The reality is that global warming probably sounds kind of good to most Canadians, and billions of dollars in oil revenues probably sound even better. (Whether it should is, of course, a different question.)
The ONLY way to prevent future global warming due to Carbon Monoxide emissions is to develop a credible alternative to petroleum for cars. I suggest a small "carbon tax" that is, by statute, 100% dedicated to alternative fuels research. The Chinese are actively pursuing this. Do we (as Americans -- sorry to all those not American) want the 21st century to be the "Chinese Century"?
So, are you suggesting that the free market is not the best way to parcel out a scarce, public resource? That... ahem... perhaps this is a natural monopoly and the consumer is best protected through (gasp!) regulation!
Dude, good thing your Canadian. If you were an American, the Republicans would be calling you a Marxist about now.
I have a Ph.D. in New Testament, and a Masters of Theological Studies. I have read the Old and New Testament, in Hebrew and Greek, many times, and in fact read the Hebrew Bible twice a year (in English, 'cause my Hebrew sucks) and the New Testament 4 times a year. I also read books about the Bible (commentaries and the like) on an on-going basis, probably average twenty or so commentaries a year.
I earn my money as a computer engineer (pay for theology professors sucks, and I'm very good at the computer gig) and have no fiduciary interest in the Bible.
I also know plenty of religious people who, in fact, read through the Bible every year.
Nice thing about your statement is that it's so easy to disprove, and it shows your bias for exactly what it is.
Actually, that's not true. There were no restrictions on copying of religious texts in the early church that I'm aware of (and I would most likely know, since i have a Ph.D. in New Testament and Early Christian History) certainly not any based on "copyright" which didn't exist. Not saying it's impossible, but the reality is that the texts that didn't get copied, for the most part, weren't copied because nobody wanted to read them.
I happen to be expert in one particular area of history (Ph.D. in New Testament and Early Christian Studies), and when I watch programs related to that area on the History Channel, I'm astounded at how uniformly awful they are. They seem determined to present any and every wacky theory, and to distort every recognized fact. While I'm not expert on other areas (e.g. American history), I also find their reporting in these areas to be... idiosyncratic?
Oddly enough, I was telling my girlfriend just tonight that I'm not very visual, and tend to approach concepts best through symbols (numbers, words, etc.) I've always found graphical representations of math more-or-less useless (although they are cool sometimes) and prefer my math without the diagrams. She told me that I'm deeply weird.:)
Just a quick comment -- although I am not familiar with that blog, I have practiced low carb for managing my diabetes VERY successfully. I raised my HDL, lowered my LDL, and dropped my average blood sugar from 140 or so to 85, not to mention losing massive amounts of weight. No other way to live!
There's a great scene in Orson Scott Card's book, "Lost Boys", set in the computing culture of the early 80's, in which the hero is offered a nasty NDA granting the new employer all rights to any programming he's ever done after moving all the way across the country for a programming job. The hero refuses to sign it, and the boss immediately offers him another one that is reasonable. His excuse: "you might have signed the first one." I've never been afraid of suggesting changes to NDA's and non-competes, and on 3 occasions have gotten them changed to be more reasonable. (On the fourth occasion, I wasn't really sure I wanted the job anyway.)
First of all, my NASA story is not a lie. May I suggest that calling someone a liar with no actual evidence is at least bad form?
Second, whether Eugenics was supported by "actual" science or not, there was a wide-spread belief that it was scientific. Also, I would argue that Eugenics was "actual" science since it's claims were falsifiable.
Third, there was a time when every scientist in the world would have told you that there was something called "Phlogiston", having negative weight. Science is not done by consensus or groupthink.
Fourth, remember back in the 80's when eating cholesterol would kill you, and there were huge government campaigns against it? Then somebody bothered to do the actual research and discovered that dietary cholesterol has no significant effect on blood cholesterol, and suddenly eggs are good for you. Or we could pick on the claim that saturated fat causes heart disease, which is now more-or-less thoroughly debunked but still government policy because "low fat" sells a lot of wheat and soybeans. Science and the political process are fundamentally incompatible, and every time science gets mixed up in politics it suffers.
Science with an agenda is rarely good science. So I don't trust the scientific backers of global warming. Again and again, it has been demonstrated that whenever politics gets involved in the scientific process, the result is that the scientists find exactly what they're being paid to look for. For that matter, I don't trust climate change skeptics either. Having had a good friend who was a NASA physicist working on Global Warming, I've seen how they do the modeling in some detail and I'm utterly unimpressed. (My friend, who was lead investigator for his particular project, privately told me he didn't really "buy it" either, but bureaucratic pressures required him to back it.)
To Global Warming, we can add: dietary cholesterol as the primary causal agent in coronary artery disease, eugenics (Nazi and American), and setting PI=3. These errors don't come from science, nor religion but from money and power, which corrupt everything.
I had occasion to fly into Ft. Worth some time back, and was struck by the fact that then, a couple of years AFTER 9/11, they apparently found it necessary to have signs instructing everyone not to bring their guns in the airport.
Unless you have studied the historic background in real depth - and I haven't, I am no expert - it is a great mistake to pontificate about the origins and development of Christianity.
I have (Ph.D. in New Testament and Early Christian Studies). Mind if I comment?
Whether the doctrine of the Trinity is to be found in the New Testament is debatable, and as I understood the GP's point it was that the doctrine IS found in the New Testament. In any case, it's undeniable that the doctrine of Jesus' divinity is found in the New Testament (John 1:1ff.; Phil 2), and by inference the church finds the divinity of the spirit as well. This has been true since at least the time of Clement of Rome (roughly 80AD IIRC).
The real problem that the church has is not accommodation or a lack of accommodation, but the difficulty of mapping a 1st century Jewish viewpoint into a pagan world, the trying to map THAT into a Medieval world, then trying to map THAT into a modern world, then trying to map THAT into a post-modern world. Simply put, things don't fit together the way they ought to. I highly recommend the work of N.T. Wright in this regard, as he knows more about first century Christianity and first century Judaism than all of his critics put together.
However, the key concept that we must cling to is simply that Jesus is Lord/King/Christ/Messiah, and Caesar isn't -- now and forever. That's the Christian message. (Note that Caesar tends not to like it.)
You betray your ignorance. For the past 200 years or so, most skeptical critics of the historical reliability of the New Testament had their roots in the field of "New Testament" studies and taught it at one university or another. Notable, contemporary examples include Dominic Crossan (formerly of Depaul, now retired -- notably, was educated almost entirely at Catholic seminaries), Marcus Borg (Oregon State), and Bart Ehrman (UNC Chapel Hill). All of these deny the basic elements of any sort of Christian conviction, and approach the New Testament as an historical document, while not being members of the Church. On a less skeptical side, there are many scholars (including N.T. Wright, Richard Hays, and E.P. Sanders) who offer interpretations of the New Testament, fully founded in an attempt to determine historical truth, that are less hostile to religious belief.
I would suggest that you don't mock fields you quite evidently know absolutely nothing about.
Really? How's your Greek? Hebrew? Knowledge of the first century world from 4BCE to 70CE? Like it or not, New Testament is a recognized field of study in secular institutions and religious institutions alike. It's basically a branch of history which many, many Americans, not all religious, find both fascinating and relevant.
Randi's been doing this for... what... 50 years? And yet, somehow, the most he's able to tell us is that one faith healer was fraudulent and that spoon-bending dude might have been using some stage magic? Why do Randi's followers always trot out the same 3-4 examples? Would expect there to be a lot more if Randi were really all that.
Meh. Randi has a couple of youtube videos attacking the Bible, and as a trained professional in the field (Ph.D. in New Testament from University of Virginia) i was not impressed. His opening attack in one of the youtube videos I watched is to attack the location of Nazareth, with lots of chuckles about the tourist industry there and the implication that the town didn't exist. What this really demonstrates is that Randi doesn't have any understanding about the ancient world or the challenges presented by the paucity of evidence for things in the first century. The funny thing is that skeptical claims regarding the New Testament keep being disproven by subsequent archaeological evidence. For example, 100 years ago skeptics told us that Quirinius was never governor of Judaea (or was it Licenius? Can't remember and too lazy to look it up) because there was no extra-Biblical attestation. When extra-Biblical attestation was found, they switched up and started attacking something else. What skeptics generally ignore is that the books of the New Testament are themselves first-century documents, offering compelling evidence for many elements of the first-century, from people enormously better prepared to separate "truth" from "fiction" than we are 2000 years later. They want to dismiss the evidence offered by the New Testament out of hand, because the documents are "religious" and therefore not trustworthy even in very ordinary claims (there was a town called Nazareth, for example) without external verification. If questioning the existence and location of Nazareth is the best Randi's got, I'm not at all impressed.
I used to weight 420 lbs. I had type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, severe sleep apnea (which could have literally killed me dead any night I forgot the CPAP), asthma, high cholesterol, IBS, and was diagnosed with type 2 bipolar disorder. I now weigh 194, have "the best cholesterol numbers [my doctor] has seen in a long time", energy to exercise, no breathing problems, I only poop when I want to now, and most of all I'm happy and stable without medication.
How did I do it, you ask? I realized that the USDA's purpose is to promote American grain-based agriculture (everything but corn, soybeans, and to a lesser degree wheat are considered "specialty crops") and not the health of Americans, and I quit following their stupid, lame, ineffective food pyramid. I save almost $10,000 in medications alone -- forget about all the other medical costs -- and I LOVE my tasty home-made bacon. That nasty corn, and wheat, and high-fructose-corn-syrup, and soybeans? Keep 'em the hell away from ME! I'd rather SMOKE than eat a school lunch -- it's better for me.
Want to lose weight? Grass-fed meats, vegetables (corn is not a vegetable -- except in school lunches!), fruit in moderation as a "treat". No added sugars of any kind. No wheat, corn, or god-help-us-soybeans-that-you-can't-even-eat-without-fermenting-them-because-they're-literally-inevitable-best-suited-for-feeding-pigs, ever.
Since the government started setting "preventative" nutritional guidelines, based on the then-unproven "low fat" theory from Dr. Ancel Keys, in 1977, have Americans gotten thinner or fatter? When the USDA publicly acknowledges that there is no "one true diet" for all humans, regardless of their ethnic background (and how recently that area developed agriculture) I MIGHT listen to them again. Until then, I think it would be insane to listen to them -- insanity being doing the same thing again and again and somehow expecting a different result.
It annoys me that the schools keep trying to tell my children that a low-fat diet is good for them. I can't imagine what I'd do if they started trying to force their hog-feed down my children's throats, but it would not be pretty.
Lots of places will scan documents for you on professional-grade scanners, including your local Kinko's. Sometimes, you don't save money by trying to do it yourself -- like when you keep buying another cheap scanner at a couple hundred a pop to avoid getting it done professionally.
Slashdot Mirror
Errr... that should have been "Carbon dioxide emissions." I'm smoking a cigarette, so I guess I have carbon monoxide on my brain.
The reality is that global warming probably sounds kind of good to most Canadians, and billions of dollars in oil revenues probably sound even better. (Whether it should is, of course, a different question.)
The ONLY way to prevent future global warming due to Carbon Monoxide emissions is to develop a credible alternative to petroleum for cars. I suggest a small "carbon tax" that is, by statute, 100% dedicated to alternative fuels research. The Chinese are actively pursuing this. Do we (as Americans -- sorry to all those not American) want the 21st century to be the "Chinese Century"?
So, are you suggesting that the free market is not the best way to parcel out a scarce, public resource? That ... ahem ... perhaps this is a natural monopoly and the consumer is best protected through (gasp!) regulation!
Dude, good thing your Canadian. If you were an American, the Republicans would be calling you a Marxist about now.
I have a Ph.D. in New Testament, and a Masters of Theological Studies. I have read the Old and New Testament, in Hebrew and Greek, many times, and in fact read the Hebrew Bible twice a year (in English, 'cause my Hebrew sucks) and the New Testament 4 times a year. I also read books about the Bible (commentaries and the like) on an on-going basis, probably average twenty or so commentaries a year.
I earn my money as a computer engineer (pay for theology professors sucks, and I'm very good at the computer gig) and have no fiduciary interest in the Bible.
I also know plenty of religious people who, in fact, read through the Bible every year.
Nice thing about your statement is that it's so easy to disprove, and it shows your bias for exactly what it is.
Actually, that's not true. There were no restrictions on copying of religious texts in the early church that I'm aware of (and I would most likely know, since i have a Ph.D. in New Testament and Early Christian History) certainly not any based on "copyright" which didn't exist. Not saying it's impossible, but the reality is that the texts that didn't get copied, for the most part, weren't copied because nobody wanted to read them.
There's lots of evidence of God's existence, both historical and present-day. Atheists just don't like looking at it.
First they infect the children. Then they infect the computer.
Luckily a little bit of reading usually helps with the disinfection process.
Dude,
Who do you think INVENTED the book? It sure as hell wasn't 19th century secularists.
I happen to be expert in one particular area of history (Ph.D. in New Testament and Early Christian Studies), and when I watch programs related to that area on the History Channel, I'm astounded at how uniformly awful they are. They seem determined to present any and every wacky theory, and to distort every recognized fact. While I'm not expert on other areas (e.g. American history), I also find their reporting in these areas to be... idiosyncratic?
Could the summary of this article have been any more anti-religious? How is this even "News for Nerds" or, for that matter, News?
Oddly enough, I was telling my girlfriend just tonight that I'm not very visual, and tend to approach concepts best through symbols (numbers, words, etc.) I've always found graphical representations of math more-or-less useless (although they are cool sometimes) and prefer my math without the diagrams. She told me that I'm deeply weird. :)
Just a quick comment -- although I am not familiar with that blog, I have practiced low carb for managing my diabetes VERY successfully. I raised my HDL, lowered my LDL, and dropped my average blood sugar from 140 or so to 85, not to mention losing massive amounts of weight. No other way to live!
There's a great scene in Orson Scott Card's book, "Lost Boys", set in the computing culture of the early 80's, in which the hero is offered a nasty NDA granting the new employer all rights to any programming he's ever done after moving all the way across the country for a programming job. The hero refuses to sign it, and the boss immediately offers him another one that is reasonable. His excuse: "you might have signed the first one." I've never been afraid of suggesting changes to NDA's and non-competes, and on 3 occasions have gotten them changed to be more reasonable. (On the fourth occasion, I wasn't really sure I wanted the job anyway.)
Good grief.
First of all, my NASA story is not a lie. May I suggest that calling someone a liar with no actual evidence is at least bad form?
Second, whether Eugenics was supported by "actual" science or not, there was a wide-spread belief that it was scientific. Also, I would argue that Eugenics was "actual" science since it's claims were falsifiable.
Third, there was a time when every scientist in the world would have told you that there was something called "Phlogiston", having negative weight. Science is not done by consensus or groupthink.
Fourth, remember back in the 80's when eating cholesterol would kill you, and there were huge government campaigns against it? Then somebody bothered to do the actual research and discovered that dietary cholesterol has no significant effect on blood cholesterol, and suddenly eggs are good for you. Or we could pick on the claim that saturated fat causes heart disease, which is now more-or-less thoroughly debunked but still government policy because "low fat" sells a lot of wheat and soybeans. Science and the political process are fundamentally incompatible, and every time science gets mixed up in politics it suffers.
Science with an agenda is rarely good science. So I don't trust the scientific backers of global warming. Again and again, it has been demonstrated that whenever politics gets involved in the scientific process, the result is that the scientists find exactly what they're being paid to look for. For that matter, I don't trust climate change skeptics either. Having had a good friend who was a NASA physicist working on Global Warming, I've seen how they do the modeling in some detail and I'm utterly unimpressed. (My friend, who was lead investigator for his particular project, privately told me he didn't really "buy it" either, but bureaucratic pressures required him to back it.)
To Global Warming, we can add: dietary cholesterol as the primary causal agent in coronary artery disease, eugenics (Nazi and American), and setting PI=3. These errors don't come from science, nor religion but from money and power, which corrupt everything.
I had occasion to fly into Ft. Worth some time back, and was struck by the fact that then, a couple of years AFTER 9/11, they apparently found it necessary to have signs instructing everyone not to bring their guns in the airport.
I have (Ph.D. in New Testament and Early Christian Studies). Mind if I comment?
Whether the doctrine of the Trinity is to be found in the New Testament is debatable, and as I understood the GP's point it was that the doctrine IS found in the New Testament. In any case, it's undeniable that the doctrine of Jesus' divinity is found in the New Testament (John 1:1ff.; Phil 2), and by inference the church finds the divinity of the spirit as well. This has been true since at least the time of Clement of Rome (roughly 80AD IIRC).
The real problem that the church has is not accommodation or a lack of accommodation, but the difficulty of mapping a 1st century Jewish viewpoint into a pagan world, the trying to map THAT into a Medieval world, then trying to map THAT into a modern world, then trying to map THAT into a post-modern world. Simply put, things don't fit together the way they ought to. I highly recommend the work of N.T. Wright in this regard, as he knows more about first century Christianity and first century Judaism than all of his critics put together.
However, the key concept that we must cling to is simply that Jesus is Lord/King/Christ/Messiah, and Caesar isn't -- now and forever. That's the Christian message. (Note that Caesar tends not to like it.)
You betray your ignorance. For the past 200 years or so, most skeptical critics of the historical reliability of the New Testament had their roots in the field of "New Testament" studies and taught it at one university or another. Notable, contemporary examples include Dominic Crossan (formerly of Depaul, now retired -- notably, was educated almost entirely at Catholic seminaries), Marcus Borg (Oregon State), and Bart Ehrman (UNC Chapel Hill). All of these deny the basic elements of any sort of Christian conviction, and approach the New Testament as an historical document, while not being members of the Church. On a less skeptical side, there are many scholars (including N.T. Wright, Richard Hays, and E.P. Sanders) who offer interpretations of the New Testament, fully founded in an attempt to determine historical truth, that are less hostile to religious belief.
I would suggest that you don't mock fields you quite evidently know absolutely nothing about.
Really? How's your Greek? Hebrew? Knowledge of the first century world from 4BCE to 70CE? Like it or not, New Testament is a recognized field of study in secular institutions and religious institutions alike. It's basically a branch of history which many, many Americans, not all religious, find both fascinating and relevant.
Randi's been doing this for ... what ... 50 years? And yet, somehow, the most he's able to tell us is that one faith healer was fraudulent and that spoon-bending dude might have been using some stage magic? Why do Randi's followers always trot out the same 3-4 examples? Would expect there to be a lot more if Randi were really all that.
Meh. Randi has a couple of youtube videos attacking the Bible, and as a trained professional in the field (Ph.D. in New Testament from University of Virginia) i was not impressed. His opening attack in one of the youtube videos I watched is to attack the location of Nazareth, with lots of chuckles about the tourist industry there and the implication that the town didn't exist. What this really demonstrates is that Randi doesn't have any understanding about the ancient world or the challenges presented by the paucity of evidence for things in the first century. The funny thing is that skeptical claims regarding the New Testament keep being disproven by subsequent archaeological evidence. For example, 100 years ago skeptics told us that Quirinius was never governor of Judaea (or was it Licenius? Can't remember and too lazy to look it up) because there was no extra-Biblical attestation. When extra-Biblical attestation was found, they switched up and started attacking something else. What skeptics generally ignore is that the books of the New Testament are themselves first-century documents, offering compelling evidence for many elements of the first-century, from people enormously better prepared to separate "truth" from "fiction" than we are 2000 years later. They want to dismiss the evidence offered by the New Testament out of hand, because the documents are "religious" and therefore not trustworthy even in very ordinary claims (there was a town called Nazareth, for example) without external verification. If questioning the existence and location of Nazareth is the best Randi's got, I'm not at all impressed.
I used to weight 420 lbs. I had type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, severe sleep apnea (which could have literally killed me dead any night I forgot the CPAP), asthma, high cholesterol, IBS, and was diagnosed with type 2 bipolar disorder. I now weigh 194, have "the best cholesterol numbers [my doctor] has seen in a long time", energy to exercise, no breathing problems, I only poop when I want to now, and most of all I'm happy and stable without medication.
How did I do it, you ask? I realized that the USDA's purpose is to promote American grain-based agriculture (everything but corn, soybeans, and to a lesser degree wheat are considered "specialty crops") and not the health of Americans, and I quit following their stupid, lame, ineffective food pyramid. I save almost $10,000 in medications alone -- forget about all the other medical costs -- and I LOVE my tasty home-made bacon. That nasty corn, and wheat, and high-fructose-corn-syrup, and soybeans? Keep 'em the hell away from ME! I'd rather SMOKE than eat a school lunch -- it's better for me.
Want to lose weight? Grass-fed meats, vegetables (corn is not a vegetable -- except in school lunches!), fruit in moderation as a "treat". No added sugars of any kind. No wheat, corn, or god-help-us-soybeans-that-you-can't-even-eat-without-fermenting-them-because-they're-literally-inevitable-best-suited-for-feeding-pigs, ever.
Since the government started setting "preventative" nutritional guidelines, based on the then-unproven "low fat" theory from Dr. Ancel Keys, in 1977, have Americans gotten thinner or fatter? When the USDA publicly acknowledges that there is no "one true diet" for all humans, regardless of their ethnic background (and how recently that area developed agriculture) I MIGHT listen to them again. Until then, I think it would be insane to listen to them -- insanity being doing the same thing again and again and somehow expecting a different result.
It annoys me that the schools keep trying to tell my children that a low-fat diet is good for them. I can't imagine what I'd do if they started trying to force their hog-feed down my children's throats, but it would not be pretty.
It wasn't free. They sent the mother a bill RTFA.
Robert Heinlein called this Lethe in Time enough for love.". Once again, he's anticipated reality
Lined with tin-foil? Nope. It IS tin-foil. Pope's hat is a potent symbol of his (nowadays nominal) secular authority. In other words, it's a crown.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_tiara
Lots of places will scan documents for you on professional-grade scanners, including your local Kinko's. Sometimes, you don't save money by trying to do it yourself -- like when you keep buying another cheap scanner at a couple hundred a pop to avoid getting it done professionally.