Which is exactly why I like Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency more than Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and recommend it to all me DNA-less friends before HHGTTG.
Dirk Gently is still funny, has less of the absurdist asides, has a plot, and one that is funny in its own right, has a bit of character development, and even inspires the occasional emotion apart from humour in the reader. And I like some Coleridge's poetry too:)
She meets guy online
Guys job is to prevent people from cracking on to younger people on chat rooms
She chats with the guy online
She gives the guy her phone number
She talks to the guy on the phone
They have increasingly explicit conversations
Now, is the guy doing his job, or not? That's what the whole thing is about.
More like this:
She meets guy online
Guys job is to prevent people from cracking on to younger people on chat rooms
She chats with the guy online.
She gives the guy her phone number.
She talks to the guy on the phone.
They have increasingly explicit conversations.
Now, is the guy doing his job, or not? That's what the whole thing is about.
It depends on the way you look at it. Currently, on MMORPGs, players expect to be able to grind up to the level cap and sit there. "Winning" the game is hitting the level cap and getting access to end-game content. But look at the example of things like old arcade machines. The goal there was to get your name at #1 on the scoreboard. But at the same time, you knew other people were going to come along and bump you off. You knew that from the minute you started playing the game. If you want permadeath to work, you need to change the goals of the MMORPG.
What I wouldn't mind seeing is a game that would do something like this: Every players starts off as a human, and can increase their in-game abilities. When they are killed, they become undead, and they're abilities are frozen at the place they were at time of death, and your job essentially becomes to kill the humans.Instead of levelling by experience, the total time online is what counts towards your level (or perhaps, time spent in zones dangerous to someone of your level). The goal would be to stay "alive" as long as possible. Of course, as you get higher and higher, more and more attention is going to be paid to you, and, sooner or later, you're gonna get killed. At which point, you'll become the highest-level undead. Until someone else survives longer...
While not technically permadeath, it certainly has that aspect that the people who want that sort of thing seem to be looking for - permanent consequences to death, and a challenge to staying alive. As well as recognition for the best players.
The grandparent makes a valid point though. Take the Babelfish-God section from the book. Try to make it into a visual piece. It just doesn't work, because the whole thing is exposition. It's just a huge digression. And a great many parts of the book, and often some of the funnier parts, are in this sort of format.
It would mean we could get rid of some of the kludges used currently to implement a stateful protocol on top of a stateless one - eg: sessions via cookies and url rewriting and stuff like the "keep alive" thingy that creates a mini-persistent connection for downloading all images referenced in page and stuff like that.
But yes, making every HTTP request create a state would be a resource drain. I think the best method would be to allow you to request either stateful or stateless connections when you make a request, but that would make stuff like web-servers that much more complicated.
Its all about a tradeoff - flexibility at the cost of simplicity. At the moment the protocol is designed to be simple, so all the complexity for maintaining state across stateless connections is added at the application level, in a series of horrible kludges.
Starting your own business is difficult for quite a few reasons. I don't run my own business now, but I contracted for a bit after I finished Uni, and I know a number of people who own and run their own businesses.
Firstly, one of the main reasons I prefer working for a company rather than running one is specialization. At my current job, all I have to be good at is system design and development. If I was running my own company, I'd have to be good at management, sales, finances and system development.
Secondly, yeah, the umbilical cord thing can be rather daunting when you have obligations. If you're single, and particularly if your still living at home, risking lowering your income on starting a business is a moderate risk. But if your supporting others, and have rent or mortgage payments to keep up, the implications of that risk go up enormously. Being employed provides (relatively speaking, and depending on the company) security, and a predictable level of income from week to week.
Thirdly, when you start your own business, all too often the lines between work-time and your-time start to blur. Three friends of mine have started their own businesses, and none of them work anything close to office hours. They all work far more than that. They usually conduct their business during the working day, but need to spend their nights doing the finances. They also need to find their own clients which, unless you're employed in sales, you don't usually need to do when you work for another company.
If you actually want to accomplish something, then reuse existing components.
Most of the time, when someones paying for your time, they're paying you to accomplish something, not educate yourself. For example, at work I recently had to write a program that communicated over the serial port. Not too hard, but I hadn't done it before. At work, I downloaded a library that simplified access to the serial port. When I got home, I looked at the code for that library, and figured out some of how it did what it did.
There's good reason for developing something from scratch, but calling anyone who uses a pre-existing component a leech is just self-righteous stupidity.
establishing the canon of the bible was not about establishing its authorship, or otherwise there would be no apocrypha written by the same authors as other texts included in the canon. It was about judging (in the 4th century, mind you) which of those texts were written under the influence of the Holy Spirit and which were merely heresies
I didn't say authorship was the sole criteria, but it was one of them. As far as I am aware, the primary criteria was consistensy with each other. Most of the books in the NT had previously been generally accepted by the early church as well.
Today it is much easier to decide what is said under the influence of the Holy Spirit because we have the dogma of papal infallibility since 1870 and anything the pope says ex cathedra (from the throne of St Peter) is protected by the Holy Spirit from all error
Perhaps I should make my position clearer. I'm a protestant; I don't believe in papal infallibility. Protestants take the Bible as their only source of divine knowledge.
What your list of councils basically proves is that the term "Christian" is now pretty much useless. There are such a wide range of religions claiming the title that it is next to impossible to establish any common beliefs among them. And you're right; perhaps I should have said the Nicene Creed was a standards document defining the term "Christian" as accepted by those in attendance.
Pretty much the only way to determine who is a Christian these days is to ask them if they think they are. There is no common standard to which theology must conform in order to make the believer Christian. Christianity is pretty much a pointless title nowadays.
Scientific proof is mathematical. Historical proof is concerned with a preponderance of evidence. Things you prove scientificallu cannot be proved historically. Things you prove historically cannot be proved scientifically. As I have said in other threads, try and prove the existance of Julius Caesar scientifically. It can't be done. Julius Caesar's existance can only be demonstrated scientifically.
It is no use trying to apply scientific methods to religion. Religion does not satisfy the scientific constraints for scientific theory. This does not mean science finds it false, it means that science is not capable of evaluating the truth of it.
Plants producing seed isn't the problem; it's them producing fertile seed that's the problem. It is possible to have a sterile plant, one that grows normally but cannot reproduce, just as it is possible to have a sterile animal. I have no idea how hard this is to accomplish artificially, but then, I really don't care. If Monsanto doesn't know enough about genetics to do protect their developments, then they should never have started tinkering with it in the first place.
The New Testament, which is what Christianity is based upon, doesn't have these monumental miracles that might show in the historical records as the Old Testament has. It's merely the philosophy (ie: non-historical) of a particular person who was by a small set of people considered the Messiah. In that sense, Christianity and Buddhism are very comparable. The philosophies of the old and new testament are very different from eachother. The Old is an account of the history of a people, while the New presents a personal account of an individual.
Not as many as the OT, but still some. Jesus performed many miracles, but one of the key events of Christianity (the crucifixion of Jesus) is clearly historical. That does not make Christianity more factual than Buddhism, it just makes it more provable/disprovable through historical analysis.
There are numerous explanations for that, including a natural (or human induced) phenomenon that was construed to be of religious significance. Religion is a matter of faith, science a matter of reasoning. The two are not exclusive, even though I am a person of little faith.
I totally agree. What most "Christian Scientists" are doing, I have observed, is trying to demonstrate that science does *not* contradice the Bible. They're not trying to prove the Bible, they're trying to demonstrate that science does not disprove it.
Its not late over here, but it is early, and I need to get some work done. I think we've both said our piece now anyway.
The fact that Jericho didn't exist anymore when the walls came tumbling down doesn't strike you in the least bit odd then
I don't know what your talking about. The general criticism of the Jericho story is that Jericho was not a walled town at the time in which the Bible claims its walls were knocked down. This is explained here.
Oh, and Buddha is as much an historical figure as Jesus. Buudha is just as historical as Jesus, but Buddhism is based more on Buddha's philosophy (ie: non-historical), as opposed to Christianity which claims miracles as evidence (ie: historical events). Christianity is more susceptible to historical proof/refutation then Buddhism is.
No there's not. Show me some evidence of religious (not historical) significance of the actions of the Christian God
I don't get his. Your asking me for the religious consequences of the Christian God's actions? The entire of existance of any religion is an outworking of religious significance of a gods' actions.
Given that they all have the same amount of (historic)
Strike one. Some religions have more historical evidence than others - simply because they have a foundation in historical events. Christianity is based on the historical events of 200 years ago, and thus has more historical evidence than something like Buddhism, which from what I understand, grew out of philosophy rather than history.
evidence behind them (none)
Strike two. Plenty of evidence. Whether you find it compelling or not is up to you, but there's plenty of it out there.
Hence any form of religious claim on truth should be disregarded.
You didn't really need to comment on most of the definitions - I emphasized the ones I considered to be taking evolution from a biological perspective, and I agree the other ones are rather vague.
Also observed, some pops split into two sepcies that cannot intterbreed.
But when that happens, its no longer a case of evolution being simply "mostly red fish -> mostly black fish". I'm not arguing over the validity of evolution here (I've done that in other places), simply stating that evolution is more than a shift in the distribuation of an attribute across a population. That is part of evolution, but not the whole of it.
I'd agree with your definition. Evolution is concerned with the introduction of new genetic data into a populations gene pool, and tracking the spread (or lack thereof) of the resultant trait.
An example of evolution would be *all* red fish -> some black fish -> mostly black fish. A trait that did not previously exist, occuring through random chance, that is favourable to the species, and thus propogates. Mostly red fish -> mostly black fish is a result of natural selection - a mechanism necessary for evolution, but not evolution itself.
Wrong. People from a scientific background generally prefer to ignore religion and its claims as something that cannot be proven or disproven. This has worked pretty well for a long time but in the last century the issue has been forced on them by activist Christians who feel compelled to jump into the scientific arena and try to prove the truth of God and the Bible. Of course, once they do that they are forced to play by the rules of science. No other scientist gets to ignore the scientific principal, why should they?
Wrong. People from a scientific background are just as likely to have religious opinions as the next person. Just because science has nothing to say about religion doesn't mean scientists don't.
True, but then it isn't really science. A hypothesis has to be testable, repeatable, and independantly verifiable.
Yes, religion isn't science. But there are many truths that cannot be verified scientifically. As I have commented on other threads, no historical data, for example, can be verified scientifically. You cannot look to science as the only test of truth. It is a good test for certain classes of things (as you said, those that can be tested, repeated and verified) but if anything falls outside that range, science can't comment on it. That's not saying science says it's wrong, just that science cannot verify it one way or another.
Most of the people I've heard of who are "mixing Christianity with science" are looking at scientific phenomena and seeing if they correspond with the Bible. That's not trying to prove the Bible scientifically, its seeing if science says the Bible is feasible (not true, but feasible). For example, the Bible says there was a worldwide flood. You can look at the scientific evidence, and see if that holds true. You can never prove the Bible scientifically that way - but you can prove that the Bible and science are not mutually exclusive.
for a good start. There has never been anything universally accepted by all Christians
No, but I doubt you can find anything universally agreed on by everyone. The criteria was "common acceptance", not universal acceptance, and was more to establish authorship (ie: legitimacy) than inspiration.
I don't know what your trying to prove with all those links - yes, there have always been people calling themselves Christians who have different theologies. That's why the Nicean Creed was established - it was a "standards document" defining the accepted definition of "Christian" at the time.
I was not talking about science. I was talking about historiography. Big difference.
Well, then stay out of the discussion. The original poster was claiming Jesus cannot be prove scientifically. I was arguing that point.
But there is no historical sources to back this up. Read the entire article.
The entire article is representative of a minority view, which it itself admits. This is why it carries a disclaimer at the start of the article stating that the majority view (among Christians and non-Christians) is that the histority of Jesus is uncontested.
You must be joking!
Great argument.
OK, ask this question: WHO is denying Holocaust and why.
Example. People with an agenda to push are denying the Holocaust. People with an agenda to push are denying the existance of Jesus. Your obvious distate for Christianity shown in your post demonstrates you are not exactly an unbiased source.
Right! Who needs power and wealth? OK, I have one advice for you. Learn some history.
You have to be joking. Out of the twelve apostles, only one died a natural death. Paul spent a large portion of his life under arrest and being transported between jails. Yay for wealth and power for the gospel writers! Wealth and power for the Catholic church didn't come about until long after the gospels were written.
I have one advice for you. Learn some history. Good advice. Take it yourself.
Well, considering Jesus was a Jew, who appeaered in Israel and whose main influence was on Israel, I don't see many reasons why Chinese or Hindu texts should deal with him at all. That's like saying "Find me a Chinese history text that proves the American Civil War".
Open history book please
Open history book please (Score:1)
by aepervius (535155) Alter Relationship on Friday January 14, @08:19AM (#11360442)
Even History book coming from extrem majority christian religious country do not put "jesus" as a proven existence. Heck, try for example Hindu or chinese history books and text (please no religious text book) and citate me on which page it says Jesus has a proven existence.
"the existence of a historical figure named Jesus is commonly accepted by Christians and non-Christians alike".
That was a quote from a page which the grandparent said demonstrated the lack of historicity of Jesus. It's from wikapedia, which is not really a credible academic source. I used it to point out that the grandparent's "proof" was false, not to prove my own point.
Like all people you are confunding "commonly accepted existence" (aka without proof) and prooved existence.
Define proved existance. How do you prove a historical figure exists? Tell me your criteria for proof. Because if your looking for absolute proof, it can't be had. Not for any historical figure. The best you can do is look at the sources and archeological evidence and infer from that. You cannot prove byeond all doubt, although you can often prove beyond reasonable doubt.
There are plenty of written accounts of the life of Jesus. Chief among these are the gospels, which you will no doubt discount. But they *are* written sources, and the earliest was written betwen 55-80 AD - a time when some eye-witnesses to the events were probably still alive.
We have numerous early, written texts attacking Christianity on a number of grounds. But none of them ever try attacking Christianity by disputing the existance of Jesus. If Jesus never really existed, wouldn't that be the first avenue of attack? But it seems his existence is never questioned, even by early critics of Christianity.
The point I was making is that scientific proof is not the only method of determining truth. Any evidence you have of Julius Caesar's existence is historical, not scientific. So saying Jesus' existance is an untestable hypothesis is a true statement, coming from a scientific perspective. But so is the existence of every other historical figure. If you try and prove Jesus' existance from a historical perspective, it is just as provable as any other historical figure. No, I don't think there are any people that dispute Caesar exist. But that's primarily because because Caesar was not such a polarizing influence as Jesus and Christianity were. Anything controversial will have people who want to deny its existence. There are people who deny the Jewish Holocaust, and that's still in living memory. Any controversial event or person will come under attacks like that sooner or later. Whether or not you believe in what Jesus preached, there's pretty much no way you can say he wasn't controversial - or we wouldn't be having this discussion.
As for the historicity of Jesus, maybe you should read your own links. I quote from a number of them:
"the existence of a historical figure named Jesus is commonly accepted by Christians and non-Christians alike"
"The reason they don't dispute it is because of the abundance of historical evidence for Jesus. Today, there is virtually no debate among serious scholars whether Jesus was real."
"I hate to spoil the party, but the fact is nearly all modern historians admit the existence of a man named Jesus. Any view that holds that he never existed is an extreme one indeed. And this has nothing to do with "cultural bias"; in fact, the question of Jesus' existence has been debated at length by scholars since the 19th century. The general consensus is that he was real, and this fact needs to be acknowledged in the article."
End of quotations. I'm not really sure why the "Talk" page of a Wikapedia article should constitute proof, but the first quote comes from the article itself.
No serious scholar questions the existance of Jesus of Nazareth any more than they do that of Julius Caesar. What they question is the veracity of his actions as recorded by his disciples, and that because extra-ordinary claims are made in them, not because the documents are any more unreliable historically than any other documents.
decided during the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325, three centuries after the alleged death of Jesus
The books of the Bible were indeed formalized at the Council of Nicaea. It was not written then, but that was when the various books that would make it up were formally decided. However, one of the top criteria used at that council was whether the early Christian church accepted the book in question as legitimate. So although a formal decision may not have been made until much later, that decision was itself based on an already-existing informal accptance.
even before we try to wonder if the Bible... contains what he said
If you have studied much of Roman history (along with Greek, pretty much the only ancient history that claims to record what people said), you'll know that historians doubt any of them contain the actual words spoken. The books of speeches and such are generally written after the event, and most historians assume, in a much more favorable light than the actual speech. So the historicity of non-Biblically recorded speeches is not exactly a great model to try and measure up to.
There isn't much reason for the writers of the gospels to lie about Jesus' existance anyway. The vast majority of the new testament is written to Christians. That is, to people who already believed in the existance of Christ. There's no need to try and fabricate stories when your audience already believes them.
Julius Caesar's existence is not contradicted by any other historical evidence (unlike that of any god, as there are a number of religions which claim that their god is the only god), and makes sense with what we know of how the world works. It does not require adding an unnecessary deity (the original form of Occam's Razor, I believe). And there are historical records from disinterested people saying that he existed, which does not seem to be the case for any God I've heard about.
Despite all that, Julius Caesar's existance is not provable via the scientific method. You are taking in the evidence, evaluating its worth based on your own common sense and its concordance with other sources, and reaching a conclusion from that. The point I was making that the fact that something cannot be proven scientifically does not mean it is not true. Religion, of whatever nature, cannot be proven scientificaly. It still may be true.
makes sense with what we know of how the world works. It does not require adding an unnecessary deity (the original form of Occam's Razor, I believe)
Not really. I find that all these sort of things tend to come back to the origin of the universe, as the fundamental event in history. Both science and religion require the universe to exist. Science cannot explain the universe without resorting to an outside influence (which in turn must have an origin, ad infinitum) or to saying that the universe simply always existed (an act of faith). Try explaining where the Universe came from without a deity or act of faith - Occam's Razor does not apply because the deity is not unnecessary. Without a deity (or similar outside influnce) there is no explanation of the origin of the universe.
And there are historical records from disinterested people saying that he existed, which does not seem to be the case for any God I've heard about.
Perhaps because experience of the divine tends to be a polarising influence. If you are the recipient of a divine revelation, you are unlikely to remain disinterested. What your saying in that remark is all the eye-witnesses are unreliable because they were eye-witnesses.
That said, there are references to a historical Jesus (and I assume major human figures in other religions) from disinterested parties. They simply make no mention of the miraculous. The disinterested, historical accounts (at least of Jesus, and there aren't many) do seem to be compatible with the writings of interested parties, however.
well, that depends on the operative definition of complexity. There are numerous organisms which you'd immediately consider less complex than humans which actually have more base pairs in their genome (and vice versa, of course). so if you measure purely by base pairs, they're potentially more complex. Clearly we're more complex, you'd say, from an anthrocentric point of view.
Arguably, any single mutation could be said to add complexity, so again consider the vast scale of time and population numbers and purely mathematically, there is a path from simple to complex. So it also depends on your scale.
I'd tend to judge complexity based on the individual attribute being modified. Something that went from having no power of locomotion to using a flagellum, or from having a patch of light-sensitive skin to a retina, or moving from no vocalization to rudimentary vocalization. Those are the sort of things I'm talking about when I'm talking about increases in complexity. Even these examples would constitute a multitide of evolutionary steps - I'm sure someone with a more intimate knowledge of biology could come up with better examples. But I think they convey my meaning.
# Biology. 1. Change in the genetic composition of a population during successive generations, as a result of natural selection acting on the genetic variation among individuals, and resulting in the development of new species.
2. The historical development of a related group of organisms; phylogeny.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
1. A continuing process of change from one state or condition to another or from one form to another.
2. The theory that groups of organisms change with passage of time, mainly as a result of natural selection, so that descendants differ morphologically and physiologically from their ancestors.
The American Heritage® Stedman's Medical Dictionary
1 : a process of change in a certain direction (there has been much discussion as to... the possible evolution of benign adenomas into invasive carcinoma --Journal of the American Medical Association)
2 a : the historical development of a biological group (as a race or species)
b : a theory that the various types of animals and plants have their origin in other preexisting types and that the distinguishable differences are due to modifications in successive generations
Merriam-Webster Medical Dictionary
Emphasis added. Care to post the defintion of evolution taught to you in whichever august institution you attended? Because all of these seem to encompass my definition.
If all your going to say in your posts is "you're wrong", don't bother replying. You accomplish nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is exactly why I like Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency more than Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and recommend it to all me DNA-less friends before HHGTTG.
:)
Dirk Gently is still funny, has less of the absurdist asides, has a plot, and one that is funny in its own right, has a bit of character development, and even inspires the occasional emotion apart from humour in the reader. And I like some Coleridge's poetry too
Um, if you actually read his post, what he's saying is that correct nomenclature is decided as an arbitrary standard, not through consensus.
More like this:
She meets guy online
Guys job is to prevent people from cracking on to younger people on chat rooms
She chats with the guy online
She gives the guy her phone number
She talks to the guy on the phone
They have increasingly explicit conversations
Now, is the guy doing his job, or not? That's what the whole thing is about.
More like this: She meets guy online Guys job is to prevent people from cracking on to younger people on chat rooms She chats with the guy online. She gives the guy her phone number. She talks to the guy on the phone. They have increasingly explicit conversations. Now, is the guy doing his job, or not? That's what the whole thing is about.
It depends on the way you look at it. Currently, on MMORPGs, players expect to be able to grind up to the level cap and sit there. "Winning" the game is hitting the level cap and getting access to end-game content. But look at the example of things like old arcade machines. The goal there was to get your name at #1 on the scoreboard. But at the same time, you knew other people were going to come along and bump you off. You knew that from the minute you started playing the game. If you want permadeath to work, you need to change the goals of the MMORPG.
What I wouldn't mind seeing is a game that would do something like this: Every players starts off as a human, and can increase their in-game abilities. When they are killed, they become undead, and they're abilities are frozen at the place they were at time of death, and your job essentially becomes to kill the humans.Instead of levelling by experience, the total time online is what counts towards your level (or perhaps, time spent in zones dangerous to someone of your level). The goal would be to stay "alive" as long as possible. Of course, as you get higher and higher, more and more attention is going to be paid to you, and, sooner or later, you're gonna get killed. At which point, you'll become the highest-level undead. Until someone else survives longer...
While not technically permadeath, it certainly has that aspect that the people who want that sort of thing seem to be looking for - permanent consequences to death, and a challenge to staying alive. As well as recognition for the best players.
The grandparent makes a valid point though. Take the Babelfish-God section from the book. Try to make it into a visual piece. It just doesn't work, because the whole thing is exposition. It's just a huge digression. And a great many parts of the book, and often some of the funnier parts, are in this sort of format.
It is irrelevant if you are discussing whether or not copying is breaking the law or not. Yes, file sharers break the law.
But it is not irrelevant if you are discussing whether or not the current laws are just.
It would mean we could get rid of some of the kludges used currently to implement a stateful protocol on top of a stateless one - eg: sessions via cookies and url rewriting and stuff like the "keep alive" thingy that creates a mini-persistent connection for downloading all images referenced in page and stuff like that.
But yes, making every HTTP request create a state would be a resource drain. I think the best method would be to allow you to request either stateful or stateless connections when you make a request, but that would make stuff like web-servers that much more complicated.
Its all about a tradeoff - flexibility at the cost of simplicity. At the moment the protocol is designed to be simple, so all the complexity for maintaining state across stateless connections is added at the application level, in a series of horrible kludges.
Starting your own business is difficult for quite a few reasons. I don't run my own business now, but I contracted for a bit after I finished Uni, and I know a number of people who own and run their own businesses. Firstly, one of the main reasons I prefer working for a company rather than running one is specialization. At my current job, all I have to be good at is system design and development. If I was running my own company, I'd have to be good at management, sales, finances and system development. Secondly, yeah, the umbilical cord thing can be rather daunting when you have obligations. If you're single, and particularly if your still living at home, risking lowering your income on starting a business is a moderate risk. But if your supporting others, and have rent or mortgage payments to keep up, the implications of that risk go up enormously. Being employed provides (relatively speaking, and depending on the company) security, and a predictable level of income from week to week. Thirdly, when you start your own business, all too often the lines between work-time and your-time start to blur. Three friends of mine have started their own businesses, and none of them work anything close to office hours. They all work far more than that. They usually conduct their business during the working day, but need to spend their nights doing the finances. They also need to find their own clients which, unless you're employed in sales, you don't usually need to do when you work for another company.
If you want to learn, then do it from scratch.
If you actually want to accomplish something, then reuse existing components.
Most of the time, when someones paying for your time, they're paying you to accomplish something, not educate yourself. For example, at work I recently had to write a program that communicated over the serial port. Not too hard, but I hadn't done it before. At work, I downloaded a library that simplified access to the serial port. When I got home, I looked at the code for that library, and figured out some of how it did what it did.
There's good reason for developing something from scratch, but calling anyone who uses a pre-existing component a leech is just self-righteous stupidity.
establishing the canon of the bible was not about establishing its authorship, or otherwise there would be no apocrypha written by the same authors as other texts included in the canon. It was about judging (in the 4th century, mind you) which of those texts were written under the influence of the Holy Spirit and which were merely heresies
I didn't say authorship was the sole criteria, but it was one of them. As far as I am aware, the primary criteria was consistensy with each other. Most of the books in the NT had previously been generally accepted by the early church as well.
Today it is much easier to decide what is said under the influence of the Holy Spirit because we have the dogma of papal infallibility since 1870 and anything the pope says ex cathedra (from the throne of St Peter) is protected by the Holy Spirit from all error
Perhaps I should make my position clearer. I'm a protestant; I don't believe in papal infallibility. Protestants take the Bible as their only source of divine knowledge.
What your list of councils basically proves is that the term "Christian" is now pretty much useless. There are such a wide range of religions claiming the title that it is next to impossible to establish any common beliefs among them. And you're right; perhaps I should have said the Nicene Creed was a standards document defining the term "Christian" as accepted by those in attendance.
Pretty much the only way to determine who is a Christian these days is to ask them if they think they are. There is no common standard to which theology must conform in order to make the believer Christian. Christianity is pretty much a pointless title nowadays.
Scientific proof is mathematical. Historical proof is concerned with a preponderance of evidence. Things you prove scientificallu cannot be proved historically. Things you prove historically cannot be proved scientifically. As I have said in other threads, try and prove the existance of Julius Caesar scientifically. It can't be done. Julius Caesar's existance can only be demonstrated scientifically.
It is no use trying to apply scientific methods to religion. Religion does not satisfy the scientific constraints for scientific theory. This does not mean science finds it false, it means that science is not capable of evaluating the truth of it.
Plants producing seed isn't the problem; it's them producing fertile seed that's the problem. It is possible to have a sterile plant, one that grows normally but cannot reproduce, just as it is possible to have a sterile animal. I have no idea how hard this is to accomplish artificially, but then, I really don't care. If Monsanto doesn't know enough about genetics to do protect their developments, then they should never have started tinkering with it in the first place.
The New Testament, which is what Christianity is based upon, doesn't have these monumental miracles that might show in the historical records as the Old Testament has. It's merely the philosophy (ie: non-historical) of a particular person who was by a small set of people considered the Messiah. In that sense, Christianity and Buddhism are very comparable. The philosophies of the old and new testament are very different from eachother. The Old is an account of the history of a people, while the New presents a personal account of an individual.
Not as many as the OT, but still some. Jesus performed many miracles, but one of the key events of Christianity (the crucifixion of Jesus) is clearly historical. That does not make Christianity more factual than Buddhism, it just makes it more provable/disprovable through historical analysis.
There are numerous explanations for that, including a natural (or human induced) phenomenon that was construed to be of religious significance. Religion is a matter of faith, science a matter of reasoning. The two are not exclusive, even though I am a person of little faith.
I totally agree. What most "Christian Scientists" are doing, I have observed, is trying to demonstrate that science does *not* contradice the Bible. They're not trying to prove the Bible, they're trying to demonstrate that science does not disprove it.
Its not late over here, but it is early, and I need to get some work done. I think we've both said our piece now anyway.
The fact that Jericho didn't exist anymore when the walls came tumbling down doesn't strike you in the least bit odd then
I don't know what your talking about. The general criticism of the Jericho story is that Jericho was not a walled town at the time in which the Bible claims its walls were knocked down. This is explained here.
Oh, and Buddha is as much an historical figure as Jesus.
Buudha is just as historical as Jesus, but Buddhism is based more on Buddha's philosophy (ie: non-historical), as opposed to Christianity which claims miracles as evidence (ie: historical events). Christianity is more susceptible to historical proof/refutation then Buddhism is.
No there's not. Show me some evidence of religious (not historical) significance of the actions of the Christian God
I don't get his. Your asking me for the religious consequences of the Christian God's actions? The entire of existance of any religion is an outworking of religious significance of a gods' actions.
Given that they all have the same amount of (historic)
Strike one. Some religions have more historical evidence than others - simply because they have a foundation in historical events. Christianity is based on the historical events of 200 years ago, and thus has more historical evidence than something like Buddhism, which from what I understand, grew out of philosophy rather than history.
evidence behind them (none) Strike two. Plenty of evidence. Whether you find it compelling or not is up to you, but there's plenty of it out there.
Hence any form of religious claim on truth should be disregarded.
Strike three, you're out.
You didn't really need to comment on most of the definitions - I emphasized the ones I considered to be taking evolution from a biological perspective, and I agree the other ones are rather vague.
Also observed, some pops split into two sepcies that cannot intterbreed.
But when that happens, its no longer a case of evolution being simply "mostly red fish -> mostly black fish". I'm not arguing over the validity of evolution here (I've done that in other places), simply stating that evolution is more than a shift in the distribuation of an attribute across a population. That is part of evolution, but not the whole of it.
I'd agree with your definition. Evolution is concerned with the introduction of new genetic data into a populations gene pool, and tracking the spread (or lack thereof) of the resultant trait.
An example of evolution would be *all* red fish -> some black fish -> mostly black fish. A trait that did not previously exist, occuring through random chance, that is favourable to the species, and thus propogates. Mostly red fish -> mostly black fish is a result of natural selection - a mechanism necessary for evolution, but not evolution itself.
Wrong. People from a scientific background generally prefer to ignore religion and its claims as something that cannot be proven or disproven. This has worked pretty well for a long time but in the last century the issue has been forced on them by activist Christians who feel compelled to jump into the scientific arena and try to prove the truth of God and the Bible. Of course, once they do that they are forced to play by the rules of science. No other scientist gets to ignore the scientific principal, why should they?
Wrong. People from a scientific background are just as likely to have religious opinions as the next person. Just because science has nothing to say about religion doesn't mean scientists don't.
True, but then it isn't really science. A hypothesis has to be testable, repeatable, and independantly verifiable.
Yes, religion isn't science. But there are many truths that cannot be verified scientifically. As I have commented on other threads, no historical data, for example, can be verified scientifically. You cannot look to science as the only test of truth. It is a good test for certain classes of things (as you said, those that can be tested, repeated and verified) but if anything falls outside that range, science can't comment on it. That's not saying science says it's wrong, just that science cannot verify it one way or another.
Most of the people I've heard of who are "mixing Christianity with science" are looking at scientific phenomena and seeing if they correspond with the Bible. That's not trying to prove the Bible scientifically, its seeing if science says the Bible is feasible (not true, but feasible). For example, the Bible says there was a worldwide flood. You can look at the scientific evidence, and see if that holds true. You can never prove the Bible scientifically that way - but you can prove that the Bible and science are not mutually exclusive.
for a good start. There has never been anything universally accepted by all Christians
No, but I doubt you can find anything universally agreed on by everyone. The criteria was "common acceptance", not universal acceptance, and was more to establish authorship (ie: legitimacy) than inspiration.
I don't know what your trying to prove with all those links - yes, there have always been people calling themselves Christians who have different theologies. That's why the Nicean Creed was established - it was a "standards document" defining the accepted definition of "Christian" at the time.
I was not talking about science. I was talking about historiography. Big difference.
Well, then stay out of the discussion. The original poster was claiming Jesus cannot be prove scientifically. I was arguing that point.
But there is no historical sources to back this up. Read the entire article.
The entire article is representative of a minority view, which it itself admits. This is why it carries a disclaimer at the start of the article stating that the majority view (among Christians and non-Christians) is that the histority of Jesus is uncontested.
You must be joking!
Great argument.
OK, ask this question: WHO is denying Holocaust and why.
Example. People with an agenda to push are denying the Holocaust. People with an agenda to push are denying the existance of Jesus. Your obvious distate for Christianity shown in your post demonstrates you are not exactly an unbiased source.
Right! Who needs power and wealth? OK, I have one advice for you. Learn some history.
You have to be joking. Out of the twelve apostles, only one died a natural death. Paul spent a large portion of his life under arrest and being transported between jails. Yay for wealth and power for the gospel writers! Wealth and power for the Catholic church didn't come about until long after the gospels were written.
I have one advice for you. Learn some history. Good advice. Take it yourself.
Well, considering Jesus was a Jew, who appeaered in Israel and whose main influence was on Israel, I don't see many reasons why Chinese or Hindu texts should deal with him at all. That's like saying "Find me a Chinese history text that proves the American Civil War".
Open history book please Open history book please (Score:1) by aepervius (535155) Alter Relationship on Friday January 14, @08:19AM (#11360442) Even History book coming from extrem majority christian religious country do not put "jesus" as a proven existence. Heck, try for example Hindu or chinese history books and text (please no religious text book) and citate me on which page it says Jesus has a proven existence.
"the existence of a historical figure named Jesus is commonly accepted by Christians and non-Christians alike".
That was a quote from a page which the grandparent said demonstrated the lack of historicity of Jesus. It's from wikapedia, which is not really a credible academic source. I used it to point out that the grandparent's "proof" was false, not to prove my own point.
Like all people you are confunding "commonly accepted existence" (aka without proof) and prooved existence.
Define proved existance. How do you prove a historical figure exists? Tell me your criteria for proof. Because if your looking for absolute proof, it can't be had. Not for any historical figure. The best you can do is look at the sources and archeological evidence and infer from that. You cannot prove byeond all doubt, although you can often prove beyond reasonable doubt.
There are plenty of written accounts of the life of Jesus. Chief among these are the gospels, which you will no doubt discount. But they *are* written sources, and the earliest was written betwen 55-80 AD - a time when some eye-witnesses to the events were probably still alive.
We have numerous early, written texts attacking Christianity on a number of grounds. But none of them ever try attacking Christianity by disputing the existance of Jesus. If Jesus never really existed, wouldn't that be the first avenue of attack? But it seems his existence is never questioned, even by early critics of Christianity.
The point I was making is that scientific proof is not the only method of determining truth. Any evidence you have of Julius Caesar's existence is historical, not scientific. So saying Jesus' existance is an untestable hypothesis is a true statement, coming from a scientific perspective. But so is the existence of every other historical figure. If you try and prove Jesus' existance from a historical perspective, it is just as provable as any other historical figure. No, I don't think there are any people that dispute Caesar exist. But that's primarily because because Caesar was not such a polarizing influence as Jesus and Christianity were. Anything controversial will have people who want to deny its existence. There are people who deny the Jewish Holocaust, and that's still in living memory. Any controversial event or person will come under attacks like that sooner or later. Whether or not you believe in what Jesus preached, there's pretty much no way you can say he wasn't controversial - or we wouldn't be having this discussion.
... contains what he said
As for the historicity of Jesus, maybe you should read your own links. I quote from a number of them:
"the existence of a historical figure named Jesus is commonly accepted by Christians and non-Christians alike"
"The reason they don't dispute it is because of the abundance of historical evidence for Jesus. Today, there is virtually no debate among serious scholars whether Jesus was real."
"I hate to spoil the party, but the fact is nearly all modern historians admit the existence of a man named Jesus. Any view that holds that he never existed is an extreme one indeed. And this has nothing to do with "cultural bias"; in fact, the question of Jesus' existence has been debated at length by scholars since the 19th century. The general consensus is that he was real, and this fact needs to be acknowledged in the article."
End of quotations. I'm not really sure why the "Talk" page of a Wikapedia article should constitute proof, but the first quote comes from the article itself.
No serious scholar questions the existance of Jesus of Nazareth any more than they do that of Julius Caesar. What they question is the veracity of his actions as recorded by his disciples, and that because extra-ordinary claims are made in them, not because the documents are any more unreliable historically than any other documents.
decided during the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325, three centuries after the alleged death of Jesus
The books of the Bible were indeed formalized at the Council of Nicaea. It was not written then, but that was when the various books that would make it up were formally decided. However, one of the top criteria used at that council was whether the early Christian church accepted the book in question as legitimate. So although a formal decision may not have been made until much later, that decision was itself based on an already-existing informal accptance.
even before we try to wonder if the Bible
If you have studied much of Roman history (along with Greek, pretty much the only ancient history that claims to record what people said), you'll know that historians doubt any of them contain the actual words spoken. The books of speeches and such are generally written after the event, and most historians assume, in a much more favorable light than the actual speech. So the historicity of non-Biblically recorded speeches is not exactly a great model to try and measure up to.
There isn't much reason for the writers of the gospels to lie about Jesus' existance anyway. The vast majority of the new testament is written to Christians. That is, to people who already believed in the existance of Christ. There's no need to try and fabricate stories when your audience already believes them.
Julius Caesar's existence is not contradicted by any other historical evidence (unlike that of any god, as there are a number of religions which claim that their god is the only god), and makes sense with what we know of how the world works. It does not require adding an unnecessary deity (the original form of Occam's Razor, I believe). And there are historical records from disinterested people saying that he existed, which does not seem to be the case for any God I've heard about.
Despite all that, Julius Caesar's existance is not provable via the scientific method. You are taking in the evidence, evaluating its worth based on your own common sense and its concordance with other sources, and reaching a conclusion from that. The point I was making that the fact that something cannot be proven scientifically does not mean it is not true. Religion, of whatever nature, cannot be proven scientificaly. It still may be true.
makes sense with what we know of how the world works. It does not require adding an unnecessary deity (the original form of Occam's Razor, I believe)
Not really. I find that all these sort of things tend to come back to the origin of the universe, as the fundamental event in history. Both science and religion require the universe to exist. Science cannot explain the universe without resorting to an outside influence (which in turn must have an origin, ad infinitum) or to saying that the universe simply always existed (an act of faith). Try explaining where the Universe came from without a deity or act of faith - Occam's Razor does not apply because the deity is not unnecessary. Without a deity (or similar outside influnce) there is no explanation of the origin of the universe.
And there are historical records from disinterested people saying that he existed, which does not seem to be the case for any God I've heard about.
Perhaps because experience of the divine tends to be a polarising influence. If you are the recipient of a divine revelation, you are unlikely to remain disinterested. What your saying in that remark is all the eye-witnesses are unreliable because they were eye-witnesses.
That said, there are references to a historical Jesus (and I assume major human figures in other religions) from disinterested parties. They simply make no mention of the miraculous. The disinterested, historical accounts (at least of Jesus, and there aren't many) do seem to be compatible with the writings of interested parties, however.
well, that depends on the operative definition of complexity. There are numerous organisms which you'd immediately consider less complex than humans which actually have more base pairs in their genome (and vice versa, of course). so if you measure purely by base pairs, they're potentially more complex. Clearly we're more complex, you'd say, from an anthrocentric point of view.
Arguably, any single mutation could be said to add complexity, so again consider the vast scale of time and population numbers and purely mathematically, there is a path from simple to complex. So it also depends on your scale.
I'd tend to judge complexity based on the individual attribute being modified. Something that went from having no power of locomotion to using a flagellum, or from having a patch of light-sensitive skin to a retina, or moving from no vocalization to rudimentary vocalization. Those are the sort of things I'm talking about when I'm talking about increases in complexity. Even these examples would constitute a multitide of evolutionary steps - I'm sure someone with a more intimate knowledge of biology could come up with better examples. But I think they convey my meaning.
# Biology.
... the possible evolution of benign adenomas into invasive carcinoma --Journal of the American Medical Association)
1. Change in the genetic composition of a population during successive generations, as a result of natural selection acting on the genetic variation among individuals, and resulting in the development of new species.
2. The historical development of a related group of organisms; phylogeny.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
1. A continuing process of change from one state or condition to another or from one form to another.
2. The theory that groups of organisms change with passage of time, mainly as a result of natural selection, so that descendants differ morphologically and physiologically from their ancestors.
The American Heritage® Stedman's Medical Dictionary
1 : a process of change in a certain direction (there has been much discussion as to
2 a : the historical development of a biological group (as a race or species)
b : a theory that the various types of animals and plants have their origin in other preexisting types and that the distinguishable differences are due to modifications in successive generations
Merriam-Webster Medical Dictionary
source
Emphasis added. Care to post the defintion of evolution taught to you in whichever august institution you attended? Because all of these seem to encompass my definition.
If all your going to say in your posts is "you're wrong", don't bother replying. You accomplish nothing.