But that's basically the same argument as assembler -- this practice might make sense in a language that lacks certain features which effectively replace it. In assembler, there aren't actual loops and such, but there are jumps. In C, there isn't actual exception handling, but there are gotos.
At this point, though, I have an honest question: Would a preprocessor hack be worse than a goto?
You are as wrong as it is possible to be with a statement that simple.
It's not a single point of failure. From the standpoint of availability, nothing prevents an OpenID provider from implementing something as robust as any website, and websites don't generally have single points of failure either. From the standpoint of control, nothing forces you to choose one OpenID provider over another, or even setting up your own.
So no, it's not "outside of your control" -- nothing prevents you from setting up your own OpenID server, with your own software, placing the entire thing entirely under your control.
In fact, if they spent half the time they did on that idea instead convincing people to use better browsers and pay attention to the address bar and SSL warnings...
But the thing is, when youre willing to make flat out false statements in challenge to my position (such as your assertion that the bible punishes rape victims for not screaming, when that verse does not use or imply "rape" in ANY English translation I could find...
I'm willing to make statements I know to be true. But let's see...
The assumption here is that if she didn't cry out for help -- if the rapist wasn't caught in the act -- then it's assumed to be consensual. Putting it in context -- 22:23-26 -- it's presenting this as a dichotomy.
when some other objection is raised("Bible claims pi is 3!" [purplemath.com] is a favorite of mine), which I must spend more time refuting...
I did argue that once. I've since learned that there's a reasonable counter. I'm skeptical of the counterargument, but it's altogether not a good argument.
So I do actually learn from this, from time to time.
But if you want to rely on others to make your arguments, then why could I not do the same and point to the volumes upon volumes of apologetic work by Spraul, Van Til, Keller, and the rest?
Even if these books are available free (and online, to save me a trip to the library), it'd take much longer to read through an entire book than to watch a five or six minute YouTube video. If you want to quote from one, I have no objection.
So choose an area of discussion, ask your question, and I will be happy to go into all the depth you need (or that I can give).
It looks like the original point we were discussing is religion as a source of evil. I'm not sure there's farther to go with that.
To me, the most important thing to discuss would be the idea of justice, but I'm not sure there's too much farther to go with that, either, and it does seem to lead to this hydra of a discussion -- because before long, we're then arguing about every action God takes in the Bible which could be interpreted one way or the other.
I think in that discussion, one thing that wasn't quite resolved is that you said once that my description of the biblical god as evil, or at least unnecessarily cruel, requires as a premise that the Bible isn't true. If I remember, you appealed to a description, which likely is in the Bible, of God as the source of good and evil, the author of morality and ethics. Setting aside both of these, we set about trying to determine from the Bible itself whether God is good or not, examining only actions.
I'd like to continue that, but I'm not sure where we can go with it, especially when the answer is often that God is judged by a different standard than we are.
I suppose I'd start with Abraham. What is the purpose of ordering Abraham to sacrifice his son, and then stopping him?
Is a natural, not caused by human death an evil? I would say no, its not. Not if you believe the eternity of the soul.
It's still suffering, and it still means the end of their life on this world. Keep in mind, once you're dead, Earth is off-limits, right? You're in heaven forever, so reincarnation is right out, and even if you could come back as a ghost, that's hardly living the old life you had.
Saying it's not that bad just because it's not the end of their existence is missing the point.
Ok, what about suffering? Surely that is evil. Well, no, we would say that suffering need not be all negative. While we would not wish it upon anyone, it can be redemptive...
Then let's cut to the chase. What about babies dying in fires? How does their suffering help anyone? How is a human responsible?
Before you can say under what conditions we can't argue that, why not define some conditions under which we could? By what measure do you judge all religions except your own to be bullshit? If you don't judge all of them bullshit, by what measure do you judge some correct and some incorrect?
Because ultimately, it's going to be an interpretation. If I say I don't believe in a particular god because of how I interpret that god, that's entirely valid. If you want to say you still have good reason to believe in a similar god, you're going to have to define how your god is different, and why the same arguments don't apply to you.
...there is simply no way nobody can *really* hurt me, except myself by being wicked.
Mind letting me punch you in the face? After all, it won't really hurt you, but it sure would be satisfying for me.
If salvation is a gift, and loving the truth (which kinda implies acting in accordance with it) is ultimately the only thing I need to "do", well, I don't really see a way to blame God for anything.
If he exists, I have at least one thing I can pretty easily blame him for: I don't see sufficient evidence to believe. Many religions claim I must believe or I'll go to Hell. If there's an omniscient God, he knows exactly what it would take to convince me. If he's omnipotent, he's capable of doing it.
Yet I don't believe.
Therefore, either there's no such God, or there's a God who knows exactly how he could save me from burning forever and, for some reason, doesn't. That's pretty cruel.
But the writing is on the wall, so to speak... it's NOT in some basement in a filing cabinet of a room with a sign saying "warning, leopard". It just isn't.
I see your free will and raise you some natural disasters.
We don't believe that God is superman who saves everyone from all evil. We believe he's more of a super manager who tels us what our role is, how to do it best, and to try our best.
Think of superman in that position, and it suddenly starts to seem at least lazy, if not downright evil.
"Superman, people are being eaten!" "I know, I heard with my super-hearing." "What are we going to do about it?" "We? What's this 'we'? You are going to investigate." "Can you at least tell us where to look?" "Yeah, I can hear him right now, crunching on the leftover bones, but why spoil the fun? You guys figure it out."
...I can tell you that the God I believe in can be scary. God is scary because he is unconditional love.
If the above is "love", that's one hell of an abusive relationship.
We don't always Love others the way we should. Our society is sick, we don't love each other the way we should. And on occasion we end up producing someone like Dalhmer. And we have no one to blame, but ourselves.
Excuse me?
We know some of the causes of people like Dahmer. (There's no 'l' in that name, by the way.) Are you really going to claim that mental illness -- many of which we've identified as being caused by a simple chemical imbalance in the brain -- are somehow also the fault of society?
Key difference: There is a bare minimum necessary to sustain my life. It's even advantageous to go above and beyond that, so I have some resources for when times are bad. Sure, I'm capable of doing more, but it would actually at least inconvenience me, and perhaps put my own life at risk.
And absolutely, if I'm in a position where I can help someone else out without harming myself in any way, especially if I know exactly what to do, and I know the person intimately... Basically, if I were to let my friend die in an asthma attack because I couldn't be bothered to give him his inhaler, even though I knew exactly where it was, and it'd only take me a few seconds, then I'm a dick. More than that, we call that negligence, and people can go to jail for less.
Now, God is supposedly omniscient and omnipotent. How could he possibly not know everyone intimately? How could he possibly be inconvenienced by anything? Every time someone dies from an asthma attack, God is like the friend who stood there with the inhaler in his hand, refusing to just reach down and give it to him.
gitk, yes, maybe. Git-gui, really? From what I've seen, it manages to be both very easy to use (very little training needed, even for "lowly windows using creatures"), and a very faithful representation of what's actually going on in Git.
And I'm not sure gitk is meant to be a standalone GUI, but it works well as the "visualize" option in git-gui, just to show a tree of recent changes -- and I don't know of a subversion tool that can visualize merges like that.
What does Tortoise have that I'd miss? Gitk and git-gui are getting pretty good, especially at exposing what's actually going on in Git, and they're portable.
That's a fair, but entirely different criticism from the one I was responding to. HBI was criticizing it for being censorship at all, suggesting all censorship is inherently evil -- while also making a point about freedom.
In her defense, I'd suggest that it's entirely up to her whether it should be a "clearinghouse of rational discussion" or just her blog.
You're entitled to your own freedom. You're not entitled to the freedom to post whatever you want on someone else's site.
See how that works?
The difference is that China doesn't allow people the freedom to decide what is and isn't on their own site. The difference between censoring your own venue and censoring everyone's venue is profound.
I don't know about you, but I've never worked anywhere where the problem was developers with too little to do. If they aren't spending all their time fixing bugs, maybe they can devote a bit more time to actual enhancements?
As others are saying, if you can get hard numbers, get them. Nothing like actual evidence to back up your claim.
However, there's a more important reason for doing this which is harder to find solid evidence for -- the concept of "paying down your technical debt." Often, we hack software together relatively quickly, without fully testing, etc -- every time we do that, we're effectively borrowing against the future stability and maintainability of the product, or realistically, against our own debugging and refactoring time in the future.
Like all debt, it has interest -- the longer you let it fester, the worse of a mess it's going to be. So like all debt, it makes sense to pay it down when you can -- a little refactoring now can save a lot of headaches later.
So, it may be difficult to get hard numbers -- though again, those are better. But if you can't do that, sell it as an investment. Invest a little time right now at least putting the automated tests in place, and maybe start with just some regression testing. Twenty minutes writing a regression test will almost certainly save you an hour the first time that bug appears -- and those are pessimistic numbers (though also made up on the spot -- find your own actual facts!)
If it's one or two dollars of difference, I'm going to read reviews and do a little research. It's more if it's twenty or thirty dollars of difference.
Because for some reason, I and apparently a large portion of the human race have something inside us that screams against the idea of the guilty going unpunished.
Then you should scream even louder at the very idea that a person can be forgiven through Christ.
Disobey God in that you ask for a king, and 70k people die?
Im going to answer this FIRST in the hope that it lays this particular point to rest. They SPECIFICALLY rejected God as their king. They SPECIFICALLY rejected his command to "not be as other nations" when they asked for a king "as other nations had". There really isnt much bigger of a rejection they could do...
If I recall, they kept asking until God gave them a king, when it would've been possible to continue to say "no."
But this is exactly the point -- it sounds like an abusive ex-husband. "I love you so much, why are you making me do this? This is your fault for rejecting me!" I realize that's not perfectly analogous, but I'm sorry, I just can't see mere rejection as a justification for one death, let alone seventy thousand.
Did he have a choice in the matter?
This is irrelevant.
The relevance is that if he had no choice in the matter, why should he be punished that much more for a mistake simply because he's king? You mention that he was willing -- well, he was ordered by God, so wouldn't that be a good thing?
When you start using youtube, the onion, and comics as the thrust of your arguments... Finally, If you do not wish to read the the end of my prior post, thats fine, but I do not intend to restate my opinions there.
Why should I restate something when I can cite an example of somewhere someone's said it much better and clearer? Especially when it's a free resource on the Internet?
I am not offended in the least; but if you have a position, you can say it yourself rather than appealing to youtube or the onion.
If you had read the onion article, you might have realized that I wasn't appealing to it to make an argument for me, I was using it as an example of a place where people use "Thou shalt not kill." It certainly didn't strike me as an atheist article making an atheist point, and when I first read it as a believer, I found it... touching.
I do not need to see videos making the same claims ive read 30 times over, especially when they get their first claim so badly wrong. I somehow dont think you would sit still for a 10 minute video of a theist making a ridiculous mockery of atomic theory...
If I thought that theist would listen to me, I'd certainly offer something more than "You've gotten it wrong, so I'm not going to watch it." So, for example:
I somehow dont think you would sit still for a 10 minute video of a theist making a ridiculous mockery of atomic theory ("Claim 1: There are little bugs floating around us called 'Atoms', and these 'Atoms' cannot even be seen by the eye! But why then arent we constantly in pain from the barrage of them?");
Not entirely still. Depending on the video, if it seemed otherwise intelligent, and if I thought someone would listen, I might take notes and make a thoughtful response. I usually try to correct as much as I can in the limited space of a single YouTube comment.
It would be reasonable to cut this off at the knees if this is actually the foundation of the argument. But to find that out, I have to watch at least enough to see what their point is. Is this the core of the argument, or is it incidental? Is this a list of separate points, some absurd, some reasonable, or is it one giant argument based on that laughably flawed premise? Maybe it's even a parody?
Well, clearly our views on morality and justice diverge quite a bit... I hope at least you can see where I come from, regarding the punishment vs the infraction.
...somewhat.
I can understand that the concept of "fairness" might lead to this idea that if you do something wrong, you should be punished for it. On top of that, your religion tells you that it must be so (otherwise, what did Jesus die for?), so I can see why that idea would be reinforced.
But think about it. Other than "because God said so", can you think of a good reason that anyone should care what happens to someone who did something wrong, beyond the reasons I outlined? What is the purpose of punishment?
I would respond that whatever it may seem to us, there are no "minor" sins in the sense that they can be "just forgotten".
In that case, the familial analogy doesn't work at all, because families do forgive minor things -- so we're again left with punishment which is disproportionate to the crime, and no good reason why this should be so.
It's roughly equivalent to giving someone the death penalty for a parking violation. Roughly, because it's worse -- rather than death, it's eternal torment, and rather than a parking violation, it's any sin, which includes much minor things, including thoughtcrime.
So nothing was ever said about counting the armies you have
There was a pretty clear "dont rely on your own military strength" command given to David (and Im not sure it was ONLY implicit-- its been a while since I was there in the Bible), and he violated it.
Where does it say he relied on his own military strength? Gideon was ordered to count his men, so he would know how many to send home.
This is especially frustrating because I just said this, and you haven't addressed it -- you've repeated your own assertion, so I've repeated my own counterargument.
Abraham was not a king, demanded by a people who refused to listen to God.
Why should the king bear that curse? David was chosen to be king. Did he have a choice in the matter?
You could perhaps think of it as a delayed judgement for utterly rejecting the Lord in demanding a king to "be like the nations around them",
It's not just that this doesn't capture the whole picture, it's that it's utterly absurd. Disobey God in that you ask for a king, and 70k people die?
Simple solution? God refuses to give them a king, knowing it will lead to that. Or, punish the king for his own actions, and leave the people out of it. Or, punish all of them with something that represents the magnitude of the crime -- slaughtering seventy thousand people isn't the act of a parent spanking a disobedient child, it's the act of a tyrant deliberately spreading fear through the population to assert his authority and discourage people from challenging him.
God told them what they needed to know, and what he told them was truth.
As I said, not the whole truth -- in this case, a lie of omission. And how is this not something they needed to know?
Indeed they did die (both physically and spiritually)-- why do you think "and then he died" is repeated so much in Genesis?
Is the point, then, that they would have lived forever if they hadn't eaten the apple?
Because what the snake said was also true. They didn't die right away, and they did gain knowledge, becoming like gods in their ability to know right and wrong.
And God certainly would have known exactly what Adam and Eve were capable of understanding, and how they would interpret each of these statements. In other words, he deliberately told them exactly enough so that they would think he meant that eating the apple is imminent death.
It may not be as bad as pirating, but what you're doing is sending them a strong financial message: "It's ok to do this shit! I don't mind! I'll give you exactly as much money as I did before, I'll just be slightly more annoyed!"
If a game has enough DRM that I'd have to crack it just to play the way I want, or to protect my system, I'm not going to buy or play that game. I'll buy a different one with either no DRM, or DRM I can live with.
Slashdot Mirror
All the more reason to avoid it.
But that's basically the same argument as assembler -- this practice might make sense in a language that lacks certain features which effectively replace it. In assembler, there aren't actual loops and such, but there are jumps. In C, there isn't actual exception handling, but there are gotos.
At this point, though, I have an honest question: Would a preprocessor hack be worse than a goto?
You are as wrong as it is possible to be with a statement that simple.
It's not a single point of failure. From the standpoint of availability, nothing prevents an OpenID provider from implementing something as robust as any website, and websites don't generally have single points of failure either. From the standpoint of control, nothing forces you to choose one OpenID provider over another, or even setting up your own.
So no, it's not "outside of your control" -- nothing prevents you from setting up your own OpenID server, with your own software, placing the entire thing entirely under your control.
Out of curiosity, why don't you trust OpenID? What is there to trust?
In fact, if they spent half the time they did on that idea instead convincing people to use better browsers and pay attention to the address bar and SSL warnings...
Erm... nearly all of that can be done with OpenID/OAuth. Why have a single point of failure when we don't have to?
But the thing is, when youre willing to make flat out false statements in challenge to my position (such as your assertion that the bible punishes rape victims for not screaming, when that verse does not use or imply "rape" in ANY English translation I could find...
I'm willing to make statements I know to be true. But let's see...
The assumption here is that if she didn't cry out for help -- if the rapist wasn't caught in the act -- then it's assumed to be consensual. Putting it in context -- 22:23-26 -- it's presenting this as a dichotomy.
when some other objection is raised("Bible claims pi is 3!" [purplemath.com] is a favorite of mine), which I must spend more time refuting...
I did argue that once. I've since learned that there's a reasonable counter. I'm skeptical of the counterargument, but it's altogether not a good argument.
So I do actually learn from this, from time to time.
But if you want to rely on others to make your arguments, then why could I not do the same and point to the volumes upon volumes of apologetic work by Spraul, Van Til, Keller, and the rest?
Even if these books are available free (and online, to save me a trip to the library), it'd take much longer to read through an entire book than to watch a five or six minute YouTube video. If you want to quote from one, I have no objection.
So choose an area of discussion, ask your question, and I will be happy to go into all the depth you need (or that I can give).
It looks like the original point we were discussing is religion as a source of evil. I'm not sure there's farther to go with that.
To me, the most important thing to discuss would be the idea of justice, but I'm not sure there's too much farther to go with that, either, and it does seem to lead to this hydra of a discussion -- because before long, we're then arguing about every action God takes in the Bible which could be interpreted one way or the other.
I think in that discussion, one thing that wasn't quite resolved is that you said once that my description of the biblical god as evil, or at least unnecessarily cruel, requires as a premise that the Bible isn't true. If I remember, you appealed to a description, which likely is in the Bible, of God as the source of good and evil, the author of morality and ethics. Setting aside both of these, we set about trying to determine from the Bible itself whether God is good or not, examining only actions.
I'd like to continue that, but I'm not sure where we can go with it, especially when the answer is often that God is judged by a different standard than we are.
I suppose I'd start with Abraham. What is the purpose of ordering Abraham to sacrifice his son, and then stopping him?
Is a natural, not caused by human death an evil? I would say no, its not. Not if you believe the eternity of the soul.
It's still suffering, and it still means the end of their life on this world. Keep in mind, once you're dead, Earth is off-limits, right? You're in heaven forever, so reincarnation is right out, and even if you could come back as a ghost, that's hardly living the old life you had.
Saying it's not that bad just because it's not the end of their existence is missing the point.
Ok, what about suffering? Surely that is evil. Well, no, we would say that suffering need not be all negative. While we would not wish it upon anyone, it can be redemptive...
Then let's cut to the chase. What about babies dying in fires? How does their suffering help anyone? How is a human responsible?
Before you can say under what conditions we can't argue that, why not define some conditions under which we could? By what measure do you judge all religions except your own to be bullshit? If you don't judge all of them bullshit, by what measure do you judge some correct and some incorrect?
Because ultimately, it's going to be an interpretation. If I say I don't believe in a particular god because of how I interpret that god, that's entirely valid. If you want to say you still have good reason to believe in a similar god, you're going to have to define how your god is different, and why the same arguments don't apply to you.
...there is simply no way nobody can *really* hurt me, except myself by being wicked.
Mind letting me punch you in the face? After all, it won't really hurt you, but it sure would be satisfying for me.
If salvation is a gift, and loving the truth (which kinda implies acting in accordance with it) is ultimately the only thing I need to "do", well, I don't really see a way to blame God for anything.
If he exists, I have at least one thing I can pretty easily blame him for: I don't see sufficient evidence to believe. Many religions claim I must believe or I'll go to Hell. If there's an omniscient God, he knows exactly what it would take to convince me. If he's omnipotent, he's capable of doing it.
Yet I don't believe.
Therefore, either there's no such God, or there's a God who knows exactly how he could save me from burning forever and, for some reason, doesn't. That's pretty cruel.
But the writing is on the wall, so to speak... it's NOT in some basement in a filing cabinet of a room with a sign saying "warning, leopard". It just isn't.
Mind showing me where it is, then?
Free will man, Free will.
I see your free will and raise you some natural disasters.
We don't believe that God is superman who saves everyone from all evil. We believe he's more of a super manager who tels us what our role is, how to do it best, and to try our best.
Think of superman in that position, and it suddenly starts to seem at least lazy, if not downright evil.
"Superman, people are being eaten!"
"I know, I heard with my super-hearing."
"What are we going to do about it?"
"We? What's this 'we'? You are going to investigate."
"Can you at least tell us where to look?"
"Yeah, I can hear him right now, crunching on the leftover bones, but why spoil the fun? You guys figure it out."
...I can tell you that the God I believe in can be scary. God is scary because he is unconditional love.
If the above is "love", that's one hell of an abusive relationship.
We don't always Love others the way we should. Our society is sick, we don't love each other the way we should. And on occasion we end up producing someone like Dalhmer. And we have no one to blame, but ourselves.
Excuse me?
We know some of the causes of people like Dahmer. (There's no 'l' in that name, by the way.) Are you really going to claim that mental illness -- many of which we've identified as being caused by a simple chemical imbalance in the brain -- are somehow also the fault of society?
Key difference: There is a bare minimum necessary to sustain my life. It's even advantageous to go above and beyond that, so I have some resources for when times are bad. Sure, I'm capable of doing more, but it would actually at least inconvenience me, and perhaps put my own life at risk.
And absolutely, if I'm in a position where I can help someone else out without harming myself in any way, especially if I know exactly what to do, and I know the person intimately... Basically, if I were to let my friend die in an asthma attack because I couldn't be bothered to give him his inhaler, even though I knew exactly where it was, and it'd only take me a few seconds, then I'm a dick. More than that, we call that negligence, and people can go to jail for less.
Now, God is supposedly omniscient and omnipotent. How could he possibly not know everyone intimately? How could he possibly be inconvenienced by anything? Every time someone dies from an asthma attack, God is like the friend who stood there with the inhaler in his hand, refusing to just reach down and give it to him.
gitk, yes, maybe. Git-gui, really? From what I've seen, it manages to be both very easy to use (very little training needed, even for "lowly windows using creatures"), and a very faithful representation of what's actually going on in Git.
And I'm not sure gitk is meant to be a standalone GUI, but it works well as the "visualize" option in git-gui, just to show a tree of recent changes -- and I don't know of a subversion tool that can visualize merges like that.
What does Tortoise have that I'd miss? Gitk and git-gui are getting pretty good, especially at exposing what's actually going on in Git, and they're portable.
That's a fair, but entirely different criticism from the one I was responding to. HBI was criticizing it for being censorship at all, suggesting all censorship is inherently evil -- while also making a point about freedom.
In her defense, I'd suggest that it's entirely up to her whether it should be a "clearinghouse of rational discussion" or just her blog.
You're entitled to your own freedom. You're not entitled to the freedom to post whatever you want on someone else's site.
See how that works?
The difference is that China doesn't allow people the freedom to decide what is and isn't on their own site. The difference between censoring your own venue and censoring everyone's venue is profound.
A sweet, legally-binding promise.
No, real developers use real version control software. Even SVN would be an upgrade, let alone Git, Mercurial, bzr, etc.
I don't know about you, but I've never worked anywhere where the problem was developers with too little to do. If they aren't spending all their time fixing bugs, maybe they can devote a bit more time to actual enhancements?
As others are saying, if you can get hard numbers, get them. Nothing like actual evidence to back up your claim.
However, there's a more important reason for doing this which is harder to find solid evidence for -- the concept of "paying down your technical debt." Often, we hack software together relatively quickly, without fully testing, etc -- every time we do that, we're effectively borrowing against the future stability and maintainability of the product, or realistically, against our own debugging and refactoring time in the future.
Like all debt, it has interest -- the longer you let it fester, the worse of a mess it's going to be. So like all debt, it makes sense to pay it down when you can -- a little refactoring now can save a lot of headaches later.
So, it may be difficult to get hard numbers -- though again, those are better. But if you can't do that, sell it as an investment. Invest a little time right now at least putting the automated tests in place, and maybe start with just some regression testing. Twenty minutes writing a regression test will almost certainly save you an hour the first time that bug appears -- and those are pessimistic numbers (though also made up on the spot -- find your own actual facts!)
...using CVS.
Do people really shop that way?
If it's one or two dollars of difference, I'm going to read reviews and do a little research. It's more if it's twenty or thirty dollars of difference.
You mean they put a dozen clones of you on Southwest flights and wait till one of you reports back that you made it alive?
Are you sure your name isn't BadAnalogyGuy?
Very briefly:
What is the purpose of punishment?
Because for some reason, I and apparently a large portion of the human race have something inside us that screams against the idea of the guilty going unpunished.
Then you should scream even louder at the very idea that a person can be forgiven through Christ.
Disobey God in that you ask for a king, and 70k people die?
Im going to answer this FIRST in the hope that it lays this particular point to rest. They SPECIFICALLY rejected God as their king. They SPECIFICALLY rejected his command to "not be as other nations" when they asked for a king "as other nations had". There really isnt much bigger of a rejection they could do...
If I recall, they kept asking until God gave them a king, when it would've been possible to continue to say "no."
But this is exactly the point -- it sounds like an abusive ex-husband. "I love you so much, why are you making me do this? This is your fault for rejecting me!" I realize that's not perfectly analogous, but I'm sorry, I just can't see mere rejection as a justification for one death, let alone seventy thousand.
Did he have a choice in the matter?
This is irrelevant.
The relevance is that if he had no choice in the matter, why should he be punished that much more for a mistake simply because he's king? You mention that he was willing -- well, he was ordered by God, so wouldn't that be a good thing?
When you start using youtube, the onion, and comics as the thrust of your arguments... Finally, If you do not wish to read the the end of my prior post, thats fine, but I do not intend to restate my opinions there.
Why should I restate something when I can cite an example of somewhere someone's said it much better and clearer? Especially when it's a free resource on the Internet?
I am not offended in the least; but if you have a position, you can say it yourself rather than appealing to youtube or the onion.
If you had read the onion article, you might have realized that I wasn't appealing to it to make an argument for me, I was using it as an example of a place where people use "Thou shalt not kill." It certainly didn't strike me as an atheist article making an atheist point, and when I first read it as a believer, I found it... touching.
I do not need to see videos making the same claims ive read 30 times over, especially when they get their first claim so badly wrong. I somehow dont think you would sit still for a 10 minute video of a theist making a ridiculous mockery of atomic theory...
If I thought that theist would listen to me, I'd certainly offer something more than "You've gotten it wrong, so I'm not going to watch it." So, for example:
I somehow dont think you would sit still for a 10 minute video of a theist making a ridiculous mockery of atomic theory ("Claim 1: There are little bugs floating around us called 'Atoms', and these 'Atoms' cannot even be seen by the eye! But why then arent we constantly in pain from the barrage of them?");
Not entirely still. Depending on the video, if it seemed otherwise intelligent, and if I thought someone would listen, I might take notes and make a thoughtful response. I usually try to correct as much as I can in the limited space of a single YouTube comment.
It would be reasonable to cut this off at the knees if this is actually the foundation of the argument. But to find that out, I have to watch at least enough to see what their point is. Is this the core of the argument, or is it incidental? Is this a list of separate points, some absurd, some reasonable, or is it one giant argument based on that laughably flawed premise? Maybe it's even a parody?
All of these require more context than deciding,
Well, clearly our views on morality and justice diverge quite a bit... I hope at least you can see where I come from, regarding the punishment vs the infraction.
...somewhat.
I can understand that the concept of "fairness" might lead to this idea that if you do something wrong, you should be punished for it. On top of that, your religion tells you that it must be so (otherwise, what did Jesus die for?), so I can see why that idea would be reinforced.
But think about it. Other than "because God said so", can you think of a good reason that anyone should care what happens to someone who did something wrong, beyond the reasons I outlined? What is the purpose of punishment?
I would respond that whatever it may seem to us, there are no "minor" sins in the sense that they can be "just forgotten".
In that case, the familial analogy doesn't work at all, because families do forgive minor things -- so we're again left with punishment which is disproportionate to the crime, and no good reason why this should be so.
It's roughly equivalent to giving someone the death penalty for a parking violation. Roughly, because it's worse -- rather than death, it's eternal torment, and rather than a parking violation, it's any sin, which includes much minor things, including thoughtcrime.
So nothing was ever said about counting the armies you have
There was a pretty clear "dont rely on your own military strength" command given to David (and Im not sure it was ONLY implicit-- its been a while since I was there in the Bible), and he violated it.
Where does it say he relied on his own military strength? Gideon was ordered to count his men, so he would know how many to send home.
This is especially frustrating because I just said this, and you haven't addressed it -- you've repeated your own assertion, so I've repeated my own counterargument.
Abraham was not a king, demanded by a people who refused to listen to God.
Why should the king bear that curse? David was chosen to be king. Did he have a choice in the matter?
You could perhaps think of it as a delayed judgement for utterly rejecting the Lord in demanding a king to "be like the nations around them",
It's not just that this doesn't capture the whole picture, it's that it's utterly absurd. Disobey God in that you ask for a king, and 70k people die?
Simple solution? God refuses to give them a king, knowing it will lead to that. Or, punish the king for his own actions, and leave the people out of it. Or, punish all of them with something that represents the magnitude of the crime -- slaughtering seventy thousand people isn't the act of a parent spanking a disobedient child, it's the act of a tyrant deliberately spreading fear through the population to assert his authority and discourage people from challenging him.
God told them what they needed to know, and what he told them was truth.
As I said, not the whole truth -- in this case, a lie of omission. And how is this not something they needed to know?
Indeed they did die (both physically and spiritually)-- why do you think "and then he died" is repeated so much in Genesis?
Is the point, then, that they would have lived forever if they hadn't eaten the apple?
Because what the snake said was also true. They didn't die right away, and they did gain knowledge, becoming like gods in their ability to know right and wrong.
And God certainly would have known exactly what Adam and Eve were capable of understanding, and how they would interpret each of these statements. In other words, he deliberately told them exactly enough so that they would think he meant that eating the apple is imminent death.
That is dishonest.
Consider Harvey Dent (Tw
It may not be as bad as pirating, but what you're doing is sending them a strong financial message: "It's ok to do this shit! I don't mind! I'll give you exactly as much money as I did before, I'll just be slightly more annoyed!"
If a game has enough DRM that I'd have to crack it just to play the way I want, or to protect my system, I'm not going to buy or play that game. I'll buy a different one with either no DRM, or DRM I can live with.