"The president makes the laws. Therefore, anything he deems to be legal is legal."
What the hell country are you talking about?
Here in the United States of America, we have three branches of government. Power is split up among them so that nobody gets to be too powerful.
The legislature (i.e. the House of Representatives and the Senate) makes the law. The president signs it. If the president vetoes it, the Congress can still override the veto, if they get enough votes.
The courts determine what actions or laws are legal or illegal. The courts can throw out unconstitutional laws and throw people in jail for breaking the laws.
The president's job is to enforce the law. He doesn't make law. He doesn't determine what is legal or illegal. In doing his job of enforcing the law, it is possible that he himself (or she herself) breaks the law. If there is any question as to whether the president has broken the law, he must be taken before the courts, because the courts decide what is legal or illegal, not the president.
This is your fatal error, one that you have consistently made throughout this entire thread.
We both agree that God said "You will die if you eat this fruit." We both agree that they died later on.
It matters why they died. It matters because God told them they would die as a result of eating the fruit. This is important because they do not die as a result of eating the fruit. This makes God a liar, because God told them they would die when they ate the fruit.
You oversimplify when you say "they ate the fruit, and they died". Those two events were not causally related. The only connection between those two events were God's jealousy and retribution. They didn't die from eating the fruit, God just decided to make them mortal after he found out.
It would be like me telling you "If you play guitar, it will be deadly to you." You decide to go ahead and play a little guitar anyways. Then 50 years down the road, I come to you and say "Remember that time 50 years ago when you were playing guitar? Well, now I'm going to kill you!"
You see how that doesn't make any sense. Those are the actions of an insane, jealous person. And God admits many times in the Bible that he is a jealous God. That's why he curses us and the serpent. He's not interested in fairness, truth, or justice. He's just a jealous megalomaniac with too much power.
I'm not trying to convert you to satanism. Frankly, I don't care what you think or believe. As long as you don't hurt me or anyone else you can do what you want. I am simply pointing out your errors in logic and your faulty arguments. But a word to the wise: you shouldn't put your blind faith in a liar, whether they are on the street corner, on TV, or up in Heaven somewhere.
No, I am saying that the eating of the fruit did not kill them, as God told them it would. Why do you have to keep twisting this?
"You have to do some serious twisting to get around that."
No you don't. It's very clear in the Bible. God says, "... But you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." (Genesis 2, verse 17) [Emphasis mine].
There it is, black and white, straight from the mouth of God. "When you eat of it, you will surely die."
Not 900 years later, not one of God's 100-year-long Hebrew days, but when they ate of it. It doesn't get much clearer than that. You keep saying I am twisting, but I think at this point you know that you are the one who is twisting. You just can't bring yourself to admit it.
"If Eat fruit == I will kill you down the road, then what is the result for you? Just like that song by The Old Dogs, "You're still gonna die." Eat fruit == die, no matter how the death comes."
If that's what God meant, then that's what God should have said. Instead, he told the people that the fruit would kill them, which wasn't true.
"Actually, the serpent is a little weaselly on the point of how they wouldn't die. "
The Bible, which is biased against the serpent, does say he is weasely. The NIV translation says he is "clever" (Genesis 3 verse 1 NIV). But what do you expect from the word of God? After all, God is a liar, and the serpent calls him on it -- of course God is going to try to paint him in a bad light.
In fact, the serpent wasn't weasely or misleading at all. Here is what the Bible says:
" [The serpent] said to the woman,"Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?" The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.'"
(Genesis 3 verse 1-3 NIV).
It's clear that they are talking about what would happen if the people ate the fruit. The serpent asked Eve what God had told her about eating the fruit. When Eve relays God's lie to the serpent, the serpent corrects her. When he says "You will surely not die", he is talking about if they ate the fruit. He is correcting God's lie.
And guess what happens? They eat the fruit, and they don't die. This contradicts what God told them would happen, and confirms the serpents' correction of God's baloney story.
You can say whatever you want about old Hebrew words, or quote verses from other parts of the Bible. What you are unable to do is to back up your beliefs with quotes from Genesis. The only thing you did was take the serpents' words out of context. They were talking about eating the fruit, and the serpent told them they wouldn't die from eating the fruit. Look, if the Bible starts out showing God to be a liar, we shouldn't trust anything that comes out of his mouth, or his supporter's mouths, later on.
"If a GPLv3ed program cannot run without a specific private key, that private key must be made available. That's all the license says. Developers are not required to disclose private keys that they use to sign code."
This simple, clear statement should be at the beginning. I think if you argue about this in the future, you would help your case to lead with this, and then back it up afterwards.
"Why is it the 'right thing' to distribute a free patch to a profit taking company, particularly one that is a profit maximising monopoly?"
That's the view of the average Windows user. If you make a patch under an open source license, you are claiming to help people, but ensuring that people can't use the patch because of the license you are releasing it under.
Average Windows User: "Oh, so you made a patch to fix this bug, but neither Microsoft nor I can use it because you have a political point to make with your license? Thanks, dickweed. Thanks for nothing."
Here's a clue: submitting a patch to MS under an open-source license is not going to set off a chain reaction that winds up releasing all MS code under open source licensing. It's just a futile effort to make a political point that just winds up making the patcher look like a bad sport.
"Most users would find it funny if somebody threw M$' licensing ju-jitsu right back at them."
Linux users would find it funny. Windows users would never know about it. If they did find out about it, they would be upset that you made a fix, but for some stupid political reason, you aren't letting anyone use it.
"Eat fruit == die. There's nothing strange about it. "
Except that in reality , Eat fruit != die. However, Eat fruit == I will kill you later on downt the road.
It is strange that God that would mislead the people like that, isn't it? Especially for a God who claims to be interested in justice and the truth. It doesn't make sense...
Oh wait, the serpent clears it up for us. After he tells us the truth about the fruit, that it won't kill people, but will give people knowledge of Good and Evil, he tells us that God is jealous and doesn't want us to be like him. That's why God lied to us, telling us that the fruit is deadly. He's jealous and wants to scare us away from the fruit. He lied to us because he is jealous, and doesn't want us to be like him. However, the serpent was honest and straightforward with us. God, in a jealous rage, decides to punish the people, and also punish the snake. This is not fair nor just behavior.
"It says in simple language (English, Spanish, the original Hebrew, any language you like),that God told them they would die for eating it, and it says they died for eating it. No twisting required."
You're twisting the meaning even when you say you are not. You lie just like your God does.
You have said that "God told them they would die for eating [the fruit]". However, the story tells us that they do not die for eating the fruit. They die because later on, after they ate the fruit, because God found out and decided to curse them to return to dust.
"They ate the fruit, and they died. The Bible says so, plain as day, in black and white."
This is the problem: God mislead them. He said "If you eat the fruit, you will surely die." The only way to read this is to come to the conclusion that the action of eating the fruit will make you dead. God *didn't* say "If you eat the fruit, I will kill you as a punishment." At best, he mislead them by speaking in a riddle, knowing that eating the fruit wouldn't kill them, but later on down the road he would wind up cursing them to mortality. How can we expect Adam and Even to understand this misleading riddle? At worse, He lied, telling them the fruit would kill them when in fact the fruit doesn't kill people. So God is either a misleading riddler or a liar. Either way, it doesn't look good for a Deity who claims to be interest in truth, honesty, and justice. In fact, the serpent was the only character who was honest -- he told them that the fruit would *not* kill them, and that God only told them the lie out of jealousy, to keep them away from the fruit.
You do a lot of twisting, spinning, and translating Hebrew words in order to make the story mean something other than it said. I think it's very telling that you made a challenge to my personal comfort and called me a troll earlier in the thread. Clearly you see that you have lost this argument, because you haven't come up with any points to refute this logic. All you can do is turn my words against me in a childish manner, or call me a troll, or claim that the Bible somehow challenges my comfortable life. Well, it has become clear that an honest reading of Genesis challenges your beliefs, and you are unable to acknowledge it.
"They wouldn't have died if they hadn't eaten the fruit, right? Right. They ate the fruit, right? Right. Did they die? Yes. "
This is the spin you are giving. God said that they would die as a result of eating the fruit. They didn't die from eating the fruit. They died from God's punishment for eating the fruit. God mislead them. Why can't you admit this? It's as plain as day.
It would be like if I said, "Don't run with scissors, or you will surely die." So you go ahead and run with scissors, and you manage not to injure yourself. Then, when I find out you ran with scissors, I flip out and say "You ran with scissors? Now I'm going to kill you!" You can see how I was misleading you about the danger of scissors.
Well, in Gods case, it was even worse. The fruit wasn't deadly at all. It was simply the fruit that imparted the knowledge of good and evil. But God mislead them and made it seem like eating the fruit would kill them. The serpent corrected the story, and tells them quite truthfully that the fruit surely won't kill them, which it doesn't, and that it actually imparts knowledge of good and evil. The serpent correctly informs them that God lied to them about the fruit because He is jealous, and doesn't want them to have knowledge of good and evil, like he does. Then the jealous, lying God flips out and punishes the people and the snake. What a douchebag.
That's my point. The facts don't matter. All that matters is public opinion, which is what you are trying to affect if you "submit" a patch.
People will look at you like you just brought a glove and bat to the football field, just to be a dick. MS comes off looking like a good guy, because you have given them no options.
So, ultimately, any 'patch protest' is counterproductive to your open-source goals.
"Marijuana is a 100% safe drug. There are exactly -zero- reported cases of deaths from it... ever. According to the US DOJ, how long should a marijuana user be put in prison for, shill?"
They should be put in jail for as long as the law says they should be put in jail.
It doesn't matter that marijuana is harmless. It is currently illegal. You shouldn't get upset with the DOJ for enforcing the law. You should get upset with the legislature for making that crappy law, and failing to correct it.
It's not the DOJ's job to do what's right. It's their job to follow the law. It's the legislatures job to make sure that the law is just, and if they fail, it's your job to hold them to account. This complaining about the DOJ is blowing smoke. Get off your lazy ass and do something.
"Brainstorm. How about people sending the patches under an incompatible license to MS. What would they do then?"
A futile response that just makes the patcher look like an unsocialized nerd who can't play nice with others.
Let's say you find a bug in the source and you make a patch. I doubt that the license MS is giving you to the source would allow you to distribute this patch in any way. Even if you could, everyday users couldn't use it, because they don't have access to the source, and they're not going to be recompiling anything anyway. Licensees of the source are probably disallowed from sharing information between them. So you are just left with the patch and incompatable license sitting on your hard drive alone, unable to go anywhere in the world.
As a protest, this will only make sense to computer nerds who already hate MS anyway. To the average user, you look like an RMS style fanatic who refuses to do the 'right thing' and share your fix with MS.
How did this study decide who was partisan? The article didn't say. Did they pick people out of rallies or fundraisers, or just people off the street who self-identified with a party?
"There is no way to interpret this other than that the consumption of the fruit from that tree will result in death. But when? The vast majority of translations take the Hebrew word here to mean "day". All through Genesis chapter 1, the term "day" has been used to describe lengths of time during which God created stuff. These time periods are generally believed to have been thousands, millions, even billions of years. The term "day" is also used in Genesis 2:4 to describe the entire period of time God spent creating things, therefore the term "day" is not necessarily literal. So when God says 'you will die in the day you eat from it', it's clear to us that he's not going to let them live forever, but that he might not necessarily have them die instantly."
This is exactly the spin I am talking about.
First off, you agree with me that the sentence means they will die from eating the fruit. But they don't die from eating the fruit. If that were the case, God should have said, "If you eat this fruit, it will set in motion a series of events at the end of which I will curse you to return to dirt."
Second, you go through all this rigamarole about how long a day is. You know what? It doesn't matter if a day is a million years for God. Some of the translations say "you will surely die", some say "you will die when you eat the fruit", some say "you will die that day". Notice how you have to do so much explaining to get this passage to mean something other than what it says? That is spin, my friend.
"... we could argue that Adam and Eve didn't know that. They may have thought they would die at sunset! So, then, when God told them about what was already going to happen to them, namely, DEATH, wasn't it nice of him not to kill them within a fundamentalist 24-hour "day"? "
That might make him nice, but it also makes him a liar, if what He told them was that they would die that day, or when they ate the fruit. It's not nice that he lies to them because he's afraid they will become like them, and then he flips out and kills them. That's pretty crazy behavior, actually. If God is so worried about being nice, how about not punishing people for disobeying his commandment when they didn't know the difference between right and wrong in the first place.
"I don't have to argue against your thesis, the Bible contradicts it. Not just the Bible, the whole Bible. First Timothy 2:4..."
You have two problems here.
One, if it turns out God is a liar at the very outset, we certainly can't trust him later on. If you meet someone and the first thing they do is lie to you, you can't expect any more truth from them. If someone tells you, "You can trust me", you should immediately be suspicious.
Second, those other parts of the Bible clearly spin Genesis just like you do. My reading is the simplest, plainest meaning you can take from the Genesis passages. Your interpretations take a lot of explaining about how long a day is for God, and outright misrepresentations.
"God said that eating the fruit would mean death, no matter how you slice it. They ate it, no matter how you slice it, and they died, no matter how you slice it."
You have not sliced it at all. You took two events that were far apart and stuck them together, when they don't belong together. God clearly tells them that the act of eating the fruit will kill them. In some translations, he even says it will kill them that day. But it doesn't kill them. They wind up dying some 900+ years later because God curses them, not after they ate this fruit.
Why can't you accept that? Does that challenge your comforting notion of a loving and caring God? Why must you reject over and over clear evidence in the beginning of the Bible that God is jealous and unjust?
You're not playing by my rules at all. You're just taking the points I made against you, and saying them against me. That's no way to make a convincing argument. I think at this point you are starting to troll. Basically what you have done is just say "Nuh-uh, *you're* wrong!" without providing any argument.
I'll repeat this for the fourth or fifth time. Here's how it went down, according to the Bible:
"And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." (Genesis 2, 16-17 NIV).
This is plain and simple. Obvious. The only way you can read this is that eating the fruit will kill them. God *doesn't* say "If you eat this fruit I will punish you with death." God doesn't say "If you eat this fruit, it will set in motion a series of events that will result in me cursing you to return to the dust, amongst other things." God plainly says to them that eating the fruit will kill them. There is no other way to interpret this without getting away from the plain meaning.
Now there has to be some facts behind this story. Either these fruit are deadly, like God indicates, or else God was misleading or lying to the people about the fruit.
Enter the serpent:
"He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?" (Genesis 3 verse 1 NIV)
OK, the serpent has a question. So far, so good.
"The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.'" (Genesis 3 verses 2-3, NIV).
OK, so the woman fills the snake in on what God said. Now, remember, there is some reality behind the fruit. Either they are deadly, like God said, or else God lied about the fruit and they are not deadly.
"You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. (Genesis 3 verse 4, NIV)
Woah there, serpent! You better had be sure about the fruit! God said it would kill them. Are you sure they won't die from eating the fruit? Well, I guess the serpent is sure, because he did say "surely".
"For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. (Genesis 3 verse 5, NIV)"
In fact, the serpent knew the facts about the fruit, and he wasn't afraid to tell people the truth. The fruit aren't deadly; they are the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The serpent tells them truth; that they won't die from eating the fruit, and that instead, they will have knowledge of Good and Evil, and he even goes as far as to call God out for his shenanegans.
God lied to the people so they would be scared to eat the fruit and become like Him, with knowledge of Good and Evil. Why should we worship a jealous, insecure Deity, especially after he told this whopper?
"When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it." (Genesis 3 verse 6, NIV)
Wow, look at that! They ate the fruit and they didn't die. Wait -- why did God tell them they would die if they ate or touched the fruit...? Oh, that's right. He's jealous and doesn't want the people to be like Him, with knowledge of good and evil. But jeese, why did he have to lie? Couldn't he just have said, "If you eat this fruit, I will kill you?" But alas, He didn't. He chose to lie.
" Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves." (Genesis 3 verse 7, NIV).
What's this? Not only didn't they die, but there eyes *were* opened to the knowledge of Good and Evil, just like
Because you haven't been able to argue successfully, doesn't mean that I am a troll. You have clearly lost the argument, and now calling me a troll is just a childish way for you to back out.
God said, " but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."
At any other time, at any other place, the plain meaning of this sentence is that the fruit itself is somehow deadly, and it will cause you to die. The meaning can't be any plainer or simpler.
But, according you, because God said it, we can't trust the plain meaning. We have to look deeper, twist the meaning, spin, and refer to other parts of the Bible. What God actually meant was that "If you eat the fruit, later on when I find out about it, I will make sure that you die at some time in the future. " Notice that this meaning is different than the plain meaning of what he actually said. I don't think we should afford a Deity who claims to be interested in justice and truth that much slack.
So, of course when the snake hears this baloney story, he tells the people, quite correctly, "No, the fruit won't kill you, you will simply get knowledge of good and evil. " Now the snake has no way of knowing that God will later flip out and kill them. We're not even sure that the snake is aware of God's commandment. The snake surely can't tell God what to do.
So, the snake was honest with as much as he knew. The snake isn't omniscient like God. We have no reason to believe the snake even knew about God telling the people not to eat the fruit. Adam and Eve chose to eat the fruit, anyways, so it's unfair for God to have punished the snake, and it's unfair for us to keep blaming the snake, when he clearly did nothing wrong.
If God is all powerful, and claims to be just and fair, we have to hold him to a higher standard than he displayed in this outrageous episode. This shady character just isn't worthy of our worship. The snake was honest, and pointed us towards the knowledge that made us like Gods. Gods got all jealous and flipped out and made us mortal. Why would you want to be that guys' sucker?
"The Bible says that God told Adam and Eve that they'd die if they ate the fruit..."
Yes, and my point is they don't die from eating the fruit, like God said they would. They do get knowledge of good and evil, like the serpent told them they would. After God finds out, he decides to kill them. So, God mislead them, and the serpent was honest with them. You are fooling yourself.
"I don't know whether to think you're a troll or just scared that what the Bible really says will just shatter your comfortable life."
I'm not trolling and my life certainly isn't 'comfortable'. I grew up in the Methodist church, and my family went to church every Sunday. All of my friends went to various churches every Sunday.
Recently in my late 20s, I started reading the Bible, on my own, as I was encouraged to by every Protestant minister I heard. I didn't go in assuming it was the word of God. I didn't go in assuming that everything in it was true. As you can see, I choked on Genesis. What I found was that God comes off looking like an incredible hotheaded douchebag, and the serpent clearly is the only one looking out for us. That is the clearest, simplest, most straightforward reading I get out of it. Any other explanation requires a lot of twisting, bending, spinning, referring to other parts of the Bible, and plenty of "Yes, that's what it says, but what it means is actually..."
So I'm not trolling, nor am I in some mansion idly chatting on the internet. I'm just an average 28yo underemployed guy who gave the Bible an honest read, and this is what I got out of it. I see no reason to believe this crazy story over the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, the Louts Sutra, or even other Gospels that the church rejected centuries after Christ's life. All of them challenge my 'comfortable life', and ask me to believe some pretty rediculous things. However, I'm coming to the conclusion that I don't need to believe in a rediculous fairy tale in order to be a decent person.
"Um...what's the difference how they would die? He said for them not to eat it, and he said they would die for eating it ("You must not eat from it, for...you will positively die", New World Translation; "thou shalt not eat of it: for...thou shalt surely die", King James Version). Where's the ambiguity?"
There is no ambiguity. That's the problem.
If I said to you, "Don't drink the orange juice in the fridge; if you do you will surely die", you would conclude that the orange juice was somehow deadly. If you went ahead and drank it, and then said, "Hey Lawpoop! I drank that orange juice and I'm still alive!" and then I flipped out and said, "YOU DRANK THE ORANGE JUI
CE?! NOW I'M GOING TO KILL YOU!" -- don't you see how that is entirely misleading? Why should I kill you for drinking the orange juice? Just because I told you not to? In that case, why didn't I just say "Don't drink the orange juice or I'll kill you" ? Why does God have to mislead them and make it seem like the fruit will kill them? Why can't he just come out and say "Don't eat the fruit, or I will kill you as a punishment" ?
There is no ambiguity. God straight-out mislead the first people.
"They knew it was wrong to eat it. "
How could they know that? Remember, this fruit was the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Before they are it, they had no knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong. So how could they know it was wrong before they had knowledge or right and wrong?
"But here's something interesting: Eve was totally fooled into thinking she wouldn't die for rebelling against God's command (which she knew was wrong). First Timothy 2:14: "Also, Adam was not deceived, but the woman was thoroughly deceived.""
Red herring. If God lies in the beginning, we shouldn't trust him later on.
"Okay, so she was fooled. But Adam was not fooled at all. He knew it was wrong, and he knew the penalty was death. He ate the fruit anyway, and they both died for it."
How could he know it was wrong before he had knowledge of good and evil? He might have realized that after he ate the fruit, but there's no way he could have known it before.
"An open-minded but accurate reading, however, shows that they knew full well the consequences, and that God did what he said he would do."
How can I trust you to give an open-minded and accurate reading when you are claiming they knew right and wrong before they ate of the Fruit of Knowledge of Right and Wrong?
Here's the best reading I can give it: God doesn't want people eating the fruit, because he doesn't want people to be like "them", i.e. having the knowledge of good and evil. So he tells them not to eat it, or they will die, I guess to make them afraid of it. However, the eating of the fruit actually doesn't kill them. It just gives them knowledge of good and evil. So God mislead them, perhaps for their own benefit, perhaps because he's jealous -- but still he wasn't honest and straightforward.
Then the snake comes along, and says "Die? Of course you won't die. It's Fruit of Kowledge of Good and Evil, not Deadly Fruit." So then they look at it, and eat it.
God then finds out and flips out. He gets real nervous about people becoming Gods like him, so he curses them to return to dust, and then banishes them from the garden so they can't get at the fruit of immortality.
How was the serpent supposed to know that God would flip out and kill them when God found out what they had done? He just told the people straight up that the fruit wasn't deadly, it would just give them knowledge of good and evil.
"As you can plainly see, the serpent was the one lying."
In fact, the exact opposite is true. Eating of the fruit didn't kill them, as God told them it would. The serpent told them the truth, saying that the fruit would bring them knowledge of good and evil. He says "you shall surely not die" -- referring to eating the fruit
That's my point exactly. How much time are you going to spend checking on frozen dad's money? If the guys in suits come to you every year and say, "yup, everything looks good!" how would you be able to call them unless you yourself were an accountant, or you hired another accountant?
Futhermore, if frozen dad dies, *you get his money*. This alone will make cryogenic trusts a practical impossibility.
"As you say, it's not really about when they died. But they wouldn't have died if they hadn't eaten it."
That's pretty far down the chain of cause and effect. God tells them, 'If you eat the fruit you will die'. Not, 'If you eat the fruit, I will kill you as a punishment.' If a human being had said this, we would accuse him of being weasely. . At best, you have to admin God wasn't straightforward with people. At best, he's some kind of Galactic Riddler.
"He said, "If you eat this fruit, you will surely die". Correct." Right. If any person said this, it clearly means that you will die as a result of eating the fruit. But for some reason, we have to make an exception with God, because he can't be open and honest with us.
"They ate the fruit, and God killed them as a punishment for disobeying his command. Also correct."
It would have been nice if he had warned the people that that's what he was going to do.
"
They ate the fruit, and they surely died. God was telling the truth. They gained certain knowledge that the serpent said they would gain, but remember that the serpent was the one that said, "Thou shalt not surely die.""
Here's the funny thing -- according to the Bible, it looks an awful like God *decided* to kill the people after they ate the fruit. God later says "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." (Gen. 3 21)
Yes, I know that God told them they would die after eating the fruit. But they don't die as a result of eating the fruit -- God kills them as a punishment. God is exercising free will and *choosing* to punish them after they eat the fruit. Which is unfair, because if you strike a deal with someone, you have to lay out the terms in advance.
An open-minded reading clearly shows that God mislead the people and then took out a punishment on them. If you disagree with that, you have to twist around the meaning of the passages with corny explanations like "One day is 900 years for God" or "God knew that in the end he would have to kill them to technically he wasn't lying". At best God is a shady riddler who can't be straightforward with us.
"As you can plainly see, the serpent was the one lying."
No, it really looks like he told us the truth. He told Eve that the fruit would give them knowledge, which God neglected to mention. He also said the fruit wouldn't kill them -- and it didn't. God decided *afterwards* to kill them as a punishment.
"The cold and flu that you and I shrug off today would kill our great grandparents (at an age of young adulthood) in an instant because of sex and diversification. Just a natural evolution process."
It works both ways too. A germ that was pandemic 500 years ago could deadly today.
I was reading how they were doing research on the world flu of the early 1900s by recovering bodies that were buried in permafrost. They had to take special precautions that they didn't start another epidemic of the world flu, because few people have immunity to it these days.
The thing about existing trusts is that there is actually some person or organization who owns it, and needs to have it run properly. The administrators of the fund know that one day they may be called to task by the benefactor of the trust (or whatever you call them.) They can be sued or put in jail or whatever.
However, if the owner of the trust is on ice, they really can't check up on the administrators. If you schluff money off the top, or orchestrate things to get the money into your hands, who is going to try to find out where the money is going? A public defender isn't going to be snooping through the books of all the stiffs on ice. For practical purposes the owner of the fund is dead.
Just as an example, perhaps the administrator 'forgets' to pay the cryogenic bill. The next of kin then gets the trust fund money. However, the administrators have taken a huge chunk out of it beforehand -- how would the next of kin know?
If the people who ran these trusts were completely honest and trustworthy, yes, then they have an income for life. However, they could take the money, buy and island, and retire there. Who is going to go after them? The guy is on ice.
So, you are legally dead if you are frozen. If you are legally dead, and then revived, is our legal system prepared to handle that? Especially if you are revived some 50 years later.
"Yes, your honor, I was dead, but now I am alive again, and I want my things back."
I think a lot of cases would have to be decided to understand how to handle someone who comes back.
So your trust fund has guardians. Big deal. What are you going to do, audit them? You're frozen.
The funds will be slowly leeched until you finally thaw and die, and at that point someone inherits it.
Also, if there is any kind of "$#!+ hits the fan" scenario, the government will confiscate these trust finds to finance the war. Again, you will thaw and die.
This has nothing to do with *how long* after eating the fruit they died. This has to do with whether or not they died as a result of eating the fruit, which God told them they would. God didn't say "If you eat this fruit, you will die in 24 hours" or "in one day" or " in 900 years", he just said "if you eat this fruit, you will die". Clearly they didn't die after eating the fruit; but they did become knowledgeable, just as the serpent told them they would. God lied to them, and more importantly, *the serpent told them the truth*. Then God killed them as a punishment for disobeying his command which he lied about. What a great being.
At best, God mislead them. He could have told them, "If you eat this fruit, I will kill you". But no. He said, "If you eat this fruit, you will surely die". So maybe the first people could conclude that the end result of their eating the fruit would be that they would eventually die somehow, perhaps not directly related to eating the fruit. But that's pretty weasely. Why not be straightforward, instead of talking in circles? Why not just say "don't eat the fruit, or else", without making it seem like the fruit is poisonous? I would expect better clarity and straightforwardness from a Deity who is supposedly interested in justice and honesty.
So if the book starts out with God lying, it's probably not a good idea to trust anything he says afterwards. So what if it says later on that "God cannot lie"? It shows right in the beginning that he lies, so why wouldn't he lie about his honesty? This God is obviously a shady character, and managed to schluff off blame onto the snake, who was the only one honest with the first people. If I were serious about the Bible, I would worship the serpent, not God.
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"The president makes the laws. Therefore, anything he deems to be legal is legal."
What the hell country are you talking about?
Here in the United States of America, we have three branches of government. Power is split up among them so that nobody gets to be too powerful.
The legislature (i.e. the House of Representatives and the Senate) makes the law. The president signs it. If the president vetoes it, the Congress can still override the veto, if they get enough votes.
The courts determine what actions or laws are legal or illegal. The courts can throw out unconstitutional laws and throw people in jail for breaking the laws.
The president's job is to enforce the law. He doesn't make law. He doesn't determine what is legal or illegal. In doing his job of enforcing the law, it is possible that he himself (or she herself) breaks the law. If there is any question as to whether the president has broken the law, he must be taken before the courts, because the courts decide what is legal or illegal, not the president.
This is your fatal error, one that you have consistently made throughout this entire thread.
We both agree that God said "You will die if you eat this fruit." We both agree that they died later on.
It matters why they died. It matters because God told them they would die as a result of eating the fruit. This is important because they do not die as a result of eating the fruit. This makes God a liar, because God told them they would die when they ate the fruit.
You oversimplify when you say "they ate the fruit, and they died". Those two events were not causally related. The only connection between those two events were God's jealousy and retribution. They didn't die from eating the fruit, God just decided to make them mortal after he found out.
It would be like me telling you "If you play guitar, it will be deadly to you." You decide to go ahead and play a little guitar anyways. Then 50 years down the road, I come to you and say "Remember that time 50 years ago when you were playing guitar? Well, now I'm going to kill you!"
You see how that doesn't make any sense. Those are the actions of an insane, jealous person. And God admits many times in the Bible that he is a jealous God. That's why he curses us and the serpent. He's not interested in fairness, truth, or justice. He's just a jealous megalomaniac with too much power.
I'm not trying to convert you to satanism. Frankly, I don't care what you think or believe. As long as you don't hurt me or anyone else you can do what you want. I am simply pointing out your errors in logic and your faulty arguments. But a word to the wise: you shouldn't put your blind faith in a liar, whether they are on the street corner, on TV, or up in Heaven somewhere.
"What, you're saying they didn't die? "
No, I am saying that the eating of the fruit did not kill them, as God told them it would. Why do you have to keep twisting this?
"You have to do some serious twisting to get around that."
No you don't. It's very clear in the Bible. God says, "... But you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." (Genesis 2, verse 17) [Emphasis mine].
There it is, black and white, straight from the mouth of God. "When you eat of it, you will surely die."
Not 900 years later, not one of God's 100-year-long Hebrew days, but when they ate of it. It doesn't get much clearer than that. You keep saying I am twisting, but I think at this point you know that you are the one who is twisting. You just can't bring yourself to admit it.
"If Eat fruit == I will kill you down the road, then what is the result for you? Just like that song by The Old Dogs, "You're still gonna die." Eat fruit == die, no matter how the death comes."
If that's what God meant, then that's what God should have said. Instead, he told the people that the fruit would kill them, which wasn't true.
"Actually, the serpent is a little weaselly on the point of how they wouldn't die. "
The Bible, which is biased against the serpent, does say he is weasely. The NIV translation says he is "clever" (Genesis 3 verse 1 NIV). But what do you expect from the word of God? After all, God is a liar, and the serpent calls him on it -- of course God is going to try to paint him in a bad light.
In fact, the serpent wasn't weasely or misleading at all. Here is what the Bible says:
" [The serpent] said to the woman,"Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?" The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.'" (Genesis 3 verse 1-3 NIV).
It's clear that they are talking about what would happen if the people ate the fruit. The serpent asked Eve what God had told her about eating the fruit. When Eve relays God's lie to the serpent, the serpent corrects her. When he says "You will surely not die", he is talking about if they ate the fruit. He is correcting God's lie.
And guess what happens? They eat the fruit, and they don't die. This contradicts what God told them would happen, and confirms the serpents' correction of God's baloney story.
You can say whatever you want about old Hebrew words, or quote verses from other parts of the Bible. What you are unable to do is to back up your beliefs with quotes from Genesis. The only thing you did was take the serpents' words out of context. They were talking about eating the fruit, and the serpent told them they wouldn't die from eating the fruit. Look, if the Bible starts out showing God to be a liar, we shouldn't trust anything that comes out of his mouth, or his supporter's mouths, later on.
"If a GPLv3ed program cannot run without a specific private key, that private key must be made available. That's all the license says. Developers are not required to disclose private keys that they use to sign code."
This simple, clear statement should be at the beginning. I think if you argue about this in the future, you would help your case to lead with this, and then back it up afterwards.
"Why is it the 'right thing' to distribute a free patch to a profit taking company, particularly one that is a profit maximising monopoly?"
That's the view of the average Windows user. If you make a patch under an open source license, you are claiming to help people, but ensuring that people can't use the patch because of the license you are releasing it under.
Average Windows User: "Oh, so you made a patch to fix this bug, but neither Microsoft nor I can use it because you have a political point to make with your license? Thanks, dickweed. Thanks for nothing."
Here's a clue: submitting a patch to MS under an open-source license is not going to set off a chain reaction that winds up releasing all MS code under open source licensing. It's just a futile effort to make a political point that just winds up making the patcher look like a bad sport.
"Most users would find it funny if somebody threw M$' licensing ju-jitsu right back at them."
Linux users would find it funny. Windows users would never know about it. If they did find out about it, they would be upset that you made a fix, but for some stupid political reason, you aren't letting anyone use it.
"Eat fruit == die. There's nothing strange about it. "
Except that in reality , Eat fruit != die. However, Eat fruit == I will kill you later on downt the road.
It is strange that God that would mislead the people like that, isn't it? Especially for a God who claims to be interested in justice and the truth. It doesn't make sense...
Oh wait, the serpent clears it up for us. After he tells us the truth about the fruit, that it won't kill people, but will give people knowledge of Good and Evil, he tells us that God is jealous and doesn't want us to be like him. That's why God lied to us, telling us that the fruit is deadly. He's jealous and wants to scare us away from the fruit. He lied to us because he is jealous, and doesn't want us to be like him. However, the serpent was honest and straightforward with us. God, in a jealous rage, decides to punish the people, and also punish the snake. This is not fair nor just behavior.
"It says in simple language (English, Spanish, the original Hebrew, any language you like),that God told them they would die for eating it, and it says they died for eating it. No twisting required."
You're twisting the meaning even when you say you are not. You lie just like your God does.
You have said that "God told them they would die for eating [the fruit]". However, the story tells us that they do not die for eating the fruit. They die because later on, after they ate the fruit, because God found out and decided to curse them to return to dust.
"They ate the fruit, and they died. The Bible says so, plain as day, in black and white."
Really? Where does it say that?
This is the problem: God mislead them. He said "If you eat the fruit, you will surely die." The only way to read this is to come to the conclusion that the action of eating the fruit will make you dead. God *didn't* say "If you eat the fruit, I will kill you as a punishment." At best, he mislead them by speaking in a riddle, knowing that eating the fruit wouldn't kill them, but later on down the road he would wind up cursing them to mortality. How can we expect Adam and Even to understand this misleading riddle? At worse, He lied, telling them the fruit would kill them when in fact the fruit doesn't kill people. So God is either a misleading riddler or a liar. Either way, it doesn't look good for a Deity who claims to be interest in truth, honesty, and justice. In fact, the serpent was the only character who was honest -- he told them that the fruit would *not* kill them, and that God only told them the lie out of jealousy, to keep them away from the fruit.
You do a lot of twisting, spinning, and translating Hebrew words in order to make the story mean something other than it said. I think it's very telling that you made a challenge to my personal comfort and called me a troll earlier in the thread. Clearly you see that you have lost this argument, because you haven't come up with any points to refute this logic. All you can do is turn my words against me in a childish manner, or call me a troll, or claim that the Bible somehow challenges my comfortable life. Well, it has become clear that an honest reading of Genesis challenges your beliefs, and you are unable to acknowledge it.
"They wouldn't have died if they hadn't eaten the fruit, right? Right. They ate the fruit, right? Right. Did they die? Yes. "
This is the spin you are giving. God said that they would die as a result of eating the fruit. They didn't die from eating the fruit. They died from God's punishment for eating the fruit. God mislead them. Why can't you admit this? It's as plain as day.
It would be like if I said, "Don't run with scissors, or you will surely die." So you go ahead and run with scissors, and you manage not to injure yourself. Then, when I find out you ran with scissors, I flip out and say "You ran with scissors? Now I'm going to kill you!" You can see how I was misleading you about the danger of scissors.
Well, in Gods case, it was even worse. The fruit wasn't deadly at all. It was simply the fruit that imparted the knowledge of good and evil. But God mislead them and made it seem like eating the fruit would kill them. The serpent corrected the story, and tells them quite truthfully that the fruit surely won't kill them, which it doesn't, and that it actually imparts knowledge of good and evil. The serpent correctly informs them that God lied to them about the fruit because He is jealous, and doesn't want them to have knowledge of good and evil, like he does. Then the jealous, lying God flips out and punishes the people and the snake. What a douchebag.
That's my point. The facts don't matter. All that matters is public opinion, which is what you are trying to affect if you "submit" a patch.
People will look at you like you just brought a glove and bat to the football field, just to be a dick. MS comes off looking like a good guy, because you have given them no options.
So, ultimately, any 'patch protest' is counterproductive to your open-source goals.
"Marijuana is a 100% safe drug. There are exactly -zero- reported cases of deaths from it... ever. According to the US DOJ, how long should a marijuana user be put in prison for, shill?"
They should be put in jail for as long as the law says they should be put in jail.
It doesn't matter that marijuana is harmless. It is currently illegal. You shouldn't get upset with the DOJ for enforcing the law. You should get upset with the legislature for making that crappy law, and failing to correct it.
It's not the DOJ's job to do what's right. It's their job to follow the law. It's the legislatures job to make sure that the law is just, and if they fail, it's your job to hold them to account. This complaining about the DOJ is blowing smoke. Get off your lazy ass and do something.
"Brainstorm. How about people sending the patches under an incompatible license to MS. What would they do then?"
A futile response that just makes the patcher look like an unsocialized nerd who can't play nice with others.
Let's say you find a bug in the source and you make a patch. I doubt that the license MS is giving you to the source would allow you to distribute this patch in any way. Even if you could, everyday users couldn't use it, because they don't have access to the source, and they're not going to be recompiling anything anyway. Licensees of the source are probably disallowed from sharing information between them. So you are just left with the patch and incompatable license sitting on your hard drive alone, unable to go anywhere in the world.
As a protest, this will only make sense to computer nerds who already hate MS anyway. To the average user, you look like an RMS style fanatic who refuses to do the 'right thing' and share your fix with MS.
How did this study decide who was partisan? The article didn't say. Did they pick people out of rallies or fundraisers, or just people off the street who self-identified with a party?
"There is no way to interpret this other than that the consumption of the fruit from that tree will result in death. But when? The vast majority of translations take the Hebrew word here to mean "day". All through Genesis chapter 1, the term "day" has been used to describe lengths of time during which God created stuff. These time periods are generally believed to have been thousands, millions, even billions of years. The term "day" is also used in Genesis 2:4 to describe the entire period of time God spent creating things, therefore the term "day" is not necessarily literal. So when God says 'you will die in the day you eat from it', it's clear to us that he's not going to let them live forever, but that he might not necessarily have them die instantly."
This is exactly the spin I am talking about.
First off, you agree with me that the sentence means they will die from eating the fruit. But they don't die from eating the fruit. If that were the case, God should have said, "If you eat this fruit, it will set in motion a series of events at the end of which I will curse you to return to dirt."
Second, you go through all this rigamarole about how long a day is. You know what? It doesn't matter if a day is a million years for God. Some of the translations say "you will surely die", some say "you will die when you eat the fruit", some say "you will die that day". Notice how you have to do so much explaining to get this passage to mean something other than what it says? That is spin, my friend.
"... we could argue that Adam and Eve didn't know that. They may have thought they would die at sunset! So, then, when God told them about what was already going to happen to them, namely, DEATH, wasn't it nice of him not to kill them within a fundamentalist 24-hour "day"? "
That might make him nice, but it also makes him a liar, if what He told them was that they would die that day, or when they ate the fruit. It's not nice that he lies to them because he's afraid they will become like them, and then he flips out and kills them. That's pretty crazy behavior, actually. If God is so worried about being nice, how about not punishing people for disobeying his commandment when they didn't know the difference between right and wrong in the first place.
"I don't have to argue against your thesis, the Bible contradicts it. Not just the Bible, the whole Bible. First Timothy 2:4..."
You have two problems here.
One, if it turns out God is a liar at the very outset, we certainly can't trust him later on. If you meet someone and the first thing they do is lie to you, you can't expect any more truth from them. If someone tells you, "You can trust me", you should immediately be suspicious.
Second, those other parts of the Bible clearly spin Genesis just like you do. My reading is the simplest, plainest meaning you can take from the Genesis passages. Your interpretations take a lot of explaining about how long a day is for God, and outright misrepresentations.
"God said that eating the fruit would mean death, no matter how you slice it. They ate it, no matter how you slice it, and they died, no matter how you slice it."
You have not sliced it at all. You took two events that were far apart and stuck them together, when they don't belong together. God clearly tells them that the act of eating the fruit will kill them. In some translations, he even says it will kill them that day. But it doesn't kill them. They wind up dying some 900+ years later because God curses them, not after they ate this fruit.
Why can't you accept that? Does that challenge your comforting notion of a loving and caring God? Why must you reject over and over clear evidence in the beginning of the Bible that God is jealous and unjust?
You're not playing by my rules at all. You're just taking the points I made against you, and saying them against me. That's no way to make a convincing argument. I think at this point you are starting to troll. Basically what you have done is just say "Nuh-uh, *you're* wrong!" without providing any argument.
I'll repeat this for the fourth or fifth time. Here's how it went down, according to the Bible:
"And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." (Genesis 2, 16-17 NIV).
This is plain and simple. Obvious. The only way you can read this is that eating the fruit will kill them. God *doesn't* say "If you eat this fruit I will punish you with death." God doesn't say "If you eat this fruit, it will set in motion a series of events that will result in me cursing you to return to the dust, amongst other things." God plainly says to them that eating the fruit will kill them. There is no other way to interpret this without getting away from the plain meaning.
Now there has to be some facts behind this story. Either these fruit are deadly, like God indicates, or else God was misleading or lying to the people about the fruit.
Enter the serpent:
"He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?" (Genesis 3 verse 1 NIV)
OK, the serpent has a question. So far, so good.
"The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.'" (Genesis 3 verses 2-3, NIV).
OK, so the woman fills the snake in on what God said. Now, remember, there is some reality behind the fruit. Either they are deadly, like God said, or else God lied about the fruit and they are not deadly.
"You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. (Genesis 3 verse 4, NIV)
Woah there, serpent! You better had be sure about the fruit! God said it would kill them. Are you sure they won't die from eating the fruit? Well, I guess the serpent is sure, because he did say "surely".
"For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. (Genesis 3 verse 5, NIV)"
In fact, the serpent knew the facts about the fruit, and he wasn't afraid to tell people the truth. The fruit aren't deadly; they are the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The serpent tells them truth; that they won't die from eating the fruit, and that instead, they will have knowledge of Good and Evil, and he even goes as far as to call God out for his shenanegans. God lied to the people so they would be scared to eat the fruit and become like Him, with knowledge of Good and Evil. Why should we worship a jealous, insecure Deity, especially after he told this whopper?
"When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it." (Genesis 3 verse 6, NIV)
Wow, look at that! They ate the fruit and they didn't die. Wait -- why did God tell them they would die if they ate or touched the fruit...? Oh, that's right. He's jealous and doesn't want the people to be like Him, with knowledge of good and evil. But jeese, why did he have to lie? Couldn't he just have said, "If you eat this fruit, I will kill you?" But alas, He didn't. He chose to lie.
" Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves." (Genesis 3 verse 7, NIV).
What's this? Not only didn't they die, but there eyes *were* opened to the knowledge of Good and Evil, just like
Because you haven't been able to argue successfully, doesn't mean that I am a troll. You have clearly lost the argument, and now calling me a troll is just a childish way for you to back out.
God said, " but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."
At any other time, at any other place, the plain meaning of this sentence is that the fruit itself is somehow deadly, and it will cause you to die. The meaning can't be any plainer or simpler.
But, according you, because God said it, we can't trust the plain meaning. We have to look deeper, twist the meaning, spin, and refer to other parts of the Bible. What God actually meant was that "If you eat the fruit, later on when I find out about it, I will make sure that you die at some time in the future. " Notice that this meaning is different than the plain meaning of what he actually said. I don't think we should afford a Deity who claims to be interested in justice and truth that much slack.
So, of course when the snake hears this baloney story, he tells the people, quite correctly, "No, the fruit won't kill you, you will simply get knowledge of good and evil. " Now the snake has no way of knowing that God will later flip out and kill them. We're not even sure that the snake is aware of God's commandment. The snake surely can't tell God what to do.
So, the snake was honest with as much as he knew. The snake isn't omniscient like God. We have no reason to believe the snake even knew about God telling the people not to eat the fruit. Adam and Eve chose to eat the fruit, anyways, so it's unfair for God to have punished the snake, and it's unfair for us to keep blaming the snake, when he clearly did nothing wrong.
If God is all powerful, and claims to be just and fair, we have to hold him to a higher standard than he displayed in this outrageous episode. This shady character just isn't worthy of our worship. The snake was honest, and pointed us towards the knowledge that made us like Gods. Gods got all jealous and flipped out and made us mortal. Why would you want to be that guys' sucker?
"The Bible says that God told Adam and Eve that they'd die if they ate the fruit..."
Yes, and my point is they don't die from eating the fruit, like God said they would. They do get knowledge of good and evil, like the serpent told them they would. After God finds out, he decides to kill them. So, God mislead them, and the serpent was honest with them. You are fooling yourself.
"I don't know whether to think you're a troll or just scared that what the Bible really says will just shatter your comfortable life."
I'm not trolling and my life certainly isn't 'comfortable'. I grew up in the Methodist church, and my family went to church every Sunday. All of my friends went to various churches every Sunday.
Recently in my late 20s, I started reading the Bible, on my own, as I was encouraged to by every Protestant minister I heard. I didn't go in assuming it was the word of God. I didn't go in assuming that everything in it was true. As you can see, I choked on Genesis. What I found was that God comes off looking like an incredible hotheaded douchebag, and the serpent clearly is the only one looking out for us. That is the clearest, simplest, most straightforward reading I get out of it. Any other explanation requires a lot of twisting, bending, spinning, referring to other parts of the Bible, and plenty of "Yes, that's what it says, but what it means is actually..."
So I'm not trolling, nor am I in some mansion idly chatting on the internet. I'm just an average 28yo underemployed guy who gave the Bible an honest read, and this is what I got out of it. I see no reason to believe this crazy story over the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, the Louts Sutra, or even other Gospels that the church rejected centuries after Christ's life. All of them challenge my 'comfortable life', and ask me to believe some pretty rediculous things. However, I'm coming to the conclusion that I don't need to believe in a rediculous fairy tale in order to be a decent person.
"Um...what's the difference how they would die? He said for them not to eat it, and he said they would die for eating it ("You must not eat from it, for...you will positively die", New World Translation; "thou shalt not eat of it: for...thou shalt surely die", King James Version). Where's the ambiguity?"
There is no ambiguity. That's the problem.
If I said to you, "Don't drink the orange juice in the fridge; if you do you will surely die", you would conclude that the orange juice was somehow deadly. If you went ahead and drank it, and then said, "Hey Lawpoop! I drank that orange juice and I'm still alive!" and then I flipped out and said, "YOU DRANK THE ORANGE JUI CE?! NOW I'M GOING TO KILL YOU!" -- don't you see how that is entirely misleading? Why should I kill you for drinking the orange juice? Just because I told you not to? In that case, why didn't I just say "Don't drink the orange juice or I'll kill you" ? Why does God have to mislead them and make it seem like the fruit will kill them? Why can't he just come out and say "Don't eat the fruit, or I will kill you as a punishment" ?
There is no ambiguity. God straight-out mislead the first people.
"They knew it was wrong to eat it. "
How could they know that? Remember, this fruit was the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Before they are it, they had no knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong. So how could they know it was wrong before they had knowledge or right and wrong?
"But here's something interesting: Eve was totally fooled into thinking she wouldn't die for rebelling against God's command (which she knew was wrong). First Timothy 2:14: "Also, Adam was not deceived, but the woman was thoroughly deceived.""
Red herring. If God lies in the beginning, we shouldn't trust him later on.
"Okay, so she was fooled. But Adam was not fooled at all. He knew it was wrong, and he knew the penalty was death. He ate the fruit anyway, and they both died for it."
How could he know it was wrong before he had knowledge of good and evil? He might have realized that after he ate the fruit, but there's no way he could have known it before.
"An open-minded but accurate reading, however, shows that they knew full well the consequences, and that God did what he said he would do."
How can I trust you to give an open-minded and accurate reading when you are claiming they knew right and wrong before they ate of the Fruit of Knowledge of Right and Wrong?
Here's the best reading I can give it: God doesn't want people eating the fruit, because he doesn't want people to be like "them", i.e. having the knowledge of good and evil. So he tells them not to eat it, or they will die, I guess to make them afraid of it. However, the eating of the fruit actually doesn't kill them. It just gives them knowledge of good and evil. So God mislead them, perhaps for their own benefit, perhaps because he's jealous -- but still he wasn't honest and straightforward.
Then the snake comes along, and says "Die? Of course you won't die. It's Fruit of Kowledge of Good and Evil, not Deadly Fruit." So then they look at it, and eat it.
God then finds out and flips out. He gets real nervous about people becoming Gods like him, so he curses them to return to dust, and then banishes them from the garden so they can't get at the fruit of immortality.
How was the serpent supposed to know that God would flip out and kill them when God found out what they had done? He just told the people straight up that the fruit wasn't deadly, it would just give them knowledge of good and evil.
"As you can plainly see, the serpent was the one lying."
In fact, the exact opposite is true. Eating of the fruit didn't kill them, as God told them it would. The serpent told them the truth, saying that the fruit would bring them knowledge of good and evil. He says "you shall surely not die" -- referring to eating the fruit
That's my point exactly. How much time are you going to spend checking on frozen dad's money? If the guys in suits come to you every year and say, "yup, everything looks good!" how would you be able to call them unless you yourself were an accountant, or you hired another accountant?
Futhermore, if frozen dad dies, *you get his money*. This alone will make cryogenic trusts a practical impossibility.
"As you say, it's not really about when they died. But they wouldn't have died if they hadn't eaten it."
That's pretty far down the chain of cause and effect. God tells them, 'If you eat the fruit you will die'. Not, 'If you eat the fruit, I will kill you as a punishment.' If a human being had said this, we would accuse him of being weasely. . At best, you have to admin God wasn't straightforward with people. At best, he's some kind of Galactic Riddler.
"He said, "If you eat this fruit, you will surely die". Correct." Right. If any person said this, it clearly means that you will die as a result of eating the fruit. But for some reason, we have to make an exception with God, because he can't be open and honest with us.
"They ate the fruit, and God killed them as a punishment for disobeying his command. Also correct."
It would have been nice if he had warned the people that that's what he was going to do.
" They ate the fruit, and they surely died. God was telling the truth. They gained certain knowledge that the serpent said they would gain, but remember that the serpent was the one that said, "Thou shalt not surely die.""
Here's the funny thing -- according to the Bible, it looks an awful like God *decided* to kill the people after they ate the fruit. God later says "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." (Gen. 3 21)
Yes, I know that God told them they would die after eating the fruit. But they don't die as a result of eating the fruit -- God kills them as a punishment. God is exercising free will and *choosing* to punish them after they eat the fruit. Which is unfair, because if you strike a deal with someone, you have to lay out the terms in advance.
An open-minded reading clearly shows that God mislead the people and then took out a punishment on them. If you disagree with that, you have to twist around the meaning of the passages with corny explanations like "One day is 900 years for God" or "God knew that in the end he would have to kill them to technically he wasn't lying". At best God is a shady riddler who can't be straightforward with us.
"As you can plainly see, the serpent was the one lying."
No, it really looks like he told us the truth. He told Eve that the fruit would give them knowledge, which God neglected to mention. He also said the fruit wouldn't kill them -- and it didn't. God decided *afterwards* to kill them as a punishment.
"The cold and flu that you and I shrug off today would kill our great grandparents (at an age of young adulthood) in an instant because of sex and diversification. Just a natural evolution process."
It works both ways too. A germ that was pandemic 500 years ago could deadly today.
I was reading how they were doing research on the world flu of the early 1900s by recovering bodies that were buried in permafrost. They had to take special precautions that they didn't start another epidemic of the world flu, because few people have immunity to it these days.
The thing about existing trusts is that there is actually some person or organization who owns it, and needs to have it run properly. The administrators of the fund know that one day they may be called to task by the benefactor of the trust (or whatever you call them.) They can be sued or put in jail or whatever.
However, if the owner of the trust is on ice, they really can't check up on the administrators. If you schluff money off the top, or orchestrate things to get the money into your hands, who is going to try to find out where the money is going? A public defender isn't going to be snooping through the books of all the stiffs on ice. For practical purposes the owner of the fund is dead.
Just as an example, perhaps the administrator 'forgets' to pay the cryogenic bill. The next of kin then gets the trust fund money. However, the administrators have taken a huge chunk out of it beforehand -- how would the next of kin know?
If the people who ran these trusts were completely honest and trustworthy, yes, then they have an income for life. However, they could take the money, buy and island, and retire there. Who is going to go after them? The guy is on ice.
Well, doesn't that open a legal pandora's box?
So, you are legally dead if you are frozen. If you are legally dead, and then revived, is our legal system prepared to handle that? Especially if you are revived some 50 years later.
"Yes, your honor, I was dead, but now I am alive again, and I want my things back."
I think a lot of cases would have to be decided to understand how to handle someone who comes back.
So your trust fund has guardians. Big deal. What are you going to do, audit them? You're frozen.
The funds will be slowly leeched until you finally thaw and die, and at that point someone inherits it.
Also, if there is any kind of "$#!+ hits the fan" scenario, the government will confiscate these trust finds to finance the war. Again, you will thaw and die.
This has nothing to do with *how long* after eating the fruit they died. This has to do with whether or not they died as a result of eating the fruit, which God told them they would. God didn't say "If you eat this fruit, you will die in 24 hours" or "in one day" or " in 900 years", he just said "if you eat this fruit, you will die". Clearly they didn't die after eating the fruit; but they did become knowledgeable, just as the serpent told them they would. God lied to them, and more importantly, *the serpent told them the truth*. Then God killed them as a punishment for disobeying his command which he lied about. What a great being.
At best, God mislead them. He could have told them, "If you eat this fruit, I will kill you". But no. He said, "If you eat this fruit, you will surely die". So maybe the first people could conclude that the end result of their eating the fruit would be that they would eventually die somehow, perhaps not directly related to eating the fruit. But that's pretty weasely. Why not be straightforward, instead of talking in circles? Why not just say "don't eat the fruit, or else", without making it seem like the fruit is poisonous? I would expect better clarity and straightforwardness from a Deity who is supposedly interested in justice and honesty.
So if the book starts out with God lying, it's probably not a good idea to trust anything he says afterwards. So what if it says later on that "God cannot lie"? It shows right in the beginning that he lies, so why wouldn't he lie about his honesty? This God is obviously a shady character, and managed to schluff off blame onto the snake, who was the only one honest with the first people. If I were serious about the Bible, I would worship the serpent, not God.