I think the working on the Sabbath being a sin is probably a misinterpretation by the original Jewish scholars based upon the fact they didn't have all the facts then. God's rest has a significantly different meaning to christians that to Jews because when God rests it is not so that he can put his feet up, but so that he can do what God wants to do, which is love you and me. It appears as if the Christian sabbath was moved to avoid the anti-semitic trend in about 321 ad, to put distance between Christians and Jews, but I don't think God will mind too much so long as we keep at least one and preferably every day Holy. http://www.religioustolerance.org/sabbath.htm
If you believe in a god, why not the One God, Lord of hosts? Praying to another if you believe in God would be to claim the the Lord was not all powerful and is obviously a sin.
The homosexual thing I am not all that certain about and I have heard many different interpretations. I've only been a Christian for a year and I've not really looked into this issue yet. A basic reading of the recent translations of the Bible seems to be very anti-homosexuality, but I'm not sure that it isn't just in the context of other sexual immorality (like unfaithfulness, incest, pedophilia, etc), which is about self-indulgence. It's possible that the concept of a stable monogamous relationship wasn't intended as the target, but you'd have to read the Hebrew and Greek to know for sure. It's a tough question and one I think that is possibly one for each person to pray about and then deal with. It's worth noting though that Jesus hung out with prostitutes.
Now though all sin is forgiven if you believe in Jesus and follow him. He died so that we didn't have to go to hell. All you have to do is gracefully accept his sacrifice and confess your sins.
"Soon", this from a God that waits Billions of years before man appeared on Earth and the dedicates just 3 chapters out of the entire scripture to that. Not only that but we'll all be dead in 70 years or so and so it is "Soon" to each individual
2) Not true. Christian teaching is that sex is a gift from God, and cannot in itself be sinful, but it is sinful to indulge yourself, to the exclusion of God. Never mind the psalms, read the song of songs.
3) hardly a basic or core belief, but prove it never happened, and that it was meant literally, which you must do say it is "bunk"
I'd agree with you about porn, but I think there a few things to add. I think violence on TV is a much bigger problem than sex, after all, sex is a gift from God, (although it is open to abuse) but violence is a direct result of sin and is from the Devil. Trying to hide you 5 year old from the reality that the world is a sinful place seems counter productive to me. Try explaining to you kid that the Herbal Essences commercial is trying to appeal to the sinful part of human nature. Try giving your children a defence against such things for when they go out into the world rather than hope your children never encounter such things. There really are more insidious problems with TV than sex and violence. For example, here in the UK the satellite broadcaster Sky (owned by Rupert Murdoch) is celebrating Christmas by cutting the price on having 2 separate decoders, and selling it on the basis that the kids can have one upstairs while the adults watch downstairs. Where once Christmas was about Jesus, now it is about splitting families into demographic audiences for trashy Christmas TV, to watch more commercials and be better consumers.
I don't think so. It looks like the card has a built in MSIL interpreter and does encryption actually on the card. The point being that you can create an encrypted connection from the card to the verification server so the clear text is never available to the client PC. This makes it very difficult to read the information off the card and duplicate it, because the card will attempt to verify the server before giving up it secrets.
Damn, you're right. It's back to the drawing board for my doomsday machine then! Perhaps if I manage to reverse the spin of the Earth and make the moons orbit retrograde...
This got me thinking. If all so-called renewable energy sources take energy from the environment in some form, what effect would they have?
Wind, wave and solar power all take energy from the climate directly and would affect global heat transport mechanisms, which is not a great thing, although in theory you could mix production to have an overall balancing effect.
Tidal power is the interesting one. Tidal power takes energy from the moons rotation around the world, so taking energy from it will eventually change the moons orbit by reducing its angular velocity, at which point it would start to decend and eventually crash into the earth.
Some quick calulations show that if we were to derive all our energy (estimated to be 5*10^19 J per year) from tidal power, the moon, which has gravitational potential energy of roughly 2* 10^20 jm-1, would lose altitude at roughly 25cm per year and crash into the earth in roughly 1 billion years.
So, logically, Saddam is a person who we would suspect.
logically, except for the fact that you had already lauched cruise missile strikes against Al Qaeda targets in Sudan and Afganistan, and they had attacked the USS Cole in Yemen IIRC and attempted to blow up the WTC with a lorry bomb a few years earlier. Then there was the intelligence that Al Qaeda was planning some kid of attack on the US. The reason that Bush immediately thought of Saddam was that he had taken his eye off the ball with regard to Islamic terrorism and was already obsessed via prompting from the neocons and straussians who advised him that Saddam was the greatest threat, despite no evidence to back that up beyond some stalling tactics in his battle with the UN. Saddam was no threat to anyone at the time except his own people, and has no history of terrorist activity anywhere that I am aware of.
I know when I first heard of the attacks on the WTC I fully expected you to jump straight down Iraq's throat, because I was aware of just how much Iraq pre-occupied the minds of the hawks in the Bush government, and was just praying that you'd actually stop and investigate who was actually behind the attacks before doing anything rash. To be honest I half expected Baghdad to be a glowing hole in the ground within hours, but by the end of the day the experts were pointing fingers at Osama Bin-Laden.
Your claim that Bush didn't want to do anything about Saddam is laughable, at best. Not least because Saddam had nothing, nil, nada to do with 9/11 at all, and yet we know that within hours Bush was asking people to look into whether Saddam was behind the attacks. Secondly Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz had all signed an open letter to President Clinton outlining why Saddam was the single greatest threat to the security of the US and had had to be dealt with decisively and soon. OK that's not Bush in person, merely his closest "advisors", but the effect is the same.
In order to undertsnd why Saddam acted the way he did you have to understand the man. He has had close relatives killed for disloyalty and coup plots. He rose from being a street thug to the leader of his nation by being brutal and making enemies along the way. The fact that he survived is due to his extreme paranoia and fanatical bodyguards. No one ever said he was actually smart.
There is no way that the US could have assasinated him. You couldn't even assasinate Castro and he is much less paranoid. Saddam had many doubles and often drove around in a battered white taxi to avoid drawing attention to himself. The truth of the matter is that even when you had Iraq monitored and shut down from the air you didn't know where he was and you can't have had many agents on the ground or the intelligence on WMD's (such as it was) would have been much better.
Climb down out of your ass and recognise that the great US of A isn't quite as omnipotent as you seem to think.
Just because debt is normal, it doesn't mean that you can continue to borrow beyond your means to repay. US nation debt is currently as nearly $7.5 trillion, almost 70% of GDP (not tax income, which is only $1.8 Trillion), and is expected to grow rapidly if Bush is re-elected. If you were in debt to 4 times your annual wage and where the interest alone was almost a quarter of you wage (nearly $400 Billion a year) AND you were still spending more than you earnt your might start to worry about the state of your finances. If you THEN decided to go and buy yourself a fancy new car or a fantastic holiday other people might question your ability to manage your own money. Paying off that debt would take the best part of 25 years IF things go well. But social security liabilty is likely to exploded as the baby boomers start to reach retirement age and those sums are looking a bit dodgy.
The reason he looked like he was hiding something was... He was hiding himself. The UN inspection team was crammed with US spies and Saddam was more than a little paranoid. He didn't want them roaming his home planting bugs and bombs to assasinate him. He also wanted to appear strong in front of his neighbours and own people, and what better way than to lead the UN and US by proxy in a wild goose chase. Sadly for Saddam the US was utterly duped by his bluff and in no mood to play games. Unfortunately for America (and the 100,000 Iraqi's who have died since the war http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041025/full/041025 -20.html) Bush was extremely gullible and possesed by an burning desire to crush Saddam long before he became president, and so there was a war which cost a lot of innocent lives, an unimaginable amount of money and a massive debt for your great grandchildren to pay off.
God controlling rights, yeah that's a good one. If you follow Jesus you will face persecution, inprisonment and abuse. I don't quite see how that squares with Him protecting your rights.
You are correct of course and I must say that I have many American friends (or clan buddies, which is mostly as close to friends as a poor slashdotter gets). They're nice guys and mostly thoughtful but sometimes you'll get some who are simply not aware of many things which go on in the world, things that are done either to them by their government, or done in their name abroad. Mostly I don't understand the refusal to question the leadership in the name of patriotism. When you nation is founded on principles, what can be more patriotic than asking hard questions about whether or not those principles are being followed?
Why is destroying Israel and setting up an islamic state any more absurd and immoral than destroying Iraq and setting up a puppet government?
Yes I exempted palestine from civilised nation status, partly because it is not a palestinian standing army which attack Israel, and partly because they don't have the infrastructure to be properly called a nation. Israel on the other hand is a wealthy, well armed nation. It should know better.
Despite Israel holding higher standards than any other country (e.g. most countries who would carpet bomb the whole of Ramallah versus Israel who loses troops by going door to door) it seems that still isn't enough.
Hmm, I must have missed the carpet bombing of Dublin. People (and many Americans) complain about Bloody Sunday, and rightly so. It was an almighty fuck up at best, and criminal at worst, and yet the equivalent takes place every week, if not daily, in the palestinian refugee camps and the occupied territories. Why is Israel not held to the same standard that we are held to?
We Brits have somewhat more experience of terrorism than you johnny-come-lately American.s Now you faced one act of terrorism and you think you know it all. Well, I guess after funding the IRA for so long you can legitamately claim to have seen both sides. Terrorism cannot be beaten by bombs and bullets because it is not a battle for territory or resources, but a battle for hearts and minds. The terrorist are trying to make their targets capitulate through fear, while the actions of the target nation SHOULD be to take away the support network on which terrorist survive. You do this by appealing to the moderates in the terrorist supporters and negotiating. Eventually as people see that negotiation work the terrorist become marginalised. Bombing those supporters on the other hand only hardens support for terrorism which is why we didn't bomb Dublin or Belfast. It would have been horribly counter productive.
actually according to the latest study published in the lancet there have been probably 100,000 additional deaths above and beyond the pre war death rate in Iraq, since the US invasion. Of those the vast majority are the direct result of violence and the single largest killer is believed to be US air strikes. This survey did not take into account deaths in falluja, where more people have been killed than anywhere else.
BULLSHIT!!!! There is no way an Israeli sniper can shoot 2 children in the head accidentally when they are the only people on the roof of a building. There is no way a soldier can shoot a tall Englishman who is well known to the Israelis in the back from 25 meters when armed with a weapon which has a scope and claim he just happened to get in the way. Israeli soldiers are deliberatly targetting UN personnel because they resent the fact that they appear to be siding with the palestinians. UN marked vehicles are often attacked from the air or by soldiers on the ground. They are deliberatly killing children because the soldiers know that a palestinian child's life is worth nothing to their bosses and so no action will come of it.
Civilised nations do not kill unarmed non combatants without serious thought and most civilians are being killed in offensive operations, which by definition Israel is to blame. If Israel wants to be considered a civilised nation then it should start acting like one, not simply claiming that,they did this or that, and so we are justified in our actions. They are held to a higher standard and are failing to meet that standard. Likewise if America wants to be called a civilised nation you should stop bombing weddings and start to charge soldiers who fail to take due care before opening fire, as we have done.
I really don't care how bad the other side is or what they have done or how they conduct their war. The standards we set for ourselves as civilised nations are absolute and rigid, otherwise we are just hypocrites.
I do not agree with Palestinian terrorist actions, I should make that clear. But you are defending the indefensible by claiming that it is not as bad as the other side. Both sides are to be condemned but you actually actively support and reward the illegal actions of the Israelis, therefore I have to stand up against you.
Slashdot Mirror
I refer the honourable gentleman to the answer I gave previously.
0 30074
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=131894&cid=11
I think the working on the Sabbath being a sin is probably a misinterpretation by the original Jewish scholars based upon the fact they didn't have all the facts then. God's rest has a significantly different meaning to christians that to Jews because when God rests it is not so that he can put his feet up, but so that he can do what God wants to do, which is love you and me. It appears as if the Christian sabbath was moved to avoid the anti-semitic trend in about 321 ad, to put distance between Christians and Jews, but I don't think God will mind too much so long as we keep at least one and preferably every day Holy. http://www.religioustolerance.org/sabbath.htm
If you believe in a god, why not the One God, Lord of hosts? Praying to another if you believe in God would be to claim the the Lord was not all powerful and is obviously a sin.
The homosexual thing I am not all that certain about and I have heard many different interpretations. I've only been a Christian for a year and I've not really looked into this issue yet. A basic reading of the recent translations of the Bible seems to be very anti-homosexuality, but I'm not sure that it isn't just in the context of other sexual immorality (like unfaithfulness, incest, pedophilia, etc), which is about self-indulgence. It's possible that the concept of a stable monogamous relationship wasn't intended as the target, but you'd have to read the Hebrew and Greek to know for sure. It's a tough question and one I think that is possibly one for each person to pray about and then deal with. It's worth noting though that Jesus hung out with prostitutes.
Now though all sin is forgiven if you believe in Jesus and follow him. He died so that we didn't have to go to hell. All you have to do is gracefully accept his sacrifice and confess your sins.
"Soon", this from a God that waits Billions of years before man appeared on Earth and the dedicates just 3 chapters out of the entire scripture to that. Not only that but we'll all be dead in 70 years or so and so it is "Soon" to each individual
1) "To me the evidence is conclusive...Over and over again in the high court I have secured the verdict on evidence no nearly so compelling [as the evidence for Jesus' resurrection]."--Sir Edward Clarke, former Justice of the High Court of England
http://www.bringyou.to/apologetics/num9.htm,
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/2964/resurrect
http://www.leaderu.com/truth/1truth22.html
2) Not true. Christian teaching is that sex is a gift from God, and cannot in itself be sinful, but it is sinful to indulge yourself, to the exclusion of God. Never mind the psalms, read the song of songs.
3) hardly a basic or core belief, but prove it never happened, and that it was meant literally, which you must do say it is "bunk"
4) "The odds against a universe like ours coming out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications" (John Boslough, Stephen Hawking's Universe, p. 121).
Tell me one basic Christian belief which is bunk.
(btw my comment was for the parent post, who did seem to share my beliefs)
I'd like to say a few things.
I'd agree with you about porn, but I think there a few things to add. I think violence on TV is a much bigger problem than sex, after all, sex is a gift from God, (although it is open to abuse) but violence is a direct result of sin and is from the Devil. Trying to hide you 5 year old from the reality that the world is a sinful place seems counter productive to me. Try explaining to you kid that the Herbal Essences commercial is trying to appeal to the sinful part of human nature. Try giving your children a defence against such things for when they go out into the world rather than hope your children never encounter such things. There really are more insidious problems with TV than sex and violence. For example, here in the UK the satellite broadcaster Sky (owned by Rupert Murdoch) is celebrating Christmas by cutting the price on having 2 separate decoders, and selling it on the basis that the kids can have one upstairs while the adults watch downstairs. Where once Christmas was about Jesus, now it is about splitting families into demographic audiences for trashy Christmas TV, to watch more commercials and be better consumers.
Actually that's 10,000 square mile, which is an awful lot of space, even for the US I would imagine.
I don't think so. It looks like the card has a built in MSIL interpreter and does encryption actually on the card. The point being that you can create an encrypted connection from the card to the verification server so the clear text is never available to the client PC. This makes it very difficult to read the information off the card and duplicate it, because the card will attempt to verify the server before giving up it secrets.
Damn, you're right. It's back to the drawing board for my doomsday machine then! Perhaps if I manage to reverse the spin of the Earth and make the moons orbit retrograde...
The moderators
I suggest hats. I crown for the respected view and a dunces cap for the wacko.
THE BASTARD!!!
A geek having an affair..... Riiight.
This got me thinking. If all so-called renewable energy sources take energy from the environment in some form, what effect would they have?
Wind, wave and solar power all take energy from the climate directly and would affect global heat transport mechanisms, which is not a great thing, although in theory you could mix production to have an overall balancing effect.
Tidal power is the interesting one. Tidal power takes energy from the moons rotation around the world, so taking energy from it will eventually change the moons orbit by reducing its angular velocity, at which point it would start to decend and eventually crash into the earth.
Some quick calulations show that if we were to derive all our energy (estimated to be 5*10^19 J per year) from tidal power, the moon, which has gravitational potential energy of roughly 2* 10^20 jm-1, would lose altitude at roughly 25cm per year and crash into the earth in roughly 1 billion years.
logically, except for the fact that you had already lauched cruise missile strikes against Al Qaeda targets in Sudan and Afganistan, and they had attacked the USS Cole in Yemen IIRC and attempted to blow up the WTC with a lorry bomb a few years earlier. Then there was the intelligence that Al Qaeda was planning some kid of attack on the US. The reason that Bush immediately thought of Saddam was that he had taken his eye off the ball with regard to Islamic terrorism and was already obsessed via prompting from the neocons and straussians who advised him that Saddam was the greatest threat, despite no evidence to back that up beyond some stalling tactics in his battle with the UN. Saddam was no threat to anyone at the time except his own people, and has no history of terrorist activity anywhere that I am aware of.
I know when I first heard of the attacks on the WTC I fully expected you to jump straight down Iraq's throat, because I was aware of just how much Iraq pre-occupied the minds of the hawks in the Bush government, and was just praying that you'd actually stop and investigate who was actually behind the attacks before doing anything rash. To be honest I half expected Baghdad to be a glowing hole in the ground within hours, but by the end of the day the experts were pointing fingers at Osama Bin-Laden.
Your claim that Bush didn't want to do anything about Saddam is laughable, at best. Not least because Saddam had nothing, nil, nada to do with 9/11 at all, and yet we know that within hours Bush was asking people to look into whether Saddam was behind the attacks. Secondly Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz had all signed an open letter to President Clinton outlining why Saddam was the single greatest threat to the security of the US and had had to be dealt with decisively and soon. OK that's not Bush in person, merely his closest "advisors", but the effect is the same.
In order to undertsnd why Saddam acted the way he did you have to understand the man. He has had close relatives killed for disloyalty and coup plots. He rose from being a street thug to the leader of his nation by being brutal and making enemies along the way. The fact that he survived is due to his extreme paranoia and fanatical bodyguards. No one ever said he was actually smart.
There is no way that the US could have assasinated him. You couldn't even assasinate Castro and he is much less paranoid. Saddam had many doubles and often drove around in a battered white taxi to avoid drawing attention to himself. The truth of the matter is that even when you had Iraq monitored and shut down from the air you didn't know where he was and you can't have had many agents on the ground or the intelligence on WMD's (such as it was) would have been much better.
Climb down out of your ass and recognise that the great US of A isn't quite as omnipotent as you seem to think.
Just because debt is normal, it doesn't mean that you can continue to borrow beyond your means to repay. US nation debt is currently as nearly $7.5 trillion, almost 70% of GDP (not tax income, which is only $1.8 Trillion), and is expected to grow rapidly if Bush is re-elected. If you were in debt to 4 times your annual wage and where the interest alone was almost a quarter of you wage (nearly $400 Billion a year) AND you were still spending more than you earnt your might start to worry about the state of your finances. If you THEN decided to go and buy yourself a fancy new car or a fantastic holiday other people might question your ability to manage your own money. Paying off that debt would take the best part of 25 years IF things go well. But social security liabilty is likely to exploded as the baby boomers start to reach retirement age and those sums are looking a bit dodgy.
The reason he looked like he was hiding something was... He was hiding himself. The UN inspection team was crammed with US spies and Saddam was more than a little paranoid. He didn't want them roaming his home planting bugs and bombs to assasinate him. He also wanted to appear strong in front of his neighbours and own people, and what better way than to lead the UN and US by proxy in a wild goose chase. Sadly for Saddam the US was utterly duped by his bluff and in no mood to play games. Unfortunately for America (and the 100,000 Iraqi's who have died since the war http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041025/full/041025 -20.html) Bush was extremely gullible and possesed by an burning desire to crush Saddam long before he became president, and so there was a war which cost a lot of innocent lives, an unimaginable amount of money and a massive debt for your great grandchildren to pay off.
God controlling rights, yeah that's a good one. If you follow Jesus you will face persecution, inprisonment and abuse. I don't quite see how that squares with Him protecting your rights.
Those damn imigants, I knew it was them. Even when it was the bears I knew it was them.
Whats the other quote? The price of freedom is eternal vigilance?
Sorry, I misplaced my tags off that last comment.
You are correct of course and I must say that I have many American friends (or clan buddies, which is mostly as close to friends as a poor slashdotter gets). They're nice guys and mostly thoughtful but sometimes you'll get some who are simply not aware of many things which go on in the world, things that are done either to them by their government, or done in their name abroad. Mostly I don't understand the refusal to question the leadership in the name of patriotism. When you nation is founded on principles, what can be more patriotic than asking hard questions about whether or not those principles are being followed?
Anyway, no (serious) offence intended.
man: "well, i believe i'll vote for a third party candidate"
kang: "ha ha ha, go ahead, throw your vote away!"
hmmm... No I've considered it and discarded it as outright fantasy. You've all been brainwashed by Fox.
Yes I exempted palestine from civilised nation status, partly because it is not a palestinian standing army which attack Israel, and partly because they don't have the infrastructure to be properly called a nation. Israel on the other hand is a wealthy, well armed nation. It should know better.
Hmm, I must have missed the carpet bombing of Dublin. People (and many Americans) complain about Bloody Sunday, and rightly so. It was an almighty fuck up at best, and criminal at worst, and yet the equivalent takes place every week, if not daily, in the palestinian refugee camps and the occupied territories. Why is Israel not held to the same standard that we are held to?
We Brits have somewhat more experience of terrorism than you johnny-come-lately American.s Now you faced one act of terrorism and you think you know it all. Well, I guess after funding the IRA for so long you can legitamately claim to have seen both sides. Terrorism cannot be beaten by bombs and bullets because it is not a battle for territory or resources, but a battle for hearts and minds. The terrorist are trying to make their targets capitulate through fear, while the actions of the target nation SHOULD be to take away the support network on which terrorist survive. You do this by appealing to the moderates in the terrorist supporters and negotiating. Eventually as people see that negotiation work the terrorist become marginalised. Bombing those supporters on the other hand only hardens support for terrorism which is why we didn't bomb Dublin or Belfast. It would have been horribly counter productive.
actually according to the latest study published in the lancet there have been probably 100,000 additional deaths above and beyond the pre war death rate in Iraq, since the US invasion. Of those the vast majority are the direct result of violence and the single largest killer is believed to be US air strikes. This survey did not take into account deaths in falluja, where more people have been killed than anywhere else.
BULLSHIT!!!! There is no way an Israeli sniper can shoot 2 children in the head accidentally when they are the only people on the roof of a building. There is no way a soldier can shoot a tall Englishman who is well known to the Israelis in the back from 25 meters when armed with a weapon which has a scope and claim he just happened to get in the way. Israeli soldiers are deliberatly targetting UN personnel because they resent the fact that they appear to be siding with the palestinians. UN marked vehicles are often attacked from the air or by soldiers on the ground. They are deliberatly killing children because the soldiers know that a palestinian child's life is worth nothing to their bosses and so no action will come of it.
Civilised nations do not kill unarmed non combatants without serious thought and most civilians are being killed in offensive operations, which by definition Israel is to blame. If Israel wants to be considered a civilised nation then it should start acting like one, not simply claiming that,they did this or that, and so we are justified in our actions. They are held to a higher standard and are failing to meet that standard. Likewise if America wants to be called a civilised nation you should stop bombing weddings and start to charge soldiers who fail to take due care before opening fire, as we have done.
I really don't care how bad the other side is or what they have done or how they conduct their war. The standards we set for ourselves as civilised nations are absolute and rigid, otherwise we are just hypocrites.
I do not agree with Palestinian terrorist actions, I should make that clear. But you are defending the indefensible by claiming that it is not as bad as the other side. Both sides are to be condemned but you actually actively support and reward the illegal actions of the Israelis, therefore I have to stand up against you.