If you accept the Bible as presented to you by an organized religious group, the Bible sounds very consistent. It's not. See the Skeptics Annotated Bible for a great way to see the contradictions side by side.
2 - consistent with other reliable works
Well, earlier you stated that there weren't any historical works that could be trusted as much as the Bible. So, if that's the case, how do you know those other works are correct?
Now, you're using archaeology as support for some of the Bible. Why is science acceptable when it supports the Bible, but not when it contradicts it?
Further, people and places in the New Testament can be pretty well matched with known history. But that doesn't mean all of the details are valid. Take "Gone With the Wind". Compared to all of the history of the Civil War era, it appears to be an accurate work. But the events described between Rhett and Scarlett never happened as written. So while we can be pretty sure that the people and places described in the New Testament are pretty accurate, the only corroboration of the details, such as miracles, are the accounts created by Christ's followers.
3 - relevance to you
If the Bible provides you comfort, guidance, etc., that's great. But it doesn't mean it has the answers for everyone, or that what is described in it must be taken at face value.
here's more to the Bible than "God said it. I believe it. That settles it."
Indeed. However, many followers _do_ take that attitude. And they are the people I had in mind in my original post. You can't have a rational debate about something when one side merely cites the Bible over and over.
challenge you to investigate the claims of Christ.
Which ones? The philosophical ones that we should treat others well? They aren't unique to Christianity. Or the claims that he is the 'Son of God', and performs miracles? The ones that are claimed, but aren't proven.
Use your mind, come at it as a skeptic and see what happens.
I have used my mind, and it's my skepticism that allows me to reject the Biblical mythology with no concerns. Being a skeptic requires that extraordinaly claims have extraordinary proof. Just as people today claim to have encounters with alien beings, people in the Middle Ages claimed to have contact with angels. The fact that miracles and other extraordinary events are written in the Bible does not provide proof that they happened.
Your mind is unlikely to be changed by the link above, or by another recommendation I'm about to make, but it sounds like you enjoy researching and discussing topics of this nature. Please read Carl Sagan's book The Demon-Haunted World
Your mother in the show is blaming GTA3 due to her own shortcomings as a parent - the question should have been "why did parents allow their children to look at mature subject matter"?
Well, the problem is that many of these busybody types have already denied their kids from having the game. The mere fact that the material exists is seen by them as horrible, and they feel it's their duty to wipe it from the face of the earth.
With all due respect, I could most likely be described as a hard-core Christian, and I agree that we do tend to say "but the Bible says...." because the Bible is a reliable reference.
Well, if the Bible works for you as a basis for how to live your life, that's great. The Bible contains many good lessons, although they aren't unique to the Judeo-Christian world.
The problem is that the Bible is vaguely reliable...it has a great deal of oral history, which has some basis in fact. But one only has to look at the way things like rumors and gossip spread and grow to realize that any kind of oral history is going to change and be embellished over time. And once written down, translations have changed it yet again.
The orginal debate that I had in mind comes from subjects such as evolution. Good scientific evidence is countered with "But the Bible says..." with no further support.
If you want to debate details about religious philosophy, it's perfectly appropriate to use the Bible as your source material. (I'm thinking of the Simpsons episode where Bart dresses as a Rabbi to debate with Krusty's father...)
You agree with me about Frontline. So you watch PBS. Presumably you watch more than Frontline. If so, you'll have seen plenty of shows on various cultures throughout the world. They all have their own stories about how the world began and how they came to be, and stories involving their god(s) and spirits. What makes the Bible a more reliable source than any of their religions? Because the Bible says so? That's the whole problem: a circular argument....the Bible is right because the Bible says so.
I think the ending of the article really hits the nail on the head. The issue of video game violence is largely driven by emotion and supported by short sound-bite statements. Mr. Jenkins went into this arena planning to use reason and rational debate.
None of the talk-show formats are going to allow reasonable discussions. It doesn't get people worked up. They have to have emotional topics to bring in the viewers. And you can't use rational arguments against people using emotional ones.
It reminds me of the debates that spring up on/. about religion. When anyone challenges the beliefs of the hard-core Christians, they point to the Bible as their supporting evidence and say "but the Bible says this".
If most people had a clue, shows like Frontline would blow crap like Donahue out of the water on ratings....
This had an erect penis, thought to be because it died of asphyxiation
Wow...the ramifications to this are endless. Is it the earliest known case of autoerotic asphyxiation? I didn't even know other animals practiced that....but I guess a mammoth could just wrap that trunk around its neck....
We had an interesting situation with Google. Since the company changed names a while back, two domain names point to the same site (although with two different IP addresses).
Links on Google would show up under one site name, but not the other. Apparently Google does something on the back-end to determine that the contents are identical and assign the listing to one of the domain names (in this case the older one).
Only after feeding all visits to the old domain with a 301 and then sending them along to the new domain name did Google's results update to only indicate the new one.
And of course, no one seems to comprehend that _they_ are the consumer, and therefore can rip off all the damn tags on every mattress, pillow, and chair in their house.
We need a new law that says any comedian or cartoonist that refers to someone getting in trouble for removing the tag should be smothered with a tagless pillow...
Re:Here is a per server solution that is cheap.
on
Cheap KVM Over IP?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
. Get a Clysdale terminal server,
Uh, don't you mean Cyclades? I think someone needs a beer...:)
Right. And after the NYT misquotes you or says something incorrect about you on the front page, they bury a little retraction a week later...
When someone is researching a newspaper database or browsing the microfilm at the library, after seeing the headline "John Smith Has Intercourse With Small Farm Animals" are they going to dig through to search for a retraction?
Not just the A series from IBM rock. We've got lots of old ThinkPad 770s still in use that take all kinds of abuse. I regularly pick mine up by the display, which they claim you aren't supposed to do, and never had a problem yet.
Only problems:
* One drive died * One keyboard had to be replaced after a salesperson tried to feed it soda. * Another salesperson somehow destroyed the connector shield for the floppy, unbeknownst to me. I reached around blind to plug a floppy in, and after a nice *pop* the whole thing shut down.
In the second case, I went ahead and replaced the keyboard in-house, since I knew they weren't going to fix that one under warranty. The others they took care of. IBM's warranty service absolutely rocks. On the last one, I called them up, and there was an Airborne Express box delivered a few hours later. Packed up the unit, shipped it out that afternoon, and the thing was back in my hands the next morning.
Still paying rent. Still paying employees. Still paying for electricity. Still paying for their 'net connection. Still paying depreciation on equipment.
IOW, all their fixed costs are still there. Any savings from shutting down for a day would be minimal. I'm not saying they shouldn't just shut down until they have a fix, but they sure won't be saving any money by not offering service.
f I kick a wall and the building falls down, whose fault is it? mine or the architect's?
Well, if an architect was allowed to design the structural aspects of the building, you need to throw in the various governmental bodies, since things like that are the realm of an engineer.
Re:Nobody's buying, but nobody's enough.
on
Spam Doesn't Work?
·
· Score: 2
Indeed. All the people who pay money for pyramid and other schemes with ads like "Make $5000 a month working from home" are frequently buying instructions and e-mail lists.
If I can entice people to pay me money to participate in my scheme, I don't have to sell any herbal breast enlarger, as I've made all my money off the suckers who bought into the program.
And there are always more people willing to buy into these programs. I still see 'work at home' ads in the paper for stuffing and mailing envelopes. And those scams were pointed out years ago.
Meanwhile, several thousand tons of extremely nasty chemicals of all sorts (from caustics to poisons to explosives) are running down roads and railroad tracks at speeds of up to 100 MPH.
Yay! People with sense do exist in the world. Our local enviro-zealots have been going nuts over radioactive waste transport for years. One of the major rail lines through St. Louis goes through a community called Webster Groves. It's an old little city, with expensive old houses and lots of charm. Oh, and lots of people who have the money to live there but nothing in the way of brains. And the local media has been talking to them a lot lately.
They're worried about derailments, terrorist attacks, etc., even though much more horrible things run through their charming city every day.
One guy they interviewed set up his architecture office in an old train station, and he said he's concerned about what kind of radiation dose he'd receive if the casks came through there...I hope he paid more attention in his architechture classes than he did in physics.
And to make it even better, one long time enviro-zealot here was even quoted as saying something to the effect of "you don't have to understand this issue, you just have a moral duty to stop it from happening". Right. Because if you do understand the issue, you'd know she's lying about the strength of the casks, which she claimed were never tested for impact....
When looking at only crude oil, Saudi Arabia is our biggest single supplier. However, once you add in gas and refined products, Canada blows everyone out of the water.
Take a look at this PDF of oil and oil product imports to the US for 2001.
The original post suggested that all oil money goes to support terrorist regimes. Look over those import numbers and you'll see that while we do import a great deal of petroleum products from Arab countries (which tarring Arab nations as terrorist is pretty racist anyway), there's a lot more coming to us from places like Venezuela, Canada, Mexico, etc.
As for offshore drilling and Alaska...while the technology of searching for oil has improved tremendously, we still can't tell exactly how much is there and how much we'll get out until we poke a hole in the ground. That's why the statements against drilling in ANWR saying "there's only x months worth of supply there" are so misleading.
I'm really suprised that the oil companies haven't waged a PR campaign for the image of oil wells. Everyone apparently has images in their mind of the old oil rush days in Texas and Oklahoma, where big black geysers shot into the sky for days. It simply isn't like that anymore. Look at the current wells in Alaska. Look at the gas production wells in the Gulf near Mobile. They're all among the cleanest facilities you can find.
Wait for one of the Borax Powered Hydrogen Fuel cell vehicles from Chrysler. Cost is supposed to be low, and emission zero.
We'll see. Right now the NaBH4 process is horribly expensive and inefficient. Millenium Cell has claimed to have created a new process that fixes all the problems, but they won't say anything until their patents are secured.
And the system isn't borax-powered...borax is basically the waste product. The power comes from the hydrogen attached to the borax, which the system removes for energy. Now we're back to the same problem...we need to get the hyrdrogen from somewhere, which requires energy, and we need to tack it onto the borax, which requires energy...
The Millenium Cell folks claim they'll have the total system efficiency to be as good as or better than gasoline...we'll see.
It's expensive (~$3/gal) but it may be worth it to you if you want to contribute to (a)saving the ozone layer and/or (b)keeping US$ out of the hands of despotic Arab states (and their terrorist pawns)..
The ozone layer has nothing to do with what fuel you're burning. Destruction of upper level ozone is from CFCs, not tailpipe emissions.
The US still produces huge quantities of oil, and most of our imports come from Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela.
Oh, did I mention that biodiesel can be made from any biological substance that contains triglycerides?
Excellent! So we just need a blood filtering system to convert those high triglyceride levels into biodiesel!
Slashdot Mirror
Let's touch on your three points:
1 - internal consistency
If you accept the Bible as presented to you by an organized religious group, the Bible sounds very consistent. It's not. See the Skeptics Annotated Bible for a great way to see the contradictions side by side.
2 - consistent with other reliable works
Well, earlier you stated that there weren't any historical works that could be trusted as much as the Bible. So, if that's the case, how do you know those other works are correct?
Now, you're using archaeology as support for some of the Bible. Why is science acceptable when it supports the Bible, but not when it contradicts it?
Further, people and places in the New Testament can be pretty well matched with known history. But that doesn't mean all of the details are valid. Take "Gone With the Wind". Compared to all of the history of the Civil War era, it appears to be an accurate work. But the events described between Rhett and Scarlett never happened as written. So while we can be pretty sure that the people and places described in the New Testament are pretty accurate, the only corroboration of the details, such as miracles, are the accounts created by Christ's followers.
3 - relevance to you
If the Bible provides you comfort, guidance, etc., that's great. But it doesn't mean it has the answers for everyone, or that what is described in it must be taken at face value.
here's more to the Bible than "God said it. I believe it. That settles it."
Indeed. However, many followers _do_ take that attitude. And they are the people I had in mind in my original post. You can't have a rational debate about something when one side merely cites the Bible over and over.
challenge you to investigate the claims of Christ.
Which ones? The philosophical ones that we should treat others well? They aren't unique to Christianity. Or the claims that he is the 'Son of God', and performs miracles? The ones that are claimed, but aren't proven.
Use your mind, come at it as a skeptic and see what happens.
I have used my mind, and it's my skepticism that allows me to reject the Biblical mythology with no concerns. Being a skeptic requires that extraordinaly claims have extraordinary proof. Just as people today claim to have encounters with alien beings, people in the Middle Ages claimed to have contact with angels. The fact that miracles and other extraordinary events are written in the Bible does not provide proof that they happened.
Your mind is unlikely to be changed by the link above, or by another recommendation I'm about to make, but it sounds like you enjoy researching and discussing topics of this nature. Please read Carl Sagan's book The Demon-Haunted World
Your mother in the show is blaming GTA3 due to her own shortcomings as a parent - the question should have been "why did parents allow their children to look at mature subject matter"?
Well, the problem is that many of these busybody types have already denied their kids from having the game. The mere fact that the material exists is seen by them as horrible, and they feel it's their duty to wipe it from the face of the earth.
With all due respect, I could most likely be described as a hard-core Christian, and I agree that we do tend to say "but the Bible says...." because the Bible is a reliable reference.
Well, if the Bible works for you as a basis for how to live your life, that's great. The Bible contains many good lessons, although they aren't unique to the Judeo-Christian world.
The problem is that the Bible is vaguely reliable...it has a great deal of oral history, which has some basis in fact. But one only has to look at the way things like rumors and gossip spread and grow to realize that any kind of oral history is going to change and be embellished over time. And once written down, translations have changed it yet again.
The orginal debate that I had in mind comes from subjects such as evolution. Good scientific evidence is countered with "But the Bible says..." with no further support.
If you want to debate details about religious philosophy, it's perfectly appropriate to use the Bible as your source material. (I'm thinking of the Simpsons episode where Bart dresses as a Rabbi to debate with Krusty's father...)
You agree with me about Frontline. So you watch PBS. Presumably you watch more than Frontline. If so, you'll have seen plenty of shows on various cultures throughout the world. They all have their own stories about how the world began and how they came to be, and stories involving their god(s) and spirits. What makes the Bible a more reliable source than any of their religions? Because the Bible says so? That's the whole problem: a circular argument....the Bible is right because the Bible says so.
I think the ending of the article really hits the nail on the head. The issue of video game violence is largely driven by emotion and supported by short sound-bite statements. Mr. Jenkins went into this arena planning to use reason and rational debate.
/. about religion. When anyone challenges the beliefs of the hard-core Christians, they point to the Bible as their supporting evidence and say "but the Bible says this".
None of the talk-show formats are going to allow reasonable discussions. It doesn't get people worked up. They have to have emotional topics to bring in the viewers. And you can't use rational arguments against people using emotional ones.
It reminds me of the debates that spring up on
If most people had a clue, shows like Frontline would blow crap like Donahue out of the water on ratings....
This had an erect penis, thought to be because it died of asphyxiation
Wow...the ramifications to this are endless. Is it the earliest known case of autoerotic asphyxiation? I didn't even know other animals practiced that....but I guess a mammoth could just wrap that trunk around its neck....
And here I thought they simply didn't store enough for the ice age. I mean, what, 3 melons?
"There went our last female...."
We had an interesting situation with Google. Since the company changed names a while back, two domain names point to the same site (although with two different IP addresses).
Links on Google would show up under one site name, but not the other. Apparently Google does something on the back-end to determine that the contents are identical and assign the listing to one of the domain names (in this case the older one).
Only after feeding all visits to the old domain with a 301 and then sending them along to the new domain name did Google's results update to only indicate the new one.
And of course, no one seems to comprehend that _they_ are the consumer, and therefore can rip off all the damn tags on every mattress, pillow, and chair in their house.
We need a new law that says any comedian or cartoonist that refers to someone getting in trouble for removing the tag should be smothered with a tagless pillow...
. Get a Clysdale terminal server,
:)
Uh, don't you mean Cyclades? I think someone needs a beer...
That would explain it. I'm really suprised it took them this long...a quick Google search turns up tons of info on it, after all... :)
Right. And after the NYT misquotes you or says something incorrect about you on the front page, they bury a little retraction a week later...
When someone is researching a newspaper database or browsing the microfilm at the library, after seeing the headline "John Smith Has Intercourse With Small Farm Animals" are they going to dig through to search for a retraction?
But unlike the other person whose mis-transcribed resume ended up on a company web site, YOU released HideSeek voluntarily.
So, make a mistake when you're 20 and it will follow you FOREVER on the web
Not really that much different than 'real life'.
Not just the A series from IBM rock. We've got lots of old ThinkPad 770s still in use that take all kinds of abuse. I regularly pick mine up by the display, which they claim you aren't supposed to do, and never had a problem yet.
Only problems:
* One drive died
* One keyboard had to be replaced after a salesperson tried to feed it soda.
* Another salesperson somehow destroyed the connector shield for the floppy, unbeknownst to me. I reached around blind to plug a floppy in, and after a nice *pop* the whole thing shut down.
In the second case, I went ahead and replaced the keyboard in-house, since I knew they weren't going to fix that one under warranty. The others they took care of. IBM's warranty service absolutely rocks. On the last one, I called them up, and there was an Airborne Express box delivered a few hours later. Packed up the unit, shipped it out that afternoon, and the thing was back in my hands the next morning.
Except for the fact that they're:
Still paying rent.
Still paying employees.
Still paying for electricity.
Still paying for their 'net connection.
Still paying depreciation on equipment.
IOW, all their fixed costs are still there. Any savings from shutting down for a day would be minimal. I'm not saying they shouldn't just shut down until they have a fix, but they sure won't be saving any money by not offering service.
f I kick a wall and the building falls down, whose fault is it? mine or the architect's?
Well, if an architect was allowed to design the structural aspects of the building, you need to throw in the various governmental bodies, since things like that are the realm of an engineer.
Indeed. All the people who pay money for pyramid and other schemes with ads like "Make $5000 a month working from home" are frequently buying instructions and e-mail lists.
If I can entice people to pay me money to participate in my scheme, I don't have to sell any herbal breast enlarger, as I've made all my money off the suckers who bought into the program.
And there are always more people willing to buy into these programs. I still see 'work at home' ads in the paper for stuffing and mailing envelopes. And those scams were pointed out years ago.
the only thing left to do was bring down all the servers & any desktop machines that weren't on a UPS
:-)
Uh, if the power was cut, wouldn't these systems already be down?
Well yeah, but the Elise is a Lotus...you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a Honda.
Meanwhile, several thousand tons of extremely nasty chemicals of all sorts (from caustics to poisons to explosives) are running down roads and railroad tracks at speeds of up to 100 MPH.
Yay! People with sense do exist in the world. Our local enviro-zealots have been going nuts over radioactive waste transport for years. One of the major rail lines through St. Louis goes through a community called Webster Groves. It's an old little city, with expensive old houses and lots of charm. Oh, and lots of people who have the money to live there but nothing in the way of brains. And the local media has been talking to them a lot lately.
They're worried about derailments, terrorist attacks, etc., even though much more horrible things run through their charming city every day.
One guy they interviewed set up his architecture office in an old train station, and he said he's concerned about what kind of radiation dose he'd receive if the casks came through there...I hope he paid more attention in his architechture classes than he did in physics.
And to make it even better, one long time enviro-zealot here was even quoted as saying something to the effect of "you don't have to understand this issue, you just have a moral duty to stop it from happening". Right. Because if you do understand the issue, you'd know she's lying about the strength of the casks, which she claimed were never tested for impact....
Have you ever been bludgeoned by a slow moving 747?
When looking at only crude oil, Saudi Arabia is our biggest single supplier. However, once you add in gas and refined products, Canada blows everyone out of the water.
Take a look at this PDF of oil and oil product imports to the US for 2001.
The original post suggested that all oil money goes to support terrorist regimes. Look over those import numbers and you'll see that while we do import a great deal of petroleum products from Arab countries (which tarring Arab nations as terrorist is pretty racist anyway), there's a lot more coming to us from places like Venezuela, Canada, Mexico, etc.
As for offshore drilling and Alaska...while the technology of searching for oil has improved tremendously, we still can't tell exactly how much is there and how much we'll get out until we poke a hole in the ground. That's why the statements against drilling in ANWR saying "there's only x months worth of supply there" are so misleading.
I'm really suprised that the oil companies haven't waged a PR campaign for the image of oil wells. Everyone apparently has images in their mind of the old oil rush days in Texas and Oklahoma, where big black geysers shot into the sky for days. It simply isn't like that anymore. Look at the current wells in Alaska. Look at the gas production wells in the Gulf near Mobile. They're all among the cleanest facilities you can find.
Ok...argue it with the US DOT
And that's the table for all vehicles. When it's viewed as passenger cars, it's even less.
2,000mi/year / (48 - 38)mi/gallon * $1/gallon = $1,200/yr
What you've just done is calculate the cost of running a car that that gets 10 miles per gallon. You need to do:
12000 * (1/48 - 1/38) * $1
Wait for one of the Borax Powered Hydrogen Fuel cell vehicles from Chrysler. Cost is supposed to be low, and emission zero.
We'll see. Right now the NaBH4 process is horribly expensive and inefficient. Millenium Cell has claimed to have created a new process that fixes all the problems, but they won't say anything until their patents are secured.
And the system isn't borax-powered...borax is basically the waste product. The power comes from the hydrogen attached to the borax, which the system removes for energy. Now we're back to the same problem...we need to get the hyrdrogen from somewhere, which requires energy, and we need to tack it onto the borax, which requires energy...
The Millenium Cell folks claim they'll have the total system efficiency to be as good as or better than gasoline...we'll see.
Good points, but a couple of comments:
It's expensive (~$3/gal) but it may be worth it to you if you want to contribute to (a)saving the
ozone layer and/or (b)keeping US$ out of the hands of despotic Arab states (and their terrorist pawns)..
The ozone layer has nothing to do with what fuel you're burning. Destruction of upper level ozone is from CFCs, not tailpipe emissions.
The US still produces huge quantities of oil, and most of our imports come from Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela.
Oh, did I mention that biodiesel can be made from any biological substance that contains triglycerides?
Excellent! So we just need a blood filtering system to convert those high triglyceride levels into biodiesel!