I'm betting those who use Google Voice never see one of those "You need to add your mobile phone number to your Google account" intersitials (with a tiny line under it that basically says "I do not want to add my number").
I didn't say that Adam and Eve didn't exist. You're attacking a strawman.
The point is that people err when they read Genesis attempting to figure out how Creation happened, when they go looking for scientific evidence that the author never intended to provide.
If you believe that God provided the Bible, and that he sent Christ, then God is knowable through those revelations--as much as he wants us to know.
My point is this: if one believes that God did create the entire universe (!), then he's obviously so much more powerful and knowledgable than we are, that it's silly to assume that such limited, primitive ideas as boredom and "trolling" apply to such a being. If we could instantaneously comprehend every particle in the entire universe and manipulate them if we so chose, we would be so vastly higher and more powerful than we are, that I find it difficult to believe that boredom and "trolling" would be relevant ideas. Perhaps you disagree.
You also are operating from a presupposition that a perfect being would necessarily choose to create a perfect creation. What if that is not the case? I believe that God created us and the universe in such a way that we may choose whether to follow him or not, because he wants people who love out of their own free will--otherwise it's not love, but robots. Such a choice could not exist without an alternative, so imperfection must be allowed to exist. That much, at least, is a logical conclusion, given the presupposition that he created us that we might choose to love.
There are also three other presuppositions you're working from:
1) that entropy and death are necessarily bad things. What if they're neither good nor bad, simply neutral?
2) That creatures exist "only to destroy themselves in the most brutal ways possible." That is clearly a fallacy--it's not logical at all. I don't know about you, but I've never destroyed myself or anyone else. The human-race-as-a-whole perspective is only one perspective--consider also the individual one.
3) That such a creator would be entertained by such events, or that he created for the purpose of entertainment. I'm not arguing that he necessarily did not, because I can't prove that to you if you don't believe in the Bible. My point is that one shouldn't assume that such an infinitely powerful being would have the same purposes and weaknesses that we humans have. To me, such infinite power and knowledge--we can't even comprehend what it would take to single-handedly create the everything in the universe from nothing--would make such things more likely to be irrelevant.
Really, such anthropomorphic beliefs are like Greek and Roman mythology, or Hinduism, or animism in general, in which the gods are only slightly above humans, and suffer such needs as hunger, sex, sleep, and boredom. If you ask me, those are beliefs that are primitive and irrational, because it's not logical that such a supremely powerful being would have such limitations.
The literal truth of Genesis is that God created. Genesis was not written for the purpose of providing a literal or scientific account of Creation. To read it looking for such is unwise, because it ignores the authorial intent and misses the meaning of the text.
Remember that the Israelites had no concept of modern science nor modern historiography. It simply makes no sense to read their works by such standards. Any such attempt is doomed to fail to understand the text's intended meaning.
"How did God create the universe?" is the wrong question. Any being powerful enough to do such a thing could do it any way he wanted to, and in ways likely incomprehensible to us. The meaningful questions are, "Did God create?" and "Why did God create?"
When I mentioned developing competence, wisdom, and discretion, I was not referring to humanity as a whole. Obviously, our race as a whole falls far short, and always will. I was referring to individuals, and that's a very different issue.
I agree with you that the Creator knew full well that people would sin and do evil things and cause misery for others. So then we move on to the question of why he created us, or why he created us with free will. Perhaps you suggest that he should not have permitted us free will, that he should not have permitted evil to exist. That's a question that could be debated for a long time, and it always will be. But the problem arises when we default to applying human motives and limitations to a being that, if he created the entire universe and everything in it, has no such limitations. Boredom? "Trolling"? An omnipotent, omnisicent creator could be so far above such concepts that it's ludicrous to assume that those ideas are relevant.
Humans typically don't like the unknown. We want to know what's in our future, how we got here, etc. Uncertainty tends to cause insecurity. So by limiting God to our own experiences and limitations, we make our concept of him more understandable. But it's a fallacy. None of us can create a universe from nothing. It doesn't make sense to think of the creator of Everything as being as limited as we are. It calls for humility. If we want to understand who God really is, we must understand him on his terms, not ours. Of course, this presupposes a belief in God. But even if one doesn't believe in God, one of the abilities we humans do have is to consider things from many difference perspectives, even ones we don't agree with.
Well, let's be clear up front: the Bible is certainly a piece of history, whether one believes it's inspired or not. The two issues are not the same.
I'd like to draw your attention to a serious issue that many people today take for granted. Notice that you referred to a novel. It is a fundamental mistake to apply contemporary literary genres to ancient texts like the Bible. The biblical writers had no concept of novels, or of modern historiography. Their idea of recording and reporting history was very different than ours today. When we judge their work by our rules, by our methods, we fail to understand the authors' purpose, and we miss their point entirely. As a brief example, it's a fundamental error to try to interpret Genesis in a scientific manner, because the writers of Genesis had no concept of science. It was not their purpose to record a scientific account of Creation, nor to provide an account in line with modern historical methods. If we try to force the text into such a mold, we utterly fail to understand the text's real meaning. As an analogy, it would be like judging a work of historical fiction by the standards of serious historical writing and research. The former is meant primarily to entertain, but the latter is meant to record and inform in (hopefully) an impartial manner. If we judge a movie set in the past by how accurate it is to the last detail, we miss the point of the movie entirely.
Finally, the question of genre is often neglected entirely. There are several different genres in the OT, such as narrative, history, poetry, wisdom, prophecy, and law. It's not about jettisoning parts of the OT--it's about interpreting them accurately and understanding how they fit into the overall message of the Bible. The fact that Ecclesiastes doesn't anticipate the coming of Christ and the revelations about eternal life doesn't undermine itself or Christianity. It simply calls for a proper understanding of the text's purpose and meaning.
I understand what you mean. I wish I had a hotline to heaven so I could have direct, two-way conversations with God.
There are a few other factors that you didn't mention. If one believes that the Bible is the word of God, then he hasn't simply left us at the mercy of whatever is passed on from person to person. Instead, he's preserved in written form what he wants us to be able to know and refer to, regardless of what other people say or think. We can each study and interpret it for ourselves. Indeed, his wisdom and guidance isn't unspoken--it's available.
Secondly, if one is a Christian, God's promised to give us his spirit as a counselor, as an advocate, to guide us and strengthen us. I don't claim to know exactly how that works. Some people do, but as it's written in Scripture, we must test such claims against Scripture itself.
Finally, there's a presupposition that, since we can't directly see God working, and can't prove that any specific thing was caused by God, God doesn't intervene--that he's not active in the world. But if one believes that he is all-powerful and all-knowing, then it's perfectly reasonable to think that we wouldn't be able to see or know when he's doing things. Indeed, if he created the entire universe and everything in it, he's so much higher than us in every way--so who are we to say what he should do, or how he should do it? If he sees literally everything, down to the smallest detail, then what we perceive as absent or not nurturing might very well be nurturing in the big picture.
We as humans are so limited in our perceptions and knowledge, yet God's given us the ability to think and reason and know good from evil, like him. So we often place our own limitations upon him and try to judge him by them. And then, of course, he doesn't make sense. But if he himself created us, then he's outside and above all of our limitations. If we humbly recognize that, our perspective can radically change. Suddenly God isn't limited by what we would do or what makes sense to us. He can see and do things that we'll never be aware of, and he can even accomplish his purposes in spite of our own.
Here's a response, but I'll try to restrain my knee.
First, let me briefly address the presupposition that the Catholic church is supposed to be the ultimate in Christian leadership. It's so sad that the Catholic church has tainted the name of Christianity throughout history. I hope you can look past their misdeeds. In the same way that not all Muslims are in favor of murdering non-Muslims, not all Christians in agreement with the Catholic church. In fact, the Catholic church has abused Scripture to create and perpetuate its own power. The Bible does not teach Catholicism or the hierarchy of the Catholic church. In other words, Catholicism != Christianity, and Christianity != Catholicism.
Second, you raise some insightful questions about the biblical text, oral transmission, and scribal manipulation. However, you don't seem to be aware of some of the answers to these questions. The fact is that the New Testament is the most widely-attested ancient document in existence. There are more manuscript fragments than any other ancient document--over 5,000. Many people have devoted years to the study of them, and the evidence shows that we can reconstruct about 95% of the NT with certainty--and the parts of which we can't be as certain are not doctrinally relevant. So we can be quite sure that we have what the NT authors originally wrote.
Regarding oral transmission, oral and form criticism is by nature limited to presuppositions that cannot be proven. While it can be useful, it cannot be conclusive, and cannot be used to disprove anything. Sadly, many people do just this. For example, the Jesus Seminar based its conclusions on it--but their final methodology was to sit down and vote with colored beads, based only upon each member's personal opinion--and of course, the members were chosen by the project's organizers. The entire project was flawed and a farce--but if you leave out the flaws, it sounds like a convincing argument against the Bible's authenticity. People like Bart Ehrmann mislead people in this way all the time.
It's good that you believe in God . I can tell that you're quite angry with him. Fair enough. Life on this earth stinks a lot of the time. We don't have all the answers to why things are the way they are, why things happen, etc. You're right: it's your life, and you can do what you want, and you can suffer the consequences, both here and in eternity. But it would be very sad if you went your whole life here misunderstanding who God is because of people who have twisted Scripture for their own gain. I don't think God created us as entertainment for himself. If he did, he must be sorely disappointed, because he doesn't enjoy watching the horrible things that people do every day. He has emotions and feelings just like we do--after all, he created us in his image. Instead of entertainment, what if God wanted people to love, and to love him? The thing about love is, it can't be forced. (And I don't just mean romantic love--I mean the kind of love exemplified in Christ laying down his life.) If love isn't a choice of free will, it's not love. And if a choice must be made, there must be an alternative to choose. Of course, the alternative to goodness and love is evil.
If the presupposition is that God doesn't mind or enjoys watching evil, bad things, then it's natural to conclude that he doesn't exist or that he's no better than anyone on this earth, and therefore not worth following or listening to. But there are alternatives to that presupposition. I encourage you to think outside the box that the atheistic society today hands you. Examine all the evidence for yourself--from all the different angles, Christian and non-Christian--and come to your own conclusions.
You're using your own, narrow definitions of nuture, competence, and sadism. Competence depends entirely on one's goal. If one's goal is robots, then forced compliance is obviously the proper methodology. But if one's goal is independent entities who choose, of their own free will, to love, to do right and good, then one must allow choice--and if evil were not allowed to exist, there would be no choice to make.
For example, if a human parent wants his children to develop competence, wisdom, and discretion, would it be wise for him to shelter his children from anything remotely evil or bad, and force his children to do only good things? or would it be wise to supervise and guide them while allowing them to make their own decisions, make mistakes, and learn from them? The former is robotic and naieve, while the latter is indeed nurturing. Would a bird nurture its young by keeping them in the nest, or by pushing them out so they learn to fly?
You're thinking within a box of presuppositions that's handed to you by the increasingly atheistic society. You're looking through tinted lenses, while perhaps not even aware that you're wearing glasses. If you can begin to recognize these self-imposed limitations, you can begin to outgrow them. If you try thinking outside them, whole new avenues of thought present themselves. Don't let society tell you what to believe or what's possible. Take a step back, examine all the evidence for yourself, and make up your own mind.
One of the appeals is hope. Without it, there is no hope after this life, and little during it.
Of course, Ecclesiastes is Israelite wisdom literature--it was not written from a Christian perspective, because Christianity didn't exist yet. The Israelites didn't have a concept of the afterlife the way Christians do (they didn't even recognize the Messiah when he came). It doesn't make sense to use Ecclesiastes to attack Christianity. Nevertheless, the wisdom of Ecclesiastes is quite valid and rational today.
I don't follow you. It's not about trashing the cache, it's about syncing. ext3 and ext4, for example, sync every 5 seconds by default.
I really don't follow your second paragraph--it seems to contradict your point in the first. Now you seem to be saying, "Yes, indeed this terminal scrollback file will be written to disk." And that's the whole point: we don't want it to hit the disk.
Even without syncing, manually or automatically, I routinely run low on RAM, my caches shrink, and stuff gets swapped. And on top of that, the kernel will, by default, swap out a few never-accessed pages even if it doesn't "need" to, because that space could be better used for cache.
Anyway, I can't tell what point you're trying to make.:)
The point is that this data should never have hit the disk in the first place. The screen is expected to be an ephemeral medium--not one recorded to disk automatically. How would you feel if you discovered that ffmpeg was recording your entire screen to/tmp/username.mpg without your knowledge? Sure, clear your browser cache and history and vacuum the dbs--but then all I need to do is find the stream of your desktop session video and play it back, and I'll be able to see most of what you did, even though it was unlinked, unless you also wipe that file byte-by-byte.
The principle is the same. To do this is a violation of long established conventions, and to do it without warning the user in BIG RED LETTERS is a violation of trust. To then downplay the issue is to dismiss reality.
Sure, you SSH in to a remote system and expect that data to hit the screen and then disappear into RAM's black hole of power-off-ness. But, oops, it was written to disk, and someone could dig it up?
The point is not that you could or should encrypt/tmp and swap--the point is that the screen's contents are not expected to hit the disk automatically.
> Stick with a small swap file and not much crap ever gets written to disc, saving you the horror of having to reset a server for the umpteenth time when it's been grinding on its system disc for five minutes trying to page in the OOM killer.
Great theory, but in reality it would hit the OOMk too often and random processes would die too often. Hey, I've suffered swap-of-doom plenty of times, so I know what you mean and feel the pain--but the alternative is worse.
What really does help is zramswap. Makes a compressed ramdisk and uses that as swap before the disk swapfile. Much faster than swapping to disk. Google for zramswap-enabler. Works perfectly out-of-the-box on Ubuntu.
Do you even run X? I have systems with 3 and 4 GB of RAM and they still end up sucking up more and more RAM and swapping stuff out if I have a long enough X session and use a modern web browser. If I had 2 GB and no swap I'd hit the OOM killer every few days at least.
Nope, they rock. When KDE did there big roll-out of KDE4 the lists *EXPLODED* with the wailing and gnashing of teeth. KDE4 arrived stable and that loud minority either adapted or went on the something else. Much the same thing happened with GNOME3 - although less than I expected. I moved to GNOME3 from GNOME2 and within a week it was clear that it was a superior system. But some adaptation was required.
it's not the same thing. The backlash against KDE4 was because it was released too soon, when it had many bugs and lacked feature parity with KDE3. The backlash against GNOME3 is because it was released at all--because it threw out what has been proven to work in favor of experimental ideas from self-appointed "designers"--because GNOME3, compared to GNOME2, is a developers' and designers' playground. GNOME3 should not have been called GNOME3, because it should not have been intended to replace GNOME2 at this time, if ever.
And this particular bug is nonsense. Basically: if someone steals your harddrive they can read your data! Really? Wow, that's a surprise. This has always been true, is true of/home,/var. and everything else unless you encrypt everything.
Why so dense? How'd you feel if you discovered that ffmpeg had been recording a video of your entire screen all the time, without your knowledge, dumping it to/tmp? Yeah, if someone gets your disk they can see what's on it--the point is that these things shouldn't be on the disk in the first place! The screen is a transient, ephemeral medium--to treat it as a semi-permanent medium by recording it to disk is breaking long-established convention, and to do it without announcing it in FLASHING RED LETTERS is to break users' trust. If you go to a web site and then delete your history/cache/etc, you can reasonably expect it to not be seen on your disk, unless someone puts forth a lot of effort looking for something that, from their perspective, might not even exist. But if your whole session is dumped to the disk separately, all someone has to do is look at that file. Even if it's deleted, recovering large chunks of one large file is easier than digging up old parts of a SQLite db and making something out of it.
Yes, it comes from a vocal minority who don't realize all these changes where discussed and made out-in-the-open. Now they enjoy pitching a fit and claiming the design changes are somehow being forced upon them.
Hahaha! Yeah, just like Congress! Their sessions are public record, so if they do something we don't like, why should we complain? They were discussed in the open!
At least we can try to vote better people into office. GNOME, however, consists of self-appointed experts. They abdicate any sense of responsibility to their many users in favor of their own, narrow-minded views. No, they have no legal responsibility to users, but I advocate a higher standard than the bare minimum: they know people depend on their software, so they should not play around willy-nilly with what they release as the standard version. If they want to experiment, fine--call it something else and release it separately!
I want to work efficiently. GNOME3 lets me do that... more than GNOME2 did. This is an important distinction from, based on mail list traffic, people who apparently *NEED* to see the real-time weather report for three cities in the panel clock in order to be productive. I think the group primarily 'alienated' by GNOME3 are the "tweakers". They have a computer almost for the sole purpose of tweaking the appearance of the user-interface. One reads much of those posts and says "eh? really? don't you have something to *do*.".
This condescending attitude is exemplary of what GNOME has become. "I don't want or need to do that--why should you? Get a life." I foresee GNOME self-destructing and splitting up into a bunch of forks that will sputter
You beg the questions, "Was the listener's understanding of the term incorrect?" and, "Is the way 95% of other people use 'begs the question' actually incorrect?"
For that matter, is there a "correct" way to use language in an informal context? I think Lewis Carroll covered this already:
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."
What kinds of serious trouble are you thinking of? And what kind of help? And how'd you convince these folks to take your idea seriously rather than thinking you're simply paranoid?
I've been using Firefox since it was Phoenix. I remember using a compact theme back then that really maximized my screen space. It was nice, and Phoenix was so customizable, it was unlike anything before (and perhaps since).
When Chrome came out, the lack of status bar was great--more screen space on these widescreen screens.
Then Ff copied Chrome, and then the Barlesque extension came out, and I kept getting more screen space! Awesome! Not to mention the global menu in KDE 4 and Kubuntu. No more menu bar (with the context menu, why do I need the menus? not enough to have them taking up space all the time, that's for sure).
Then I gave Pentadactyl another shot, and wow, no more toolbar/address bar, either.
The Firefox chrome (not Chrome) keeps getting smaller, but under the hood it keeps getting bigger. Now if they'd just get rid of the long UI freezes...how many years have we been waiting for that...
Haha, have you looked at the Weave bugs in bugzilla? Nothing about the Weave code is simple. In fact, from what I can tell, they're still adding or rewriting basic things like conflict handling. It can't even handle something as simple as moving bookmarks from one folder to another, or adding a bookmark keyword--they just don't get replicated to the other systems. CPU usage goes through the roof while syncing. And trying to debug it with the logs is...well, not fun. Not to mention that it only writes to the logs in occasional batches, so if you see it going CPU-crazy, you can't see what it's doing until later, when it deigns to write the logs.
It should definitely still be an extension, and should be considered beta at best.
I used to use Xmarks, but I remember it going CPU-crazy too. I don't understand why syncing bookmarks is so difficult. What we need is rsync or unison for bookmarks, and it needs to be out-of-process so it doesn't slow down Firefox.
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I'm betting those who use Google Voice never see one of those "You need to add your mobile phone number to your Google account" intersitials (with a tiny line under it that basically says "I do not want to add my number").
You're wrong.
Real Christianity is not defined by those who claim to be Christian. Real Christianity is defined by Christ.
You're generalizing millions of people into one, "intolerant", "ignorant" whole. That strikes me as hypocritical.
Not to mention your generalizing the entire state of Texas. Your arguments aren't logical at all.
I didn't say that Adam and Eve didn't exist. You're attacking a strawman.
The point is that people err when they read Genesis attempting to figure out how Creation happened, when they go looking for scientific evidence that the author never intended to provide.
If you believe that God provided the Bible, and that he sent Christ, then God is knowable through those revelations--as much as he wants us to know.
My point is this: if one believes that God did create the entire universe (!), then he's obviously so much more powerful and knowledgable than we are, that it's silly to assume that such limited, primitive ideas as boredom and "trolling" apply to such a being. If we could instantaneously comprehend every particle in the entire universe and manipulate them if we so chose, we would be so vastly higher and more powerful than we are, that I find it difficult to believe that boredom and "trolling" would be relevant ideas. Perhaps you disagree.
You also are operating from a presupposition that a perfect being would necessarily choose to create a perfect creation. What if that is not the case? I believe that God created us and the universe in such a way that we may choose whether to follow him or not, because he wants people who love out of their own free will--otherwise it's not love, but robots. Such a choice could not exist without an alternative, so imperfection must be allowed to exist. That much, at least, is a logical conclusion, given the presupposition that he created us that we might choose to love.
There are also three other presuppositions you're working from:
1) that entropy and death are necessarily bad things. What if they're neither good nor bad, simply neutral?
2) That creatures exist "only to destroy themselves in the most brutal ways possible." That is clearly a fallacy--it's not logical at all. I don't know about you, but I've never destroyed myself or anyone else. The human-race-as-a-whole perspective is only one perspective--consider also the individual one.
3) That such a creator would be entertained by such events, or that he created for the purpose of entertainment. I'm not arguing that he necessarily did not, because I can't prove that to you if you don't believe in the Bible. My point is that one shouldn't assume that such an infinitely powerful being would have the same purposes and weaknesses that we humans have. To me, such infinite power and knowledge--we can't even comprehend what it would take to single-handedly create the everything in the universe from nothing--would make such things more likely to be irrelevant.
Really, such anthropomorphic beliefs are like Greek and Roman mythology, or Hinduism, or animism in general, in which the gods are only slightly above humans, and suffer such needs as hunger, sex, sleep, and boredom. If you ask me, those are beliefs that are primitive and irrational, because it's not logical that such a supremely powerful being would have such limitations.
It's ignorant to equate Catholicism with Christianity. Real Christianity doesn't condone executing anyone. (cf. John 8:1-11)
The literal truth of Genesis is that God created. Genesis was not written for the purpose of providing a literal or scientific account of Creation. To read it looking for such is unwise, because it ignores the authorial intent and misses the meaning of the text.
Remember that the Israelites had no concept of modern science nor modern historiography. It simply makes no sense to read their works by such standards. Any such attempt is doomed to fail to understand the text's intended meaning.
"How did God create the universe?" is the wrong question. Any being powerful enough to do such a thing could do it any way he wanted to, and in ways likely incomprehensible to us. The meaningful questions are, "Did God create?" and "Why did God create?"
When I mentioned developing competence, wisdom, and discretion, I was not referring to humanity as a whole. Obviously, our race as a whole falls far short, and always will. I was referring to individuals, and that's a very different issue.
I agree with you that the Creator knew full well that people would sin and do evil things and cause misery for others. So then we move on to the question of why he created us, or why he created us with free will. Perhaps you suggest that he should not have permitted us free will, that he should not have permitted evil to exist. That's a question that could be debated for a long time, and it always will be. But the problem arises when we default to applying human motives and limitations to a being that, if he created the entire universe and everything in it, has no such limitations. Boredom? "Trolling"? An omnipotent, omnisicent creator could be so far above such concepts that it's ludicrous to assume that those ideas are relevant.
Humans typically don't like the unknown. We want to know what's in our future, how we got here, etc. Uncertainty tends to cause insecurity. So by limiting God to our own experiences and limitations, we make our concept of him more understandable. But it's a fallacy. None of us can create a universe from nothing. It doesn't make sense to think of the creator of Everything as being as limited as we are. It calls for humility. If we want to understand who God really is, we must understand him on his terms, not ours. Of course, this presupposes a belief in God. But even if one doesn't believe in God, one of the abilities we humans do have is to consider things from many difference perspectives, even ones we don't agree with.
Well, let's be clear up front: the Bible is certainly a piece of history, whether one believes it's inspired or not. The two issues are not the same.
I'd like to draw your attention to a serious issue that many people today take for granted. Notice that you referred to a novel. It is a fundamental mistake to apply contemporary literary genres to ancient texts like the Bible. The biblical writers had no concept of novels, or of modern historiography. Their idea of recording and reporting history was very different than ours today. When we judge their work by our rules, by our methods, we fail to understand the authors' purpose, and we miss their point entirely. As a brief example, it's a fundamental error to try to interpret Genesis in a scientific manner, because the writers of Genesis had no concept of science. It was not their purpose to record a scientific account of Creation, nor to provide an account in line with modern historical methods. If we try to force the text into such a mold, we utterly fail to understand the text's real meaning. As an analogy, it would be like judging a work of historical fiction by the standards of serious historical writing and research. The former is meant primarily to entertain, but the latter is meant to record and inform in (hopefully) an impartial manner. If we judge a movie set in the past by how accurate it is to the last detail, we miss the point of the movie entirely.
Finally, the question of genre is often neglected entirely. There are several different genres in the OT, such as narrative, history, poetry, wisdom, prophecy, and law. It's not about jettisoning parts of the OT--it's about interpreting them accurately and understanding how they fit into the overall message of the Bible. The fact that Ecclesiastes doesn't anticipate the coming of Christ and the revelations about eternal life doesn't undermine itself or Christianity. It simply calls for a proper understanding of the text's purpose and meaning.
I understand what you mean. I wish I had a hotline to heaven so I could have direct, two-way conversations with God.
There are a few other factors that you didn't mention. If one believes that the Bible is the word of God, then he hasn't simply left us at the mercy of whatever is passed on from person to person. Instead, he's preserved in written form what he wants us to be able to know and refer to, regardless of what other people say or think. We can each study and interpret it for ourselves. Indeed, his wisdom and guidance isn't unspoken--it's available.
Secondly, if one is a Christian, God's promised to give us his spirit as a counselor, as an advocate, to guide us and strengthen us. I don't claim to know exactly how that works. Some people do, but as it's written in Scripture, we must test such claims against Scripture itself.
Finally, there's a presupposition that, since we can't directly see God working, and can't prove that any specific thing was caused by God, God doesn't intervene--that he's not active in the world. But if one believes that he is all-powerful and all-knowing, then it's perfectly reasonable to think that we wouldn't be able to see or know when he's doing things. Indeed, if he created the entire universe and everything in it, he's so much higher than us in every way--so who are we to say what he should do, or how he should do it? If he sees literally everything, down to the smallest detail, then what we perceive as absent or not nurturing might very well be nurturing in the big picture.
We as humans are so limited in our perceptions and knowledge, yet God's given us the ability to think and reason and know good from evil, like him. So we often place our own limitations upon him and try to judge him by them. And then, of course, he doesn't make sense. But if he himself created us, then he's outside and above all of our limitations. If we humbly recognize that, our perspective can radically change. Suddenly God isn't limited by what we would do or what makes sense to us. He can see and do things that we'll never be aware of, and he can even accomplish his purposes in spite of our own.
Hey Don,
Here's a response, but I'll try to restrain my knee.
First, let me briefly address the presupposition that the Catholic church is supposed to be the ultimate in Christian leadership. It's so sad that the Catholic church has tainted the name of Christianity throughout history. I hope you can look past their misdeeds. In the same way that not all Muslims are in favor of murdering non-Muslims, not all Christians in agreement with the Catholic church. In fact, the Catholic church has abused Scripture to create and perpetuate its own power. The Bible does not teach Catholicism or the hierarchy of the Catholic church. In other words, Catholicism != Christianity, and Christianity != Catholicism.
Second, you raise some insightful questions about the biblical text, oral transmission, and scribal manipulation. However, you don't seem to be aware of some of the answers to these questions. The fact is that the New Testament is the most widely-attested ancient document in existence. There are more manuscript fragments than any other ancient document--over 5,000. Many people have devoted years to the study of them, and the evidence shows that we can reconstruct about 95% of the NT with certainty--and the parts of which we can't be as certain are not doctrinally relevant. So we can be quite sure that we have what the NT authors originally wrote.
Regarding oral transmission, oral and form criticism is by nature limited to presuppositions that cannot be proven. While it can be useful, it cannot be conclusive, and cannot be used to disprove anything. Sadly, many people do just this. For example, the Jesus Seminar based its conclusions on it--but their final methodology was to sit down and vote with colored beads, based only upon each member's personal opinion--and of course, the members were chosen by the project's organizers. The entire project was flawed and a farce--but if you leave out the flaws, it sounds like a convincing argument against the Bible's authenticity. People like Bart Ehrmann mislead people in this way all the time.
It's good that you believe in God . I can tell that you're quite angry with him. Fair enough. Life on this earth stinks a lot of the time. We don't have all the answers to why things are the way they are, why things happen, etc. You're right: it's your life, and you can do what you want, and you can suffer the consequences, both here and in eternity. But it would be very sad if you went your whole life here misunderstanding who God is because of people who have twisted Scripture for their own gain. I don't think God created us as entertainment for himself. If he did, he must be sorely disappointed, because he doesn't enjoy watching the horrible things that people do every day. He has emotions and feelings just like we do--after all, he created us in his image. Instead of entertainment, what if God wanted people to love, and to love him? The thing about love is, it can't be forced. (And I don't just mean romantic love--I mean the kind of love exemplified in Christ laying down his life.) If love isn't a choice of free will, it's not love. And if a choice must be made, there must be an alternative to choose. Of course, the alternative to goodness and love is evil.
If the presupposition is that God doesn't mind or enjoys watching evil, bad things, then it's natural to conclude that he doesn't exist or that he's no better than anyone on this earth, and therefore not worth following or listening to. But there are alternatives to that presupposition. I encourage you to think outside the box that the atheistic society today hands you. Examine all the evidence for yourself--from all the different angles, Christian and non-Christian--and come to your own conclusions.
You're using your own, narrow definitions of nuture, competence, and sadism. Competence depends entirely on one's goal. If one's goal is robots, then forced compliance is obviously the proper methodology. But if one's goal is independent entities who choose, of their own free will, to love, to do right and good, then one must allow choice--and if evil were not allowed to exist, there would be no choice to make.
For example, if a human parent wants his children to develop competence, wisdom, and discretion, would it be wise for him to shelter his children from anything remotely evil or bad, and force his children to do only good things? or would it be wise to supervise and guide them while allowing them to make their own decisions, make mistakes, and learn from them? The former is robotic and naieve, while the latter is indeed nurturing. Would a bird nurture its young by keeping them in the nest, or by pushing them out so they learn to fly?
You're thinking within a box of presuppositions that's handed to you by the increasingly atheistic society. You're looking through tinted lenses, while perhaps not even aware that you're wearing glasses. If you can begin to recognize these self-imposed limitations, you can begin to outgrow them. If you try thinking outside them, whole new avenues of thought present themselves. Don't let society tell you what to believe or what's possible. Take a step back, examine all the evidence for yourself, and make up your own mind.
One of the appeals is hope. Without it, there is no hope after this life, and little during it.
Of course, Ecclesiastes is Israelite wisdom literature--it was not written from a Christian perspective, because Christianity didn't exist yet. The Israelites didn't have a concept of the afterlife the way Christians do (they didn't even recognize the Messiah when he came). It doesn't make sense to use Ecclesiastes to attack Christianity. Nevertheless, the wisdom of Ecclesiastes is quite valid and rational today.
I don't follow you. It's not about trashing the cache, it's about syncing. ext3 and ext4, for example, sync every 5 seconds by default.
I really don't follow your second paragraph--it seems to contradict your point in the first. Now you seem to be saying, "Yes, indeed this terminal scrollback file will be written to disk." And that's the whole point: we don't want it to hit the disk.
Even without syncing, manually or automatically, I routinely run low on RAM, my caches shrink, and stuff gets swapped. And on top of that, the kernel will, by default, swap out a few never-accessed pages even if it doesn't "need" to, because that space could be better used for cache.
Anyway, I can't tell what point you're trying to make. :)
The point is that this data should never have hit the disk in the first place. The screen is expected to be an ephemeral medium--not one recorded to disk automatically. How would you feel if you discovered that ffmpeg was recording your entire screen to /tmp/username.mpg without your knowledge? Sure, clear your browser cache and history and vacuum the dbs--but then all I need to do is find the stream of your desktop session video and play it back, and I'll be able to see most of what you did, even though it was unlinked, unless you also wipe that file byte-by-byte.
The principle is the same. To do this is a violation of long established conventions, and to do it without warning the user in BIG RED LETTERS is a violation of trust. To then downplay the issue is to dismiss reality.
Sure, you SSH in to a remote system and expect that data to hit the screen and then disappear into RAM's black hole of power-off-ness. But, oops, it was written to disk, and someone could dig it up?
The point is not that you could or should encrypt /tmp and swap--the point is that the screen's contents are not expected to hit the disk automatically.
It fits at first--but after a day or two it doesn't. Then you have to restart X, or at least log out/in.
> Stick with a small swap file and not much crap ever gets written to disc, saving you the horror of having to reset a server for the umpteenth time when it's been grinding on its system disc for five minutes trying to page in the OOM killer.
Great theory, but in reality it would hit the OOMk too often and random processes would die too often. Hey, I've suffered swap-of-doom plenty of times, so I know what you mean and feel the pain--but the alternative is worse.
What really does help is zramswap. Makes a compressed ramdisk and uses that as swap before the disk swapfile. Much faster than swapping to disk. Google for zramswap-enabler. Works perfectly out-of-the-box on Ubuntu.
Do you even run X? I have systems with 3 and 4 GB of RAM and they still end up sucking up more and more RAM and swapping stuff out if I have a long enough X session and use a modern web browser. If I had 2 GB and no swap I'd hit the OOM killer every few days at least.
What filesystems do you use that are never synced?
Nope, they rock. When KDE did there big roll-out of KDE4 the lists *EXPLODED* with the wailing and gnashing of teeth. KDE4 arrived stable and that loud minority either adapted or went on the something else. Much the same thing happened with GNOME3 - although less than I expected. I moved to GNOME3 from GNOME2 and within a week it was clear that it was a superior system. But some adaptation was required.
it's not the same thing. The backlash against KDE4 was because it was released too soon, when it had many bugs and lacked feature parity with KDE3. The backlash against GNOME3 is because it was released at all--because it threw out what has been proven to work in favor of experimental ideas from self-appointed "designers"--because GNOME3, compared to GNOME2, is a developers' and designers' playground. GNOME3 should not have been called GNOME3, because it should not have been intended to replace GNOME2 at this time, if ever.
And this particular bug is nonsense. Basically: if someone steals your harddrive they can read your data! Really? Wow, that's a surprise. This has always been true, is true of /home, /var. and everything else unless you encrypt everything.
Why so dense? How'd you feel if you discovered that ffmpeg had been recording a video of your entire screen all the time, without your knowledge, dumping it to /tmp? Yeah, if someone gets your disk they can see what's on it--the point is that these things shouldn't be on the disk in the first place! The screen is a transient, ephemeral medium--to treat it as a semi-permanent medium by recording it to disk is breaking long-established convention, and to do it without announcing it in FLASHING RED LETTERS is to break users' trust. If you go to a web site and then delete your history/cache/etc, you can reasonably expect it to not be seen on your disk, unless someone puts forth a lot of effort looking for something that, from their perspective, might not even exist. But if your whole session is dumped to the disk separately, all someone has to do is look at that file. Even if it's deleted, recovering large chunks of one large file is easier than digging up old parts of a SQLite db and making something out of it.
Yes, it comes from a vocal minority who don't realize all these changes where discussed and made out-in-the-open. Now they enjoy pitching a fit and claiming the design changes are somehow being forced upon them.
Hahaha! Yeah, just like Congress! Their sessions are public record, so if they do something we don't like, why should we complain? They were discussed in the open!
At least we can try to vote better people into office. GNOME, however, consists of self-appointed experts. They abdicate any sense of responsibility to their many users in favor of their own, narrow-minded views. No, they have no legal responsibility to users, but I advocate a higher standard than the bare minimum: they know people depend on their software, so they should not play around willy-nilly with what they release as the standard version. If they want to experiment, fine--call it something else and release it separately!
I want to work efficiently. GNOME3 lets me do that... more than GNOME2 did. This is an important distinction from, based on mail list traffic, people who apparently *NEED* to see the real-time weather report for three cities in the panel clock in order to be productive. I think the group primarily 'alienated' by GNOME3 are the "tweakers". They have a computer almost for the sole purpose of tweaking the appearance of the user-interface. One reads much of those posts and says "eh? really? don't you have something to *do*.".
This condescending attitude is exemplary of what GNOME has become. "I don't want or need to do that--why should you? Get a life." I foresee GNOME self-destructing and splitting up into a bunch of forks that will sputter
You beg the questions, "Was the listener's understanding of the term incorrect?" and, "Is the way 95% of other people use 'begs the question' actually incorrect?"
For that matter, is there a "correct" way to use language in an informal context? I think Lewis Carroll covered this already:
Through the Looking Glass
What kinds of serious trouble are you thinking of? And what kind of help? And how'd you convince these folks to take your idea seriously rather than thinking you're simply paranoid?
How do you know this?
I've been using Firefox since it was Phoenix. I remember using a compact theme back then that really maximized my screen space. It was nice, and Phoenix was so customizable, it was unlike anything before (and perhaps since).
When Chrome came out, the lack of status bar was great--more screen space on these widescreen screens.
Then Ff copied Chrome, and then the Barlesque extension came out, and I kept getting more screen space! Awesome! Not to mention the global menu in KDE 4 and Kubuntu. No more menu bar (with the context menu, why do I need the menus? not enough to have them taking up space all the time, that's for sure).
Then I gave Pentadactyl another shot, and wow, no more toolbar/address bar, either.
The Firefox chrome (not Chrome) keeps getting smaller, but under the hood it keeps getting bigger. Now if they'd just get rid of the long UI freezes...how many years have we been waiting for that...
Haha, have you looked at the Weave bugs in bugzilla? Nothing about the Weave code is simple. In fact, from what I can tell, they're still adding or rewriting basic things like conflict handling. It can't even handle something as simple as moving bookmarks from one folder to another, or adding a bookmark keyword--they just don't get replicated to the other systems. CPU usage goes through the roof while syncing. And trying to debug it with the logs is...well, not fun. Not to mention that it only writes to the logs in occasional batches, so if you see it going CPU-crazy, you can't see what it's doing until later, when it deigns to write the logs.
It should definitely still be an extension, and should be considered beta at best.
I used to use Xmarks, but I remember it going CPU-crazy too. I don't understand why syncing bookmarks is so difficult. What we need is rsync or unison for bookmarks, and it needs to be out-of-process so it doesn't slow down Firefox.
$ sudo aptitude purge ~ngnome ~nunity xubuntu-desktop+
$ for i in gconf gtk gnome; do mv ~/.$i{,.old}; done