Even if I were too old to rant about it, there's still some practical steps I can take. Between work and school, there's no way I can spend that much time on games, so I choose the ones I actually play carefully.
Put it this way: Why would you play a bad game when you can play a good one? There are so many games to choose from, it's actually getting reasonable to boycott DRM altogether. It's even getting reasonable to only play games which run natively on Linux.
I'm more than happy to buy games. What I'm not happy to do is have certain DRM on my system (actually as harmful as any malware), or vote with my dollars that shit like this is OK.
Worse, they might corrupt the whole idea by supporting USB, but requiring the charger to authenticate itself, and either refusing to charge or deliberately drawing less power when you detect the wrong charger.
I think we (along with most people) would agree with the following-- that while it may be bad to murder a stranger, it is worse to murder a friend, and much worse to murder a parent.
I don't, or at least, it's not a distinction that matters to me. What matters to me is that I have no intention of ever murdering anyone, and when others do, my concern is what to do about them. Since I don't believe in vengeance, "what to do about them" isn't about making sure they "pay for their crimes", it's about making sure they don't kill again, making them productive members of society if it's possible, and hopefully making it enough of a deterrent that others are less likely to murder.
We see such familial crimes as worse in part because the one doing the killing owes so much to the one he murders.
I'm not sure that's the case -- is a child killing a parent worse than a parent killing a child?
It would seem to me that if you extend that idea to the one who you owe the very conception of existence to, the punishment for even minor crimes would be correspondingly magnified.
Your family must be very different than mine. With my family, and friends, and even casual acquaintances, it seems that the closer I get to someone, the more likely I am to be forgiving of little things, in favor of focusing on what actually matters.
the crimes we commit are against one with such high standards, and to whom we owe so much, that no attempts by us can ever exonerate us.
And he knows this. In other words, the person (being?) setting the standards is deliberately setting them so high no one will reach them, and then punishing them for falling short. It's like a parent beating his child because the child can't fly.
David's sin was lack of trust. IIRC earlier in either Samuel or Chronicles, the Israelites were told NOT to construct large armies, but to rely on the Lord. David's intention was to perform a census for the express purpose of judging his military readiness, a clear violation of the implicit command to trust.
Emphasis mine.
So nothing was ever said about counting the armies you have (or how large "large" is), and it's even acknowledged that it's an implicit command. And this still doesn't address the question.
Normal person: "You didn't trust me. I'm disappointed." Mob boss: "You didn't trust me. If you ever fail me again, I'll kill your family." Serial killer: "You didn't trust me. My trust issues are going to make me somewhat unstable, so I'm just going to kill a dozen random people." God: "You didn't trust me. I'm going to kill seventy thousand of your people!"
Loving? Really? I can only imagine what God would've done if Abraham had refused to sacrifice his son.
You can clearly see that he is a God who values covenants, truth, and "holiness" (perhaps best defined as being set apart, isolation from moral corruption) highly enough to put a high price on their violation;
Defining "holiness" in terms of moral corruption buys you nothing. I consider killing seventy thousand people as punishment for a lack of faith to be petty and morally corrupt. By your own definition, then, I would have to judge God as unholy.
That leaves covenants and truth. I think we can boil this down to just truth, because what's the worth of a covenant with a dishonest being? But God didn't tell the whole truth about the Tree of Knowledge. He certainly wasn't honest about his intentions for Abraham's son -- that, or he was fickle, commanding one thing, then another. There's a number of things attributed to God, particularly in Job, which are metaphor at best -- "corners of the Earth", for instance.
Even if I grant covenants, the way he goes about enforcing them is brutal. He promised the land of Canaan to Abraham. Fine. But to keep this covenant, he led the Israelit
The other difference is that here, at least the laws aren't as totalitarian. I'd rather have politicians who dishonestly slap me from time to time (then claim they didn't) than politicians who rape me openly.
I admit my views on sex ed are considered outmoded. 10-year olds having sex with 8-year olds is a problem, but how to 'solve' that problem is beyond me. Our culture glorifies sexuality so much its inevitable.
The way I was brought up, it wasn't likely to happen. I'm not sure if that's because my parents did a good job, or because I was a geek.
And my example 'you killed another person unjustly' is called murder. Sometimes we, as a society, consider the circumstances of a particular murder so heinous or depraved that we require the life of the murderer in exchange. Right or wrong, that's the law. I'm not at all sure whether I support it or not.
It's true, it's the law... I think we were talking about right or wrong. Personally, I feel that "fairness" isn't really what this is about. I don't think vengeance is ever a good reason. The reasons we lock people up are:
To correct their behavior, so they won't do it again.
To remove them from the general population until they can be corrected (if they can), so they won't do it again.
To serve as a deterrent to others.
I don't think there's another good reason, or really another good reason to punish people. It's not at all important to me that a murderer gets what they deserve. It's far more important to me that they don't murder again.
Of course self-defense is an interesting problem. Can you subdue your attacker with less than deadly force? But honestly, we are probably arguing over the grey, not the black and white.
Maybe. This one doesn't seem terribly complicated -- for instance, it may be that I could've subdued the attacker with less than deadly force, but it would've put me at considerably greater risk... My personal rule (which I've been fortunate enough not to have to test) is that once you attack me physically, you've given up any right you had to expect me not to hurt or kill you. If I can subdue without killing you, even without hurting you, so much the better, but it's just not a priority at that point.
I'm not sure we're actually arguing about this point, though.
Your points about gay marriage do really speak to the fundamental point. Gays (and I somewhat hate using that term, it's simplistic and terse, but using 'homosexuals' seems stuffy, and well, perhaps an unintentional insult)
Well, if either "gay" or "homosexual" is an insult, you really can't win. I support the rights of a broader group, but I'm not sure there's a better word. For instance, if one of the two getting married is transsexual, is it gay or straight marriage? I don't really know, don't really care what we call it, but I don't see a reason to prevent it.
truly want to be accepted into society, not tolerated or enjoyed as amusement. I understand their desire to be accepted. Until even a simple majority agrees, that isn't going to be written into law....
I'm not sure that's what the gay marriage thing is about, though, or "Don't ask, don't tell." This isn't about people accepting them in any way other than allowing them the same rights as anyone else.
In the case of marriage, one simple solution would be to remove marriage as a legal concept and rephrase everything in terms of civil unions. Short of that, the issue is that a legally-recognized marriage gets tax breaks that a gay one doesn't, at least not in all states. The original reason for these tax breaks is that families were seen to be a positive contribution to society -- and this wasn't just someone's opinion about a moral good, you can actually find studies which show this to be the case.
So while I realize it may be politically difficult to get people to apply the same logic, you can run studies as to whether gay marriage carries the same secular benefits as straight marriage.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I'd much rather see many of these decisions resolved in
If the interpretation finds itself at odds with the rest of scripture, I would call it erroneous.
At odds with an interpretation you accept of the rest of scripture, you mean?
Only if you skip the parts about His covenants, which man violated,
The problem is first, this doesn't always seem to be the case, and second, the punishment is nearly always disproportionate to the crime -- what we'd call "cruel and unusual" in our human justice systems. Worse, often God punishes people who were not involved at all.
Take 1 Chronicles 21:9-14. First, why punish David at all? The closest I could find to an explanation was this. Seriously? According to that page, David's being punished because knowing the strength of his armies could lead him to sin? Or maybe God just hates that it was Satan's idea -- assuming that is, indeed, the more accurate translation.
Whatever the excuse given, I can't find God ever telling David he couldn't conduct a census, especially given that Gideon was allowed to count his armies. What "covenant" was being broken here?
Even if it was wrong, David counted some people. He. Counted. People. In what morality is that such a horrible crime as to justify slaughtering 70,000 of God's own chosen people?!
And God didn't even punish David. He punished David's people. Sure, that punishes David indirectly, but that means 70,000 people who did nothing wrong were punished for the crimes of one person. Were these 70k sinful in some other way? Perhaps, but it's pretty clear they're not being punished for that, they're being punished for David.
...and his perfect judgement and his holiness.
That's what I was talking about with the second bit you quoted. But if you simply take the Bible as historical fact, you don't know God is perfectly just and holy. All you really know is that he says he is, and that some people said he was -- and that's the perspective I'm using here.
If you just accept a priori that God is good and just, then this entire discussion is pretty much useless, because you've already made up your mind before you turned a single page of that book.
when you speak of Hitler's injustice, surely you are appealing to some absolute, internal sense of justice which you assume I share?
I'm appealing to whatever sense of justice you have. Most people base theirs on a simple moral intuition, or on some basic principles.
I left out one or two logical steps because I thought they were self-evident-- "If the bible is not true, then God is not a capable judge of any and all who sin; if he is not a capable judge, then justice is not done by his actions...."
And that exposes the fallacy I wouldn't have made: "if he is not a capable judge, then justice is not done by his actions..." That's a non-sequitur. If he's not a capable judge, he might do just things anyway by accident. All that follows is that "he is just" is no longer a justification for declaring his actions to be just.
No, my premise is that you cannot simply define God as just by fiat
I can get there from the premise that he is the creator,
Not just from that, you can't...
..."just" appeals to an absolute created by him.
Aside from the point that there are standards of justice independent of any deity which we generally share, I don't think this helps you. He could well have created a standard and then chose to be unjust by his own standard. After all, he's the one who wrote "Thou shalt not kill," and he has by far the highest body count of any character in the Bible.
I'd also like you to show me this, because I don't see it in Genesis.
If you are without the belief that there is a theos, that is practically the same as the belief that there is no theos.
There is a world of difference between a positive assertion and a simple lack of belief. Let me put it this way:
Do you believe I'm wearing a black shirt? Do you believe I'm not wearing a black shirt?
If you said "yes" to either of the above questions, that's a belief -- you're saying you believe something which, particularly in this case, you don't have sufficient evidence to know. And why couldn't you say "no" to both questions? The only thing you can't do is say "yes" to both questions and be consistent.
That doesn't mean all things you don't believe are of equal certainty. For example:
Do you believe I have a million dollars? Do you believe I don't have a million dollars?
Well, especially if you knew me, you'd be a bit more skeptical. But could you say you absolutely know for certain I don't? Have you searched every bank in the world, under my mattress, everywhere it could possibly be to be sure I don't have the money?
Now, it may be that people who positively assert that there are no gods end up with similar ideas and opinions to those who don't assert any positive belief whatsoever about the existence of gods -- but then, it could also be argued that secular ethical systems are very similar to liberal Christian ethical systems. That doesn't change the fact that the underlying philosophies are very different.
To put it another way, saying that atheism is a "belief system" is like saying not collecting stamps is a hobby. (That isn't mine, but I don't remember who said it.)
you are losing sight of the fact that in modern english, athiesm is an ism (to quote wikipedia [wiktionary.org], "a principle, belief or movement").
Note the 'or'. It's a principle, and a very simple one, with no dogmas and very little to unify those who profess it. The only thing I mean when I say I'm an atheist is that I lack a belief in God.
...discomfort at the idea that everyone has a belief system of their own, even if they would prefer to think of their own as mere rejection of all others...
I never said that. In fact, I said pretty much just the opposite, early in this thread:
No one word is sufficient to define me. I'm also a software developer, son, brother, gamer, geek, martial artist, and forever a student -- and these are not sufficient to define me, either.
That encompasses a lot of opinions, beliefs, preferences, and other things that make up a personality. I'll extend that list: I am generally a naturalist, in that I believe that there is nothing supernatural -- that things we might consider to be supernatural (ghosts, aliens, gods), if they existed, would only be following natural laws we don't yet understand.
I also care about what's true -- I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible. To that end, I currently don't see sufficient evidence to believe in any gods, but that's entirely a result of the evidence. If presented with sufficient evidence, I will change my mind. So atheism isn't even a core principle for me, it's entirely secondary.
Point is, atheism itself doesn't imply any of that. There are atheists who believe all kinds of crazy things. There are even atheists who pray -- a significant subset of Jews and Buddhists are atheists.
The point isn't that I believe nothing, or that atheists believe nothing. The point is that atheism, by itself, is not a belief system and does not say what you think it says.
Just guessing (!!!) that you talking about an enterprise situation
Nope. I'm talking about taking my mother, sitting her down in front of Try Ruby, and watching her figure it out pretty much on her own. I'm not saying she was a good programmer by the end of it, but it wasn't hard to follow.
Tryruby.org is for people with knowledge of another language not for teaching basic programming principles.
If you say so. I've seen people who don't know anything about programming follow that tutorial well enough.
they would then have to completely relearn everything to move to other mainstream languages and not also understand the stuff that makes ruby a good language.
Maybe. But some of that stuff is pretty accessible. Try going back to setters and getters in Java after using attr_accessor.
It just seems wrong, since at 8 children that are using condoms are at least in a situation where someone is violating the law.
That "someone" being, say, a 10-year-old friend?
More importantly, while I see your point, I also think it makes sense to teach children before they will need to know. They're going to be sexually mature in a few years, and it'll likely be before you notice.
I do like the approach my parents took. They didn't give me "the talk", they gave me a book to read. It wasn't required, it was just if I was curious. This was also the approach they took to my questions -- they answered exactly what I wanted to know, and truthfully -- not a word about the stork, and I was never told "When you're older..."
Ah, but the 'damned good reason' varies from 'you killed another person unjustly' to 'you drew a picture of Mohammed'. Universal values? Not in that example.
I don't think either of those are sufficient -- and drawing from the universal value of life, there are plenty of situations where the answer is obvious. Someone's trying to kill you, unprovoked? Kill them in self-defense. It's easy to make that rational: If someone has to die, better it be the person who started the fight.
By contrast, why do we have to kill someone for either of the reasons you listed?
Unfortunately, if we want people to be free to live as they want, some want to live in ways we don't.
This is the fundamental difference between what I'm describing and what seems to be common conservative philosophy:
Some will want to live in ways I don't. So long as it doesn't affect me, I don't feel I have a right to make them stop. I may not like what they're doing, but that's not up to me.
In the West, we have an additional value that speech should generally be free -- that being offended is really my responsibility. You could deliver the same insult to two people, and one would be offended, and one wouldn't -- and this is actually something you can choose, not to be offended.
So, I agree with this:
Freedom is nothing if it is cast only in our image.
The point is for us to have as much freedom as we possibly can, while not giving anyone the freedom to harm another.
In light of that:
But the issue of gay marriage is entirely different. If it were a simple as gay couples wanting to be together and publically acknowledged, that is already done. But they seem to want to change the definition of marriage in a way I don't support.
Why does it matter? It's their marriage. How does it harm you?
It changes the definition of family as well.
No, it doesn't. There are families which are married, and marriages which will never produce families.
I don't see how preventing gay marriage is going to prevent gay families, and I certainly don't see how any of this is going to affect straight families.
Having said that, though, if gay marriage becomes the law of the land wherever I am, well, I'll be fine, and accept it, and move on.
That's admirable, but it's not really enough. If there's a vote on the issue of gay marriage, for instance, you do have a say.
...what happens politically is His will. I make my views known, I vote, and I accept the authorities He permits. What else am I to do, challenge God's authority to make the world as He sees fit?
What would you do with a corrupt regime, then?
If everything in the world that happens, truly happens according to God's will, I'm not really sure how you can say that anyone is sinful. For them to be able to sin, to do something God doesn't want, they would have to be able to do something contrary to God's will.
So wouldn't it follow that a government can be evil and sinful, and it could be your duty to do w
So why is it not fair for me to say (regarding the inquisition) thats not Christianity, its opression?
If you can justify it, sure. But by what definition of "Christianity" do you justify saying that the inquisition either was not propagated by Christians, or was not a Christian thing to do?
By contrast, it's trivial to justify an atrocity directly from a religious text.
Not without making rather serious errors of judgement and interpretation.
I'm not sure what you mean by "errors of judgment" in this case, but "errors of interpretation" -- by what metric do you judge which is and is not a correct interpretation?
If we start with the proposition, "The Bible is truth from God",
The Bible is self-contradictory, so that proposition fails immediately. Suppose that wasn't the case...
it is easy to reach conclusion A, that God is the only truly capable judge, and that he is within His "right" to judge wicked people.
That depends what you mean by "truth". If you mean that the Bible is historically true, that the events it described actually did happen, then God is a monster of incalculable evil.
The only way around this is to accept a further "truth", that when the Bible says God was doing something just, it was, because the Bible is true. If the Bible were consistent, and if you did accept it as absolute truth, I really have no argument. There's really nothing I can say to Fred Phelps, for instance.
But you're actually proving my point. You haven't presented an argument for how you know God is just. You've only asserted that he is, and therefore, anything he commands is just. And I hate to Godwin this, but Hitler did believe he was doing God's work, and he's a perfect example -- either he was right, in which case everything he did is justified, or he was wrong, in which case he was a monster. How do you know he was wrong?
Regarding the "truth" of the Bible, this is especially circular. Even if you know it's from God, how do you know it's the truth? Because God is just, right? But how do you know he's just? You just admitted it's because the Bible says so.
The mistake you are making is that, in arguing against my position, you start with the premise "well, the main thing you believe in (Biblical truth) is wrong; therefore God is not just; therefore he has no right to judge people; therefore doing so proves that the Bible is false; therefore God is not just...
Let's not strawman, shall we? I mean, "therefore God is not just" is a pretty blatant non-sequitur. I'm capable of logical fallacy, but I don't think I could make one that obvious if I tried.
No, my premise is that you cannot simply define God as just by fiat. We discover the character of a person by their actions, and I see no reason for a deity to be judged any other way. And like it or not, you do judge your god -- only in your case, you judge him to be just because the Bible says so.
It seems that if we are to judge him fairly, it must be from an unbiased stance. We have to judge him by the same standards we judge anybody else.
An all-knowing and all-powerful god has it even worse -- pick just about any of the things in that video, and you and I, humans, could come up with less painful ways to accomplish the same goals.
You may be correct, but I havent seen any statistics on that. Seemed a rather bold statement regardless.
Not particularly. I'm not judging baptists at all. However, it does seem that all of the loudest and most irritating creationists are baptists.
Lets not take things out of context or misquote them, please. The full quote ends with "until all is accomplished", the
Nowhere does it say it's a "belief system", first of all. It's the simple negation of theism, which is the belief that there is a God. The negation of that is again the lack of that belief.
And listen to yourself. "Without God." Yes, that's what it means. I'm not really sure how you get from there to "a belief system around the idea that there is no theos," as opposed to, say, "the state of being without the idea that there is a theos."
The main reason i was thinking of is that there are multiple ways to do the same thing.
And why is this bad?
For/while loops can use *.each, num.times... can be use to generate the same resault (where to use each one is not immediately obvious if your witting your first program)
Same problem exists between for and while. Every language is going to have some sort of choices built in.
I don't know if I have an intelligent response, other than to suggest you go to tryruby.org and type 'help'. It actually makes the idea of a "block" feel natural, and they're covered before any actual loops happen.
Why would a programmer keep using a tool if it's much worse for the job? It just doesn't really happen.
You're lucky, then, or exceptional. Or at least, speaking only for myself, I do have to spend years building habits like version control (killing the bad habit of commenting tons of stuff out and in to make it work), automated testing and especially any sort of test-first development, and so on.
Also, I think GOTO's have one advantage for a learning language aimed at small children: It's easier for a child to learn and understand, as a building block / stepping stone toward more complex things. For some reason, I even remember this learning process (using basic, that was popular then) when I was a small child, on our 48K ZX Spectrum... GOTO's were easy and obvious, but I recall seeing these weird GOSUB things that seemed more abstract somehow.
I remember that, too. But I also remember that when I first saw functions, they made sense. Maybe the GOSUB syntax was just unhelpful?
Finally, any good programmer needs to do significant amounts of assembler at some point in his life, and you're gonna be doing lots of JMP's there anyway, and yet nobody considers that 'learning bad habits',
I would say that's mostly because assembly generally isn't taught as a first programming language. By the time you learn assembly, you already understand structured programming and why it's a good thing, certainly by contrast to assembly.
There are many other bad habits that cause FAR more damage in real-world programming, and yet nobody even cares to teach those in formal Comp Sci or Engineering programs.
I'd certainly like to hear about those. I'm in an odd situation where instructors in my formal Comp Sci program actually listen to me. (Of course, it's academia, so even if they took me as seriously as I'd like them to, it'd still take years to change...)
Have a look at PowerBASIC [powerbasic.com], for example.
DOS/Windows and proprietary? No thanks.
In my opinion a key point which makes BASIC great as a beginner's language is readability. It's more or less plain english and stays away from all that curley bracket/semicolon stuff.
When you're telling the CPU what you want it to do ?
In what sense?
I'm telling the CPU what to do when I type here, but I'm certainly not giving it a jump instruction, or any other instruction, manually. I'd have to be insane to do so just to type up a Slashdot post.
Now, if I needed assembly for some reason, yes, a jump instruction becomes relevant. I can't remember ever needing assembly for anything.
and how is GOTO different than exception handling?
Exception handling is structured, and it does things GOTO can't, that I know of. For instance:
if (world is ending)
throw IDontKnowWhatToDoException
This puts the actual error-handling code somewhere up the stack where it's actually relevant.
Its just a more generalized version of using break, continue, etc.
Well, in the same sense, it's also a more generalized version of a loop, but you still use structured loops, don't you?
Break, continue, return, etc, are all limited in scope. They do one thing, and do it well. Aside from being clumsier for the things I'd use a break for, goto can take me anywhere else in the program.
Another good reason is to avoid unnecessary indentations. If I had a dime for every time I saw code like
I know return is effectively a goto, but I do prefer it, along with break, continue, and exceptions, as a more structured approach. So I'd do:
if (testopt("-h")) {
showusage();
return; } rest of program here
Pretty much the same as:
It's also worth noting that "break" is a scope-limited goto, yet few have issues with it.
Well, precisely because it's limited in scope and much better defined. I also have far less of a problem with, for instance, the way Java handles references than with the way C++ has stack objects, references, and pointers, complete with pointer arithmetic. It may be the same thing in some abstract sense, but there's far less opportunity to screw it up.
One, to avoid repeating cleanup/logging code [c2.com] when an error occurs within a deeply nested conditional. There are many who disagree with the use (or overuse) of exceptions, especially when used to control normal flow rather than catching true errors.
Why is a goto better than an exception in this case? Seems to me that things like break, return, and exceptions are effectively goto, but somewhat more structured and safe.
Did you reject GOTO as a way to forever avoid writing anything in assembly?
Perhaps. I certainly reject it when I'm not forced to write assembly.
it misrepresents the content of the letter.
I'm not sure how the original title makes it any better.
Good enough for you?
Probably not, but let's see:
they are often more readable than large amounts of indentation.
Solution: Use two spaces to indent.
But I think the most telling bit is this:
That said, I have used exactly two "goto" statements in all the lines of C, C++, Fortran 95, and (yes) COBOL I've written since leaving BASIC and Fortran IV behind. In one case, a single "goto" doubled the speed of a time-critical application; in the other case, "goto" shortens a segment of code by half and makes the algorithm much clearer. I would not use a goto willy-nilly for the fun of it -- unless I was entering an obfuscated code contest;)
So, I take it back -- there are cases where a goto might be nice. However, they do seem to be about that rare, so I wouldn't want them in an intro to programming any more than I'd want pointers.
Actually atheism [merriam-webster.com] means that you disbelieve there is a god.
Look at definition 2a. And should I take them seriously when they still list (even as archaic) "wickedness" as a synonym?
Agnosticism [merriam-webster.com] means that you can find no justification for either belief or disbelief in a god.
Look at definition 1 there -- that's the "unknowable" definition I was talking about. Do you actually believe the only rational approach is to say that the question of a god's existence is unknowable? I certainly wouldn't be bold enough to commit to that without at least having a working definition of whichever god we're talking about.
My turn: Check Wikipedia, especially the first four sentences. Or better yet, look at the people who actually definethemselves as atheists are saying about it.
By contrast, I know very few who positively assert that there is no God, or there are no gods, and they don't seem to have a problem with the word "atheist" describing those who just don't believe, rather than actively disbelieving. The only people who seem to have a problem are religious people who want to strawman us, or atheists who don't like the negative connotation and want some sort of a middle ground, so they self-identify as agnostics.
We can't say anything for sure other than "I sense these things."
Which is still more than cogito ergo sum. And we can say more than that -- that they exist.
Of course I try to root out contradictions, mine and other people's. I just don't mock people for them, it's not worth the effort. I prefer good, clear logic rather then getting emotions involved.
Ah, I see....whereas I find mocking is sometimes the only appropriate response. Fred Phelps isn't going to respond to good, clear logic. He's not going to respond to mocking, either, but it's a lot more fun than trying to reason with him.
But it looks like we don't actually disagree on much here.
I actually did think for myself when I rejected GOTO. I actually went back and read the "GOTO considered harmful" essay.
Can you provide an example of when goto is appropriate -- in particular, when it's appropriate to use a goto rather than actually structured programming, or even a safer option like break, return, or throw?
Slashdot Mirror
Even if I were too old to rant about it, there's still some practical steps I can take. Between work and school, there's no way I can spend that much time on games, so I choose the ones I actually play carefully.
Put it this way: Why would you play a bad game when you can play a good one? There are so many games to choose from, it's actually getting reasonable to boycott DRM altogether. It's even getting reasonable to only play games which run natively on Linux.
I'm more than happy to buy games. What I'm not happy to do is have certain DRM on my system (actually as harmful as any malware), or vote with my dollars that shit like this is OK.
Worse, they might corrupt the whole idea by supporting USB, but requiring the charger to authenticate itself, and either refusing to charge or deliberately drawing less power when you detect the wrong charger.
I think we (along with most people) would agree with the following-- that while it may be bad to murder a stranger, it is worse to murder a friend, and much worse to murder a parent.
I don't, or at least, it's not a distinction that matters to me. What matters to me is that I have no intention of ever murdering anyone, and when others do, my concern is what to do about them. Since I don't believe in vengeance, "what to do about them" isn't about making sure they "pay for their crimes", it's about making sure they don't kill again, making them productive members of society if it's possible, and hopefully making it enough of a deterrent that others are less likely to murder.
We see such familial crimes as worse in part because the one doing the killing owes so much to the one he murders.
I'm not sure that's the case -- is a child killing a parent worse than a parent killing a child?
It would seem to me that if you extend that idea to the one who you owe the very conception of existence to, the punishment for even minor crimes would be correspondingly magnified.
Your family must be very different than mine. With my family, and friends, and even casual acquaintances, it seems that the closer I get to someone, the more likely I am to be forgiving of little things, in favor of focusing on what actually matters.
the crimes we commit are against one with such high standards, and to whom we owe so much, that no attempts by us can ever exonerate us.
And he knows this. In other words, the person (being?) setting the standards is deliberately setting them so high no one will reach them, and then punishing them for falling short. It's like a parent beating his child because the child can't fly.
David's sin was lack of trust. IIRC earlier in either Samuel or Chronicles, the Israelites were told NOT to construct large armies, but to rely on the Lord. David's intention was to perform a census for the express purpose of judging his military readiness, a clear violation of the implicit command to trust.
Emphasis mine.
So nothing was ever said about counting the armies you have (or how large "large" is), and it's even acknowledged that it's an implicit command. And this still doesn't address the question.
Normal person: "You didn't trust me. I'm disappointed."
Mob boss: "You didn't trust me. If you ever fail me again, I'll kill your family."
Serial killer: "You didn't trust me. My trust issues are going to make me somewhat unstable, so I'm just going to kill a dozen random people."
God: "You didn't trust me. I'm going to kill seventy thousand of your people!"
Loving? Really? I can only imagine what God would've done if Abraham had refused to sacrifice his son.
You can clearly see that he is a God who values covenants, truth, and "holiness" (perhaps best defined as being set apart, isolation from moral corruption) highly enough to put a high price on their violation;
Defining "holiness" in terms of moral corruption buys you nothing. I consider killing seventy thousand people as punishment for a lack of faith to be petty and morally corrupt. By your own definition, then, I would have to judge God as unholy.
That leaves covenants and truth. I think we can boil this down to just truth, because what's the worth of a covenant with a dishonest being? But God didn't tell the whole truth about the Tree of Knowledge. He certainly wasn't honest about his intentions for Abraham's son -- that, or he was fickle, commanding one thing, then another. There's a number of things attributed to God, particularly in Job, which are metaphor at best -- "corners of the Earth", for instance.
Even if I grant covenants, the way he goes about enforcing them is brutal. He promised the land of Canaan to Abraham. Fine. But to keep this covenant, he led the Israelit
The other difference is that here, at least the laws aren't as totalitarian. I'd rather have politicians who dishonestly slap me from time to time (then claim they didn't) than politicians who rape me openly.
I admit my views on sex ed are considered outmoded. 10-year olds having sex with 8-year olds is a problem, but how to 'solve' that problem is beyond me. Our culture glorifies sexuality so much its inevitable.
The way I was brought up, it wasn't likely to happen. I'm not sure if that's because my parents did a good job, or because I was a geek.
And my example 'you killed another person unjustly' is called murder. Sometimes we, as a society, consider the circumstances of a particular murder so heinous or depraved that we require the life of the murderer in exchange. Right or wrong, that's the law. I'm not at all sure whether I support it or not.
It's true, it's the law... I think we were talking about right or wrong. Personally, I feel that "fairness" isn't really what this is about. I don't think vengeance is ever a good reason. The reasons we lock people up are:
I don't think there's another good reason, or really another good reason to punish people. It's not at all important to me that a murderer gets what they deserve. It's far more important to me that they don't murder again.
Of course self-defense is an interesting problem. Can you subdue your attacker with less than deadly force? But honestly, we are probably arguing over the grey, not the black and white.
Maybe. This one doesn't seem terribly complicated -- for instance, it may be that I could've subdued the attacker with less than deadly force, but it would've put me at considerably greater risk... My personal rule (which I've been fortunate enough not to have to test) is that once you attack me physically, you've given up any right you had to expect me not to hurt or kill you. If I can subdue without killing you, even without hurting you, so much the better, but it's just not a priority at that point.
I'm not sure we're actually arguing about this point, though.
Your points about gay marriage do really speak to the fundamental point. Gays (and I somewhat hate using that term, it's simplistic and terse, but using 'homosexuals' seems stuffy, and well, perhaps an unintentional insult)
Well, if either "gay" or "homosexual" is an insult, you really can't win. I support the rights of a broader group, but I'm not sure there's a better word. For instance, if one of the two getting married is transsexual, is it gay or straight marriage? I don't really know, don't really care what we call it, but I don't see a reason to prevent it.
truly want to be accepted into society, not tolerated or enjoyed as amusement. I understand their desire to be accepted. Until even a simple majority agrees, that isn't going to be written into law....
I'm not sure that's what the gay marriage thing is about, though, or "Don't ask, don't tell." This isn't about people accepting them in any way other than allowing them the same rights as anyone else.
In the case of marriage, one simple solution would be to remove marriage as a legal concept and rephrase everything in terms of civil unions. Short of that, the issue is that a legally-recognized marriage gets tax breaks that a gay one doesn't, at least not in all states. The original reason for these tax breaks is that families were seen to be a positive contribution to society -- and this wasn't just someone's opinion about a moral good, you can actually find studies which show this to be the case.
So while I realize it may be politically difficult to get people to apply the same logic, you can run studies as to whether gay marriage carries the same secular benefits as straight marriage.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I'd much rather see many of these decisions resolved in
If the interpretation finds itself at odds with the rest of scripture, I would call it erroneous.
At odds with an interpretation you accept of the rest of scripture, you mean?
Only if you skip the parts about His covenants, which man violated,
The problem is first, this doesn't always seem to be the case, and second, the punishment is nearly always disproportionate to the crime -- what we'd call "cruel and unusual" in our human justice systems. Worse, often God punishes people who were not involved at all.
Take 1 Chronicles 21:9-14. First, why punish David at all? The closest I could find to an explanation was this. Seriously? According to that page, David's being punished because knowing the strength of his armies could lead him to sin? Or maybe God just hates that it was Satan's idea -- assuming that is, indeed, the more accurate translation.
Whatever the excuse given, I can't find God ever telling David he couldn't conduct a census, especially given that Gideon was allowed to count his armies. What "covenant" was being broken here?
Even if it was wrong, David counted some people. He. Counted. People. In what morality is that such a horrible crime as to justify slaughtering 70,000 of God's own chosen people?!
And God didn't even punish David. He punished David's people. Sure, that punishes David indirectly, but that means 70,000 people who did nothing wrong were punished for the crimes of one person. Were these 70k sinful in some other way? Perhaps, but it's pretty clear they're not being punished for that, they're being punished for David.
...and his perfect judgement and his holiness.
That's what I was talking about with the second bit you quoted. But if you simply take the Bible as historical fact, you don't know God is perfectly just and holy. All you really know is that he says he is, and that some people said he was -- and that's the perspective I'm using here.
If you just accept a priori that God is good and just, then this entire discussion is pretty much useless, because you've already made up your mind before you turned a single page of that book.
when you speak of Hitler's injustice, surely you are appealing to some absolute, internal sense of justice which you assume I share?
I'm appealing to whatever sense of justice you have. Most people base theirs on a simple moral intuition, or on some basic principles.
I left out one or two logical steps because I thought they were self-evident-- "If the bible is not true, then God is not a capable judge of any and all who sin; if he is not a capable judge, then justice is not done by his actions...."
And that exposes the fallacy I wouldn't have made: "if he is not a capable judge, then justice is not done by his actions..." That's a non-sequitur. If he's not a capable judge, he might do just things anyway by accident. All that follows is that "he is just" is no longer a justification for declaring his actions to be just.
No, my premise is that you cannot simply define God as just by fiat
I can get there from the premise that he is the creator,
Not just from that, you can't...
..."just" appeals to an absolute created by him.
Aside from the point that there are standards of justice independent of any deity which we generally share, I don't think this helps you. He could well have created a standard and then chose to be unjust by his own standard. After all, he's the one who wrote "Thou shalt not kill," and he has by far the highest body count of any character in the Bible.
I'd also like you to show me this, because I don't see it in Genesis.
There's an o
The two are the same.
...oh dear.
If you are without the belief that there is a theos, that is practically the same as the belief that there is no theos.
There is a world of difference between a positive assertion and a simple lack of belief. Let me put it this way:
Do you believe I'm wearing a black shirt?
Do you believe I'm not wearing a black shirt?
If you said "yes" to either of the above questions, that's a belief -- you're saying you believe something which, particularly in this case, you don't have sufficient evidence to know. And why couldn't you say "no" to both questions? The only thing you can't do is say "yes" to both questions and be consistent.
That doesn't mean all things you don't believe are of equal certainty. For example:
Do you believe I have a million dollars?
Do you believe I don't have a million dollars?
Well, especially if you knew me, you'd be a bit more skeptical. But could you say you absolutely know for certain I don't? Have you searched every bank in the world, under my mattress, everywhere it could possibly be to be sure I don't have the money?
Now, it may be that people who positively assert that there are no gods end up with similar ideas and opinions to those who don't assert any positive belief whatsoever about the existence of gods -- but then, it could also be argued that secular ethical systems are very similar to liberal Christian ethical systems. That doesn't change the fact that the underlying philosophies are very different.
To put it another way, saying that atheism is a "belief system" is like saying not collecting stamps is a hobby. (That isn't mine, but I don't remember who said it.)
you are losing sight of the fact that in modern english, athiesm is an ism (to quote wikipedia [wiktionary.org], "a principle, belief or movement").
Note the 'or'. It's a principle, and a very simple one, with no dogmas and very little to unify those who profess it. The only thing I mean when I say I'm an atheist is that I lack a belief in God.
I dont know what the fuss is about,
This is about basic understanding, even definitions, which you seem to be getting repeatedly and profoundly wrong.
...discomfort at the idea that everyone has a belief system of their own, even if they would prefer to think of their own as mere rejection of all others...
I never said that. In fact, I said pretty much just the opposite, early in this thread:
No one word is sufficient to define me. I'm also a software developer, son, brother, gamer, geek, martial artist, and forever a student -- and these are not sufficient to define me, either.
That encompasses a lot of opinions, beliefs, preferences, and other things that make up a personality. I'll extend that list: I am generally a naturalist, in that I believe that there is nothing supernatural -- that things we might consider to be supernatural (ghosts, aliens, gods), if they existed, would only be following natural laws we don't yet understand.
I also care about what's true -- I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible. To that end, I currently don't see sufficient evidence to believe in any gods, but that's entirely a result of the evidence. If presented with sufficient evidence, I will change my mind. So atheism isn't even a core principle for me, it's entirely secondary.
Point is, atheism itself doesn't imply any of that. There are atheists who believe all kinds of crazy things. There are even atheists who pray -- a significant subset of Jews and Buddhists are atheists.
The point isn't that I believe nothing, or that atheists believe nothing. The point is that atheism, by itself, is not a belief system and does not say what you think it says.
Just guessing (!!!) that you talking about an enterprise situation
Nope. I'm talking about taking my mother, sitting her down in front of Try Ruby, and watching her figure it out pretty much on her own. I'm not saying she was a good programmer by the end of it, but it wasn't hard to follow.
No, she wasn't a programmer.
Tryruby.org is for people with knowledge of another language not for teaching basic programming principles.
If you say so. I've seen people who don't know anything about programming follow that tutorial well enough.
they would then have to completely relearn everything to move to other mainstream languages and not also understand the stuff that makes ruby a good language.
Maybe. But some of that stuff is pretty accessible. Try going back to setters and getters in Java after using attr_accessor.
It just seems wrong, since at 8 children that are using condoms are at least in a situation where someone is violating the law.
That "someone" being, say, a 10-year-old friend?
More importantly, while I see your point, I also think it makes sense to teach children before they will need to know. They're going to be sexually mature in a few years, and it'll likely be before you notice.
I do like the approach my parents took. They didn't give me "the talk", they gave me a book to read. It wasn't required, it was just if I was curious. This was also the approach they took to my questions -- they answered exactly what I wanted to know, and truthfully -- not a word about the stork, and I was never told "When you're older..."
Ah, but the 'damned good reason' varies from 'you killed another person unjustly' to 'you drew a picture of Mohammed'. Universal values? Not in that example.
I don't think either of those are sufficient -- and drawing from the universal value of life, there are plenty of situations where the answer is obvious. Someone's trying to kill you, unprovoked? Kill them in self-defense. It's easy to make that rational: If someone has to die, better it be the person who started the fight.
By contrast, why do we have to kill someone for either of the reasons you listed?
Unfortunately, if we want people to be free to live as they want, some want to live in ways we don't.
This is the fundamental difference between what I'm describing and what seems to be common conservative philosophy:
Some will want to live in ways I don't. So long as it doesn't affect me, I don't feel I have a right to make them stop. I may not like what they're doing, but that's not up to me.
In the West, we have an additional value that speech should generally be free -- that being offended is really my responsibility. You could deliver the same insult to two people, and one would be offended, and one wouldn't -- and this is actually something you can choose, not to be offended.
So, I agree with this:
Freedom is nothing if it is cast only in our image.
The point is for us to have as much freedom as we possibly can, while not giving anyone the freedom to harm another.
In light of that:
But the issue of gay marriage is entirely different. If it were a simple as gay couples wanting to be together and publically acknowledged, that is already done. But they seem to want to change the definition of marriage in a way I don't support.
Why does it matter? It's their marriage. How does it harm you?
It changes the definition of family as well.
No, it doesn't. There are families which are married, and marriages which will never produce families.
I don't see how preventing gay marriage is going to prevent gay families, and I certainly don't see how any of this is going to affect straight families.
Having said that, though, if gay marriage becomes the law of the land wherever I am, well, I'll be fine, and accept it, and move on.
That's admirable, but it's not really enough. If there's a vote on the issue of gay marriage, for instance, you do have a say.
...what happens politically is His will. I make my views known, I vote, and I accept the authorities He permits. What else am I to do, challenge God's authority to make the world as He sees fit?
What would you do with a corrupt regime, then?
If everything in the world that happens, truly happens according to God's will, I'm not really sure how you can say that anyone is sinful. For them to be able to sin, to do something God doesn't want, they would have to be able to do something contrary to God's will.
So wouldn't it follow that a government can be evil and sinful, and it could be your duty to do w
So why is it not fair for me to say (regarding the inquisition) thats not Christianity, its opression?
If you can justify it, sure. But by what definition of "Christianity" do you justify saying that the inquisition either was not propagated by Christians, or was not a Christian thing to do?
By contrast, it's trivial to justify an atrocity directly from a religious text.
Not without making rather serious errors of judgement and interpretation.
I'm not sure what you mean by "errors of judgment" in this case, but "errors of interpretation" -- by what metric do you judge which is and is not a correct interpretation?
If we start with the proposition, "The Bible is truth from God",
The Bible is self-contradictory, so that proposition fails immediately. Suppose that wasn't the case...
it is easy to reach conclusion A, that God is the only truly capable judge, and that he is within His "right" to judge wicked people.
That depends what you mean by "truth". If you mean that the Bible is historically true, that the events it described actually did happen, then God is a monster of incalculable evil.
The only way around this is to accept a further "truth", that when the Bible says God was doing something just, it was, because the Bible is true. If the Bible were consistent, and if you did accept it as absolute truth, I really have no argument. There's really nothing I can say to Fred Phelps, for instance.
But you're actually proving my point. You haven't presented an argument for how you know God is just. You've only asserted that he is, and therefore, anything he commands is just. And I hate to Godwin this, but Hitler did believe he was doing God's work, and he's a perfect example -- either he was right, in which case everything he did is justified, or he was wrong, in which case he was a monster. How do you know he was wrong?
Regarding the "truth" of the Bible, this is especially circular. Even if you know it's from God, how do you know it's the truth? Because God is just, right? But how do you know he's just? You just admitted it's because the Bible says so.
The mistake you are making is that, in arguing against my position, you start with the premise "well, the main thing you believe in (Biblical truth) is wrong; therefore God is not just; therefore he has no right to judge people; therefore doing so proves that the Bible is false; therefore God is not just...
Let's not strawman, shall we? I mean, "therefore God is not just" is a pretty blatant non-sequitur. I'm capable of logical fallacy, but I don't think I could make one that obvious if I tried.
No, my premise is that you cannot simply define God as just by fiat. We discover the character of a person by their actions, and I see no reason for a deity to be judged any other way. And like it or not, you do judge your god -- only in your case, you judge him to be just because the Bible says so.
It seems that if we are to judge him fairly, it must be from an unbiased stance. We have to judge him by the same standards we judge anybody else.
And if any human did what God has supposedly done, they would be seen as a monster.
An all-knowing and all-powerful god has it even worse -- pick just about any of the things in that video, and you and I, humans, could come up with less painful ways to accomplish the same goals.
You may be correct, but I havent seen any statistics on that. Seemed a rather bold statement regardless.
Not particularly. I'm not judging baptists at all. However, it does seem that all of the loudest and most irritating creationists are baptists.
Lets not take things out of context or misquote them, please. The full quote ends with "until all is accomplished", the
Nowhere does it say it's a "belief system", first of all. It's the simple negation of theism, which is the belief that there is a God. The negation of that is again the lack of that belief.
And listen to yourself. "Without God." Yes, that's what it means. I'm not really sure how you get from there to "a belief system around the idea that there is no theos," as opposed to, say, "the state of being without the idea that there is a theos."
The main reason i was thinking of is that there are multiple ways to do the same thing.
And why is this bad?
For/while loops can use *.each, num.times ... can be use to generate the same resault (where to use each one is not immediately obvious if your witting your first program)
Same problem exists between for and while. Every language is going to have some sort of choices built in.
I don't know if I have an intelligent response, other than to suggest you go to tryruby.org and type 'help'. It actually makes the idea of a "block" feel natural, and they're covered before any actual loops happen.
That's pretty stupid. If you can learn GOTO, you can learn jump. But until you need it for assembly, why would you want to?
Why would a programmer keep using a tool if it's much worse for the job? It just doesn't really happen.
You're lucky, then, or exceptional. Or at least, speaking only for myself, I do have to spend years building habits like version control (killing the bad habit of commenting tons of stuff out and in to make it work), automated testing and especially any sort of test-first development, and so on.
Also, I think GOTO's have one advantage for a learning language aimed at small children: It's easier for a child to learn and understand, as a building block / stepping stone toward more complex things. For some reason, I even remember this learning process (using basic, that was popular then) when I was a small child, on our 48K ZX Spectrum ... GOTO's were easy and obvious, but I recall seeing these weird GOSUB things that seemed more abstract somehow.
I remember that, too. But I also remember that when I first saw functions, they made sense. Maybe the GOSUB syntax was just unhelpful?
Finally, any good programmer needs to do significant amounts of assembler at some point in his life, and you're gonna be doing lots of JMP's there anyway, and yet nobody considers that 'learning bad habits',
I would say that's mostly because assembly generally isn't taught as a first programming language. By the time you learn assembly, you already understand structured programming and why it's a good thing, certainly by contrast to assembly.
There are many other bad habits that cause FAR more damage in real-world programming, and yet nobody even cares to teach those in formal Comp Sci or Engineering programs.
I'd certainly like to hear about those. I'm in an odd situation where instructors in my formal Comp Sci program actually listen to me. (Of course, it's academia, so even if they took me as seriously as I'd like them to, it'd still take years to change...)
Have a look at PowerBASIC [powerbasic.com], for example.
DOS/Windows and proprietary? No thanks.
In my opinion a key point which makes BASIC great as a beginner's language is readability. It's more or less plain english and stays away from all that curley bracket/semicolon stuff.
So does Ruby. More so, I'd argue.
When you're telling the CPU what you want it to do ?
In what sense?
I'm telling the CPU what to do when I type here, but I'm certainly not giving it a jump instruction, or any other instruction, manually. I'd have to be insane to do so just to type up a Slashdot post.
Now, if I needed assembly for some reason, yes, a jump instruction becomes relevant. I can't remember ever needing assembly for anything.
and how is GOTO different than exception handling?
Exception handling is structured, and it does things GOTO can't, that I know of. For instance:
This puts the actual error-handling code somewhere up the stack where it's actually relevant.
Its just a more generalized version of using break, continue, etc.
Well, in the same sense, it's also a more generalized version of a loop, but you still use structured loops, don't you?
Break, continue, return, etc, are all limited in scope. They do one thing, and do it well. Aside from being clumsier for the things I'd use a break for, goto can take me anywhere else in the program.
I'd have to imagine that if your state transition is effectively the end of that function, tail-call optimizations could still be done. For instance:
Effectively a goto, but semantically a function call. Why wouldn't that be caught as a tail call?
Another good reason is to avoid unnecessary indentations. If I had a dime for every time I saw code like
I know return is effectively a goto, but I do prefer it, along with break, continue, and exceptions, as a more structured approach. So I'd do:
Pretty much the same as:
It's also worth noting that "break" is a scope-limited goto, yet few have issues with it.
Well, precisely because it's limited in scope and much better defined. I also have far less of a problem with, for instance, the way Java handles references than with the way C++ has stack objects, references, and pointers, complete with pointer arithmetic. It may be the same thing in some abstract sense, but there's far less opportunity to screw it up.
One, to avoid repeating cleanup/logging code [c2.com] when an error occurs within a deeply nested conditional. There are many who disagree with the use (or overuse) of exceptions, especially when used to control normal flow rather than catching true errors.
Why is a goto better than an exception in this case? Seems to me that things like break, return, and exceptions are effectively goto, but somewhat more structured and safe.
Two, when you're writing in assembler.
Fair enough.
Did you reject GOTO as a way to forever avoid writing anything in assembly?
Perhaps. I certainly reject it when I'm not forced to write assembly.
it misrepresents the content of the letter.
I'm not sure how the original title makes it any better.
Good enough for you?
Probably not, but let's see:
they are often more readable than large amounts of indentation.
Solution: Use two spaces to indent.
But I think the most telling bit is this:
That said, I have used exactly two "goto" statements in all the lines of C, ;)
C++, Fortran 95, and (yes) COBOL I've written since leaving BASIC and
Fortran IV behind. In one case, a single "goto" doubled the speed of a
time-critical application; in the other case, "goto" shortens a segment of
code by half and makes the algorithm much clearer. I would not use a goto
willy-nilly for the fun of it -- unless I was entering an obfuscated code
contest
So, I take it back -- there are cases where a goto might be nice. However, they do seem to be about that rare, so I wouldn't want them in an intro to programming any more than I'd want pointers.
Actually atheism [merriam-webster.com] means that you disbelieve there is a god.
Look at definition 2a. And should I take them seriously when they still list (even as archaic) "wickedness" as a synonym?
Agnosticism [merriam-webster.com] means that you can find no justification for either belief or disbelief in a god.
Look at definition 1 there -- that's the "unknowable" definition I was talking about. Do you actually believe the only rational approach is to say that the question of a god's existence is unknowable? I certainly wouldn't be bold enough to commit to that without at least having a working definition of whichever god we're talking about.
My turn: Check Wikipedia, especially the first four sentences. Or better yet, look at the people who actually define themselves as atheists are saying about it.
By contrast, I know very few who positively assert that there is no God, or there are no gods, and they don't seem to have a problem with the word "atheist" describing those who just don't believe, rather than actively disbelieving. The only people who seem to have a problem are religious people who want to strawman us, or atheists who don't like the negative connotation and want some sort of a middle ground, so they self-identify as agnostics.
We can't say anything for sure other than "I sense these things."
Which is still more than cogito ergo sum. And we can say more than that -- that they exist.
Of course I try to root out contradictions, mine and other people's. I just don't mock people for them, it's not worth the effort. I prefer good, clear logic rather then getting emotions involved.
Ah, I see. ...whereas I find mocking is sometimes the only appropriate response. Fred Phelps isn't going to respond to good, clear logic. He's not going to respond to mocking, either, but it's a lot more fun than trying to reason with him.
But it looks like we don't actually disagree on much here.
I actually did think for myself when I rejected GOTO. I actually went back and read the "GOTO considered harmful" essay.
Can you provide an example of when goto is appropriate -- in particular, when it's appropriate to use a goto rather than actually structured programming, or even a safer option like break, return, or throw?