I don't want to be told that what consenting adults do is as bad as child rape
You don't want to be told that, in all objectiveness, whether consentual or not, strangling your partner while stuffing lemons up her butt and smearing her with dog excrement is just as morally depraved and sexually deviant as raping a child?
Pretty soon you'll be drooling in an insane asylum, alongside the Marquis de Sade, helping him enact some scenes from his novels. Have fun with that!;-)
.. one of the biggest problems with the Catholic church [..] is the dependence on tradition over scriptures.
That's not true. Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition are both held to the same degree of reverence. I'll quote the Catechism once more:
81 "Sacred Scripture is the speech of God as it is put down in writing under the breath of the Holy Spirit."
"and [Holy] Tradition transmits in its entirety the Word of God which has been entrusted to the apostles by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit. It transmits it to the successors of the apostles so that, enlightened by the Spirit of truth, they may faithfully preserve, expound and spread it abroad by their preaching."
82 As a result the Church, to whom the transmission and interpretation of Revelation is entrusted, "does not derive her certainty about all revealed truths from the holy Scriptures alone. Both Scripture and Tradition must be accepted and honoured with equal sentiments of devotion and reverence."
[...]
85 "The task of giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of God, whether in its written form or in the form of Tradition, has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church alone. Its authority in this matter is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ." This means that the task of interpretation has been entrusted to the bishops in communion with the successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome.
86 "Yet this Magisterium is not superior to the Word of God, but is its servant. It teaches only what has been handed on to it. At the divine command and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it listens to this devotedly, guards it with dedication and expounds it faithfully. All that it proposes for belief as being divinely revealed is drawn from this single deposit of faith."
The entirety of your argument was based on comentaries writen over 1000 years after christ.
That's simply not true either. The entirety of my argument is based on passages from the Bible. Any quotes I gave from sources more recent than the the Bible only serve to reinforce my argument, to the extent that Protestants do not have a leg to stand on in defence of their own position. Prior to the Reformation, Protestants cannot produce any evidence from Christian history which supports their doctrinal beliefs. Catholics, on the other hand, have truck loads of extant manuscripts which prove their position.
As for your "1000 years after Christ" nonsense, here's a quote from St. Ignatius of Antioch who wrote around the year 100AD on his journey to Rome to be executed by the Emperor Trajan for being a Christian (from the Letter to the Smyrnaeans):
But look at the men who have those perverted notions about the grace of Jesus Christ which has come down to us, and see how contrary to the mind of God they are.[..]
They even absent themselves from the Eucharist and the public prayers because they will not admit that the Eucharist is the self-same body of our Saviour Jesus Christ which suffered for our sins, and which the Father in His goodness afterwards raised up again. Consequently, since they reject God's good gifts, they are doomed in their disputatiousness. They would have done better to learn charity, if they were ever to know any resurrection. [...]
Abjure all fractions, for they are the beginning of evils. Follow your bishop, every one of you, as obediently as Jesus Christ followed the Father. Obey your clergy too, as you would the Apostles; give your deacons the same reverence that you would to a command from God. Make sure no step affecting the Church is ever taken by anyone without the bishop's sanction. The sole Eucharist you should consider valid is one that is celebrated by the bishop himself, or by some person authorised by him. Where the bishop is to be seen, there let all his people be; just as wherever Jesus Christ is present, we have the catholic Church.
Your taking your beliefs, ones that I'm fairly sure are not Orthodox even in the Catholic church (and definately not in any protestant denomination)
Obviously my beliefs aren't held by any Protestant deomination - that's the whole point of my posts, to show that there is a gaping hole in the foundation of Protestantism. This hole is the result of moving away from the one Church founded by Jesus Christ, and the behaviour of fundies (which started this whole thread off) is a consequence of their clinging to heresy.
As for my beliefs not being orthodox within the Catholic Church, would you care to quantify this statement? Everything I've said is backed up by the Catechism:
1336 The first announcement of the Eucharist divided the disciples, just as the announcement of the Passion scandalized them: "This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?" The Eucharist and the Cross are stumbling blocks. It is the same mystery and it never ceases to be an occasion of division. "Will you also go away?": The Lord's question echoes through the ages, as a loving invitation to discover that only he has "the words of eternal life" and that to receive in faith the gift of his Eucharist is to receive the Lord himself.
[..]
1374 The mode of Christ's presence under the Eucharistic species is unique. It raises the Eucharist above all the sacraments as "the perfection of the spiritual life and the end to which all the sacraments tend." In the most blessed sacrament of the Eucharist "the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, the whole Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained." "This presence is called 'real' - by which is not intended to exclude the other types of presence as if they could not be 'real' too, but because it is presence in the fullest sense: that is to say, it is a substantial presence by which Christ, God and man, makes himself wholly and entirely present."
1375 It is by the conversion of the bread and wine into Christ's body and blood that Christ becomes present in this sacrament. the Church Fathers strongly affirmed the faith of the Church in the efficacy of the Word of Christ and of the action of the Holy Spirit to bring about this conversion. Thus St. John Chrysostom declares:
"It is not man that causes the things offered to become the Body and Blood of Christ, but he who was crucified for us, Christ himself. the priest, in the role of Christ, pronounces these words, but their power and grace are God's. This is my body, he says. This word transforms the things offered."
and St. Ambrose says about this conversion:
"Be convinced that this is not what nature has formed, but what the blessing has consecrated. the power of the blessing prevails over that of nature, because by the blessing nature itself is changed.... Could not Christ's word, which can make from nothing what did not exist, change existing things into what they were not before? It is no less a feat to give things their original nature than to change their nature."
1376 The Council of Trent summarizes the Catholic faith by declaring: "Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly his body that he was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation."
1377 The Eucharistic presence of Christ begins at the moment of the consecration and endures as long as the Eucharistic species subsist. Christ is present whole and entire in each of the species and whole and entire in each of their parts, in such a way that the breaking of the br
Yeah, so you think christ wanted us to canabolize his body. But then later when this was pointed out you said it would be crazy for anyone to believe that.
For goodness sake, read that post of mine again. Hesiod was claiming that I was trying to insist that the Christians in the Bible were cannibalising THEMSELVES. Read his exact precise words:
"You are saying that these people, literally, ate themselves (their own flesh) to the point of killing themselves?"
Christ is quite clear in John 6 that we must eat his flesh and drink his blood if we are to have any life in us.
Is this cannibalism? What does cannibalism mean? Dictionary.com says that it is "A person who eats the flesh of other humans". Was Christ strictly human? No. He is, at the same time, the man Jesus and the Second Person of the Trinity. So, strictly speaking, you cannot label as cannibalism what it is Christ is asking us to do, it is more than that - we must eat God!
But, like Hesiod, some of the disciples thought at the time that Christ wanted us to eat the flesh of his physical body (like there'd be enough to go around!). Christ knew this, and he said to them (from John 6):
"60 Then many of his disciples who were listening
said, "This saying is hard; who can accept
it?"
61 Since Jesus knew that his disciples were
murmuring about this, he said to them, "Does
this shock you?
62 What if you were to see the Son of Man
ascending to where he was before?
63 It is the spirit that gives life, while the
flesh is of no avail."
The disciples thought that he meant they would have to eat the flesh of the physical body of Christ stood before them. But Christ said no, that he would ascend back to heaven in his physical body, and the commandment to eat his flesh and drink his blood would be met through a spiritual, mystical mechanism. And that's exactly what happened.
This commandment of Christ's doesn't just come out of thin air, nor is it some sort of man-made doctrine. If you have read your Bible at all, you'll notice in the Old Testament that God makes it a specific requirement of the Jews that they must offer various sacrifices. But it's never a simple matter of simply slaughtering an animal and burning it on the altar - the Jews always had to consume the offering because that was an essential part of the ritual.
Christ was the perfect sacrifice offered up for the forgiveness of our sins, once, and for all. In keeping with the precedents set out by God himself, we must consume the sacrifice if it is to be efficacious for us as individuals.
When Catholics celebrate Mass, they are not re-sacrificing Christ once again. This is a common misconception people have against the Church. As Paul said, when we celebrate the Lord's Supper, we are proclaiming his death until he comes again - we do it in rememberance of Christ's death because Christ's sacrifice was once, and for all. But, that doesn't mean one can imply the Lord's Supper is all a metaphor.
For 2000 years, we have believed that, somehow, Christ becomes truly present in the consecrated bread and wine - body, blood, soul, and divinity, Christ is there. We don't offer any explanation as to how this comes about because we simply do not know, it is a mystery - we just take Christ at his word, and practice the faith as handed down to us from the Apostles.
Hesiod laughs at this because, according to him, "it's contrary to the established laws.. of all science". Even if this were true, how does it matter? Is God not the creator of these laws? Why does everyone always assume God is bound by the laws of his own creation? With God, nothing shall be impossible!
Anyway, to put all this in simple language for you, what I am arguing is this: we must eat the flesh of Christ and drink his blood if we are to have any life in us. That's
Ok, so I read through this entire thread a couple times hoping somewhere along the line you would actualy say something...
I could say the same for you! Would you care to elaborate on what you disliked about what I said, or what you wanted me to clarify?
If you wanted me to say something interesting, why not just ask some decent questions? When twits like hesiod come out of the woodwoork, the conversation usually hits the gutter pretty fast. You can't expect anything interesting to come out of such exchanges.
The simple fact is that the Cross and the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist are always going to be stumbling blocks for people. Who could possibly believe that God would incarnate as man just to be crucified and then resurrect himself from the grave? The Greeks had a real hard time with that one in St. Paul's day. Similarly, as we've seen on this thread, how could anyone believe that this same God makes himself truly present in consecrated bread and wine all because he wants us to eat him? As we read in John 6, the disciples stumbled big time on hearing this one.
It's also interesting to compare the real presence of Christ in the New Testament bread with the Bread of the Presence from the Old Testament. There are also many other foreshadowings of the Eucharist in the OT (e.g., mana in the desert, unleaven bread eaten at Passover, the Ark of the Convenant which contained the Ten Commandments, Aaron's staff, and some of the mana - all symbolic of the forthcoming Christ).
As I said earlier in the thread, the situation is really this simple: you either believe that the Church fell into grievous error for over 1500 years on this issue thus making Christ out to be a liar, or you believe that John 6, Mat 26:26-28 1 Cor 11:23-34, are simply metaphors for some sort of spiritual teaching - a belief that is not backed up by those passages, the rest of the Bible, or Christian history. Either way, you're rejecting the words of Christ in some manner, and you've thus fallen into a hole.
But I suppose the big problem here, as witnessed on this thread, is how do you get yourself out of a hole unless you realise you're actually in a hole?
Do you make that comparison under the false assumption that it affects my argument at all?
Sure it affects your argument. Your reasoning was essentially Gnostic in character. Gnostic teachings were rejected by all of Christianity from the outset. Therefore your hypothesis is not keeping with the character of traditional Christian beliefs, which makes it anomalous.
... Jesus wanted people to drink his blood and eat his flesh!
That's exactly what I am saying. But you seem to have been confused last time around when you thought I was saying "that these people, literally, ate themselves (their own flesh) to the point of killing themselves." Eating the flesh of God and eating your own body are not the same thing.
... many Christians do not agree with you. But more importantly, plenty of biblical scholars disagree with you.
So what? Truth is not determined by a majority vote. And any way, most Christians do agree with me, over 1 billion of them in fact.
YOU are the one making extremely extraordinary claims, the burden of proof is on you
No, I'm afraid it's not. I am simply proclaiming the beliefs that the Church has had for over 2000 years. Only recently has there been any widespread doubt about these things, so it is for the doubters to prove their position for they are the ones deviating from the standard.
Tell me what I misunderstood.
So far, you have demonstrated a misunderstanding of Christian history; a misunderstanding that a philosophy condemned by the early Church cannot possibly hope to yield the truth about Christ; a misunderstanding of the difference between eating and drinking bread and wine which has been mystically transformed into the real body and blood of Christ, and eating real human flesh; a misunderstanding that "the established laws.. of all science" do not explain every single aspect of the universe and the nature of human life; a misunderstanding that some kooky website and a bunch of equally kooky biblical scholars don't prove your position simply because they are in agreement with you; a misunderstanding that the burden of proof lies with you.
I went to a Jesuit University. Do you know what that means?
Yes. They taught you nothing about the catholic church.
English, motherfucker, do you understand it?
Oh, how belligerent of you. Swearing always adds to one's credibility.
Secondly, even if I did mean Gnosticism, "the church," made that decision a thousand years after Christ died. Not exactly a solid source.:)
I didn't say you meant Gnosticism, I said your statement was "too much like Gnosticism". And the Church had already spoken against several forms of Gnosticism before 500AD.
The only way to translate what you have written is "Jesus made sick those that did not partake in his cannibalism." You are saying that these people, literally, ate themselves (their own flesh) to the point of killing themselves?
Hahaha! Wow! I really don't understand how anyone could possibly translate "... that many of them were sick and had died because they had failed to discern the true body and blood of Christ when they came together to celebrate the Lord's Supper" as meaning that people were cannibalising themselves! Man, I've heard some dumb "translations" in my time, but this one transcends the hitherto known bounds of human incompetence.
Well, I can insist it because it's contrary to the established laws.. of all science and it reeks of ignorant mysticism.
Bwahaha! As a professional computational astrophysicist, I can say you really have some deep misconceptions about the "established laws of all science".
I believe it's all hogwash anyway, so it makes no personal difference to me
Yes, I suppose a man of your degree of intellectual malformation and miscomprehension of the English language has more pertinent issues with which to be concerned.
... but perhaps he believed that true wisdom can only come when one figures out the metaphor for themself
Not likely. This is too much like the thinking of Gnosticism, which has been condemned by the Church.
It might just be that those disciples were not mentally ready for the statement to be personally meaningful.
This view is simply not supported by the Bible, nor anywhere in Christian history (except in heretical circles). The disciples knew that Christ was being quite literal, and the language used to record the event in the book of John is extremely clear and precise leaving it impossible to honestly formulate any theories of a metaphorical sense.
When Christ was being metaphorical, he spoke specifically in parables. The Bread of Life discourse in John 6 is clearly not a parable.
But we are also failing to recall what Paul wrote to the Corinthians, explaining that many of them were sick and had died because they had failed to discern the true body and blood of Christ when they came together to celebrate the Lord's Supper. This completely blows away any Protestant metaphorical fantasies about the Eucharist! If Christ was being metaphorical, then how come those people were eating and drinking themselves unto death?
Paul's letter to the Corinthians clearly demonstrates that the Apostles and the whole Church at that time truly believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. How can you possibly insist that they were in error?
Umm... yeah, actualy it is a metaphor, and its pretty clear, as in no sane human could possibly argue otherwise if they have a clue what they are talking about.
Gee, well, then I guess the whole of Christendom was in grievous error for over 1500 years! How did all those smart guys, people like Sts. Jerome, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, how did they get it all so wrong?
But... hold on a minute! Didn't Christ also say, "... you are Cephas, and on this rock will I build my Church; and the gates of hades shall not prevail against"? I guess Christ must've been metaphorical here too because, if what you say is true, then the gates of Hell have prevailed against the Church, and that kinda makes Christ look like a liar.
Wow! Our Lord is so great, he let us spend almost 1600 years believing in error that we were somehow really eating his body and really drinking his blood. He's so great, he only managed to set the Church right a couple hundred years ago, when people finally realised he was just being metaphorical!
Get real, dude. No sane person could believe that all these words of Christ were merely metaphorical - their meaning is perfectly clear to anyone who approaches the Bible without any biases and preconcieved ideas. His words were also perfectly clear to his disciples at the time because they walked off in disgust and left him. Just think about that for a moment. If Christ was just being metaphorical, why did all the disciples disassociate themselves from him? Why did Christ let them walk off without clarifying his metaphor? Christ lost followers over this, and he did nothing to bring them back! Why?
To me at least, it seemed like there was a huge amount of conflict between different Christian groups fighting with each other for dominance and declaring each other heretics. And even at the point where the modern roots of Christianity really took hold, trying to remove the existence of the other Christian philosophies became an even more significant and workable priority.
There was (and is) a lot of conflict between Christians over articles of faith. The reason for this is because there is only one faith, one Church, one Truth.
St. Paul's letters in the New Testament, especially those to the Corinthians, are very explicit in their teaching that "there must be no divisions among you" because there is only one body of Christ, one Church. Anyone who cares about the history of Christianity will also find that the Church fathers, such as St. Ignatius of Antioch, are extremely concerned with unity of faith, and so many Church councils have been called to clarify the faith in response to groups who have decided to preach something contrary to what has been handed down from Christ to the Apostles to their successors and so on.
Is Christianity a tolerant religion? Where articles of faith and morals are concerned, absolutely not. Why? Because we're all a bunch of crazed fundies who beat people to death with Bible quotes? No! It's because the Truth is immutable, and those who would twist it to suit their own personal whims also lead others astray with their lies - and that's when the problems start happening.
Heresy finds its source in personal pride. Why should you submit to the Truth, and to the Church which is the pillar and foundation of the Truth, when you can wake up in the morning and believe whatever you want to believe, where you can become your own personal authority subject to no one except your own conscience?
In the case of fundies, this is exactly what they do. Although they will try to tell you that they believe the Bible, only the Bible, and whatever the Bible teaches, if you put them under the microscope, it becomes clear that their knowledge of what the Bible actually says is appallingly poor!
For instance, ask a fundie what he makes of Christ telling his disciples in John 6:25-70 that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood if they are to have any life in them. They'll probably tell you that Christ was just being metaphorical. But then why did all of his disciples walk off in disgust without Christ calling after them, "But I was just being metaphorical!"? There is another curious connection to this in 1 Cor 9:17-30 where St. Paul is telling the Corinthians that many among them are sick and have died because they have not discerned the Body and Blood of Christ when they have come together for the Lord's Supper. This IS NOT just a metaphor!
This alone is a huge difficulty for the fundies. If they believe everything the Bible says, then why do they always just brush these (and several other) passages off? Any Bible-believing Christian has to take Christ at his word, and that means they should be eating and drinking his real body and blood. That's what every Christian did up until, and even during, the Reformation.
But, like I said, this is the problem with heresy. People just believe whatever they want to believe, and not even the in-your-face truth of the Bible or the weight of Christian history (both of which leave modern Protestantism, in any of its versions, without a leg to stand on) can make a dent in their swelled up pride. The Church has always warned against and condemned heresy because it leads people into a quagmire of lies and the hand of Satan - variety is not "the spice of life"!
And, the old testament is only a very distant second to the new testament in order of importance.
I think I understand what you're trying to say, but it's worth remembering a quote due to St. Augustine that, "The New Testament is in the Old Testament concealed, the Old Testament is in the New Testament revealed." In other words, both Testaments are so closely entwined that to speak of orders of importance doesn't really make a lot of sense.
Don't be so naive. It has everything to do with good design! Would you want to buy a car if you knew they always come in kit form, with some parts that you had to manufacture yourself? I doubt it. You'd probably be saying how much car companies suck, and lamenting the fact that you have to put in so much work for each new car you buy. Similarly, why should any sane person be happy about having to put together documents in the typographical equivalent of assembly language?
The program does exactly what it was intended to do.
So what? If Microsoft Windows "does exactly what it was intended to do", then why do people complain so much about it? If good software design is only about fulfilling the intentions of the commissioning party, then we might as well just ditch Linux/Unix/OS X and stick with Windows - delete TeX and install Word - because, by your reasoning, one is no better or worse than the other.
But hey, let's see your brilliantly designed, bug-free (or close to it), still-going-strong-after-more-than-15-years project. The one with an interface that even you can handle, but with every option an advanced user could want. That magical piece of software that suits everybody's needs perfectly. Put up or shut up, champ.
That's right: you're not allowed to complain or criticise or point out the flaws in any piece of software or scientific theory or in any product whatsoever unless you can present a better version, of your own design, which satisfies all the flaws of the original.
Grow up, mate. It's time to lose that teenage elitist asshole attitude.
Why should everything be dumbed for you & "the unwashed masses"?
Look, numbnuts, it's not about "dumbing things down", it's about the principles of good design. It's not the 60's anymore. Why do I have to typeset documents in a markup language that looks absolutely disgusting, and has all the grace and verbosity of XML? I just want to get things done, I don't want to wrestle a 5 ton monster every time I have to meet a submission deadline.
Good design is about more than sheer power. It's also about usability. If I am a scientist or engineer, does that mean I want to do every single thing like I'm designing a jet engine? Bullshit! Yes, I'd like to be able to go down to that level should I need to, but 99.99% of the time I'll want to ignore most of the intricacies and just write my document. But TeX doesn't let you do that; TeX forces you down to the level of nuts and bolts and transistors and opcodes every time.
There are many bad things I can say about Paul Graham, but I can say one good thing: he seems to understand good design (or at least he used to, if the previews of ARC are anything to go by). Go read his essays about starting Viaweb. One of the cool things about Viaweb was the HTML macro language Graham wrote in Lisp for Viaweb customers to design their online stores. It was called RTML. Graham expected that it would be the main interface that customers would use, however, people mostly ended up using Viaweb's pre-defined templates:
"[..] Rtml didn't end up being the main interface to the program. It ended up playing two roles. First of all, it was an escape valve for the really sophisticated users, who wanted something our built-in templates couldn't provide. [..] Only one out of every couple hundred users actually wrote their own templates. And this led to the second advantage of Rtml.
By looking at the way these users modified our built-in templates, we knew what we needed to add to them. Eventually we made it our goal that no one should ever have to use Rtml. Our built-in templates should do everything people wanted. In this new approach, Rtml served us as a warning sign that something was missing in our software." [1]
Why do you suppose people used the pre-defined templates? Because they were dumb? Because they were too stupid to figure out RTML? No, it was simply because they wanted to get stuff done, and the templating system made that possible. If someone wanted something specific, they always had recourse to the underlying RTML.
What was stopping Knuth from designing TeX in a similar manner? Why couldn't he have provided an easy to use set of document templates, and a syntactially simple markup language for those of us with other things to do, but yet still giving the poweruser access to the underlying TeX commands? If that's "dumbing down" TeX, then how come most TeX users call upon LaTeX? LaTeX makes TeX (barely) usable, but the very fact that it exists proves that TeX was not "well-designed for its target audience".
Ahh, so because you're too stupid to use TeX, Knuth's success in creating a useful, reliable, and elegant system for math typesetting qualifies him as awful at writing software. Huh.
Too stupid to use TeX? As a scientist, I have no choice but to use TeX because there is nothing better for typesetting papers. Does that mean I have to actually like TeX? Hell no!
I think it's clear that you have not had to typeset a substantial number of scientific documents in TeX/LaTeX. When I first started out, I thought TeX was great too, but then I actually had to use it to produce a lot of reports, papers, and conference posters. Believe me, when you find yourself struggling time after time to find the right arcane command and/or trick to make TeX render your document correctly, you'll be ready to put your fist through the screen too.
Maybe Knuth is good at writing software - the fact that TeX actually works with a low probability of finding a bug is testament to that - but he's absolutely rubbish at designing software. This flaw in Knuth's intellect is also clearly present in TAOCP with the obtuse instruction set architecture he designed for the programming examples and exercises, bizarre numeric representations, strange encodings, odd limitations, etc..
Be realistic, mate. There is more to writing software than just getting the right output. If people are going to adopt your software, you have to make it easy for them to use. Knuth sees the world through a microscope, and revels in the fine, intricate details. That's how he designed TeX, and that's how he put together the material for TAOCP. The unwashed masses, however, are not quite so abstracted.
Knuth and Graham are both reasonably good at writing books, but awful at writing software - Knuth because TeX is one of the most poorly designed, difficult to use, impractical pieces of software I've ever had the displeasure of using; and Graham because he hasn't written any software since Viaweb, he now just writes about writing software.
Still, as you point out, I wouldn't hold my breath over ACPv4 or ARC - at this rate, Knuth will be dead, and Lisp will be mainstream before either product is released!
You know, all this just boils down to people who cannot deal with any amount of uncertainty in their lives. Just let everything be explained, and they'll be happy.
Science is not about dealing with uncertainty, it's about dealing with facts. Darwinian evolution is not a rock-solid, sound as the Earth is round, absolute fact - many of the main principles of natural selection do not even apply to humans. But yet, despite the inconsistencies, evolutionists cannot deal with the uncertainty of their hypothesis and so shout down the nay-sayers with all sorts of historical lies and insults, as you have done in your post.
Faith ruled Europe for fifteen hundred years with an iron hand. Faith's crowning achievement was some pretty buildings, some nifty art, and some good books that only a privileged few could read.
You should go read the history of Europe, my friend, for your sentiments are far from accurate. If it wasn't for the Church, you'd probably be an illiterate Muslim, and the highly refined sciences we know today would not exist.
Reason has ruled the Western world for the last five hundred. And while some may lament the dubious contributions in the areas of art and literature, our quality of life has risen dramatically.
Ha ha ha! If you think STDs being at an all-time high, and a significant portion of the population being obese is a "high quality of life", then you are even more crazy than what I had imagined!
Science gives you a big fat honking stick to beat Nature back with.
Go tell that to the tsunami victims.
You know, maybe that's why the Fundies get so outraged: Science says that all of their "faith" is probably for nothing.
Science says nothing of the sort. And it never will for that is beyond the scope of science. Perhaps if you were a scientist, you'd know that.
...The point about a "theory" in science is that it is a logically consistent explanation of as many observations as possible. Observations which do not fit existing theories either result in a revised theories or completly new theories.
That's not quite true. The point of a scientific theory is not only to explain a natural phenomenon in a logical manner, but also to allow scientists to make accurate predictions about how the natural phenomenon will behave in the future.
There is nothing especially special about the theory of evolution within science.
Well, apart from the fact that it's only half a theory, and cannot be used to accurately predict how a species will evolve - as such, Darwinian evolution is a pretty useless "theory".
Also, can one prove that Darwinian evolution isn't just a case of selectively choosing those points which fit a desired regression curve? In other words, what level of confidence can I have, as a scientist, that the model actually describes all of the data, and isn't just a case of over-interpreting the data, or describing microphenomena in a highly non-linear chaotic system?
Not entirely - DNA is a necessary requirement in the definition of "human", but not sufficient.
What constitutes human then? The sensible answer is my view (and others) is that it depends upon the thing's ability to be part of a society with other 'humans', and to have qualities such as empathy, self-consciousness and the like which are regarded as human qualities. Without those, a thing is no more human than its DNA might be.
These socio-emotional factors are not even necessary requirements in the definition of "human" because all are entirely subjective and relative, such as empathy and "the ability to be part of a society" (a phrase bordering on the realms of nonsense), and some immediately lead to absurdity, such as the need for self-consciousness (you aren't very self-conscious when you're asleep, does that mean you suddenly become less human?). Relativism is a deficient foundation for the definition of "human".
As we learn more about biology, we can be more precise about the physiological aspects of "human", but we must also acknowledge a metaphysical component to "human", as manifest in the comparison between a deceased human and a living human, or between an embryonic unborn human and a newborn baby. In other words, there are necessary aspects in the definition of "human" that are beyond scientific observation, analysis, or experiment.
To deny this metaphysical element, as so many people try to do nowadays, leads to an incomplete and twisted view of what is and is not "human", and this has disastrous consequences for society (unless you think destroying unborn embryonic humans, euthanising old people, and so on, are instrinsically good things).
"...No you can never directly die from HIV, HIV only infects CD4 positive cells..."
Bwahaha! That's like saying, "No, you can never directly die from the knife some crack head just stabbed you with, the knife only irreparably lacerates a major organ which, unfortunately, is necessary for life. Without it functioning correctly, you quickly succumb to a multitude of complications that can kill."
According to your reasoning on causality, it would then seem absurd to brand a felon someone who intentionally infected another person with HIV. Afterall, you can never directly die from HIV...
"There's no reason the entire human race would succumb to the AIDS epidemic, because it's entirely preventable. The only problem is educating people about the danger, and that's mostly solved in developed countries."
So how come HIV infection rates in developed countries are still increasing?
...Every time I read a Graham article, I feel dirty at the amount of false modesty and self-congratulation involved. He's like a digital Stuart Smalley.
Don't you think it's absurd how Paul Graham spends all his time writing about hackers, programming languages, and how to write code, without actually writing any code himself?
Since the two lisp books and Viaweb, the man has written absolutely nothing in the way of code (aside from some very simple Bayesian spam filter snippets, and this vapour-ware programming language 'Arc' he's apparently designing). Instead, he's devoted himself to writing geek fluff articles, and cultivating this stupid geek superhero stereotype mythos wherein rogue computer nerds use their super coding powers to save the world by thinking "forbidden thoughts". It's just so lame, like a bad episode of Star Trek Voyager where the crew pull their way out of a few scrapes, and then give themselves the old self-congratulatory Federation reach-around for a job well done (which is usually either violating the Prime Directive by interfering with another civilisation and imposing "human morality" upon them, or finding some inter-dimensional time-travelling phenomenon that allows them to circumvent certain doom, a.k.a. the infamous Rick Berman and Brannon Braga reset button).
Here's a message for Paul Graham: real hackers write code - they don't sit on their arses writing about writing code. They also don't spend their time entertaining stupidities such as the promotion of heretical thinking just because they want to justify their own arrogant, selfish, and ill-considered bastardisation of the one true faith. You are a myth. The Paul Graham uber-hacker of internet fame no longer exists. What happened to him, I really can't say - maybe Viaweb burnt him out, and he's now wandering the streets of Cambridge in a daze, muttering to himself some confused fantasy that it was all Robert Morris's fault, and Trevor Blackwell was really a Communist infiltrator from the north who had been mailing code to the Russians. Who knows! But the reality is clear: the Paul Graham that runs paulgraham.com is no more of a hacker than Barney the dinosaur.
Slashdot Mirror
...the government might ship him off to guantanamo anyway
for documenting US infrastructure.
I don't want to be told that what consenting adults do is as bad as child rape
;-)
You don't want to be told that, in all objectiveness, whether
consentual or not, strangling your partner while stuffing
lemons up her butt and smearing her with dog excrement is
just as morally depraved and sexually deviant as raping a
child?
Pretty soon you'll be drooling in an insane asylum, alongside
the Marquis de Sade, helping him enact some scenes from his
novels. Have fun with that!
"... This is known as "liberation theology" and though many Catholics disdain
it, it's perfectly plausible."
Except that's not what Liberation Theology
actually refers to.
Geez, can't anyone get anything right these days?
That's not true. Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition are both held to the same degree of reverence. I'll quote the Catechism once more:
The entirety of your argument was based on comentaries writen over 1000 years after christ.
That's simply not true either. The entirety of my argument is based on passages from the Bible. Any quotes I gave from sources more recent than the the Bible only serve to reinforce my argument, to the extent that Protestants do not have a leg to stand on in defence of their own position. Prior to the Reformation, Protestants cannot produce any evidence from Christian history which supports their doctrinal beliefs. Catholics, on the other hand, have truck loads of extant manuscripts which prove their position.
As for your "1000 years after Christ" nonsense, here's a quote from St. Ignatius of Antioch who wrote around the year 100AD on his journey to Rome to be executed by the Emperor Trajan for being a Christian (from the Letter to the Smyrnaeans):
If you want to ever
Obviously my beliefs aren't held by any Protestant deomination - that's the whole point of my posts, to show that there is a gaping hole in the foundation of Protestantism. This hole is the result of moving away from the one Church founded by Jesus Christ, and the behaviour of fundies (which started this whole thread off) is a consequence of their clinging to heresy.
As for my beliefs not being orthodox within the Catholic Church, would you care to quantify this statement? Everything I've said is backed up by the Catechism:
For goodness sake, read that post of mine again. Hesiod was claiming that I was trying to insist that the Christians in the Bible were cannibalising THEMSELVES . Read his exact precise words:
Christ is quite clear in John 6 that we must eat his flesh and drink his blood if we are to have any life in us.
.. of all science". Even if this were true, how does it matter? Is God not the creator of these laws? Why does everyone always assume God is bound by the laws of his own creation? With God, nothing shall be impossible!
Is this cannibalism? What does cannibalism mean? Dictionary.com says that it is "A person who eats the flesh of other humans". Was Christ strictly human? No. He is, at the same time, the man Jesus and the Second Person of the Trinity. So, strictly speaking, you cannot label as cannibalism what it is Christ is asking us to do, it is more than that - we must eat God!
But, like Hesiod, some of the disciples thought at the time that Christ wanted us to eat the flesh of his physical body (like there'd be enough to go around!). Christ knew this, and he said to them (from John 6):
"60 Then many of his disciples who were listening
said, "This saying is hard; who can accept
it?"
61 Since Jesus knew that his disciples were
murmuring about this, he said to them, "Does
this shock you?
62 What if you were to see the Son of Man
ascending to where he was before?
63 It is the spirit that gives life, while the
flesh is of no avail."
The disciples thought that he meant they would have to eat the flesh of the physical body of Christ stood before them. But Christ said no, that he would ascend back to heaven in his physical body, and the commandment to eat his flesh and drink his blood would be met through a spiritual, mystical mechanism. And that's exactly what happened.
This commandment of Christ's doesn't just come out of thin air, nor is it some sort of man-made doctrine. If you have read your Bible at all, you'll notice in the Old Testament that God makes it a specific requirement of the Jews that they must offer various sacrifices. But it's never a simple matter of simply slaughtering an animal and burning it on the altar - the Jews always had to consume the offering because that was an essential part of the ritual.
Christ was the perfect sacrifice offered up for the forgiveness of our sins, once, and for all. In keeping with the precedents set out by God himself, we must consume the sacrifice if it is to be efficacious for us as individuals.
When Catholics celebrate Mass, they are not re-sacrificing Christ once again. This is a common misconception people have against the Church. As Paul said, when we celebrate the Lord's Supper, we are proclaiming his death until he comes again - we do it in rememberance of Christ's death because Christ's sacrifice was once, and for all. But, that doesn't mean one can imply the Lord's Supper is all a metaphor.
For 2000 years, we have believed that, somehow, Christ becomes truly present in the consecrated bread and wine - body, blood, soul, and divinity, Christ is there. We don't offer any explanation as to how this comes about because we simply do not know, it is a mystery - we just take Christ at his word, and practice the faith as handed down to us from the Apostles.
Hesiod laughs at this because, according to him, "it's contrary to the established laws
Anyway, to put all this in simple language for you, what I am arguing is this: we must eat the flesh of Christ and drink his blood if we are to have any life in us. That's
Ok, so I read through this entire thread a couple times hoping somewhere along the line you would actualy say something ...
I could say the same for you! Would you care to elaborate on what you disliked about what I said, or what you wanted me to clarify?
If you wanted me to say something interesting, why not just ask some decent questions? When twits like hesiod come out of the woodwoork, the conversation usually hits the gutter pretty fast. You can't expect anything interesting to come out of such exchanges.
The simple fact is that the Cross and the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist are always going to be stumbling blocks for people. Who could possibly believe that God would incarnate as man just to be crucified and then resurrect himself from the grave? The Greeks had a real hard time with that one in St. Paul's day. Similarly, as we've seen on this thread, how could anyone believe that this same God makes himself truly present in consecrated bread and wine all because he wants us to eat him? As we read in John 6, the disciples stumbled big time on hearing this one.
It's also interesting to compare the real presence of Christ in the New Testament bread with the Bread of the Presence from the Old Testament. There are also many other foreshadowings of the Eucharist in the OT (e.g., mana in the desert, unleaven bread eaten at Passover, the Ark of the Convenant which contained the Ten Commandments, Aaron's staff, and some of the mana - all symbolic of the forthcoming Christ).
As I said earlier in the thread, the situation is really this simple: you either believe that the Church fell into grievous error for over 1500 years on this issue thus making Christ out to be a liar, or you believe that John 6, Mat 26:26-28 1 Cor 11:23-34, are simply metaphors for some sort of spiritual teaching - a belief that is not backed up by those passages, the rest of the Bible, or Christian history. Either way, you're rejecting the words of Christ in some manner, and you've thus fallen into a hole.
But I suppose the big problem here, as witnessed on this thread, is how do you get yourself out of a hole unless you realise you're actually in a hole?
Do you make that comparison under the false assumption that it affects my argument at all?
... Jesus wanted people to drink his blood and eat his flesh!
... many Christians do not agree with you. But more importantly, plenty of biblical scholars disagree with you.
.. of all science" do not explain every single aspect of the universe and the nature of human life; a misunderstanding that some kooky website and a bunch of equally kooky biblical scholars don't prove your position simply because they are in agreement with you; a misunderstanding that the burden of proof lies with you.
Sure it affects your argument. Your reasoning was essentially Gnostic in character. Gnostic teachings were rejected by all of Christianity from the outset. Therefore your hypothesis is not keeping with the character of traditional Christian beliefs, which makes it anomalous.
That's exactly what I am saying. But you seem to have been confused last time around when you thought I was saying "that these people, literally, ate themselves (their own flesh) to the point of killing themselves." Eating the flesh of God and eating your own body are not the same thing.
So what? Truth is not determined by a majority vote. And any way, most Christians do agree with me, over 1 billion of them in fact.
YOU are the one making extremely extraordinary claims, the burden of proof is on you
No, I'm afraid it's not. I am simply proclaiming the beliefs that the Church has had for over 2000 years. Only recently has there been any widespread doubt about these things, so it is for the doubters to prove their position for they are the ones deviating from the standard.
Tell me what I misunderstood.
So far, you have demonstrated a misunderstanding of Christian history; a misunderstanding that a philosophy condemned by the early Church cannot possibly hope to yield the truth about Christ; a misunderstanding of the difference between eating and drinking bread and wine which has been mystically transformed into the real body and blood of Christ, and eating real human flesh; a misunderstanding that "the established laws
I went to a Jesuit University. Do you know what that means?
Yes. They taught you nothing about the catholic church.
English, motherfucker, do you understand it?
Oh, how belligerent of you. Swearing always adds to one's credibility.
Secondly, even if I did mean Gnosticism, "the church," made that decision a thousand years after Christ died. Not exactly a solid source. :)
.. of all science and it reeks of ignorant mysticism.
I didn't say you meant Gnosticism, I said your statement was "too much like Gnosticism". And the Church had already spoken against several forms of Gnosticism before 500AD.
The only way to translate what you have written is "Jesus made sick those that did not partake in his cannibalism." You are saying that these people, literally, ate themselves (their own flesh) to the point of killing themselves?
Hahaha! Wow! I really don't understand how anyone could possibly translate "... that many of them were sick and had died because they had failed to discern the true body and blood of Christ when they came together to celebrate the Lord's Supper" as meaning that people were cannibalising themselves! Man, I've heard some dumb "translations" in my time, but this one transcends the hitherto known bounds of human incompetence.
Well, I can insist it because it's contrary to the established laws
Bwahaha! As a professional computational astrophysicist, I can say you really have some deep misconceptions about the "established laws of all science".
I believe it's all hogwash anyway, so it makes no personal difference to me
Yes, I suppose a man of your degree of intellectual malformation and miscomprehension of the English language has more pertinent issues with which to be concerned.
... but perhaps he believed that true wisdom can only come when one figures out the metaphor for themself
Not likely. This is too much like the thinking of Gnosticism, which has been condemned by the Church.
It might just be that those disciples were not mentally ready for the statement to be personally meaningful.
This view is simply not supported by the Bible, nor anywhere in Christian history (except in heretical circles). The disciples knew that Christ was being quite literal, and the language used to record the event in the book of John is extremely clear and precise leaving it impossible to honestly formulate any theories of a metaphorical sense.
When Christ was being metaphorical, he spoke specifically in parables. The Bread of Life discourse in John 6 is clearly not a parable.
But we are also failing to recall what Paul wrote to the Corinthians, explaining that many of them were sick and had died because they had failed to discern the true body and blood of Christ when they came together to celebrate the Lord's Supper. This completely blows away any Protestant metaphorical fantasies about the Eucharist! If Christ was being metaphorical, then how come those people were eating and drinking themselves unto death?
Paul's letter to the Corinthians clearly demonstrates that the Apostles and the whole Church at that time truly believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. How can you possibly insist that they were in error?
Umm... yeah, actualy it is a metaphor, and its pretty clear, as in no sane human could possibly argue otherwise if they have a clue what they are talking about.
... hold on a minute! Didn't Christ also say, "... you are Cephas, and on this rock will I build my Church; and the gates of hades shall not prevail against"? I guess Christ must've been metaphorical here too because, if what you say is true, then the gates of Hell have prevailed against the Church, and that kinda makes Christ look like a liar.
Gee, well, then I guess the whole of Christendom was in grievous error for over 1500 years! How did all those smart guys, people like Sts. Jerome, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, how did they get it all so wrong?
But
Wow! Our Lord is so great, he let us spend almost 1600 years believing in error that we were somehow really eating his body and really drinking his blood. He's so great, he only managed to set the Church right a couple hundred years ago, when people finally realised he was just being metaphorical!
Get real, dude. No sane person could believe that all these words of Christ were merely metaphorical - their meaning is perfectly clear to anyone who approaches the Bible without any biases and preconcieved ideas. His words were also perfectly clear to his disciples at the time because they walked off in disgust and left him. Just think about that for a moment. If Christ was just being metaphorical, why did all the disciples disassociate themselves from him? Why did Christ let them walk off without clarifying his metaphor? Christ lost followers over this, and he did nothing to bring them back! Why?
Think about it!
To me at least, it seemed like there was a huge amount of conflict between different Christian groups fighting with each other for dominance and declaring each other heretics. And even at the point where the modern roots of Christianity really took hold, trying to remove the existence of the other Christian philosophies became an even more significant and workable priority.
There was (and is) a lot of conflict between Christians over articles of faith. The reason for this is because there is only one faith, one Church, one Truth.
St. Paul's letters in the New Testament, especially those to the Corinthians, are very explicit in their teaching that "there must be no divisions among you" because there is only one body of Christ, one Church. Anyone who cares about the history of Christianity will also find that the Church fathers, such as St. Ignatius of Antioch, are extremely concerned with unity of faith, and so many Church councils have been called to clarify the faith in response to groups who have decided to preach something contrary to what has been handed down from Christ to the Apostles to their successors and so on.
Is Christianity a tolerant religion? Where articles of faith and morals are concerned, absolutely not. Why? Because we're all a bunch of crazed fundies who beat people to death with Bible quotes? No! It's because the Truth is immutable, and those who would twist it to suit their own personal whims also lead others astray with their lies - and that's when the problems start happening.
Heresy finds its source in personal pride. Why should you submit to the Truth, and to the Church which is the pillar and foundation of the Truth, when you can wake up in the morning and believe whatever you want to believe, where you can become your own personal authority subject to no one except your own conscience?
In the case of fundies, this is exactly what they do. Although they will try to tell you that they believe the Bible, only the Bible, and whatever the Bible teaches, if you put them under the microscope, it becomes clear that their knowledge of what the Bible actually says is appallingly poor!
For instance, ask a fundie what he makes of Christ telling his disciples in John 6:25-70 that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood if they are to have any life in them. They'll probably tell you that Christ was just being metaphorical. But then why did all of his disciples walk off in disgust without Christ calling after them, "But I was just being metaphorical!"? There is another curious connection to this in 1 Cor 9:17-30 where St. Paul is telling the Corinthians that many among them are sick and have died because they have not discerned the Body and Blood of Christ when they have come together for the Lord's Supper. This IS NOT just a metaphor!
This alone is a huge difficulty for the fundies. If they believe everything the Bible says, then why do they always just brush these (and several other) passages off? Any Bible-believing Christian has to take Christ at his word, and that means they should be eating and drinking his real body and blood. That's what every Christian did up until, and even during, the Reformation.
But, like I said, this is the problem with heresy. People just believe whatever they want to believe, and not even the in-your-face truth of the Bible or the weight of Christian history (both of which leave modern Protestantism, in any of its versions, without a leg to stand on) can make a dent in their swelled up pride. The Church has always warned against and condemned heresy because it leads people into a quagmire of lies and the hand of Satan - variety is not "the spice of life"!
And, the old testament is only a very distant second to the new testament in order of importance.
I think I understand what you're trying to say, but it's worth remembering a quote due to St. Augustine that, "The New Testament is in the Old Testament concealed, the Old Testament is in the New Testament revealed." In other words, both Testaments are so closely entwined that to speak of orders of importance doesn't really make a lot of sense.
That has nothing to do with good design.
Don't be so naive. It has everything to do with good design! Would you want to buy a car if you knew they always come in kit form, with some parts that you had to manufacture yourself? I doubt it. You'd probably be saying how much car companies suck, and lamenting the fact that you have to put in so much work for each new car you buy. Similarly, why should any sane person be happy about having to put together documents in the typographical equivalent of assembly language?
The program does exactly what it was intended to do.
So what? If Microsoft Windows "does exactly what it was intended to do", then why do people complain so much about it? If good software design is only about fulfilling the intentions of the commissioning party, then we might as well just ditch Linux/Unix/OS X and stick with Windows - delete TeX and install Word - because, by your reasoning, one is no better or worse than the other.
But hey, let's see your brilliantly designed, bug-free (or close to it), still-going-strong-after-more-than-15-years project. The one with an interface that even you can handle, but with every option an advanced user could want. That magical piece of software that suits everybody's needs perfectly. Put up or shut up, champ.
That's right: you're not allowed to complain or criticise or point out the flaws in any piece of software or scientific theory or in any product whatsoever unless you can present a better version, of your own design, which satisfies all the flaws of the original.
Grow up, mate. It's time to lose that teenage elitist asshole attitude.
Look, numbnuts, it's not about "dumbing things down", it's about the principles of good design. It's not the 60's anymore. Why do I have to typeset documents in a markup language that looks absolutely disgusting, and has all the grace and verbosity of XML? I just want to get things done, I don't want to wrestle a 5 ton monster every time I have to meet a submission deadline.
Good design is about more than sheer power. It's also about usability. If I am a scientist or engineer, does that mean I want to do every single thing like I'm designing a jet engine? Bullshit! Yes, I'd like to be able to go down to that level should I need to, but 99.99% of the time I'll want to ignore most of the intricacies and just write my document. But TeX doesn't let you do that; TeX forces you down to the level of nuts and bolts and transistors and opcodes every time.
There are many bad things I can say about Paul Graham, but I can say one good thing: he seems to understand good design (or at least he used to, if the previews of ARC are anything to go by). Go read his essays about starting Viaweb. One of the cool things about Viaweb was the HTML macro language Graham wrote in Lisp for Viaweb customers to design their online stores. It was called RTML. Graham expected that it would be the main interface that customers would use, however, people mostly ended up using Viaweb's pre-defined templates:
Why do you suppose people used the pre-defined templates? Because they were dumb? Because they were too stupid to figure out RTML? No, it was simply because they wanted to get stuff done, and the templating system made that possible. If someone wanted something specific, they always had recourse to the underlying RTML.
What was stopping Knuth from designing TeX in a similar manner? Why couldn't he have provided an easy to use set of document templates, and a syntactially simple markup language for those of us with other things to do, but yet still giving the poweruser access to the underlying TeX commands? If that's "dumbing down" TeX, then how come most TeX users call upon LaTeX? LaTeX makes TeX (barely) usable, but the very fact that it exists proves that TeX was not "well-designed for its target audience".
References:
[1] http://lib.store.yahoo.com/lib/paulgraham/bbnexce
Ahh, so because you're too stupid to use TeX, Knuth's success in creating a useful, reliable, and elegant system for math typesetting qualifies him as awful at writing software. Huh.
Too stupid to use TeX? As a scientist, I have no choice but to use TeX because there is nothing better for typesetting papers. Does that mean I have to actually like TeX? Hell no!
I think it's clear that you have not had to typeset a substantial number of scientific documents in TeX/LaTeX. When I first started out, I thought TeX was great too, but then I actually had to use it to produce a lot of reports, papers, and conference posters. Believe me, when you find yourself struggling time after time to find the right arcane command and/or trick to make TeX render your document correctly, you'll be ready to put your fist through the screen too.
Maybe Knuth is good at writing software - the fact that TeX actually works with a low probability of finding a bug is testament to that - but he's absolutely rubbish at designing software. This flaw in Knuth's intellect is also clearly present in TAOCP with the obtuse instruction set architecture he designed for the programming examples and exercises, bizarre numeric representations, strange encodings, odd limitations, etc..
Be realistic, mate. There is more to writing software than just getting the right output. If people are going to adopt your software, you have to make it easy for them to use. Knuth sees the world through a microscope, and revels in the fine, intricate details. That's how he designed TeX, and that's how he put together the material for TAOCP. The unwashed masses, however, are not quite so abstracted.
"Great minds" is more than an over-statement.
Knuth and Graham are both reasonably good at writing books, but awful at writing software - Knuth because TeX is one of the most poorly designed, difficult to use, impractical pieces of software I've ever had the displeasure of using; and Graham because he hasn't written any software since Viaweb, he now just writes about writing software.
Still, as you point out, I wouldn't hold my breath over ACPv4 or ARC - at this rate, Knuth will be dead, and Lisp will be mainstream before either product is released!
My mother always told me to Never Feed the Negative Energy Monster.
Coward.
You know, all this just boils down to people who cannot deal with any amount of uncertainty in their lives. Just let everything be explained, and they'll be happy.
Science is not about dealing with uncertainty, it's about dealing with facts. Darwinian evolution is not a rock-solid, sound as the Earth is round, absolute fact - many of the main principles of natural selection do not even apply to humans. But yet, despite the inconsistencies, evolutionists cannot deal with the uncertainty of their hypothesis and so shout down the nay-sayers with all sorts of historical lies and insults, as you have done in your post.
Faith ruled Europe for fifteen hundred years with an iron hand. Faith's crowning achievement was some pretty buildings, some nifty art, and some good books that only a privileged few could read.
You should go read the history of Europe, my friend, for your sentiments are far from accurate. If it wasn't for the Church, you'd probably be an illiterate Muslim, and the highly refined sciences we know today would not exist.
Reason has ruled the Western world for the last five hundred. And while some may lament the dubious contributions in the areas of art and literature, our quality of life has risen dramatically.
Ha ha ha! If you think STDs being at an all-time high, and a significant portion of the population being obese is a "high quality of life", then you are even more crazy than what I had imagined!
Science gives you a big fat honking stick to beat Nature back with.
Go tell that to the tsunami victims.
You know, maybe that's why the Fundies get so outraged: Science says that all of their "faith" is probably for nothing.
Science says nothing of the sort. And it never will for that is beyond the scope of science. Perhaps if you were a scientist, you'd know that.
...The point about a "theory" in science is that it is a logically consistent explanation of as many observations as possible. Observations which do not fit existing theories either result in a revised theories or completly new theories.
That's not quite true. The point of a scientific theory is not only to explain a natural phenomenon in a logical manner, but also to allow scientists to make accurate predictions about how the natural phenomenon will behave in the future.
There is nothing especially special about the theory of evolution within science.
Well, apart from the fact that it's only half a theory, and cannot be used to accurately predict how a species will evolve - as such, Darwinian evolution is a pretty useless "theory".
Also, can one prove that Darwinian evolution isn't just a case of selectively choosing those points which fit a desired regression curve? In other words, what level of confidence can I have, as a scientist, that the model actually describes all of the data, and isn't just a case of over-interpreting the data, or describing microphenomena in a highly non-linear chaotic system?
What counts as human is not the DNA.
Not entirely - DNA is a necessary requirement in the definition of "human", but not sufficient.
What constitutes human then? The sensible answer is my view (and others) is that it depends upon the thing's ability to be part of a society with other 'humans', and to have qualities such as empathy, self-consciousness and the like which are regarded as human qualities. Without those, a thing is no more human than its DNA might be.
These socio-emotional factors are not even necessary requirements in the definition of "human" because all are entirely subjective and relative, such as empathy and "the ability to be part of a society" (a phrase bordering on the realms of nonsense), and some immediately lead to absurdity, such as the need for self-consciousness (you aren't very self-conscious when you're asleep, does that mean you suddenly become less human?). Relativism is a deficient foundation for the definition of "human".
As we learn more about biology, we can be more precise about the physiological aspects of "human", but we must also acknowledge a metaphysical component to "human", as manifest in the comparison between a deceased human and a living human, or between an embryonic unborn human and a newborn baby. In other words, there are necessary aspects in the definition of "human" that are beyond scientific observation, analysis, or experiment.
To deny this metaphysical element, as so many people try to do nowadays, leads to an incomplete and twisted view of what is and is not "human", and this has disastrous consequences for society (unless you think destroying unborn embryonic humans, euthanising old people, and so on, are instrinsically good things).
[...] To them, people living in "the world of sin" deserve to get sick. These people disgust me.
And in your opinion, unborn humans deserve to die.
Which view is more disgusting?
"...No you can never directly die from HIV, HIV only infects CD4 positive cells..."
Bwahaha! That's like saying, "No, you can never directly die from the knife some crack head just stabbed you with, the knife only irreparably lacerates a major organ which, unfortunately, is necessary for life. Without it functioning correctly, you quickly succumb to a multitude of complications that can kill."
According to your reasoning on causality, it would then seem absurd to brand a felon someone who intentionally infected another person with HIV. Afterall, you can never directly die from HIV...
So how come HIV infection rates in developed countries are still increasing?
http://www.healthscout.com/news/68/516241/main.ht
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2003-02-11-hi
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_pag
http://www.hivdent.org/publicp/ppIHDS122003.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3856963.stm
Don't you think it's absurd how Paul Graham spends all his time writing about hackers, programming languages, and how to write code, without actually writing any code himself?
Since the two lisp books and Viaweb, the man has written absolutely nothing in the way of code (aside from some very simple Bayesian spam filter snippets, and this vapour-ware programming language 'Arc' he's apparently designing). Instead, he's devoted himself to writing geek fluff articles, and cultivating this stupid geek superhero stereotype mythos wherein rogue computer nerds use their super coding powers to save the world by thinking "forbidden thoughts". It's just so lame, like a bad episode of Star Trek Voyager where the crew pull their way out of a few scrapes, and then give themselves the old self-congratulatory Federation reach-around for a job well done (which is usually either violating the Prime Directive by interfering with another civilisation and imposing "human morality" upon them, or finding some inter-dimensional time-travelling phenomenon that allows them to circumvent certain doom, a.k.a. the infamous Rick Berman and Brannon Braga reset button).
Here's a message for Paul Graham: real hackers write code - they don't sit on their arses writing about writing code. They also don't spend their time entertaining stupidities such as the promotion of heretical thinking just because they want to justify their own arrogant, selfish, and ill-considered bastardisation of the one true faith. You are a myth. The Paul Graham uber-hacker of internet fame no longer exists. What happened to him, I really can't say - maybe Viaweb burnt him out, and he's now wandering the streets of Cambridge in a daze, muttering to himself some confused fantasy that it was all Robert Morris's fault, and Trevor Blackwell was really a Communist infiltrator from the north who had been mailing code to the Russians. Who knows! But the reality is clear: the Paul Graham that runs paulgraham.com is no more of a hacker than Barney the dinosaur.