but it is not something that is arguable in the sense that you can prove it by logic or material evidence.
It is as arguable as "1 + 1 = 3". No external evidence is needed to disprove something which is self-contradictory. And the thought-pattern of "God is just, so he punishes sin, but he makes an exception if you love Him, which isn't just" is a simple contradiction:
Consider this scenario: A guy chops off your arm with an ax. You go to court against this person. The judge says, "well, it was wrong what he did to you, but seeing as how I am such a forgiving fellow, I am going to let him off without any punishment." Is this just? Would you like it if all judges were like this?
Consider this scenario: A guy chops off your wife's head with an ax. You go to court against this person. The judge says, "well, it was wrong what he did to her, but seeing as how he's a personal friend of mine, and I've already spent 3 nights in jail, I am going to let him off without any punishment." Is this just? Would you like it if all judges were like this?
Finally, you shouldn't consider sporting equipment and a sports facility as something that is wrong. Remember, the school is also spending time teaching the students fitness and living a healthy lifestyle.
Although gym classes can encourage fitness and health, sports teams do not. The message they teach is that athletics is for the rare few excellent players, and that everyone else should be happy to sit in the bleachers and clap (and buy at the concession stand).
High school and college athletics are indoctrination into the sedentary livestyle of watching other people run around.
If sin weren't the major issue that it is, why would God need to 'redeem' sinners in the first place?
If God can tolerate redeemed sin, then the claim that God cannot tolerate sin is false.
Suppose I claim to hate cats. If I later tell you that I enjoy hairless cats, then my prior claim has been disproved.
You might argue that Jesus "washes away" sin, and that God then tolerates them because they have no sin anymore. But sin isn't a physical or metaphysical object that one can logically move around- it's the state of having done something wrong in the past. Unless He's time-travelling to block the commission of the offense, the sin cannot be removed.
He wouldn't need to redeem us. What your saying doesn't make sense,
Another contender for the 2004 Twirp-Pudge trophy! (Although a theological topic gives you an unfair advantage over the rest of the field)
And finally, when we reach the new testament, there is no commandment to individuals to do violence against anyone. In fact, the command is to not even resist evil men with violence.
That's completely true, which is why it's so sadly hilarious to see George W Bush claim Jesus as his favorite political philosopher. (Of course, he's acting just like any of the millions of Christians who focus on the concept that love for Jesus protects sinners, freeing them to sin and ignore Jesus's fundamental directions for life)
To avoid repetition, please see this thread for my response to your points.
To clarify, you said "God NEVER ordered killing infidels". And then when that falsehood was pointed out, you said "Oh, alright, he ordered some infidels killed, but he had a real good reason".
Which contradicts the claims that God is powerful, just, or merciful.
Is this just? Would you like it if all judges were like this?
If the judge were omnipotent, he'd grow me a replacement arm in 3 seconds, and that would be justice, and I'd like it a lot. (He could also go and punish the guy, but only proportionally to the harm done, which means years in jail, not millenia in Hell)
Human traditions of justice only make sense because we have a need to deter crime, as we lack the power to completely heal its effects. God allegedly has that power.
And so, we have Jesus , the son of God, who takes our place and our punishment.
If what you just wrote was the actual Christian dogma, it'd be fine. But they don't claim that- they say Jesus only takes your punishment if you call on him. A perfectly loving Jesus would save even those who don't love him back, instead of demanding reciprocity... which is exactly the line I started the big thread with. (Have you read ToTC? Good book, with a strong anti-Christian parable for the climax)
I think if you really want a good explanation for this, you should check out this web page.
That says nothing. It's based on using the older definition of sacrifice- today it means "give up something of value", but it once meant "to make sacred or holy". I already explained how the cruxification didn't meet definition 1. It doesn't meet definition 2 either, because Jesus was already sacred, holy, and belonged completely to God (Himself).
That wasn't a sacrifice, because you can't pay a man with something he already owns. If you try and he lets you get away with it, then he's essentially decided let you off without payment at all, which is something you claimed God's sense of justice won't let Him do.
The God of the Christian Bible never commands Christians to kill unbelievers.
That's a dishonest misdirection. The statement is technically true, but not if you replace "Christians" with "followers". The Israelites were always destroying one nation or another, with God's command and support. And in the New Testament, Jesus never refutes it; he never comes out and says that God was wrong to order those genocides.
The Gods of the Old and New testament are one and the same.
Why would it require knowledge of evil to obey your creator?
Answer is too obvious to bear the effort of typing it out. Must be a rhetorical question to which no response was desired.
Your will is not that they should die, but your nature is such that it cannot be otherwise.
Contradicts the claim that God is omnipotent, or even highly powerful. Disputed by "Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven"
God is absolutely holy and any sin cannot coexist in his presence
Contradicted by the claim that Jesus redeems sinners.
Thus the warning, eat from that tree and you will surely die.
There is no reason for separation from God to imply death, unless God decides to explicitly kill people separate from Him. (Observe that humans walking around outside your window today aren't dead, even though they're mostly sinners and thus separate from God)
If I permit verbatim copying of my articles, that's not permission by me also for anyone to copy only selected portions of it.
As I already explained, that's true if and only if you only permitted verbatim copying. If you simply uploaded to USENET without specifying what kinds of copying was allowed, you implicitly gave permission for both total and partial copies.
I could take your article above, cut and paste it in its entirety into another Slashdot article and repost it as "Anonymous Coward" without referring to you as its real author. I don't know whether you would object to it, but it sure wouldn't be "fair use" of your work.
Because you are being intentionally untruthful, that's fraud. It's a completely separate crime from copyright infringement, and in fact isn't part of intellectual property law at all. Copyright Law includes no right to attribution.
In this example, you are intentionally trying to trick other people, which is a critical difference from what Google Groups does, because they make their email-blocking obvious and aboveboard. If Google was replacing the addresses with valid-looking but phony ones, or erasing the whole address, or otherwise making it less than obvious that an email address had been there, you might have a point.
I think we should concentrate on the common underlying principles behind copyright, not the peculiarities of national laws.
That'll get you nowhere fast. 1) Google is a USA company. 2) You are probably a USA poster. 3) WIPO is constantly working to standardize copyright law worldwide.
Maybe I violated Google's rights by retrieving them?
but true justice demands that someone pay the penalty for the crime.
No it doesn't. That's vengenece, not justice. By Jesus's own words, "We forgive those who trespass against us".
but true justice demands that someone pay the penalty for the crime.
Wrong. God intentionally created that situation, unless you're one of the numerous quasi-Christians who subconciously assume Satan is equally as powerful as Jesus.
Now, if God were truly evil like so many people seem to believe, why would he bother sacrificing his Son?
If Jesus is still alive, then he wasn't sacrificed, by definition. To offer something and then yank it back is cheating.
By dying and then not returning back to life? It seems to me that that would be the greater sacrifice.
Looking at available evidence, that's what happened.
After all, when was the last time you saw Jesus on TV? Or even give a newspaper interview? If He was still alive, don't you think people would see him around occasionally? The statue of limitations for declared death (even without finding a body) has expired about 500 times over.
(Alternatively, if He's alive but in hiding, then he's trying to fool us all, which is a sin of dishonesty. Jesus would never sin, so He must be dead.)
Fortunately, we have God's word in writing, and if we somehow get the idea that God is telling us to do something inconsistent with His Word, we can know that somehow we're being deceived
No. The Bible contains a specific example of God issuing a command to do evil as a test of faith. Genesis 22:02. The approved response is to carry out the act, trusting that God will intercede at the last moment.
Strapping on a belt of explosives to slaughter the infidels is inconsistent with God's Word.
No. Slaughtering infidels on God's command is a repeating pattern throughtout much of the beginning Bible. Although explosives were obviously unavaible back then, the tactic of dying yourself to kill multiple enemy is approved: Judges 16:29
This is among the most basic of standard Christian theology (as far as I know) in the Catholic and Protestant denomincations
I see now that this is in the oft-recited Apostle's creed... but that's non-Biblical. Acts 2:31 clearly says He didn't go to hell. However, a person who translates both "sheol" and "gehenna" into "hell" could make this mistake (as the former should really be "limbo")
Also, Luke 23:43 "Today shalt thou be with me in paradise". That was on the morning of the cruxification, 3 days before resurrection.
(granted, I'm not sure what you mean by "rhetoric" here - I agree that you definitely
Maybe I used it as a synonym for "dogma".
don't hear about the death of Christ much on television)
Part of the mystery about this is the Trinity - which nobody has ever claimed to understand
I, and many others with an interest in historical mythology claim to understand. It's an elementary syncretism. (Although, the explanation proferred by Umberto's fictional priest is amusing: the Trinity is an intentional absurdity as a test of faith)
God said, don't eat from this one tree, or else you are going to die.
And why would he say that? Especially why would he expect people to be able to follow rules when they don't even have a conception of good & evil yet?
Now, if God didn't punish Adam for what he did, especially after he said they would die, how could he be considered true to his word?
So, if I tell my daughter "Don't turn on the TV or I'll kill you?", you would support me actually carrying out that literally murderous punishment if/when she breaks the rule?
If someone promises to do an evil thing (like excessive punishment), don't praise Him for honesty when he follows through on a cruel, evil promise!
Charging five cents per article read without any agreement with the original author, is not a valid fair use of a Usenet post.
Nope. That's not how Fair Use law works. While it's true that profit motive is one of the 5 factors determining whether a certain "Use" is "Fair", it's a rather minor one. Not by itself enough to tip a balance.
Furthermore, Fair Use is irrelevant to USENET. Copying messages from USENET is allowed, because permission was automatically granted by the author when she uploaded the message. Fair Use is a limited exception to copyright, which doesn't matter to someone who already has broad permission.
Pulling out a message to a very different medium, such as quoting it in a newspaper, would require Fair Use however. And of course, If the message included data copyrighted by someone other than the poster, then it's illegal to copy.
# Since Usenet posts normally expire after a few days,
That's false. There have normally been persistent archivers running (on a subset of groups) throughout the active history of USENET. (Not all the way back to the beginning, but far enough back to predate the messages Google Groups contains)
Since I retain the copyright to my articles, I have the right to control in what way they may be disseminated by others.
Nope. That's not how copyright law works. You control whether people can copy/distribute your messages- but once you give that permission, you have no further authority. If you allow someone to copy something, he implicitly is able to choose to copy only half of it, if that's what he prefers.
Blacking out small parts of a work and then redistributing it is common and legal. Recent court decisions reinforce this view, such as the one with a company that sold censored VHS tapes.
I want to tell Google: You can continue distributing my 429 articles if you like, as long as you distribute them verbatim, without any modifications of
Is that requirement already attached to your messages? If not, too late. By uploading them to USENET, you have implicitly given permission for the content to be replicated widely (since you knew that such copying would occur automatically once you posted)
If you had explicitly required that your posts only be republished in full (or not at all), then you might have a case here.
(Note that such a clause would make it impossible to display the message in the Google Groups interface, since wrapping it in an HTML border and colorizing indents counts as modifications. They could theoretically link to a plain-ascii page, though)
2) This code contains information that for a variety of reasons is confidential (security, personal privacy, etc).
Totally wrong. The security and privacy are BENEFITs of Open Source, not penalties. All real security researchers know that a published system is safer than a secret one.
Plus there's the whole related matter of trust and accountability (as exemplified by the dispute about vote-counting software). All 4 of these points are better accomplished with open source. Closed source allows incorrect software to survive.
do automobile manufacturers create car accidents? You can reasonably argue that they create the potential for car accidents,
The companies are imperfect, so they create imperfections. If they could, there wouldn't be a possibility for accidents.
So, if you are explaining that God is imperfect and thus his creations do things He doesn't want, that's fine. But an imperfect God doesn't deserve worship, especially when He lies about his own flaws.
Now, I don't say that you have to believe these things, but these are answers to your questions.
Repeating the question in the form of an assertion is not an answer. You've responded to nothing, except to underscore an unexamined faith. The closest you came to an answer were equivalent to "Because that's how it is" or "Because God said so". One such non-response:
In this instance, the only reason is because Hitler submitted to Christ. The same reason, in the Christian context, anyone is saved.
That's no more satisfactory than a murderer explaining to a judge that he shot two people because they were looking at him funny. He had a reason, but it wasn't a valid one. Likewise, if God sees a reason to punish Ghandi more than Hitler, His reasoning is incorrect. One of those people was inarguably better than the other, and giving one a free pass because he came from a Christian cultural tradition is completely unjust.
All you've done is repeat the usual Christian dogma, without addressing my point that any God who creates and enforces such a regime is NOT GOOD, because blatant injustices go unrepaired.
"guy shoots stuff," would it be that much better with satanic imagery?
Yes it would! For the shooting to be maximally enjoyable, it must be guilt-free. The viewer can be given no room to imagine that the targets of the shooting don't completely deserve to absorb those rapid-fire napalm rockets.
Only the very evilist of enemies can deserve such unmerciful shootage. The only two known creatures of this type are Satanists and Nazis (and its no coincidence that idsoftware uses them both)
It's in the Bible. When Jesus asks the apostles to spread his message, because he can't or won't do it himself.
The keyword is "Gospel", and it's one of the major conceptual flaws to Christianity: God sends to hell all sinners who reject Jesus, even if they've never heard of him. A powerful God could magically spread the Gospel and save more souls, but instead He sits back and allows fallable human missionaries to do that hyper-important job.
Oh? God created everything, didn't He? (If you don't think so, you're once again going back to dualism. Which is fine with me!)
But when compared next to perfection, those two (and anyone else on the planet) are pretty much the same.
If God cannot manage to detect and account for the distinction between Gandhi and Stalin, He is flawed. Not only is He imperfect, but actually less perceptive than a typical human. (Alternatively, if He's aware of the difference but just doesn't care, then the flaw is not with perception, but justice- an even greater divine offense)
But I can ignore that and make an even better analogy (which I earlier skipped because people tend to rant about Godwin). Replace Stalin with Adolf Hitler, and suppose for the sake of argument that he repented to Christ just before death (which is entirely possible, for all we know). Now explain why Adolf's in Heaven and Ghandi is in Hell with Stalin and Judas.
How glorious is a God who offers mercy to an evildoer in exchange for a proclaimation of love, but turns his back on decent, common children who had the misfortune to die without hearing the gospel?
And the lack of sin is what is required to be in an eternal relationship with God.
Flip-flopping? Remember the bit about Jesus welcoming (repentant) sinners to the Heavenly embrace?
My changed life is additional evidence for me above and beyond that.
The observation that believing a comforting lie can make people happier and more productive isn't exactly new. Indeed, the fact that so many human religions exist is evidence that religosity has practical benefits, regardless of any truth to the underlying supernatural claims.
my email address I promise to respond by email late Tuesday.
Anti-religion debates are so easy to find on the internet that any particular one has no real value. However, I will repeat what turned out to be the best paragraph I just posted, so you can reply to it quickly if you like:
Honestly, I would not feel comfortable spending externity with a guy who punishes Mohandas Ghandi exactly as harshly as Josef Stalin. (Both major leaders who committed multiple sins through their lives, and both died without accepting Jesus). A loving God would give the denizens of Hell an opportunity to change their minds after a few centuries of torment.
In 1986, the Internet was up and running just fine.
No it wasn't. Just go back to your old documents and see if "The Internet" is used with capitalization. It wasn't: back then, "internet" was a common noun, not a proper one. Walking up to a networking professional and asking him about a connection to "the internet" was still an ambiguous question.
We can make fun of all the misspeaking that Dubya does, but we can't mock Gore for saying "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."?
Wrong. At that time, there were internets, such as ARPANET. Today, there is "The Internet"- a single network that exists partly because Al Gore fought for it. (Back then, he called it The Information Superhighway, because "Internet" was a little ambiguous)
Slashdot Mirror
but it is not something that is arguable in the sense that you can prove it by logic or material evidence.
It is as arguable as "1 + 1 = 3". No external evidence is needed to disprove something which is self-contradictory. And the thought-pattern of "God is just, so he punishes sin, but he makes an exception if you love Him, which isn't just" is a simple contradiction:
Consider this scenario: A guy chops off your arm with an ax. You go to court against this person. The judge says, "well, it was wrong what he did to you, but seeing as how I am such a forgiving fellow, I am going to let him off without any punishment." Is this just? Would you like it if all judges were like this?
Consider this scenario: A guy chops off your wife's head with an ax. You go to court against this person. The judge says, "well, it was wrong what he did to her, but seeing as how he's a personal friend of mine, and I've already spent 3 nights in jail, I am going to let him off without any punishment." Is this just? Would you like it if all judges were like this?
Finally, you shouldn't consider sporting equipment and a sports facility as something that is wrong. Remember, the school is also spending time teaching the students fitness and living a healthy lifestyle.
Although gym classes can encourage fitness and health, sports teams do not. The message they teach is that athletics is for the rare few excellent players, and that everyone else should be happy to sit in the bleachers and clap (and buy at the concession stand).
High school and college athletics are indoctrination into the sedentary livestyle of watching other people run around.
If sin weren't the major issue that it is, why would God need to 'redeem' sinners in the first place?
If God can tolerate redeemed sin, then the claim that God cannot tolerate sin is false.
Suppose I claim to hate cats. If I later tell you that I enjoy hairless cats, then my prior claim has been disproved.
You might argue that Jesus "washes away" sin, and that God then tolerates them because they have no sin anymore. But sin isn't a physical or metaphysical object that one can logically move around- it's the state of having done something wrong in the past. Unless He's time-travelling to block the commission of the offense, the sin cannot be removed.
He wouldn't need to redeem us. What your saying doesn't make sense,
Another contender for the 2004 Twirp-Pudge trophy! (Although a theological topic gives you an unfair advantage over the rest of the field)
And finally, when we reach the new testament, there is no commandment to individuals to do violence against anyone. In fact, the command is to not even resist evil men with violence.
That's completely true, which is why it's so sadly hilarious to see George W Bush claim Jesus as his favorite political philosopher. (Of course, he's acting just like any of the millions of Christians who focus on the concept that love for Jesus protects sinners, freeing them to sin and ignore Jesus's fundamental directions for life)
To avoid repetition, please see this thread for my response to your points.
To clarify, you said "God NEVER ordered killing infidels". And then when that falsehood was pointed out, you said "Oh, alright, he ordered some infidels killed, but he had a real good reason".
Which contradicts the claims that God is powerful, just, or merciful.
Is this just? Would you like it if all judges were like this?
If the judge were omnipotent, he'd grow me a replacement arm in 3 seconds, and that would be justice, and I'd like it a lot. (He could also go and punish the guy, but only proportionally to the harm done, which means years in jail, not millenia in Hell)
Human traditions of justice only make sense because we have a need to deter crime, as we lack the power to completely heal its effects. God allegedly has that power.
And so, we have Jesus , the son of God, who takes our place and our punishment.
If what you just wrote was the actual Christian dogma, it'd be fine. But they don't claim that- they say Jesus only takes your punishment if you call on him. A perfectly loving Jesus would save even those who don't love him back, instead of demanding reciprocity... which is exactly the line I started the big thread with. (Have you read ToTC? Good book, with a strong anti-Christian parable for the climax)
I think if you really want a good explanation for this, you should check out this web page.
That says nothing. It's based on using the older definition of sacrifice- today it means "give up something of value", but it once meant "to make sacred or holy". I already explained how the cruxification didn't meet definition 1. It doesn't meet definition 2 either, because Jesus was already sacred, holy, and belonged completely to God (Himself).
That wasn't a sacrifice, because you can't pay a man with something he already owns. If you try and he lets you get away with it, then he's essentially decided let you off without payment at all, which is something you claimed God's sense of justice won't let Him do.
The God of the Christian Bible never commands Christians to kill unbelievers.
That's a dishonest misdirection. The statement is technically true, but not if you replace "Christians" with "followers". The Israelites were always destroying one nation or another, with God's command and support. And in the New Testament, Jesus never refutes it; he never comes out and says that God was wrong to order those genocides.
The Gods of the Old and New testament are one and the same.
Why would it require knowledge of evil to obey your creator?
Answer is too obvious to bear the effort of typing it out. Must be a rhetorical question to which no response was desired.
Your will is not that they should die, but your nature is such that it cannot be otherwise.
Contradicts the claim that God is omnipotent, or even highly powerful. Disputed by "Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven"
God is absolutely holy and any sin cannot coexist in his presence
Contradicted by the claim that Jesus redeems sinners.
Thus the warning, eat from that tree and you will surely die.
There is no reason for separation from God to imply death, unless God decides to explicitly kill people separate from Him. (Observe that humans walking around outside your window today aren't dead, even though they're mostly sinners and thus separate from God)
If I permit verbatim copying of my articles, that's not permission by me also for anyone to copy only selected portions of it.
As I already explained, that's true if and only if you only permitted verbatim copying. If you simply uploaded to USENET without specifying what kinds of copying was allowed, you implicitly gave permission for both total and partial copies.
I could take your article above, cut and paste it in its entirety into another Slashdot article and repost it as "Anonymous Coward" without referring to you as its real author. I don't know whether you would object to it, but it sure wouldn't be "fair use" of your work.
Because you are being intentionally untruthful, that's fraud. It's a completely separate crime from copyright infringement, and in fact isn't part of intellectual property law at all. Copyright Law includes no right to attribution.
In this example, you are intentionally trying to trick other people, which is a critical difference from what Google Groups does, because they make their email-blocking obvious and aboveboard. If Google was replacing the addresses with valid-looking but phony ones, or erasing the whole address, or otherwise making it less than obvious that an email address had been there, you might have a point.
I think we should concentrate on the common underlying principles behind copyright, not the peculiarities of national laws.
That'll get you nowhere fast. 1) Google is a USA company. 2) You are probably a USA poster. 3) WIPO is constantly working to standardize copyright law worldwide.
Maybe I violated Google's rights by retrieving them?
Why the total non-sequiter?
but true justice demands that someone pay the penalty for the crime.
No it doesn't. That's vengenece, not justice. By Jesus's own words, "We forgive those who trespass against us".
but true justice demands that someone pay the penalty for the crime.
Wrong. God intentionally created that situation, unless you're one of the numerous quasi-Christians who subconciously assume Satan is equally as powerful as Jesus.
Now, if God were truly evil like so many people seem to believe, why would he bother sacrificing his Son?
If Jesus is still alive, then he wasn't sacrificed, by definition. To offer something and then yank it back is cheating.
By dying and then not returning back to life? It seems to me that that would be the greater sacrifice.
Looking at available evidence, that's what happened.
After all, when was the last time you saw Jesus on TV? Or even give a newspaper interview? If He was still alive, don't you think people would see him around occasionally? The statue of limitations for declared death (even without finding a body) has expired about 500 times over.
(Alternatively, if He's alive but in hiding, then he's trying to fool us all, which is a sin of dishonesty. Jesus would never sin, so He must be dead.)
Fortunately, we have God's word in writing, and if we somehow get the idea that God is telling us to do something inconsistent with His Word, we can know that somehow we're being deceived
No. The Bible contains a specific example of God issuing a command to do evil as a test of faith. Genesis 22:02. The approved response is to carry out the act, trusting that God will intercede at the last moment.
Strapping on a belt of explosives to slaughter the infidels is inconsistent with God's Word.
No. Slaughtering infidels on God's command is a repeating pattern throughtout much of the beginning Bible. Although explosives were obviously unavaible back then, the tactic of dying yourself to kill multiple enemy is approved: Judges 16:29
This is among the most basic of standard Christian theology (as far as I know) in the Catholic and Protestant denomincations
I see now that this is in the oft-recited Apostle's creed... but that's non-Biblical. Acts 2:31 clearly says He didn't go to hell. However, a person who translates both "sheol" and "gehenna" into "hell" could make this mistake (as the former should really be "limbo")
Also, Luke 23:43 "Today shalt thou be with me in paradise". That was on the morning of the cruxification, 3 days before resurrection.
(granted, I'm not sure what you mean by "rhetoric" here - I agree that you definitely
Maybe I used it as a synonym for "dogma".
don't hear about the death of Christ much on television)
But it's big in theaters and DVD!
Part of the mystery about this is the Trinity - which nobody has ever claimed to understand
I, and many others with an interest in historical mythology claim to understand. It's an elementary syncretism. (Although, the explanation proferred by Umberto's fictional priest is amusing: the Trinity is an intentional absurdity as a test of faith)
God said, don't eat from this one tree, or else you are going to die.
And why would he say that? Especially why would he expect people to be able to follow rules when they don't even have a conception of good & evil yet?
Now, if God didn't punish Adam for what he did, especially after he said they would die, how could he be considered true to his word?
So, if I tell my daughter "Don't turn on the TV or I'll kill you?", you would support me actually carrying out that literally murderous punishment if/when she breaks the rule?
If someone promises to do an evil thing (like excessive punishment), don't praise Him for honesty when he follows through on a cruel, evil promise!
Charging five cents per article read without any agreement with the original author, is not a valid fair use of a Usenet post.
Nope. That's not how Fair Use law works. While it's true that profit motive is one of the 5 factors determining whether a certain "Use" is "Fair", it's a rather minor one. Not by itself enough to tip a balance.
Furthermore, Fair Use is irrelevant to USENET. Copying messages from USENET is allowed, because permission was automatically granted by the author when she uploaded the message. Fair Use is a limited exception to copyright, which doesn't matter to someone who already has broad permission.
Pulling out a message to a very different medium, such as quoting it in a newspaper, would require Fair Use however. And of course, If the message included data copyrighted by someone other than the poster, then it's illegal to copy.
# Since Usenet posts normally expire after a few days,
That's false. There have normally been persistent archivers running (on a subset of groups) throughout the active history of USENET. (Not all the way back to the beginning, but far enough back to predate the messages Google Groups contains)
Since I retain the copyright to my articles, I have the right to control in what way they may be disseminated by others.
Nope. That's not how copyright law works. You control whether people can copy/distribute your messages- but once you give that permission, you have no further authority. If you allow someone to copy something, he implicitly is able to choose to copy only half of it, if that's what he prefers.
Blacking out small parts of a work and then redistributing it is common and legal. Recent court decisions reinforce this view, such as the one with a company that sold censored VHS tapes.
I want to tell Google: You can continue distributing my 429 articles if you like, as long as you distribute them verbatim, without any modifications of
Is that requirement already attached to your messages? If not, too late. By uploading them to USENET, you have implicitly given permission for the content to be replicated widely (since you knew that such copying would occur automatically once you posted)
If you had explicitly required that your posts only be republished in full (or not at all), then you might have a case here.
(Note that such a clause would make it impossible to display the message in the Google Groups interface, since wrapping it in an HTML border and colorizing indents counts as modifications. They could theoretically link to a plain-ascii page, though)
2) This code contains information that for a variety of reasons is confidential (security, personal privacy, etc).
Totally wrong. The security and privacy are BENEFITs of Open Source, not penalties. All real security researchers know that a published system is safer than a secret one.
Plus there's the whole related matter of trust and accountability (as exemplified by the dispute about vote-counting software). All 4 of these points are better accomplished with open source. Closed source allows incorrect software to survive.
do automobile manufacturers create car accidents? You can reasonably argue that they create the potential for car accidents,
The companies are imperfect, so they create imperfections. If they could, there wouldn't be a possibility for accidents.
So, if you are explaining that God is imperfect and thus his creations do things He doesn't want, that's fine. But an imperfect God doesn't deserve worship, especially when He lies about his own flaws.
Now, I don't say that you have to believe these things, but these are answers to your questions.
Repeating the question in the form of an assertion is not an answer. You've responded to nothing, except to underscore an unexamined faith. The closest you came to an answer were equivalent to "Because that's how it is" or "Because God said so". One such non-response:
In this instance, the only reason is because Hitler submitted to Christ. The same reason, in the Christian context, anyone is saved.
That's no more satisfactory than a murderer explaining to a judge that he shot two people because they were looking at him funny. He had a reason, but it wasn't a valid one. Likewise, if God sees a reason to punish Ghandi more than Hitler, His reasoning is incorrect. One of those people was inarguably better than the other, and giving one a free pass because he came from a Christian cultural tradition is completely unjust.
All you've done is repeat the usual Christian dogma, without addressing my point that any God who creates and enforces such a regime is NOT GOOD, because blatant injustices go unrepaired.
"guy shoots stuff," would it be that much better with satanic imagery?
Yes it would! For the shooting to be maximally enjoyable, it must be guilt-free. The viewer can be given no room to imagine that the targets of the shooting don't completely deserve to absorb those rapid-fire napalm rockets.
Only the very evilist of enemies can deserve such unmerciful shootage. The only two known creatures of this type are Satanists and Nazis (and its no coincidence that idsoftware uses them both)
When did God say he needed TV evangelists?
It's in the Bible. When Jesus asks the apostles to spread his message, because he can't or won't do it himself.
The keyword is "Gospel", and it's one of the major conceptual flaws to Christianity: God sends to hell all sinners who reject Jesus, even if they've never heard of him. A powerful God could magically spread the Gospel and save more souls, but instead He sits back and allows fallable human missionaries to do that hyper-important job.
God didn't create sin,
Oh? God created everything, didn't He? (If you don't think so, you're once again going back to dualism. Which is fine with me!)
But when compared next to perfection, those two (and anyone else on the planet) are pretty much the same.
If God cannot manage to detect and account for the distinction between Gandhi and Stalin, He is flawed. Not only is He imperfect, but actually less perceptive than a typical human. (Alternatively, if He's aware of the difference but just doesn't care, then the flaw is not with perception, but justice- an even greater divine offense)
But I can ignore that and make an even better analogy (which I earlier skipped because people tend to rant about Godwin). Replace Stalin with Adolf Hitler, and suppose for the sake of argument that he repented to Christ just before death (which is entirely possible, for all we know). Now explain why Adolf's in Heaven and Ghandi is in Hell with Stalin and Judas.
How glorious is a God who offers mercy to an evildoer in exchange for a proclaimation of love, but turns his back on decent, common children who had the misfortune to die without hearing the gospel?
And the lack of sin is what is required to be in an eternal relationship with God.
Flip-flopping? Remember the bit about Jesus welcoming (repentant) sinners to the Heavenly embrace?
My changed life is additional evidence for me above and beyond that.
The observation that believing a comforting lie can make people happier and more productive isn't exactly new. Indeed, the fact that so many human religions exist is evidence that religosity has practical benefits, regardless of any truth to the underlying supernatural claims.
Anti-religion debates are so easy to find on the internet that any particular one has no real value. However, I will repeat what turned out to be the best paragraph I just posted, so you can reply to it quickly if you like:
Honestly, I would not feel comfortable spending externity with a guy who punishes Mohandas Ghandi exactly as harshly as Josef Stalin. (Both major leaders who committed multiple sins through their lives, and both died without accepting Jesus). A loving God would give the denizens of Hell an opportunity to change their minds after a few centuries of torment.
In 1986, the Internet was up and running just fine.
No it wasn't. Just go back to your old documents and see if "The Internet" is used with capitalization. It wasn't: back then, "internet" was a common noun, not a proper one. Walking up to a networking professional and asking him about a connection to "the internet" was still an ambiguous question.
We can make fun of all the misspeaking that Dubya does, but we can't mock Gore for saying "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."?
Wrong. At that time, there were internets, such as ARPANET. Today, there is "The Internet"- a single network that exists partly because Al Gore fought for it. (Back then, he called it The Information Superhighway, because "Internet" was a little ambiguous)