Only a few fanatics really cared how God worked. It has always been enough for the bulk of us to say "God works", and not to worry about how.
Are you KIDDING? The canonical kid question about religion is "ok, everything came from god...but where did god come from?" That is a natural question, and is a huge part of "how does God work".
Well, no... you're still thinking of philosophy. The questions most people really have are the ones that matter on a day-to-day basis: How am I to live? What does God want me to do?
In the old days, most people who baked bread did't really care about how the heat catalyzes the chemical reaction and so on... they wanted to eat, and they wanted to know what they can do to bring that about. Knowing the chemical reactions going on and why they happen is nice, but it's not necessary for eating; you just need the recipe.
Plus, being a chemist doesn't necessarily make you a good cook, although it can help; neither does being a philosopher or a theologian necessarily make you good, or closer to God; although it can certainly help. =)
I realized that "cosmic evidence" could be misunderstood... what I meant was, "scientific evidence from the cosmos." There are, of course, many different kinds of evidence that affect our beliefs (more on this later); if the only thing I were to judge on were scientific evidence about the cosmos, though, I think here's my main one: If the universe were in a steady state or in a cycle. This doesn't prove there's no God, of course, but it takes away the whole "How did we get here" problem: the universe has always existed, and always will.
I'm not sure if the following really come under "cosmic" or not, but here's a couple:
If there were found to be life on many planets, in many very diverse conditions, and in many different stages of evolution. If we observed bacteria in our laboratories evolve into multi-cellular organisms and thence to sexual beings; if we could breed a dog into a cat; if we observed life come from nothing on a regular basis.
If animals developed religion and art, at appropraite degrees of development.
If scientists had never come up with the "Anthropic principle". If there were relatively few physical constants, or if there were a wide range of values for which the universe as we know it, or a universe of similar complexity, could exist.
None of these would prove conclusively that there is no God; but it would probably make an unbiased observer, looking only at this evidence, more prone to naturalism than deism.
As for evidence, there are many different kinds of evidence. What kind of scientific evidence is there that the person I call my mom is actually my biological mother? Well, there's DNA evidence, blood types, and so on. What kind of scientific evidence is there that my mother loves me? Or what would it take to convince me that that she never loved me? It's of a different type.
If all I had was a dusy book and a bunch of arguments about science and all that, I don't think my faith would be very lasting.
So, OK -- now it's your turn. What kind of cosmic evidence would make you prone to believe in a creator?
P.S. I read your "Skeptics Guide to Mortality". Pretty good; all the same, I like mine a lot better. =)
Well, there's a lot of potential answers to this... I think Stephen Hawking conjectured "baby universes" dropping like bubbles from some "other" universe (someone who's read the book follow up here.)
Of course, there is that whole God thing too. Maybe God just made the big bang. It's a theory with at least as much scientific support as "baby universes". What kind of cosmic evidence would it take for "science" to conclude that the universe was created?
No, spam is a moral and social problem, not a technical one; that's exactly why we need legislation on it.
Saying spam is a technical problem is like saying a gun is a technical problem. Sure, gun is technology; and one solution to protect yourself from random people with guns would be to wear body armor. That's now how we deal with guns though; we deal with the murderer or thief who uses the gun inappropriately.
Similarly, there's nothing wrong with e-mail technically. The problem is with people who are willing to piss off 9,999 people to make one sale. They *know* for a fact that most of the people who receive their mail don't want it -- otherwise, why would they forge headers, and keep their spam a moving target, difficult to filter?
Well, no... It's not the money, but how you win -- the one with the most votes wins, you don't need a majority -- which pretty much guarantees that there will always be *exactly* two contending parties. Parties have come and gone in our nation's history; but pretty much whenever a new party came, it either never "made it", or eventually "made it" by squeezing out one of the two previously "ruling parties".
Isn't this pretty much how the Republicans won with Lincon before the US Civl War? The Democrats split into two parties, which completely killed either party's chance for success. I can't say for sure, but it's possible that's how Clinton won against Bush Sr. back in '92. If those who voted for Perot had voted for Bush instead (and most of those that I knew who voted for Perot would have) he'd've had more of the popular vote than Clinton, anyway, IIRC. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here.)
If we lived in a country where you *had* to have a majority, and could form coalitions between parties to gain that majority, you can bet we'd have thousands of parties, and probably ten major ones, money or no. But since you can win with the *most* votes, it's in your best interest to have as "big a tent", so to speak, as possible.
It's not so bad anyway -- it pretty much guarantees that both parties are really close to the center.
Personally, I find that my eating habits have less to do with how things taste, and more to do with whether my body feels satiated or not. Your tongue may be telling you that there's lots of sugar and fat, but the fact is that there is no sugar or fat in your blood stream and your body knows it.
I have a much better time eating a small amount of relatively fatty foods (along with appropriate amounts of vegetables and starches) and feeling satisfied than eating large amounts of low-fat foods and still feeling hungry.
Given my experience with aspartame / saccarine / splenda / olean, I'd be able to taste this stuff within a few seconds and hate it. I'm sick of fake stuff -- give me real sugar, real cream, real butter, real meat, make it taste good; I'll eat moderately and exercise, and feel good.
I'm actually working on a research project that comes close. We're not working on reversability, but on exact repeatabilty, as many times as you'd like. Roll back to a checkpoint, and run forward again until just one instruction before you stopped last time. It turns out to be easier than you'd think.
Computers are by nature deterministic; same starting state + same input => same output. So if you can manage to log all the external input to a program and deliver it the same way, it will do exactly the same thing.
Input comes in two types:
External data like keyboard, mouse, and so on
Timing like interrupts, signals, or scheduling.
External data is pretty easy. Interrupts are a bit harder, but possible. In fact,
I've done it.
Right now we're using it for forensic analysis after an intrusion, but there's no reason it couldn't be used for debugging as well.
As one of the posters above commented, pro-lifers have known and favored adult stem-cell research for a long time. AFAIK, there are no "ethical" objections to stem cells in themselves, only how they were gotten -- by depriving a human being of life. For adult stem cells, this would be the ethical equivalent of a skin graft, or at worst a transplant, I would think.
People have been hoping for break-through cures from embryonic stem cells; but there's no direct evidence that there will be any, only hopes and guesses. And while the ethics of cloning and embryonic stem cells are being debated, wouldn't it be at least practical to RESEARCH all the other alternatives firt?
Does someone want to explain to me how they can intercept SSL connections? I thought the whole point of encryption and secure protocols was that we need not fear sniffing and man-in-the-middle attacks...
I'm always amazed that they are forgetting the central tenet of Christianity: only Christians go to Heaven.
Well, not quite. In fact, I'm glad you refuse to believe in a religion with such a belief.
Thankfully, that's not what Christianity says; in fact, almost exactly the opposite. The whole point of this Jesus thing is that God doesn't sit there and wait for us to come to him; he goes out of his way, leaves his own comfort, and does whatever it takes (even being tortured to death) to come and find us. If God is willing to give up all his glory and power, and to be treated like scum and tortured to death to bring people to him, there's nothing in his power that he won't do to bring people to him.
On the other hand, if there were any other way to bring us to him, other than the cross, don't you think he would have done it? If the Jewish traditions, or Bhuddism, or greek mythology or whatever were enough, wouldn't Jesus simply have come down and preached one of those, instead of allowing himself to be crucified?
What does say is this: Jesus is the only way. If a Bhuddist gets to heaven, it will be because although he doesn't realize it, Jesus has been working through him to prepare him for heaven; and when he reaches heaven, he will recognize the one he'd actually been following all of his life.
Abraham never knew Jesus' name, or said, "Jesus, come into my heart" or anything like that; but he is considered (by Christians) the father of everyone who has faith in Jesus.
But of course, although you can frequently get by with incomplete knowledge (people managed to get by for thousands of years without Newtonian physics), it's always better to know the truth.
I suppose the "all beliefs are OK" crowd are probably also upset that we told them the Earth was round...
Someone else mentioned Greek myths; but don't forget things like Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Robert Spenser's The Faerie Queene (which also had elves as a separate race) certainly qualitfy as fantasy, even if they are a bit allegorical. I've only read bits of Dante's Inferno, and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, but those might make the cut.
George MacDonald's Lilith and Phantastes are very mythopoeic as well, as are his fairy tales and other works like Curdie and The Princess and the Goblin.
Tolkien didn't come out of nowhere -- he came from a strong tradition of fantasy. Of course, he did pretty much define a subsection of fantasy, inspire the whole D&D culture, and so on. But you can find plenty of fantasy today not based on his work -- things based on Authurian legends, for instance; or more things like the Earthsea books.
Read old books! People these days tend to think that everything interesting was invented in the last 50 years or so; after reading a couple of old books, you realize that this is not at all the case.
Well, don't forget the post I was replying to: the poster said
Steem-cell and cloning studies are being banned because some religious texts were interpreted as saying that this sort of thing is "unholy".
My main purpose was to point out that this is not the reason I think experiments on embryonic humans should be illegal.
That being said, I have a few things in response: The human stem cells and clones they're doing research on are not dead (or were not dead before some other human's interference) otherwise they'd be rather useless. It's one thing to take the kidney from someone who died in an auto accident; it's another thing to shoot someone and then take his kidney ("He was dead already...").
I have nothing wrong against doing things with dead bodies, or organ donation if there's a good purpose, and if there's no chance of demand for dead bodies causing more dead bodies to show up. Paying women for aborted fetuses, for instance, could easily lead to a situation where women becoming pregnant for the express purpose of having an abortion, so they can sell the fetus.
As far as abortion-on-demand, I admit the situations you describe are tough, and I'm willing to discuss them. But how many abortions are really from situations like this? (And would doctors really use stem cells from an embryonic human that had cystic fibrosis?) The vast number of abortions are essentially an alternate (or supplement) to birth control; and the law of the land in the US, at least, is that you have absolutely no rights until you pass completely through a birth canal (natural or c-section); you're merely a hunk of flesh, at the mercy of your mother's whims. That, I hope you agree, needs to change.
Re:Some reason (hopefully a good one)
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Human-Mouse Hybrids?
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No, I'm not against cloning or embryonic stem cell research because I'm religious, but because I'm an American.
In America, you have rights simply because you are a human being; The color of your skin, or how old or young you are, or how smart or dumb you are, or whether you can walk, or who your parents are, shouldn't matter. Being born out-of-wedlock to a teenage mother doesn't (or shouldn't) doom you to a life of poverty and minimum-wage jobs, and being born to rich parents is no guarantee of being a success yourself.
We take pride in protecting the rights of the weak, and we should -- both the weak in numbers, and the weak compared to the rest of us. We have laws against discrimination of minorities, and we have laws requiring things for those with disabilities.
So why would we chose not to protect the weakest among us? Why should we be allowed to perform experiments on a human being just because he can't talk yet, or doesn't look like one yet? Why should a human being be denied a chance at living a full life, simply because her parents find her inconvenient?
It's arbitrarily dening a certain class of human beings their rights so they can be exploited by others -- completely against the principles of democracy our country is based on.
I don't know the details of the spanning tree, but aren't network protocols generally designed to be as stateless as possible (for exactly this reason)? If the network was dead anyway, couldn't they simply have turned off all the switches, routers, etc. for a minute or so, and turned them back on, and let them reconfigure themselves?
I think we do create, and we do have a peculiar relationship with the things we create. Isn't that why guys name their cars? We have an affection for the things we create and use on a regular basis, things that are properly subordinate to us.
But there are different types of things. In a sense we "create" our children, but we do not own them -- we are making another creature like ourselves, a peer so to speak, and we have no right to dominate a peer the way we do our subordinates. If we ever did create an artificial intelligence or another form of life similar to our own, we would not be inventing something new, but copying what's already there -- ourselves; and such a thing would not belong to us, although we have had a hand in making it, any more than our children do.
In other words, God has a patent on the making of a "spiritual" being (whatever that means to you), and licenses the patent to us on the stipulation that we respect other spiritual beings as peers. =)
That I never denied that the Old Testament law mandates death for children who curse their parents. And to modern ears, that certainly sounds really harsh as it is; and I'm sure it's surprising that Jesus appears to approve of it.
But you're not content to let it stand, harsh as it is; you introduce two untruths to make it even harsher.
One, in this passage he is not chastising them for failing to kill people. He is chastising them for telling them it's OK to let their parents starve. That's the point of the passage; that's the tradition that Jesus is upset about, that's the reason he quotes the Old Testament. To ignore this fact is simply dishonest.
Two, the command you quote is to kill children who "curse their parents" -- i.e., those who say, "Fuck you mom, I wish you would go to Hell.". This is a far cry from respectfully "defying", or as you mis-paraphrase it somewhere else, "failing to do everything they say". Again, to put it this way is simply dishonest.
Like I said, the command to actually kill children who say "Fuck you, Mom and Dad" is harsh enough, and I could understand you disagreeing with that, and disrespecting Jesus for approving of the rule. There's no need to distort it.
Here's another example. Why was Sodom destroyed? Two strangers showed up in town just to spend the night, and the whole town turned out to gang rape them! And when someone tried to protect them, they got offended and decided to gang rape him too! That's a whole lot more than just "happening to show physical affection to someone of the same gender." Imagine driving through a town in the US, stopping for the night at a hotel, and having all the locals show up for a gang-bang, whether you were keen on the idea or not.
If you want to say that destroying the whole town is too harsh, that's fine; but don't miss the point of the passage: the town of Sodom had become so wicked, that there weren't even ten good people in the whole city.
Perhaps I am blinded by my belief. But it's very clear that you are blinded by your strong belief as well.
Yeah, because no one should dare to even refer to popular culture of the past in a public forum. Just mention it and you might get some guy insulting your religion.
Badly, I might add. Seriously dude, there are plenty of passages that are hard to take in reality, but you don't bother; you make something up and sprinkle it with a little truth.
For the record, just in case any readers were wondering, most of his examples are just nonsense. The most ridiculous is this one:
Jesus chastised the Pharisees for failing to kill those children who defied their parents' commands (Mark 7:9-13)
What actually happened was that the religious leaders of those days endorsed a lawyerly trick to get out of supporting your parents in their old age. Remember, in those days, "Social Security" was called "Your kids".
Apparently SublteNuance thinks it's OK to let your parents starve when they're too old to work.
I could go on, but that's enough to show you how much SubtleNuance cares about the truth.
There are a couple of things about this case which puts OSS at a distinct disadvantage. It sounds like
This is a relatively uncommon piece of software; unlike gcc, emacs, gnome, the kernels, etc., there aren't a billion-and-one users / developers out there.
The company in question is only using one instance of the product, and is relatively small; so licensing fees and tech support contracts are cheaper than having an in-house expert.
There isn't a company to give support to the open-source version of the software. Perhaps because of #1 there just wouldn't be enough business for such a company; or perhaps no one has just happened to start a company to do so yet; but this is a major part of the OSS money-making model. If there were such a company, they could surely provide tech support for less than an in-house expert if there were enough business. (Anyone interested in a start-up?)
But in spite of all this, the OSS only cost a bit more; and that's not even counting benefits other people mentioned, like not having to worry about the vendor tanking, deciding not to support show-stopper featuers, or forced upgrades.
So even though it looks like the closed-source solution is more economically viable, the fact that OSS did so well in spite of its relative disadvantages says something.
Dude, I don't know where you're looking. Perl? Python? Bash? Emacs? TCL/TK? GCC? GDB? XFree86? OpenSSH? Ogg? Gnome and KDE have a lot more innovative UI features than Windows or Mac will ever dare to use, because we have the technical users who can understand them and use them. What about all the features in the Linux kernel made by open source developers, not found anywhere else?
Why come up with an "innovative" spreadsheet that no one can use because the learning curve is too high? The current spreadsheet design is the result of 20 years of refinement.
That's what open source is all about right -- copy someone else's good idea, and if you can't find a good idea, make your own. Insisting on novelty just for the sake of novelty is just stupid. Ignore whether it's "innovative" and try to do something useful, and you'll probably end up being innovative.
Well, the basic problem is that we don't have any of the original documents -- we have copies of copies of copies of copies; it's inevitable that discrepancies and errors happen in the copying, no matter how careful people are.
That's why there's a science called "textual criticism", where archeologists look at different manuscripts of the same document and try to figure out what the original writer actually wrote. A good translation will even include footnotes like "Most early texts say bar; some say foo."
Just FYI, what helps is (1) number of copies of the document from (2) different areas. It makes sense; if we only have one copy of a letter supposedly written by Paul from 100 years after he died, who knows how accurate it is? But if we have ten copies, from a bunch of different places, and they're all pretty similar, we can get a pretty good idea what Paul actually wrote.
Just for reference, I believe (someone who knows this stuff correct me) typical number of copies for non-biblical texts is 1-20. The highest number is Homer's Oddessy, of which we have about 800 copies.
Compare that to the New Testament, where we have over 2,000 different texts from all over the world. And that doesn't include fragments, etc., which brings it closer to 5,000.
So by normal archeological standards, we have a pretty good idea of what the original NT writers actually wrote; if you chose to believe our copies of the NT texts unreliable, you bascially have to throw out all ancient texts as unreliable.
But more is always better, and there's always interesting historical notes; that's why putting the rare texts online is useful. It may be useful to someone to know that there's a copy of Corinthians found in Ethiopia, dated xxx AD, with a verse that says "foo" instead of "bar"
IANABS (biblical scholar), this is what I remember from "More Than a Carpenter" by Josh McDowell, and "The Case for Christ", by Lee Strobel.
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In the old days, most people who baked bread did't really care about how the heat catalyzes the chemical reaction and so on... they wanted to eat, and they wanted to know what they can do to bring that about. Knowing the chemical reactions going on and why they happen is nice, but it's not necessary for eating; you just need the recipe.
Plus, being a chemist doesn't necessarily make you a good cook, although it can help; neither does being a philosopher or a theologian necessarily make you good, or closer to God; although it can certainly help. =)
I'm not sure if the following really come under "cosmic" or not, but here's a couple:
- If there were found to be life on many planets, in many very diverse conditions, and in many different stages of evolution. If we observed bacteria in our laboratories evolve into multi-cellular organisms and thence to sexual beings; if we could breed a dog into a cat; if we observed life come from nothing on a regular basis.
- If animals developed religion and art, at appropraite degrees of development.
- If scientists had never come up with the "Anthropic principle". If there were relatively few physical constants, or if there were a wide range of values for which the universe as we know it, or a universe of similar complexity, could exist.
None of these would prove conclusively that there is no God; but it would probably make an unbiased observer, looking only at this evidence, more prone to naturalism than deism.As for evidence, there are many different kinds of evidence. What kind of scientific evidence is there that the person I call my mom is actually my biological mother? Well, there's DNA evidence, blood types, and so on. What kind of scientific evidence is there that my mother loves me? Or what would it take to convince me that that she never loved me? It's of a different type.
If all I had was a dusy book and a bunch of arguments about science and all that, I don't think my faith would be very lasting.
So, OK -- now it's your turn. What kind of cosmic evidence would make you prone to believe in a creator?
P.S. I read your "Skeptics Guide to Mortality". Pretty good; all the same, I like mine a lot better. =)
Of course, there is that whole God thing too. Maybe God just made the big bang. It's a theory with at least as much scientific support as "baby universes". What kind of cosmic evidence would it take for "science" to conclude that the universe was created?
Saying spam is a technical problem is like saying a gun is a technical problem. Sure, gun is technology; and one solution to protect yourself from random people with guns would be to wear body armor. That's now how we deal with guns though; we deal with the murderer or thief who uses the gun inappropriately.
Similarly, there's nothing wrong with e-mail technically. The problem is with people who are willing to piss off 9,999 people to make one sale. They *know* for a fact that most of the people who receive their mail don't want it -- otherwise, why would they forge headers, and keep their spam a moving target, difficult to filter?
Well, no... It's not the money, but how you win -- the one with the most votes wins, you don't need a majority -- which pretty much guarantees that there will always be *exactly* two contending parties. Parties have come and gone in our nation's history; but pretty much whenever a new party came, it either never "made it", or eventually "made it" by squeezing out one of the two previously "ruling parties".
Isn't this pretty much how the Republicans won with Lincon before the US Civl War? The Democrats split into two parties, which completely killed either party's chance for success. I can't say for sure, but it's possible that's how Clinton won against Bush Sr. back in '92. If those who voted for Perot had voted for Bush instead (and most of those that I knew who voted for Perot would have) he'd've had more of the popular vote than Clinton, anyway, IIRC. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here.)
If we lived in a country where you *had* to have a majority, and could form coalitions between parties to gain that majority, you can bet we'd have thousands of parties, and probably ten major ones, money or no. But since you can win with the *most* votes, it's in your best interest to have as "big a tent", so to speak, as possible.
It's not so bad anyway -- it pretty much guarantees that both parties are really close to the center.
I have a much better time eating a small amount of relatively fatty foods (along with appropriate amounts of vegetables and starches) and feeling satisfied than eating large amounts of low-fat foods and still feeling hungry.
Given my experience with aspartame / saccarine / splenda / olean, I'd be able to taste this stuff within a few seconds and hate it. I'm sick of fake stuff -- give me real sugar, real cream, real butter, real meat, make it taste good; I'll eat moderately and exercise, and feel good.
Computers are by nature deterministic; same starting state + same input => same output. So if you can manage to log all the external input to a program and deliver it the same way, it will do exactly the same thing.
Input comes in two types:
- External data like keyboard, mouse, and so on
- Timing like interrupts, signals, or scheduling.
External data is pretty easy. Interrupts are a bit harder, but possible. In fact, I've done it.Right now we're using it for forensic analysis after an intrusion, but there's no reason it couldn't be used for debugging as well.
People have been hoping for break-through cures from embryonic stem cells; but there's no direct evidence that there will be any, only hopes and guesses. And while the ethics of cloning and embryonic stem cells are being debated, wouldn't it be at least practical to RESEARCH all the other alternatives firt?
Does someone want to explain to me how they can intercept SSL connections? I thought the whole point of encryption and secure protocols was that we need not fear sniffing and man-in-the-middle attacks...
Well, not quite. In fact, I'm glad you refuse to believe in a religion with such a belief.
Thankfully, that's not what Christianity says; in fact, almost exactly the opposite. The whole point of this Jesus thing is that God doesn't sit there and wait for us to come to him; he goes out of his way, leaves his own comfort, and does whatever it takes (even being tortured to death) to come and find us. If God is willing to give up all his glory and power, and to be treated like scum and tortured to death to bring people to him, there's nothing in his power that he won't do to bring people to him.
On the other hand, if there were any other way to bring us to him, other than the cross, don't you think he would have done it? If the Jewish traditions, or Bhuddism, or greek mythology or whatever were enough, wouldn't Jesus simply have come down and preached one of those, instead of allowing himself to be crucified?
What does say is this: Jesus is the only way. If a Bhuddist gets to heaven, it will be because although he doesn't realize it, Jesus has been working through him to prepare him for heaven; and when he reaches heaven, he will recognize the one he'd actually been following all of his life.
Abraham never knew Jesus' name, or said, "Jesus, come into my heart" or anything like that; but he is considered (by Christians) the father of everyone who has faith in Jesus.
But of course, although you can frequently get by with incomplete knowledge (people managed to get by for thousands of years without Newtonian physics), it's always better to know the truth.
I suppose the "all beliefs are OK" crowd are probably also upset that we told them the Earth was round...
Tolkien didn't come out of nowhere -- he came from a strong tradition of fantasy. Of course, he did pretty much define a subsection of fantasy, inspire the whole D&D culture, and so on. But you can find plenty of fantasy today not based on his work -- things based on Authurian legends, for instance; or more things like the Earthsea books.
Read old books! People these days tend to think that everything interesting was invented in the last 50 years or so; after reading a couple of old books, you realize that this is not at all the case.
That being said, I have a few things in response: The human stem cells and clones they're doing research on are not dead (or were not dead before some other human's interference) otherwise they'd be rather useless. It's one thing to take the kidney from someone who died in an auto accident; it's another thing to shoot someone and then take his kidney ("He was dead already...").
I have nothing wrong against doing things with dead bodies, or organ donation if there's a good purpose, and if there's no chance of demand for dead bodies causing more dead bodies to show up. Paying women for aborted fetuses, for instance, could easily lead to a situation where women becoming pregnant for the express purpose of having an abortion, so they can sell the fetus.
As far as abortion-on-demand, I admit the situations you describe are tough, and I'm willing to discuss them. But how many abortions are really from situations like this? (And would doctors really use stem cells from an embryonic human that had cystic fibrosis?) The vast number of abortions are essentially an alternate (or supplement) to birth control; and the law of the land in the US, at least, is that you have absolutely no rights until you pass completely through a birth canal (natural or c-section); you're merely a hunk of flesh, at the mercy of your mother's whims. That, I hope you agree, needs to change.
In America, you have rights simply because you are a human being; The color of your skin, or how old or young you are, or how smart or dumb you are, or whether you can walk, or who your parents are, shouldn't matter. Being born out-of-wedlock to a teenage mother doesn't (or shouldn't) doom you to a life of poverty and minimum-wage jobs, and being born to rich parents is no guarantee of being a success yourself.
We take pride in protecting the rights of the weak, and we should -- both the weak in numbers, and the weak compared to the rest of us. We have laws against discrimination of minorities, and we have laws requiring things for those with disabilities.
So why would we chose not to protect the weakest among us? Why should we be allowed to perform experiments on a human being just because he can't talk yet, or doesn't look like one yet? Why should a human being be denied a chance at living a full life, simply because her parents find her inconvenient?
It's arbitrarily dening a certain class of human beings their rights so they can be exploited by others -- completely against the principles of democracy our country is based on.
I don't know the details of the spanning tree, but aren't network protocols generally designed to be as stateless as possible (for exactly this reason)? If the network was dead anyway, couldn't they simply have turned off all the switches, routers, etc. for a minute or so, and turned them back on, and let them reconfigure themselves?
But there are different types of things. In a sense we "create" our children, but we do not own them -- we are making another creature like ourselves, a peer so to speak, and we have no right to dominate a peer the way we do our subordinates. If we ever did create an artificial intelligence or another form of life similar to our own, we would not be inventing something new, but copying what's already there -- ourselves; and such a thing would not belong to us, although we have had a hand in making it, any more than our children do.
In other words, God has a patent on the making of a "spiritual" being (whatever that means to you), and licenses the patent to us on the stipulation that we respect other spiritual beings as peers. =)
But you're not content to let it stand, harsh as it is; you introduce two untruths to make it even harsher.
One, in this passage he is not chastising them for failing to kill people. He is chastising them for telling them it's OK to let their parents starve. That's the point of the passage; that's the tradition that Jesus is upset about, that's the reason he quotes the Old Testament. To ignore this fact is simply dishonest.
Two, the command you quote is to kill children who "curse their parents" -- i.e., those who say, "Fuck you mom, I wish you would go to Hell.". This is a far cry from respectfully "defying", or as you mis-paraphrase it somewhere else, "failing to do everything they say". Again, to put it this way is simply dishonest.
Like I said, the command to actually kill children who say "Fuck you, Mom and Dad" is harsh enough, and I could understand you disagreeing with that, and disrespecting Jesus for approving of the rule. There's no need to distort it.
Here's another example. Why was Sodom destroyed? Two strangers showed up in town just to spend the night, and the whole town turned out to gang rape them! And when someone tried to protect them, they got offended and decided to gang rape him too! That's a whole lot more than just "happening to show physical affection to someone of the same gender." Imagine driving through a town in the US, stopping for the night at a hotel, and having all the locals show up for a gang-bang, whether you were keen on the idea or not.
If you want to say that destroying the whole town is too harsh, that's fine; but don't miss the point of the passage: the town of Sodom had become so wicked, that there weren't even ten good people in the whole city.
Perhaps I am blinded by my belief. But it's very clear that you are blinded by your strong belief as well.
Badly, I might add. Seriously dude, there are plenty of passages that are hard to take in reality, but you don't bother; you make something up and sprinkle it with a little truth.
For the record, just in case any readers were wondering, most of his examples are just nonsense. The most ridiculous is this one:
What actually happened was that the religious leaders of those days endorsed a lawyerly trick to get out of supporting your parents in their old age. Remember, in those days, "Social Security" was called "Your kids". Apparently SublteNuance thinks it's OK to let your parents starve when they're too old to work.I could go on, but that's enough to show you how much SubtleNuance cares about the truth.
But in spite of all this, the OSS only cost a bit more; and that's not even counting benefits other people mentioned, like not having to worry about the vendor tanking, deciding not to support show-stopper featuers, or forced upgrades.
So even though it looks like the closed-source solution is more economically viable, the fact that OSS did so well in spite of its relative disadvantages says something.
Why come up with an "innovative" spreadsheet that no one can use because the learning curve is too high? The current spreadsheet design is the result of 20 years of refinement.
That's what open source is all about right -- copy someone else's good idea, and if you can't find a good idea, make your own. Insisting on novelty just for the sake of novelty is just stupid. Ignore whether it's "innovative" and try to do something useful, and you'll probably end up being innovative.
Well, the basic problem is that we don't have any of the original documents -- we have copies of copies of copies of copies; it's inevitable that discrepancies and errors happen in the copying, no matter how careful people are.
That's why there's a science called "textual criticism", where archeologists look at different manuscripts of the same document and try to figure out what the original writer actually wrote. A good translation will even include footnotes like "Most early texts say bar; some say foo."
Just FYI, what helps is (1) number of copies of the document from (2) different areas. It makes sense; if we only have one copy of a letter supposedly written by Paul from 100 years after he died, who knows how accurate it is? But if we have ten copies, from a bunch of different places, and they're all pretty similar, we can get a pretty good idea what Paul actually wrote.
Just for reference, I believe (someone who knows this stuff correct me) typical number of copies for non-biblical texts is 1-20. The highest number is Homer's Oddessy, of which we have about 800 copies.
Compare that to the New Testament, where we have over 2,000 different texts from all over the world. And that doesn't include fragments, etc., which brings it closer to 5,000.
So by normal archeological standards, we have a pretty good idea of what the original NT writers actually wrote; if you chose to believe our copies of the NT texts unreliable, you bascially have to throw out all ancient texts as unreliable.
But more is always better, and there's always interesting historical notes; that's why putting the rare texts online is useful. It may be useful to someone to know that there's a copy of Corinthians found in Ethiopia, dated xxx AD, with a verse that says "foo" instead of "bar"
IANABS (biblical scholar), this is what I remember from "More Than a Carpenter" by Josh McDowell, and "The Case for Christ", by Lee Strobel.