on marriage working in a specific way. In a hypothetical society with no marriage and completely open relationships, it wouldn't exist).
The lesson I think that should be drawn from that is that all attempts of strictly controlling people's behaviors are necessarily brutal and repressive. Both the extreme of fundamentalism and outlawing religion are bad and in fact effectively the same thing in the end: an attempt to force the entire population to adhere to a specific behavior. Whether that is called a religion or not doesn't make much difference.
Religion shouldn't be forcefully eliminated, it should be made redundant and unnecessary, so that it just slowly fades away. Believing in Helios is not forbidden, but nobody just cares anymore, because he's not needed for anything.
Contaldi has poor reading skills. 'Peer review' is of low value from people who can't understand straightforward explanations that were understood by others.
I think you're being too harsh. Clarity is important. Misunderstandings get people on the wrong way. I think it's much better to add a clarification than to complain about people misreading the work.
Right. And the specific complaint is that they're ignoring the commandment that tells that "Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death".
To me, that doesn't sound like unconditional love at all.
Slashdot Mirror
But by that standard it's all carbon neutral, as oil is just carbon that came from dead dinosaurs millions of years ago, which came from the vegetation at the time, which came from the air from back then.
But that way of looking at things isn't very useful. What matters is the effect actions have on the atmosphere that exists right now.
Also, forests persist a lot longer than 80 years. Individual trees aren't important. Forests may sequester carbon for thousands of years easily.
No, the disease the europeans brought with them
No, but bringing millions via boats takes an awful long time. They didn't just show up and replace millions of natives with millions of europeans in one day. Natives died first, their fields got abandoned and forests grew in them, and over the centuries the europeans bred and took over the space. But meanwhile the forests were happily spreading.
No, not really. Experiments have been done and results aren't all that impressive.
Plants also need water and minerals, and space. They might grow faster for a while but eventually they'll just bump into another limit.
Well, I'm not saying it's the pinnacle of the art, but it certainly doesn't look bad to me.
Still, the general point stands: some things people do with robots look like they came out of a nightmare. I figure even a half way decent furry head would look better.
I'm pretty sure somebody did that, but I forgot who.
Now that is interesting, got links/pictures?
Er, no, it's entirely consistent. The important part is the forest growing. There was an X amount of CO2 in the air, trees grew and locked up a part of it. Where do you see the opposite effect happening?
Right, so how is what I said the opposite of that? The forest has to grow in the first place.
I think you're mixing up something.
Suppose initially there's no forest. Over 100 years a forest grows, absorbing quantity X of CO2. This carbon is now locked up in the trees.
Now eventually it reaches a stable phase. Trees absorb Y amount of CO2, produce leaves, leaves fall and rot, release Y amount of CO2. Trees die, but get replaced so the forest neither grows nor shrinks. I guess that's what you mean. But the carbon that went originally into making the trees is still locked up in the forest. Burning it will most definitely release carbon into the environment that wasn't free before.
Some people make very good looking ones
IMO the biggest advantage would be that realistic fur is much easier to do than realistic skin. Most people haven't seen anything besides cats and dogs from very close, so they'd find it hard to tell when something isn't accurate. Also, unlike with skin, on a cat a good part of what you see is dead, which makes things easier.
What's the rush? He's dead, and that's not going to change. It doesn't matter that much if it takes a few hours to post something.
I'd rather have a well written article than "Dennis Ritchie was reported dead 5 minutes ago" and nothing else, because of the rush to publish.
No, I see a glorified sex doll funding interesting research. I just don't particularly mind the sex doll part. Not my thing, but hey, I have plenty weird interests of my own.
Besides lots of awesome tech is first adopted in silly toys for ridiculously rich people with nothing better to do. Then the tech gets cheaper and benefits everybody.
Why just women?
I think overall it ought to balance in women's favour actually. Both men and women could conceivably get a sex bot of the opposite gender. But reproduction is still actually done by women. A woman can go with artificial insemination when she wants, and problem solved. A man can't have children with his bot, he still needs to find an actual woman for that.
That's at most a catgirl, not furry enough.
Though I don't know why people keep insisting on making creepy humanlike robots when they could just put it in a fursuit. There are plenty makers out there that make very good looking ones, even.
Why, I think it's awesome.
We'll probably have good humanoid robots before we have human-like intelligence. But that's okay, because you still can use the bot for telepresence. Think about being able to have a walk in a park, or help in some physical way a friend who is on the other side of the planet.
With a good enough bot and control system it could be completely revolutionary. Lots and lots of applications: making things easier for old and handicapped people, virtually visiting remote and hard to access locations, remote customer service where an operator connects to a local bot...
I'm quite happy to see people contribute to the development of such things
Progress seems to be steadily moving towards making Chobits a reality.
They should make sure to use redundant SSDs for storage, and have backup functionality, though. Hard drives lead to tragedy.
I suppose it's a matter of perspective.
I think the idea is that in politization you bring up arguments like "but what about the economy?", trying to distract people from reality with emotional arguments.
In "scientization" you do the contrary: you bring up scientific sounding arguments, trying to distract people from the real political motivations.
In the end it comes down to the same thing, it's just that the angle is different. In one you emphasize politics, in the other you attempt to present a facade of rigor and impartiality.
Sure it is. If there was source, porting it to 64 bit would have been straightforward enough. Hell, it might even compile fine as it is.
Such an ocurrence indicates it's not being maintained anyway. Which means it's only a matter of time for it to break. Even if the ABI stays constant other things come up. Maybe it's a driver for PCI Express 1.0, which does something incorrectly which just happens to work, but that no longer holds true on 2.0. Then the ABI being identical won't help much. Code gets written with all kinds of assumptions, like memcpy having a defined behavior with overlapping source and destination (which according to the standard, it doesn't). What works today but makes an incorrect assumption might not tomorrow when somebody decides to optimize it and makes the assumption no longer hold.
A lot less fucked than when a closed driver stops working. I have the option of fixing it myself, or paying somebody for it. There's generally very little reason for a Linux driver to get dropped.
Also drivers get dropped very rarely. My ancient Logitech Webcam Pro still works on my current modern 64 bit desktop, though there's very little point in it. That thing is like it came from the stone age. USB1, slow as heck, crap quality. Still works like back when I bought it, maybe 10 years ago or so. It's one of the first USB webcams in existence, I think.
Thanks to this I got my brother's old color laser printer and scanner, which didn't have 64 bit drivers either. They work just one on 64 bit Linux though.
Examples, please
Which is why I work to change the situation by not buying anything that needs a proprietary driver. Like I said, work is being done on open card drivers, and as soon as that's done, no more binary drivers for me. If it has no driver in the kernel, I'll buy something else.
Thing is, as a Linux user I don't want third party drivers. They suck. They're written quickly, for whatever specific architecture is popular at the time, and quickly forgotten when the hardware gets old.
Hard to throw out a perfectly good laser printer because there's no 64 bit Windows driver for it. Which wasn't even that old.
What I look for is native Linux support. Native as in comes with the kernel. For that reason I don't care about all this whining about the ABI. I wouldn't use such a thing anyway. I want only hardware supported by the unpatched kernel, community maintained. Third party packages might as well not exist.
I only make an exception for 3D drivers right now, but as soon as the open drivers get good enough, I'm done with binary ones for good.
I think they made a mistake in doing it when people were going to work.
That's a bad time. Sleepy grumpy people rushing to work because they don't plan to waste any time on the way, and don't want to arrive early. Of course they won't want to arrive late either. The guy leaning against the wall was probably unemployed.
I have ocassionally passed near musicians in the underground that sounded very good, but still decided not to stop either because I was going to work, or because I couldn't wait to get home.
He should have played in a large public park or some such place, where people really can afford to stop and listen.
Kickstarter funds plenty weird projects. Say, the statue of Robocop is a pretty strange thing, but it got funded. Steve Grand's Grandroids project got funded.
About that one: Steve Grand made an A-Life game, in 1996. Then he left the company. Creatures 2 and 3, and Docking Station went progressively downhill, until the company went bankrupt in 2003. The game itself is an artificial life simulator, somewhat akin to the Sims but rather less user friendly. It heavily appeals to technical people who like to mess with the virtual genetics and chemistry.
So, the thing Grand made is 15 years old at this point, and the latest game is 8 years old. Plus it's a very niche game that appeals to a particular kind of person. He still got $57K, about twice of what he asked for.
Kickstarter also funded multiple projects related to stuff like 3D printers, CNC machines, and laser cutters. Hardly popular for the masses kind of thing.
I recently threw a few bucks to an artist making a book of illustrations of japanese demons. That one got 9X what he asked for.
One doesn't need to do really popular stuff to get funded on Kickstarter. In fact the reason to get funded there is that your work is not mainstream enough, and the people who pay are interested in funding things that are hard to find because they don't have such a wide appeal.
Ok, so what exactly should they do regarding the pork and disrespect of parents?
I get it fine. What I'm saying has nothing to do with pork, though.
Jesus' complaint can be resolved in two ways:
A. The Pharisees stop enforcing the pork prohibition
B. The Pharisees start killing the children that curse their parents
The implication of that option B is even in the slightest a serious option is what I find utterly disgusting. In my view, the Pharisees are mostly in the right here. They're choosing not to enforce a brutal law. That's good. Jesus' view of that you should either follow all of it, or none of it doesn't impress me much.
Sure. Sacrifice was perfectly fine in the Maya culture.
Recently I saw somebody effectively saying that biblical morality is relative too, to explain Abraham's attempted sacrifice of his son. You see, back at the beginning, God hadn't given the commandment's yet, so all Abraham had to go on was God's orders. So complying was the right thing. And so was stopping. He couldn't attempt to refuse on moral grounds because those morals weren't passed on yet.
Ok. Where does your absolute morality come from, and why doesn't everybody agree?
I already explained. Basically, it's complicated. It's not all absolute, nor all entirely arbitrary. There is a spectrum, and different parts of morality fall on different places in it.
Some morals exist because not having them is obviously counterproductive. Eg, allowing indiscriminate murder would quickly result in the end of the society that had such a rule.
Some are derived from our behavior and instincts. We are social animals, and we're wired to care about our friends and children, without needing to be told even.
Some are indeed arbitrary. Things like marriage related customs and what constitutes polite behavior differs between cultures, up to there being cases where in one culture the correct thing is the opposite of the correct thing in another.
And a whole bunch of rules is a consequence of other rules.
Take a building code for instance: some rules are dictated by the laws of physics, some are codified good practices, and some are arbitrary but there because having something done the same way everywhere is a good thing Take mains voltage for instance. There's no intrinsically correct voltage. What's correct depends on where you are. Then some rules are derived from those, like the correct size of conductors depending on the voltage and current used.
Sure I can. Easy: it's neither black nor white, it's a spectrum.
So your morality changed. You're just trying to hold on to the idea that you saw the light and found the Truth because the alternative makes you uncomfortable.
There's no such thing as perfection. We can make improvements, but yes, historically that's precisely how things have worked.
We had that with universal suffrage and slavery for instance. Soon we'll have it with gay marriage. In 50 years from now people will wonder why there ever was an argument, because it's obvious there's nothing wrong with it. Somebody from a couple centuries back would have the complete certainty that the planet is ruled by Satan though.
I'm not sure about that. Sure, studies may show it, but there's hardly a precise way of measuring the amount of happiness. In my experience, religious people have many sources of stress that I don't.
Also, religion creates a bias against admitting unhappiness. Religion is supposed to show you the right way to live, and should make you happy. Admitting unhappiness would in part involve admitting to some sort of wrongdoing or that your religion doesn't work.
There are no known examples to my knowledge of societies that are entirely without religion where coercion wasn't used. However, there are countries like Sweden with a small percentage of believers which don't seem particularly evil to me.
Sorry, there's no absolute morality as plainly evidenced by that nobody agrees with what the absolute morality supposed to be. Your morality doesn't agree with that of the other religions and other times. If you use a bible to "prove" that slavery is evil, then you're using the same book that was used to "prove" it's perfectly fine in the past.
However, I don't think that the inexistence of an absolute morality means that morality is entirely arbitrary. Some rules are pretty much universally agreed on (murder is bad, human sacrifices are bad). Some rules are quite arbitrary (like those relating to marriage), and some are logical consequences of other rules (like adultery, which depends on marriage working in a specific way. In a hypothetical society with no marriage and completely open relationships, it wouldn't exist).
The lesson I think that should be drawn from that is that all attempts of strictly controlling people's behaviors are necessarily brutal and repressive. Both the extreme of fundamentalism and outlawing religion are bad and in fact effectively the same thing in the end: an attempt to force the entire population to adhere to a specific behavior. Whether that is called a religion or not doesn't make much difference.
Religion shouldn't be forcefully eliminated, it should be made redundant and unnecessary, so that it just slowly fades away. Believing in Helios is not forbidden, but nobody just cares anymore, because he's not needed for anything.
I think you're being too harsh. Clarity is important. Misunderstandings get people on the wrong way. I think it's much better to add a clarification than to complain about people misreading the work.
Right. And the specific complaint is that they're ignoring the commandment that tells that "Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death".
To me, that doesn't sound like unconditional love at all.