Perhaps God did it for amusement, perhaps he's artistically inclined. Look at the average painter's paintings (and the stuff the doesn't even like himself and destroys/hides), does he produce useful or aesthetically perfect paintings? How can flaws in nature be an argument against creationism any more than they can be used against evolution theory, when evolution supposedly optimizes away flawed designs in the long run?
You know what we call artists who make their paintings occasionally explode and kill the viewer? Psychopaths.
Now, Jews are okay with God being a dick (there's the saying, "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans"), but in general modern Christians really aren't. Your analogy only works if you're okay with God not being omnibenevolent (unless you stretch the term "omnibenevolent" to the point where it makes genocide and infanticide a-ok), and that's just not what Christians want to believe.
Is that even a error or isn't it just a completely wrong way to understand a biblical text? Most of time literal interpretation seems to completely miss the point. They are like claiming "The Fountainhead" is a book about modern architecture.
Okay, let's not interpret the Bible literally then. Jesus wasn't literally resurrected, that was a metaphor, right? Because that contradicts pretty much everything we know about biology, and it seems that the only way you can tell where the Bible is being metaphorical is to figure out where it contradicts modern science.
I mean, it's not like the Church put Galileo under house arrest because they thought that Genesis 1:1 was a metaphor back then.
The thing is: at the bottom of it, metaphors are useful lies. They are useful, but fundamentally untrue. This is absolutely not something that Christians are okay with; they think that their religion is fundamentally true. They only say "oh it's metaphorical" in order to get around the fact that it's untrue, without actually coming out and saying so.
Also: The hebrew word used for day in the genesis story can be translated to both "day" and "time span".
Sorry, I don't care at all about what "time spans" you used - the order of things being created in Genesis I is absolutely incorrect. The Earth was not made before the Sun, nor were plants; the moon was not made in the same time span as the sun, animals did not start reproducing in a different timespan than the one in which they were created... and that's not even talking about Adam and Eve. Did you know that a lot of people actually think that men have one less rib, because God removed it to make Eve?
Minor point of conflict: you cannot have a universe that contains both: 1. at least one all-knowing entity and 2. at least one other entity which has free will.
The propositions conflict with one another.
By definition, the future actions of an entity with free will cannot be known. By definition, an all-knowing entity knows the future actions of all entities. Hence, a contradiction exists, and both propositions cannot be true. This is a fairly common form of logical disproof.
It's like an immovable object and an irresistible force; they simply cannot be in the same universe, because the existence of one precludes the existence of another.
Why do costs continue to skyrocket? Because the colleges know that effectively any student anywhere can get loans to pay for the cost of college. From the school's standpoint, they can just about charge whatever they want. There's no brake on the price increase.
I would love to see a citation on that, because as far as I can tell the reason why the University of California (to cite a concrete example) has been raising tuition and putting staff on mandatory furloughs is because they are no longer receiving as much money from the State of California, and the budget shortfall has to be made up somehow.
It's not like the extra money they charge just disappears into someone's pockets, after all - these are public institutions, and their financial records are pretty open.
There's two different kinds of addiction: physiological addiction, and psychological addiction. Physical addiction is the bad shit; it means that if you take this substance, your body will eventually come to depend on it - and if you stop taking the substance, your body will be exceptionally unhappy with you.
One extremely common example of a physically addictive drug is Citalopram, one of those drugs they prescribe for anxiety and depression; if you want to stop taking it and quit cold turkey, you're going to have massive headaches for a couple of weeks. There's also, of course, the common trifecta of alcohol, tobacco and caffeine, all of which are truly physically addictive.
The thing is, though, when people say "it's addictive", they're almost never clear on whether they mean physically addicting or psychologically addicting. The problem with that is, well, anything can be psychologically addicting - all it really means is that you really like doing something, and so change your behavior in order to do it more, potentially to the detriment of other aspects of your life. Sure, you can get addicted to, say, World of Warcraft - but if you quit, you're not going to get blazing headaches or anything like that (except maybe from being out in the sun more).
So, it is true that marijuana can be addicting, in the same way that a good book or an exciting game or an interesting TV show is addicting. It's not true that marijuana is addicting in the same way as tobacco or alcohol or caffeine.
What I found hilarious, though, is that you could use his argument against legalizing marijuana as an argument for the prohibition of basically any currently-legal drug. Maybe we should start up a new proposal to get those banned, since after all the White House is now on record as saying that they don't fit the criteria for legalization?
That's you. Warner Brothers doesn't care about you not wanting three hundred different apps, they care about the fact that if they have their own service that streams their movies and shows, they might get you to sign up for it and cut out the Netflix middle-man.
I prefer the version that ends with the "fact" that the girth of the Apollo rocket was constrained by the average width of a pair of Roman horses. It's still not true, but more entertaining.
You have to ask yourself: is the company currently worth being loyal to?
All too often, people seem to think that loyalty is, in and of itself, something you should strive for. It's not. Being mindlessly loyal is just plain dumb; the things you choose to be loyal to should, in some way, be worthy of that loyalty.
Your current company doesn't seem like it really cares about being worthy of your loyalty. I'm sure their flagship product was shipped out overseas against your recommendation, if they even bothered to ask (and that's entirely ignoring the incredibad business decision of outsourcing a core product), which just indicates that they don't really care.
Also, if another company is willing to try and snipe you off with a raise, you're probably worth significantly more than what either of them are offering. I mean, just ask yourself - if I'm worth my salary + 7k (which is what another company is willing to pay for me right now), why hasn't my current company given me that raise? Because they're taking advantage of your "loyalty".
Finally, the fact that they've given you two junior devs to train up at this juncture kinda sounds like they've decided that you're too much of a senior dev, and they'd prefer to pay two junior salaries instead of one senior salary. This is, of course, conjecture, but this sort of behavior is not at all unknown in business.
So yeah, it really seems like there's no reason to be loyal to the company, even though there may be people in the company who are worthwhile. What has the company done recently to be worthy of your loyalty? Keep in mind that your current salary is in exchange for your work, if they want your loyalty they have to do more.
Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, "Father?" "Yes, my son?" Abraham replied. "The fire and wood are here," Isaac said, "but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?"
Abraham answered, "God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." And the two of them went on together.
God WILL provide, not God HAS provided.
Dude. Did you not read the story up until that point? Abraham is keeping the whole "voices in my head are telling me to sacrifice you" thing hidden from Isaac. If he'd said "God has provided", the jig would have been up - even the densest kid would realize that there's really only one sacrifice available at that point.
Furthermore, your interpretation paints Abraham as a slave and the God he serves as a sadistic bastard. I mean, what kind of absolute douchebag pulls "loyalty" tests like that? It serves no purpose whatsoever, besides making God feel like he's in control. And what kind of mindless drone actually follows such a horrific order?
No, the conflict between science and religion is a false conflict created by atheists as a way to denigrate religion and make it seem as if atheism is supported by science.
Hate to break it to you, but atheism is the only theological position supported by science. There is not one scrap of evidence for the existence of any divine being; therefore, if you are religious, your faith was not arrived at via scientific means.
That's what people mean when they say that science and faith are not compatible, not "you cannot be a scientist and have faith at the same time". That's obviously false; we all know that humans are more than capable of believing two mutually contradictory things at the same time, and there are definitely religious scientists out there. The fact of the matter is, though, that the ideas of science and religion are fundamentally contradictory.
I mean, just look at Francis Collins, the evangelical Christian who's the head of the NIH at the moment. How did he return to Christianity (because he was an agnostic at one point, IIRC)? Was it through research, through study?
No, he saw a frozen waterfall while hiking and had a religious experience. That's about it. It's also the worst kind of scientific evidence. If he tried to publish a paper on the existence of God with that as his basis, he wouldn't even make it to peer review (which is why he wrote a book about it, but that's another matter).
Oh come on, Jesus said everything both ways. I'll see your Matthew 22:37-40 and raise you a Matthew 5:17. Your passage says that the previous laws hang on those two principles, not that they're abolished by them - and my passage confirms that the previous laws are still in effect.
There's a reason why cafeteria Christianity is so popular - the Bible can be interpreted as contradicting itself on almost every subject, which means that you have to pick and choose what you want to believe - it's just not consistent if you don't.
If there were a God, I would think that he would be angered by the atrocities committed in his name.
Clearly you haven't read the Old Testament. God is an asshole. See, oh I don't know, the story where God commands Abraham to kill his son and then says "lol jk", the story where God lets Job's family get killed but then gives him an even better one, the story where God spends a couple of months trolling Jonah by doing various weirdly passive-aggressive things to him, or hell just any one of the stories about the Israelites raping and pillaging their way across the countryside, with God's blessing.
The only difference between the Old and New Testaments is that in the NT, God's an asshole who just got laid. It's been two thousand years since the last Messiah with that particular origin story, so I'd assume that the rosy afterglow has worn off.
If there is a God, he's sitting up there going "trolololo".
Well really, what the heck did they expect? The e-mail they sent out about splitting up the streaming and dvd mailing services was ridiculously patronizing.
I mean, I would have been a lot more okay with things if they'd just been straightforward and said "look, the people we get our content from are raising the prices on us, we need to charge you more to cover it". That's fine, that I can understand.
Instead, those assholes decided to pitch it as some sort of super awesome deal, where instead of being forced to pay for streaming and dvd mailing together, you're now paying for them separately! It's great! So much better than the old deal! And you, the consumer, are such an idiot that you're not even going to notice that the price of your plan increased significantly, doubling in some cases! (if you're like me and you were on the 1 dvd + streaming plan).
Do they not have any sort of market demographics at all? Do they have no idea the kinds of people that subscribe to their service? We're more likely to be early adopters, for goodness' sakes; we're not going to appreciate being talked down to like we're children who can't do math.
And look, I do appreciate Netflix - as convenient as Redbox is, it doesn't quite have the selection. It's just, reading that goddamn e-mail about the new plans left such a bad taste in my mouth I couldn't stand giving them money any more.
More like fucking bullshit. If they'd seen fit to allocate that 500 million to Nasa in 2010, we could have had the James Webb in 2016 for a total of $6.5 billion.
The 11 billion extra you're seeing here is so Nasa can dig themselves out of the hole that Congress pushed them in to - if you don't pay vital employees they leave and take millions of dollars woth of practical experience with them, and if you don't fund important parts manufacturers they close down and you have to pay billions to get them started again.
Great job weaving some bigotry and flame-baiting into an otherwise reasonable post.
If you think the OP is merely "weaving some bigotry and flame-baiting" into his post, then you have clearly never heard of the Doctrine of Mental Reservation, which is pretty much "this is how you should lie for Christianity". Someone well-practiced in that doctrine would probably be harder to detect, because as far as they're concerned they're not actually lying.
Question: what, exactly, would lead you to actually blame an attack on religion? I mean, if a bunch of dudes doing it because they believe they are guaranteed something good after they die doesn't do it, what exactly would?
The original budget was intentionally low-balled (i.e. it was a lie), and now the truth is coming out.
Since I submitted this story, I've actually RTFA'd and that's exactly what didn't happen.
Here's a timeline of events:
1. NASA says "we could make the JWST for $5.1 billion, and launch in 2014". Not "make and run for five years", the $5.1 billion only covers making the thing and putting it into space. 2. NASA's management fucks up, and an independent review panel finds that the actual price tag will be $6.5 billion, with a launch in 2015. This is NASA's fault. 3. However, the $6.5 billion number is contingent on NASA having $250 million to spend in 2011 and 2012 on important things like not laying off critical workers, and funding the fabrication of vital parts. 4. Congress does not provide that money, so the $6.5 billion number was never actually achievable anyway. 5. Now that NASA's fucked, climbing back out of the hole will cost an extra 1 - 1.5 billion dollars, because Congress didn't want to approve a total of 0.5 billion dollars over the next two years. 6. To add insult to injury, the number they're bandying about right now to show how much the project has gone over includes the cost of running it for five years, which the initial estimates did not. This adds nearly an extra billion on to the number.
At no point did NASA intentionally lowball the budget; if NASA's management hadn't fucked up, they could have made it. The initial cost overrun from $5.1 to $6.5 billion is NASA's fault, because NASA's been administrated by idiots for the last couple of decades.
isn't wanting something cheaper just as greedy as wanting something more expensive?
If I demand a $5 hearing aid how is that less greedy than charging $5k? Value is set by the individuals on both sides of a transaction.
Three reasons:
1. Because you won't get that five dollar hearing aid, but the company will sell a five thousand dollar one. If it's not actually possible to set the price you want, that's not actual practical greed, it's just wishful thinking.
2. Because the people who want the five dollar hearing aid have a real disability which would be cured by the hearing aid, whereas the producer presumably already has a hearing aid if they need it. This is generally seen as being less greedy - it's not so much a matter of I want it for cheap, it's more I need it and it's too expensive.
3. Because people gauge greed based on presumed cost to manufacture vs price asked on the market; if people think it was really cheap to make your product but you're asking five thousand dollars for it, they'll think you're greedy. I mean, how expensive do you think hearing aids are to make these days? It's just a teeny little DSP with a microphone, battery and speaker, for goodness sakes. Sure, it's all miniaturized, but even then I'd have a hard time believing the thing costs more than fifty dollars to make and ship. Of course, people say that it's expensive to comply with FDA regulations, but I really don't think that costs thousands of dollars per unit.
On the other hand, it means that companies must file patents (or at least provisional applications) much earlier in the process and much more often to avoid the risk of a competitor coming up with the same idea and screwing them.
Actually, that could totally be twisted into a major win - after all, if there are two applications for substantially similar patents filed within a year or so of each other, isn't that pretty good evidence that the thing being patented is obvious to at least two people familiar with the area, and thus not patentable?
On the other hand, if there are no other applications like it, isn't that good evidence that it's novel?
Except - in the developed world at least - there just aren't many evolutionary pressures any more. Modern medicine can help carriers of almost any gene survive to procreate, and with in vitro fertilisation and suchlike, you don't even need to necessarily be attractive to pass them on. Evolution is an adaptive mechanism, not some endless process churning out more and more advanced forms of life....
Accidental deaths and homicides account for around 45% of deaths before child bearing age. Unless we're adapting to being stab-resistant, or able to survive collision at 100km/hr, we're not really moving anywhere.
Wow yeah and that's why all peacocks are dull and brown, right?
Look, there's more kinds of selection than reproduction by those who live to a certain age. Things like with whom you have children and how many you have and the way you raise them all natural selection.
If that's what you're worried about, then you would be far better off having some method by which students can report e-mails that they receive as being threatening or harassing.
Your current system is, in itself, threatening and/or harassing, without providing any benefit at all. The bullies will quickly figure out which words are on your concern list, and stop using those words - while the students who are merely talking to each other about personal issues will have their conversations snooped on by the school administration.
I mean, who do you really think is going to be caught by this concern filter? Albert, a perfectly normal gay student who is just sending his best friend an e-mail about being afraid of telling his parents that he's gay, or Billy the bully, whose goal is to not come to the attention of the school administration, and thus probably has some sort of knowledge about the concern filter and will use words like "ghey" or "ponce" or some school slang you've never even heard in his email?
And that doesn't even consider the fact that there's a plethora of free e-mail providers out there! After a couple of run-ins with the law, Billy the bully's not even going to be sending his evil e-mails from his school account; he'll be logged in to a free Hotmail or Gmail account he set up at the local library. Sure, your system might report these incoming concerning e-mails, but what are you going to do about it? They're pretty much untraceable without a court order.
Basically, your school is wasting their time and money for what amounts to a false sense of security.
For example I believe if one adheres to the old testament prohibitions against eating certain types of seafood then one will avoid most of the unsafe species in that part of the world.
Sure, but if you look at all the religious prohibitions in the Old Testament, you'll see that, statistically, they probably only got those ones right by accident.
I mean, have you seen the list of prohibited foods in the OT? It's not just pork and shellfish - you're also not allowed to eat rabbits (and according to God, rabbits chew cud), anything that "lives in water and doesn't have fins and scales", a ton of different kinds of birds, a ton of different insects, weasels, rats, chameleons, monitor lizards...
I mean, everyone knows about the shellfish and pigs and thinks "oh that's just because you can get sick off of them", but if you look at the whole list it almost looks like they got that right by accident while some Rabbi was going off on an OCD* "don't eat that, don't eat that" rant.
It's only sensible if you pull out the sensible parts, and ignore the rest of it. And even the sensible parts aren't that sensible - non-Jews have been eating pigs and shellfish for generations, and it's not like it's been noticeably detrimental (even before modern, more sanitary farming practices).
*In fact, there's some pretty interesting theories about OCD and religion floating around out there.
First off, Thomas Jefferson re-wrote the Bible to make it less miraculous - he famously removed such minor things as the resurrection, for goodness sakes. It's pretty much as non-religious as you can get after taking a razor to the pages of the Bible, unless you go so far as to cut out everything. Furthermore, pretty much all the historical evidence we have indicates that Thomas Jefferson was a deist, which was about as close as you could get to atheism back then while being intellectually honest; keep in mind that before Darwin came up with the theory of evolution, some form of Creationism was the best theory available for the origin of the species - and in order to have creationism, you must have a creator.
Secondly, Martin Luther didn't re-write the Bible, he translated it. There's a huge difference: although he might have incidentally made changes in order to translate it into German, his goal was to produce a German copy of the Bible that was essentially the same as the Latin version, except in a different language. That's not rewriting, that's translating - it's the same book, in a different language. Although what you said was trivially true (he did write it again, or re-write the book), the implication does not match your point at all. I will grant that he was very religious, though.
Thirdly, Joseph Smith didn't even touch the Bible, he just added a whole lot of gibberish on top - kinda like the New Testament (the Even Newer Testament?). Furthermore, pretty much all the historical evidence we have about the man points to him being a crook who snookered a bunch of people into his new religion, and did it primarily for the lifestyle it would offer him. He didn't write the Book of Mormon for religious purposes, he wrote it for the polygamy.
So that's one for three on "most religious", and one for three on "rewriting the Bible" - and unfortunately for your point, they're not the same ones.
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You know what we call artists who make their paintings occasionally explode and kill the viewer? Psychopaths.
Now, Jews are okay with God being a dick (there's the saying, "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans"), but in general modern Christians really aren't. Your analogy only works if you're okay with God not being omnibenevolent (unless you stretch the term "omnibenevolent" to the point where it makes genocide and infanticide a-ok), and that's just not what Christians want to believe.
Okay, let's not interpret the Bible literally then. Jesus wasn't literally resurrected, that was a metaphor, right? Because that contradicts pretty much everything we know about biology, and it seems that the only way you can tell where the Bible is being metaphorical is to figure out where it contradicts modern science.
I mean, it's not like the Church put Galileo under house arrest because they thought that Genesis 1:1 was a metaphor back then.
The thing is: at the bottom of it, metaphors are useful lies. They are useful, but fundamentally untrue. This is absolutely not something that Christians are okay with; they think that their religion is fundamentally true. They only say "oh it's metaphorical" in order to get around the fact that it's untrue, without actually coming out and saying so.
Sorry, I don't care at all about what "time spans" you used - the order of things being created in Genesis I is absolutely incorrect. The Earth was not made before the Sun, nor were plants; the moon was not made in the same time span as the sun, animals did not start reproducing in a different timespan than the one in which they were created... and that's not even talking about Adam and Eve. Did you know that a lot of people actually think that men have one less rib, because God removed it to make Eve?
Minor point of conflict: you cannot have a universe that contains both:
1. at least one all-knowing entity and
2. at least one other entity which has free will.
The propositions conflict with one another.
By definition, the future actions of an entity with free will cannot be known. By definition, an all-knowing entity knows the future actions of all entities. Hence, a contradiction exists, and both propositions cannot be true. This is a fairly common form of logical disproof.
It's like an immovable object and an irresistible force; they simply cannot be in the same universe, because the existence of one precludes the existence of another.
I would love to see a citation on that, because as far as I can tell the reason why the University of California (to cite a concrete example) has been raising tuition and putting staff on mandatory furloughs is because they are no longer receiving as much money from the State of California, and the budget shortfall has to be made up somehow.
It's not like the extra money they charge just disappears into someone's pockets, after all - these are public institutions, and their financial records are pretty open.
Strictly speaking, it's not a lie.
There's two different kinds of addiction: physiological addiction, and psychological addiction. Physical addiction is the bad shit; it means that if you take this substance, your body will eventually come to depend on it - and if you stop taking the substance, your body will be exceptionally unhappy with you.
One extremely common example of a physically addictive drug is Citalopram, one of those drugs they prescribe for anxiety and depression; if you want to stop taking it and quit cold turkey, you're going to have massive headaches for a couple of weeks. There's also, of course, the common trifecta of alcohol, tobacco and caffeine, all of which are truly physically addictive.
The thing is, though, when people say "it's addictive", they're almost never clear on whether they mean physically addicting or psychologically addicting. The problem with that is, well, anything can be psychologically addicting - all it really means is that you really like doing something, and so change your behavior in order to do it more, potentially to the detriment of other aspects of your life. Sure, you can get addicted to, say, World of Warcraft - but if you quit, you're not going to get blazing headaches or anything like that (except maybe from being out in the sun more).
So, it is true that marijuana can be addicting, in the same way that a good book or an exciting game or an interesting TV show is addicting. It's not true that marijuana is addicting in the same way as tobacco or alcohol or caffeine.
What I found hilarious, though, is that you could use his argument against legalizing marijuana as an argument for the prohibition of basically any currently-legal drug. Maybe we should start up a new proposal to get those banned, since after all the White House is now on record as saying that they don't fit the criteria for legalization?
That's you. Warner Brothers doesn't care about you not wanting three hundred different apps, they care about the fact that if they have their own service that streams their movies and shows, they might get you to sign up for it and cut out the Netflix middle-man.
I prefer the version that ends with the "fact" that the girth of the Apollo rocket was constrained by the average width of a pair of Roman horses. It's still not true, but more entertaining.
You have to ask yourself: is the company currently worth being loyal to?
All too often, people seem to think that loyalty is, in and of itself, something you should strive for. It's not. Being mindlessly loyal is just plain dumb; the things you choose to be loyal to should, in some way, be worthy of that loyalty.
Your current company doesn't seem like it really cares about being worthy of your loyalty. I'm sure their flagship product was shipped out overseas against your recommendation, if they even bothered to ask (and that's entirely ignoring the incredibad business decision of outsourcing a core product), which just indicates that they don't really care.
Also, if another company is willing to try and snipe you off with a raise, you're probably worth significantly more than what either of them are offering. I mean, just ask yourself - if I'm worth my salary + 7k (which is what another company is willing to pay for me right now), why hasn't my current company given me that raise? Because they're taking advantage of your "loyalty".
Finally, the fact that they've given you two junior devs to train up at this juncture kinda sounds like they've decided that you're too much of a senior dev, and they'd prefer to pay two junior salaries instead of one senior salary. This is, of course, conjecture, but this sort of behavior is not at all unknown in business.
So yeah, it really seems like there's no reason to be loyal to the company, even though there may be people in the company who are worthwhile. What has the company done recently to be worthy of your loyalty? Keep in mind that your current salary is in exchange for your work, if they want your loyalty they have to do more.
Dude. Did you not read the story up until that point? Abraham is keeping the whole "voices in my head are telling me to sacrifice you" thing hidden from Isaac. If he'd said "God has provided", the jig would have been up - even the densest kid would realize that there's really only one sacrifice available at that point.
Furthermore, your interpretation paints Abraham as a slave and the God he serves as a sadistic bastard. I mean, what kind of absolute douchebag pulls "loyalty" tests like that? It serves no purpose whatsoever, besides making God feel like he's in control. And what kind of mindless drone actually follows such a horrific order?
Hate to break it to you, but atheism is the only theological position supported by science. There is not one scrap of evidence for the existence of any divine being; therefore, if you are religious, your faith was not arrived at via scientific means.
That's what people mean when they say that science and faith are not compatible, not "you cannot be a scientist and have faith at the same time". That's obviously false; we all know that humans are more than capable of believing two mutually contradictory things at the same time, and there are definitely religious scientists out there. The fact of the matter is, though, that the ideas of science and religion are fundamentally contradictory.
I mean, just look at Francis Collins, the evangelical Christian who's the head of the NIH at the moment. How did he return to Christianity (because he was an agnostic at one point, IIRC)? Was it through research, through study?
No, he saw a frozen waterfall while hiking and had a religious experience. That's about it. It's also the worst kind of scientific evidence. If he tried to publish a paper on the existence of God with that as his basis, he wouldn't even make it to peer review (which is why he wrote a book about it, but that's another matter).
Oh come on, Jesus said everything both ways. I'll see your Matthew 22:37-40 and raise you a Matthew 5:17. Your passage says that the previous laws hang on those two principles, not that they're abolished by them - and my passage confirms that the previous laws are still in effect.
There's a reason why cafeteria Christianity is so popular - the Bible can be interpreted as contradicting itself on almost every subject, which means that you have to pick and choose what you want to believe - it's just not consistent if you don't.
Tell that to Isaac Asimov, who died due to AIDS caused by a blood transfusion.
Clearly you haven't read the Old Testament. God is an asshole. See, oh I don't know, the story where God commands Abraham to kill his son and then says "lol jk", the story where God lets Job's family get killed but then gives him an even better one, the story where God spends a couple of months trolling Jonah by doing various weirdly passive-aggressive things to him, or hell just any one of the stories about the Israelites raping and pillaging their way across the countryside, with God's blessing.
The only difference between the Old and New Testaments is that in the NT, God's an asshole who just got laid. It's been two thousand years since the last Messiah with that particular origin story, so I'd assume that the rosy afterglow has worn off.
If there is a God, he's sitting up there going "trolololo".
Well really, what the heck did they expect? The e-mail they sent out about splitting up the streaming and dvd mailing services was ridiculously patronizing.
I mean, I would have been a lot more okay with things if they'd just been straightforward and said "look, the people we get our content from are raising the prices on us, we need to charge you more to cover it". That's fine, that I can understand.
Instead, those assholes decided to pitch it as some sort of super awesome deal, where instead of being forced to pay for streaming and dvd mailing together, you're now paying for them separately! It's great! So much better than the old deal! And you, the consumer, are such an idiot that you're not even going to notice that the price of your plan increased significantly, doubling in some cases! (if you're like me and you were on the 1 dvd + streaming plan).
Do they not have any sort of market demographics at all? Do they have no idea the kinds of people that subscribe to their service? We're more likely to be early adopters, for goodness' sakes; we're not going to appreciate being talked down to like we're children who can't do math.
And look, I do appreciate Netflix - as convenient as Redbox is, it doesn't quite have the selection. It's just, reading that goddamn e-mail about the new plans left such a bad taste in my mouth I couldn't stand giving them money any more.
More like fucking bullshit. If they'd seen fit to allocate that 500 million to Nasa in 2010, we could have had the James Webb in 2016 for a total of $6.5 billion.
The 11 billion extra you're seeing here is so Nasa can dig themselves out of the hole that Congress pushed them in to - if you don't pay vital employees they leave and take millions of dollars woth of practical experience with them, and if you don't fund important parts manufacturers they close down and you have to pay billions to get them started again.
If you think the OP is merely "weaving some bigotry and flame-baiting" into his post, then you have clearly never heard of the Doctrine of Mental Reservation, which is pretty much "this is how you should lie for Christianity". Someone well-practiced in that doctrine would probably be harder to detect, because as far as they're concerned they're not actually lying.
Question: what, exactly, would lead you to actually blame an attack on religion? I mean, if a bunch of dudes doing it because they believe they are guaranteed something good after they die doesn't do it, what exactly would?
Since I submitted this story, I've actually RTFA'd and that's exactly what didn't happen.
Here's a timeline of events:
1. NASA says "we could make the JWST for $5.1 billion, and launch in 2014". Not "make and run for five years", the $5.1 billion only covers making the thing and putting it into space.
2. NASA's management fucks up, and an independent review panel finds that the actual price tag will be $6.5 billion, with a launch in 2015. This is NASA's fault.
3. However, the $6.5 billion number is contingent on NASA having $250 million to spend in 2011 and 2012 on important things like not laying off critical workers, and funding the fabrication of vital parts.
4. Congress does not provide that money, so the $6.5 billion number was never actually achievable anyway.
5. Now that NASA's fucked, climbing back out of the hole will cost an extra 1 - 1.5 billion dollars, because Congress didn't want to approve a total of 0.5 billion dollars over the next two years.
6. To add insult to injury, the number they're bandying about right now to show how much the project has gone over includes the cost of running it for five years, which the initial estimates did not. This adds nearly an extra billion on to the number.
At no point did NASA intentionally lowball the budget; if NASA's management hadn't fucked up, they could have made it. The initial cost overrun from $5.1 to $6.5 billion is NASA's fault, because NASA's been administrated by idiots for the last couple of decades.
Three reasons:
1. Because you won't get that five dollar hearing aid, but the company will sell a five thousand dollar one. If it's not actually possible to set the price you want, that's not actual practical greed, it's just wishful thinking.
2. Because the people who want the five dollar hearing aid have a real disability which would be cured by the hearing aid, whereas the producer presumably already has a hearing aid if they need it. This is generally seen as being less greedy - it's not so much a matter of I want it for cheap, it's more I need it and it's too expensive.
3. Because people gauge greed based on presumed cost to manufacture vs price asked on the market; if people think it was really cheap to make your product but you're asking five thousand dollars for it, they'll think you're greedy. I mean, how expensive do you think hearing aids are to make these days? It's just a teeny little DSP with a microphone, battery and speaker, for goodness sakes. Sure, it's all miniaturized, but even then I'd have a hard time believing the thing costs more than fifty dollars to make and ship. Of course, people say that it's expensive to comply with FDA regulations, but I really don't think that costs thousands of dollars per unit.
Actually, that could totally be twisted into a major win - after all, if there are two applications for substantially similar patents filed within a year or so of each other, isn't that pretty good evidence that the thing being patented is obvious to at least two people familiar with the area, and thus not patentable?
On the other hand, if there are no other applications like it, isn't that good evidence that it's novel?
You forgot the ads between newlines, though I suppose that might have been a bit too blatant
Wow yeah and that's why all peacocks are dull and brown, right?
Look, there's more kinds of selection than reproduction by those who live to a certain age. Things like with whom you have children and how many you have and the way you raise them all natural selection.
If that's what you're worried about, then you would be far better off having some method by which students can report e-mails that they receive as being threatening or harassing.
Your current system is, in itself, threatening and/or harassing, without providing any benefit at all. The bullies will quickly figure out which words are on your concern list, and stop using those words - while the students who are merely talking to each other about personal issues will have their conversations snooped on by the school administration.
I mean, who do you really think is going to be caught by this concern filter? Albert, a perfectly normal gay student who is just sending his best friend an e-mail about being afraid of telling his parents that he's gay, or Billy the bully, whose goal is to not come to the attention of the school administration, and thus probably has some sort of knowledge about the concern filter and will use words like "ghey" or "ponce" or some school slang you've never even heard in his email?
And that doesn't even consider the fact that there's a plethora of free e-mail providers out there! After a couple of run-ins with the law, Billy the bully's not even going to be sending his evil e-mails from his school account; he'll be logged in to a free Hotmail or Gmail account he set up at the local library. Sure, your system might report these incoming concerning e-mails, but what are you going to do about it? They're pretty much untraceable without a court order.
Basically, your school is wasting their time and money for what amounts to a false sense of security.
Sure, but if you look at all the religious prohibitions in the Old Testament, you'll see that, statistically, they probably only got those ones right by accident.
I mean, have you seen the list of prohibited foods in the OT? It's not just pork and shellfish - you're also not allowed to eat rabbits (and according to God, rabbits chew cud), anything that "lives in water and doesn't have fins and scales", a ton of different kinds of birds, a ton of different insects, weasels, rats, chameleons, monitor lizards...
I mean, everyone knows about the shellfish and pigs and thinks "oh that's just because you can get sick off of them", but if you look at the whole list it almost looks like they got that right by accident while some Rabbi was going off on an OCD* "don't eat that, don't eat that" rant.
It's only sensible if you pull out the sensible parts, and ignore the rest of it. And even the sensible parts aren't that sensible - non-Jews have been eating pigs and shellfish for generations, and it's not like it's been noticeably detrimental (even before modern, more sanitary farming practices).
*In fact, there's some pretty interesting theories about OCD and religion floating around out there.
What?
First off, Thomas Jefferson re-wrote the Bible to make it less miraculous - he famously removed such minor things as the resurrection, for goodness sakes. It's pretty much as non-religious as you can get after taking a razor to the pages of the Bible, unless you go so far as to cut out everything. Furthermore, pretty much all the historical evidence we have indicates that Thomas Jefferson was a deist, which was about as close as you could get to atheism back then while being intellectually honest; keep in mind that before Darwin came up with the theory of evolution, some form of Creationism was the best theory available for the origin of the species - and in order to have creationism, you must have a creator.
Secondly, Martin Luther didn't re-write the Bible, he translated it. There's a huge difference: although he might have incidentally made changes in order to translate it into German, his goal was to produce a German copy of the Bible that was essentially the same as the Latin version, except in a different language. That's not rewriting, that's translating - it's the same book, in a different language. Although what you said was trivially true (he did write it again, or re-write the book), the implication does not match your point at all. I will grant that he was very religious, though.
Thirdly, Joseph Smith didn't even touch the Bible, he just added a whole lot of gibberish on top - kinda like the New Testament (the Even Newer Testament?). Furthermore, pretty much all the historical evidence we have about the man points to him being a crook who snookered a bunch of people into his new religion, and did it primarily for the lifestyle it would offer him. He didn't write the Book of Mormon for religious purposes, he wrote it for the polygamy.
So that's one for three on "most religious", and one for three on "rewriting the Bible" - and unfortunately for your point, they're not the same ones.