Well, duh. The way the Internet is right now, there is no way to incorporate
or monopolize any particular aspect of it, and that makes some folks very
fidgety.
One challenge in any reconstruction, though, will be balancing the interests of various constituencies. The first time around, researchers were able to toil away in their labs quietly. Industry is playing a bigger role this time, and law enforcement is bound to make its needs for wiretapping known.
Yup, some "needs" are just impossible to meet with the Internet in its
present state. Like the "need" for a single agency to monitor all Internet
traffic. Or the "need" for some folks to control every physical traffic channel.
Or the burning need of one familiar industry group to be able to decide unilaterally which computers
are "trustworthy" enough to connect to the Web.
As it stands, anyone can set up routers, anyone can lay cables and install
WAPs, anyone can run a root DNS, an email server, a search portal, or simply host a universally
accessible website, etc., etc... What a nightmarish world for a monopolist
to live in.
Hehe, you think it's funny, but I expect to see more of this crap
as we go along. Modern compulsory schooling is built on the paradigm
which is antithetical to that of a wiki. In schools, the "education"
is produced, neatly packaged and sold to the kids who are supposed
to learn how to be passive consumers. On a wiki site, otoh, the education
is a process facilitated by the student. The student, moreover, has
an option (is encouraged even) to participate as a teacher. Contributions
as simple as asking a question on the discussion page may enlighten
dozens of editors and PhDs. Being such a place, the wiki is a very dangerous
competitor. People might just realize that the compulsory schooling is
only good for teaching, but sucks balls for learning, one of the biggest
obstacles to that being the fact that a student almost never gets to learn
what she really wants to learn.
Eh... Actually, we (guys) would end up having more sex with
real chicks, not less, because they would become afraid of
the competition. When the demand becomes saturated by
computerized dolls, women will go to extraordinary lengths
to get laid by a real dude.
--a real dude
Mods?... The parent is far from OT. That was the first thing in
my mind as well: how universities are becoming a place where
people are taught to own and protect their ideas. Historically,
a university was a place where scholars engaged in sharing of their
ideas, where the free flow of information was encouraged. Modern
universities, otoh, are built after an industrial model. Their
curricula are fixed and their original research is sometimes
regarded as a trade secret. An awful place to do science at.
I think that ndiswrapper also requires cutting the firmware. Anyway,
I also use it still, even though bcm43xx kind of works now. Mostly because
I found ndiswrapper to be somewhat more stable.
people don't consider $15 a good deal for an hours worth of music
Why do you find this surprising? I would consider paying $5-15 for
a couple of hours of LIVE music, especially when I can stand right next
to the stage. That making a copy of a digital recording should be
more expensive is totally absurd.
That's because people, especially those who determine the policy,
are not worshiping Christian God as much as they worship money and power.
The Christian rhetoric is but a veil. It plays to their advantage
that people fight Christianity and science, while largely ignoring
gods who really influence the politics.
Stallman, obviously, is a half-Human cleric of Lathander and a
Divination wizard, while Linus is a pure Gnome Enchanter wizard
and has some powerful equipment.
Sure, Linus has more powerful spells, being a pure class,
but, IMHO, Stallman is more powerful because he usually carries
the initiative and can cast Silence, which really screws up
other casting types.
You are right, I am flaming. I do not think that my post
was insulting or a personal attack, but I apologize to ggp for
my rather harsh tone. My grudge is not with him, but with the modern
organized Christianity.
And I am not an atheist, I am a Christian.
I am just upset because ggp seems to be one of those who think that
having Aquinas (or reason in general) on one's side somehow makes one's
moral beliefs "better". He also makes a mistake of assuming that
atheists' morals must be emotive in origin. In my view, the first one is a hypocrisy.
Christian morals have their foundation in brotherly love which has
to be experienced firsthand. An atheist who "loves his neighbor"
knows more of God, is closer to God (in the NT sense of the word)
than, say, a Catholic who does not. This goes to show that his main question
is misguided. There are plenty of people around who bought completely into
the Christian morals while rejecting all of the theology. When these
people say "this is wrong", they mean exactly the same thing as
a Christian next to them. If they cannot justify their choices by
appealing to their love, the worth of the community, and the equality
of all people, then neither can Christians.
What are you aiming at? Are you implying that Christianity provides
"rational grounds for morality"? Seriously? Perusing the New
Testament gave me an impression that Christian
morals are grounded in the innate love which we have for each other
(agape), but, apparently, I missed a memo.
What exactly is the rational explanation for you having to love
your neighbor? Do you even have one? I, for one, do not. I just do not
see a need to justify to myself why I should not be a dick to other
people. May be it has something to do with me noticing that I really
enjoy the company of people who love me; may be it has to do with
trusting the moral judgment of people whom I cannot help but to love.
Believing in God, or buying into the official theology,
or justifying your morals with reason does not
make you any less of a dick. Loving your neighbor for no reason at all--does.
Go figure.
Actually, after reading the article, I suspect that they are funded
by the government (the boss there talks about wasting tax payers'
money). If so, it would match up pretty well with their populist approach
to education, which includes shaping the students into "well-rounded
human beings".
The primary purpose of attending university is to get an education,
not 24/7 Internet access.
Mmm? Take Computer Science, for example. The Internet is indisputably the best
academic resource for it. To a somewhat lesser degree it goes also for
other areas of science. If anything, universities should be encouraging
students to use Internet as a research and collaboration tool. It can be a
platform for building a scientific community which could not exist in the
world of paper journals.
Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions.
It reads like it was Augustine who was preparing Hell. And that he did;
he did not invent Hell (like he did the Original Sin), but he was a staunch
defender of the eternal punishment at the time when a substantial part of
the Church still believed in Apocatastasis.
The problem is that people like you lie to the world, claiming that religion doesn't say these things and doesn't contain these messages. It's obviously false, to anyone who has ever cracked one of these books open. You may be a pacifist, and the books may contain many loving ideas, but there are also sections commanding followers to kill.
Well, if it is so obviously false, may be you can crack one of them open and quote?
May be you can justify how any of us, living today, are qualified to be the followers
of Moses? (There is a problem: Moses is dead.) Or may be you can explain to us
how can we possibly kill people who prevent
Moses and his tribe from settling down in the promised land? (These people were also
dead for 2.5K years.) You are the one who is
lying. Seriously, take either the Bible or the Koran and try finding a single verse
to justify your statement, i.e. that it commands the contemporary audience to kill.
There is a world of difference between Moses commanding his followers to kill
and the book documenting it, and, on the other hand, the book commanding us to kill, do you not agree?
There are so many inaccuracies in what you are saying
that I do not even know where to start. For one, there
is no word "hell" in the New Testament. "Hades" means,
more or less, the purgatory where everyone awaits God's
judgment; "Gehenna" is a bad part of that purgatory;
"Tartarus" is the worst part of that purgatory where
only fallen angels go. If you cannot understand these
simple concepts, do not even bother replying.
Mark 9:43 reads "Gehenna", a fiery garbage dump near Jerusalem.
In the rabbinic tradition contemporary to Jesus the word referred a place
of temporary punishment reserved for the wicked while were
expecting the day of judgment. On that view, Gehenna is the bad part of Hades,
while "Paradise" is the good part where good people go, again, temporarily,
to hang out with Abraham and drink pina coladas (Jesus used "Paradise" on the cross,
for example). Nowhere in the New Testament
Jesus indicates that he is at odds with the rabbinical (even Pharisaic)
eschatology. He just thought that most Pharisees are hypocrites who
will go straight into Gehenna.
In John 14:6, the holy writer says that there is no way to the Father
except for that through the Son. To the Father. Not to God, not to salvation, not
to Heaven... To God as Father. John the Evangelist is very careful and
consistent with his theology throughout the book (unlike other Gospel
writers who mush several traditions together) and there is no
reason to believe that he is saying more than it is written. Knowing Jesus
as the Son of God is indeed the only way to know God as a step-father
to all humanity. It in no way follows that knowing Jesus or believing in
him (whatever that might involve) is a requirement for being reconciled
with God. We are all reconciled with God, but we do not all know that.
By the time of Jesus, rabbis largely removed God from the scene.
He was sitting way up in Heaven, not bothering about individual
people, doing everything through his angels. Now go back a few lines,
where Jesus says "You know where I am going and you know the way".
He is going to God, naturally, so Thomas is confused, because there is no
direct way to God in Judaism at that time. Verse 14:6 clarifies this
matter by saying that there is indeed a direct way to know God, i.e.
through his Son. Far from excluding anyone from anything, this verse
opens up an awesome new possibility which was not available in Judaism.
LOL, it does not matter if we digress at this point, no one is reading this sub-thread
anymore.
You should not be afraid. Death is natural, and it feels just like
sleeping. We will have to drink this cup no matter what. Waking up
in Heaven is a pure bonus.
You want to distinguish between "religion" and "organized religion together with
a hierarchical power structure". The latter one has done all of the evil things
you have mentioned, but it is not a "motivational force", it is a power
structure. Every power structure has a conceptual framework on which it is reliant,
and it is rather irrelevant what the details of that framework are.
It could be something to do with God, economics, evolutionary biology,
environmental science, philosophy, etc., etc. A power structure can only exist
if every participant
is speaking the same moral language, so that there is no confusion as to
what is "good" and what is "bad". Once this condition is met, the meaning
of "good" and "bad" can be manipulated on a grand scale through broadcasting.
The religion, on the other hand, is a motivational force, and it caused a lot of good.
In my view, religion itself caused much more good than bad: there is not a single
mainstream religion which does not advocate what we think of as humanist ideals.
People who do evil things and say that they are acting on behalf of gods, etc.,
are liars, and can be easily shown to be liars by comparing their actions
with those commended in respective holy texts. As an easy example, Bush junior
says that he acts on behalf of the Christian God, while at the same time
bombing the shit out of Iraq and making it impossible for a civil war to end.
Here we all know that his motivation is not religious, but it is rather
a mix of greed for money and power. The motivation of poor voters is not
religious either: it is the desire for a sense of security together with a
hypocritical aspiration to "help the spread of Democracy". (Hypocritical because
there are still people alive who remember not being able to vote on the
account of being black. If I was a US citizen, I would be worried about spreading
Democracy at home first.) In order to justify their actions, everyone is
forced to use the Christian moral language. The fact that they are justifying
what the holy texts did condemn does not faze them, since they are getting
what they really want: money, power, security, self-satisfaction. My main point
is, this theater is made possible thanks to the work of hierarchical Christian
churches, and never by ideas exposed in the New Testament.
As to ignorance, Christian ideals are demonstrably hostile to it
(while most power structures, regardless of being religious, are obviously not).
Wisdom is regarded very highly in the Bible, and is mostly meant as
what we today would call "expertize". Great many Church Fathers,
starting with Paul, were brilliantly educated
and not ashamed of it. (Some, like Origen, were a little bit too proud of it.)
Many hard scientists (Newton comes to mind) had true religious aspirations,
while the main proponents of blissful ignorance were usually motivated
by their desire to retain the control over masses.
I also do not agree that God is a sadist if he allows people to choose Hell. He is not inflicting this upon them, but rather allow them their free will. Were he to force them to do otherwise he would be callously murdering their ability to choose, and their sense of self or pride.
In which case you should give some thought to the annihilation of the soul as
an alternative to the eternal suffering. The "second death" does not disrespect one's
choice, and, unlike Hell, it is merciful. One just goes back into non-being from
which he came. The end result is also quite awesome: Heaven for everyone, no
pointless suffering anywhere, no more opposition to God's will.
I understand that his works were never translated from Russian, but
S. Bulgakov
(an Orthodox priest, by the way) had a very insightful thing to say about this.
As long as there are people or angels who, in their sense of self-pride,
oppose God's will, Christ's work has obviously not been completed.
As long as Satan or anyone else burns in Hell, Satan wins. To be God's
spiritual adversary is exactly what he wanted, and the popular doctrine
says that he will persist at that forever? But that only means that
Christ's sacrifice, as the means to reconcile God with his
Creation (which includes even angels) was ineffective.
I am not sure if you are personally agreeing with your second paragraph or
just reciting it from above, but I will say something against it anyway.
We make the choice to be separate from God, or inseparable from him.
I understand that. We make a choice, but who is responsible for actualizing
this choice? Is it really in our power to be separate from God if he desires
us to be in communion? Or to be in communion if he desires us to perish?
We can choose all we want, but in the end it is up to God to assemble our
destiny. If God allows evil to exist eternally in Hell and people to suffer,
even though they chose it freely, he is a sadist. It would be better to
just kill these people off without their consent, just like they were born
without consent.
The (Philosophical) Taoism is quite different from the teaching of Jesus
and the Apostles, not because one is right and the other is wrong, but
mainly because they are concerned with different things. Jesus and pals were
mainly talking about a community, while Taoists were discussing individual
spirituality. In my understanding, their views coalesce when it comes to discussing
politics and the hypocrisy (in Taoist view, plain evil) of the organized
religion.
It is asserted by many that "Tao" is comparable to "Logos" as a concept,
but that does not mean that you can understand Taoism after reading the Gospel of John.
Both are "ways", but are they the same way? They certainly are described
in a very different manner.
If you want to find out more about Taoism, it is actually an easy and very
enjoyable journey. There are only three foundational texts, and you do not
even have to read them all. I would recommend picking up Tao Te Ching and the first five chapters of Zhuangzi, and going from there.
While it may sound counterintuitive, I would start with Zhuangzi.
It provides a broad context for Tao Te Ching, which is just a collection
of cryptic sayings.
I have the highest regard for Philosophical Taoism, and I do not think that
Tao is fit to be described as a "Force". If I had to compare it with an
Occidental notion, I would choose "Logos" or "the Way of Life" in the
early Christianity. (Incidentally, the Chinese Bible translates "Logos"
as "Tao".) Tao is the natural way of the universe. It is the way in which
all things undergo their transformations.
Well then, God must be letting out a chuckle every time he condemns someone
to Hell. "I will design them to be unreasonable beings, driven mainly
by emotions, and throw them into a world that does not make much sense.
Let us see who believes in me now, bwa-ha-ha-ha..." Of course people
are at times unreasonable and uninformed, but the main point here
is that it never does make sense to blame a person for making
a wrong choice between Heaven and Hell. If in one person's understanding
it is good to go to Hell, then it is solely because God is OK with it.
It would not be much of a contradiction if Hell was not advanced by the
same people who argue that God is benevolent and is a sole designer of
the universe and everything in it, including our very thoughts.
Is God so stuck up that he would not fully inform us and give us an ample
time to make a calm decision even after we die? That is not what I would
call "benevolent"; that sounds more like he is a sadistic bastard who
enjoys torturing people and playing smoke-and-mirrors games while it
would be just as easy for him to place them in a position from
which they may come to see the truth, or to mercy-kill them.
It is sometimes said that evil came into being so that an even greater
good might be born out of it (e.g., Paul). What possible good can be born
out of evil that is Hell, after the end of time?
who have always been considered heretics by mainstream Christian churches
While I agree most of your post and proud to be a heretic, the above is
not true. Jesus and Apostles were Jewish, they did not believe in Hell (its modern
version) and some
of the church fathers were arguing for universal
salvation. It took a few hundred years for the idea of Hell as a place
of eternal torment (as opposed to Jewish purgatory, where it only
lasts for a year) to become mainstream.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, duh. The way the Internet is right now, there is no way to incorporate or monopolize any particular aspect of it, and that makes some folks very fidgety.
Yup, some "needs" are just impossible to meet with the Internet in its present state. Like the "need" for a single agency to monitor all Internet traffic. Or the "need" for some folks to control every physical traffic channel. Or the burning need of one familiar industry group to be able to decide unilaterally which computers are "trustworthy" enough to connect to the Web. As it stands, anyone can set up routers, anyone can lay cables and install WAPs, anyone can run a root DNS, an email server, a search portal, or simply host a universally accessible website, etc., etc... What a nightmarish world for a monopolist to live in.
Hehe, you think it's funny, but I expect to see more of this crap as we go along. Modern compulsory schooling is built on the paradigm which is antithetical to that of a wiki. In schools, the "education" is produced, neatly packaged and sold to the kids who are supposed to learn how to be passive consumers. On a wiki site, otoh, the education is a process facilitated by the student. The student, moreover, has an option (is encouraged even) to participate as a teacher. Contributions as simple as asking a question on the discussion page may enlighten dozens of editors and PhDs. Being such a place, the wiki is a very dangerous competitor. People might just realize that the compulsory schooling is only good for teaching, but sucks balls for learning, one of the biggest obstacles to that being the fact that a student almost never gets to learn what she really wants to learn.
Eh... Actually, we (guys) would end up having more sex with real chicks, not less, because they would become afraid of the competition. When the demand becomes saturated by computerized dolls, women will go to extraordinary lengths to get laid by a real dude. --a real dude
Mods?... The parent is far from OT. That was the first thing in my mind as well: how universities are becoming a place where people are taught to own and protect their ideas. Historically, a university was a place where scholars engaged in sharing of their ideas, where the free flow of information was encouraged. Modern universities, otoh, are built after an industrial model. Their curricula are fixed and their original research is sometimes regarded as a trade secret. An awful place to do science at.
I think that ndiswrapper also requires cutting the firmware. Anyway, I also use it still, even though bcm43xx kind of works now. Mostly because I found ndiswrapper to be somewhat more stable.
people don't consider $15 a good deal for an hours worth of music
Why do you find this surprising? I would consider paying $5-15 for a couple of hours of LIVE music, especially when I can stand right next to the stage. That making a copy of a digital recording should be more expensive is totally absurd.
That's because people, especially those who determine the policy, are not worshiping Christian God as much as they worship money and power. The Christian rhetoric is but a veil. It plays to their advantage that people fight Christianity and science, while largely ignoring gods who really influence the politics.
Stallman, obviously, is a half-Human cleric of Lathander and a Divination wizard, while Linus is a pure Gnome Enchanter wizard and has some powerful equipment.
Sure, Linus has more powerful spells, being a pure class, but, IMHO, Stallman is more powerful because he usually carries the initiative and can cast Silence, which really screws up other casting types.
You are right, I am flaming. I do not think that my post was insulting or a personal attack, but I apologize to ggp for my rather harsh tone. My grudge is not with him, but with the modern organized Christianity.
And I am not an atheist, I am a Christian. I am just upset because ggp seems to be one of those who think that having Aquinas (or reason in general) on one's side somehow makes one's moral beliefs "better". He also makes a mistake of assuming that atheists' morals must be emotive in origin. In my view, the first one is a hypocrisy. Christian morals have their foundation in brotherly love which has to be experienced firsthand. An atheist who "loves his neighbor" knows more of God, is closer to God (in the NT sense of the word) than, say, a Catholic who does not. This goes to show that his main question is misguided. There are plenty of people around who bought completely into the Christian morals while rejecting all of the theology. When these people say "this is wrong", they mean exactly the same thing as a Christian next to them. If they cannot justify their choices by appealing to their love, the worth of the community, and the equality of all people, then neither can Christians.
What are you aiming at? Are you implying that Christianity provides "rational grounds for morality"? Seriously? Perusing the New Testament gave me an impression that Christian morals are grounded in the innate love which we have for each other (agape), but, apparently, I missed a memo.
What exactly is the rational explanation for you having to love your neighbor? Do you even have one? I, for one, do not. I just do not see a need to justify to myself why I should not be a dick to other people. May be it has something to do with me noticing that I really enjoy the company of people who love me; may be it has to do with trusting the moral judgment of people whom I cannot help but to love.
Believing in God, or buying into the official theology, or justifying your morals with reason does not make you any less of a dick. Loving your neighbor for no reason at all--does. Go figure.
Actually, after reading the article, I suspect that they are funded by the government (the boss there talks about wasting tax payers' money). If so, it would match up pretty well with their populist approach to education, which includes shaping the students into "well-rounded human beings".
Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions.
It reads like it was Augustine who was preparing Hell. And that he did; he did not invent Hell (like he did the Original Sin), but he was a staunch defender of the eternal punishment at the time when a substantial part of the Church still believed in Apocatastasis.
Well, if it is so obviously false, may be you can crack one of them open and quote? May be you can justify how any of us, living today, are qualified to be the followers of Moses? (There is a problem: Moses is dead.) Or may be you can explain to us how can we possibly kill people who prevent Moses and his tribe from settling down in the promised land? (These people were also dead for 2.5K years.) You are the one who is lying. Seriously, take either the Bible or the Koran and try finding a single verse to justify your statement, i.e. that it commands the contemporary audience to kill.
There is a world of difference between Moses commanding his followers to kill and the book documenting it, and, on the other hand, the book commanding us to kill, do you not agree?
There are so many inaccuracies in what you are saying that I do not even know where to start. For one, there is no word "hell" in the New Testament. "Hades" means, more or less, the purgatory where everyone awaits God's judgment; "Gehenna" is a bad part of that purgatory; "Tartarus" is the worst part of that purgatory where only fallen angels go. If you cannot understand these simple concepts, do not even bother replying.
Mark 9:43 reads "Gehenna", a fiery garbage dump near Jerusalem. In the rabbinic tradition contemporary to Jesus the word referred a place of temporary punishment reserved for the wicked while were expecting the day of judgment. On that view, Gehenna is the bad part of Hades, while "Paradise" is the good part where good people go, again, temporarily, to hang out with Abraham and drink pina coladas (Jesus used "Paradise" on the cross, for example). Nowhere in the New Testament Jesus indicates that he is at odds with the rabbinical (even Pharisaic) eschatology. He just thought that most Pharisees are hypocrites who will go straight into Gehenna.
In John 14:6, the holy writer says that there is no way to the Father except for that through the Son. To the Father. Not to God, not to salvation, not to Heaven... To God as Father. John the Evangelist is very careful and consistent with his theology throughout the book (unlike other Gospel writers who mush several traditions together) and there is no reason to believe that he is saying more than it is written. Knowing Jesus as the Son of God is indeed the only way to know God as a step-father to all humanity. It in no way follows that knowing Jesus or believing in him (whatever that might involve) is a requirement for being reconciled with God. We are all reconciled with God, but we do not all know that.
By the time of Jesus, rabbis largely removed God from the scene. He was sitting way up in Heaven, not bothering about individual people, doing everything through his angels. Now go back a few lines, where Jesus says "You know where I am going and you know the way". He is going to God, naturally, so Thomas is confused, because there is no direct way to God in Judaism at that time. Verse 14:6 clarifies this matter by saying that there is indeed a direct way to know God, i.e. through his Son. Far from excluding anyone from anything, this verse opens up an awesome new possibility which was not available in Judaism.
LOL, it does not matter if we digress at this point, no one is reading this sub-thread anymore.
You should not be afraid. Death is natural, and it feels just like sleeping. We will have to drink this cup no matter what. Waking up in Heaven is a pure bonus.
You want to distinguish between "religion" and "organized religion together with a hierarchical power structure". The latter one has done all of the evil things you have mentioned, but it is not a "motivational force", it is a power structure. Every power structure has a conceptual framework on which it is reliant, and it is rather irrelevant what the details of that framework are. It could be something to do with God, economics, evolutionary biology, environmental science, philosophy, etc., etc. A power structure can only exist if every participant is speaking the same moral language, so that there is no confusion as to what is "good" and what is "bad". Once this condition is met, the meaning of "good" and "bad" can be manipulated on a grand scale through broadcasting.
The religion, on the other hand, is a motivational force, and it caused a lot of good. In my view, religion itself caused much more good than bad: there is not a single mainstream religion which does not advocate what we think of as humanist ideals. People who do evil things and say that they are acting on behalf of gods, etc., are liars, and can be easily shown to be liars by comparing their actions with those commended in respective holy texts. As an easy example, Bush junior says that he acts on behalf of the Christian God, while at the same time bombing the shit out of Iraq and making it impossible for a civil war to end. Here we all know that his motivation is not religious, but it is rather a mix of greed for money and power. The motivation of poor voters is not religious either: it is the desire for a sense of security together with a hypocritical aspiration to "help the spread of Democracy". (Hypocritical because there are still people alive who remember not being able to vote on the account of being black. If I was a US citizen, I would be worried about spreading Democracy at home first.) In order to justify their actions, everyone is forced to use the Christian moral language. The fact that they are justifying what the holy texts did condemn does not faze them, since they are getting what they really want: money, power, security, self-satisfaction. My main point is, this theater is made possible thanks to the work of hierarchical Christian churches, and never by ideas exposed in the New Testament.
As to ignorance, Christian ideals are demonstrably hostile to it (while most power structures, regardless of being religious, are obviously not). Wisdom is regarded very highly in the Bible, and is mostly meant as what we today would call "expertize". Great many Church Fathers, starting with Paul, were brilliantly educated and not ashamed of it. (Some, like Origen, were a little bit too proud of it.) Many hard scientists (Newton comes to mind) had true religious aspirations, while the main proponents of blissful ignorance were usually motivated by their desire to retain the control over masses.
I agree wholeheartedly up to this point:
In which case you should give some thought to the annihilation of the soul as an alternative to the eternal suffering. The "second death" does not disrespect one's choice, and, unlike Hell, it is merciful. One just goes back into non-being from which he came. The end result is also quite awesome: Heaven for everyone, no pointless suffering anywhere, no more opposition to God's will.
I understand that his works were never translated from Russian, but S. Bulgakov (an Orthodox priest, by the way) had a very insightful thing to say about this. As long as there are people or angels who, in their sense of self-pride, oppose God's will, Christ's work has obviously not been completed. As long as Satan or anyone else burns in Hell, Satan wins. To be God's spiritual adversary is exactly what he wanted, and the popular doctrine says that he will persist at that forever? But that only means that Christ's sacrifice, as the means to reconcile God with his Creation (which includes even angels) was ineffective.
I am not sure if you are personally agreeing with your second paragraph or just reciting it from above, but I will say something against it anyway.
I understand that. We make a choice, but who is responsible for actualizing this choice? Is it really in our power to be separate from God if he desires us to be in communion? Or to be in communion if he desires us to perish? We can choose all we want, but in the end it is up to God to assemble our destiny. If God allows evil to exist eternally in Hell and people to suffer, even though they chose it freely, he is a sadist. It would be better to just kill these people off without their consent, just like they were born without consent.
The (Philosophical) Taoism is quite different from the teaching of Jesus and the Apostles, not because one is right and the other is wrong, but mainly because they are concerned with different things. Jesus and pals were mainly talking about a community, while Taoists were discussing individual spirituality. In my understanding, their views coalesce when it comes to discussing politics and the hypocrisy (in Taoist view, plain evil) of the organized religion.
It is asserted by many that "Tao" is comparable to "Logos" as a concept, but that does not mean that you can understand Taoism after reading the Gospel of John. Both are "ways", but are they the same way? They certainly are described in a very different manner.
If you want to find out more about Taoism, it is actually an easy and very enjoyable journey. There are only three foundational texts, and you do not even have to read them all. I would recommend picking up Tao Te Ching and the first five chapters of Zhuangzi, and going from there. While it may sound counterintuitive, I would start with Zhuangzi. It provides a broad context for Tao Te Ching, which is just a collection of cryptic sayings.
I, for one, would like to see a place in the Bible where the modern concept of Hell is described at all.
I have the highest regard for Philosophical Taoism, and I do not think that Tao is fit to be described as a "Force". If I had to compare it with an Occidental notion, I would choose "Logos" or "the Way of Life" in the early Christianity. (Incidentally, the Chinese Bible translates "Logos" as "Tao".) Tao is the natural way of the universe. It is the way in which all things undergo their transformations.
Well then, God must be letting out a chuckle every time he condemns someone to Hell. "I will design them to be unreasonable beings, driven mainly by emotions, and throw them into a world that does not make much sense. Let us see who believes in me now, bwa-ha-ha-ha..." Of course people are at times unreasonable and uninformed, but the main point here is that it never does make sense to blame a person for making a wrong choice between Heaven and Hell. If in one person's understanding it is good to go to Hell, then it is solely because God is OK with it. It would not be much of a contradiction if Hell was not advanced by the same people who argue that God is benevolent and is a sole designer of the universe and everything in it, including our very thoughts. Is God so stuck up that he would not fully inform us and give us an ample time to make a calm decision even after we die? That is not what I would call "benevolent"; that sounds more like he is a sadistic bastard who enjoys torturing people and playing smoke-and-mirrors games while it would be just as easy for him to place them in a position from which they may come to see the truth, or to mercy-kill them.
It is sometimes said that evil came into being so that an even greater good might be born out of it (e.g., Paul). What possible good can be born out of evil that is Hell, after the end of time?