ou bastard, how dare you imply that Truman did wrong by bombing the Japanese. It is unusual that I will call a person a name . . . but you are a spoiled and arrogant.
You are spoiled to a world where nations fight wars and do not kill civilians. You are spoiled to a world that has had no large conflict in your lifetime. You are spoiled to a world where you are not hungry and people are not killing others for food. You are spoiled to a world where morality is controled by television and all problems can be solved with pretty words and a flesh wound.
Ad hominem. Take your "you damn kids have it so lucky" bullshit and cram it up your ass, grandpa. I fucking dare you to try and justify the mass slaughter of civilians as a morally-defensible method to win a war. If you seriously think that the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki deserved to be wiped out in a nuclear fireball for merely supporting their nation, then you've got serious issues with your moral compass.
You are arrogant because you can not see that things were different during WWII. You are arrogant because you do not see any world other than your own.
World War II is the only war I can name where the "good guys" won by dropping weapons of mass destruction on civilian targets. Excuse me if I sympathize with those poor people who were wiped out in a nuclear fireball.
After inventing it, they requested input from other companies and made it a standard. Why do you think that people pay royalties to Apple for its use?
ColorSync -- no. Color compensation has been done, many times. Apple just built it into a personal computer.
Oh Christ. Just because they didn't invent the concept of color correction doesn't mean they get credit for ColorSync, the industry standard for color correction in desktop publishing? It's a color correction engine that far exceeds anything the competition offers.
QuickTime -- No. Apple licensed the codec from Sorenson.
QuickTime was around before version 3.0, you know. It did exist. It's a media framework, not a codec, and it was the first of its kind. No one had ever implemented the idea of a media framework which could be accessed by any application coded for it with full decoding, encoding and capture capabilities. That's why QuickTime was revolutionary. Are you done making an ass of yourself yet?
That's why they're laws of nature. If we observe a phenomenon that doesn't conform to our understanding of natural law, then we must modify our understanding of natural law to accomodate that phenomenon. The idea of metaphysics is patently absurd and pseudoscientific.
Maybe the finale will involve Rick Berman and Brannon Braga being tied to a fence post and being whipped with flails. They've managed to take a legendary franchise and turn it into a soap opera in space diluted with weekly writer wankfests over "frequencies" and "phases" as solutions to every problem in existence. I can't bring myself to watch it due to the massive amounts of pseudoscience permeating every episode.
I love this idea. In fact, I think that we should start raiding the Bush daughters' rooms and throw them in jail for 3 years. You can't tell me that those two aren't illegally downloading music.
If not them, then certainly the children of representatives and senators. If this guy wants to show how truly just he is, then I'm sure he'd be more than happy to make his children examples of what happens when you don't follow the law.
That "curse of Ham" crap was debunked ages ago. Black people aren't 'cursed' at all, though there have been silly people trotting out that nonsense for some time...:/
Yes, it was "debunked" when Biblical scholars became aware of the fact that civilized people consider slavery reprehensible, so they climbed all over themselves to find a way, no matter how absurd, to interpret the passage so that it doesn't explicitly condone slavery of blacks.
Granted, it never explicitly states that the curse applies to all of Ham's descendents, but Canaan's descendents were treated much worse than his other sons', so that doesn't really help matters much, nor does it excuse the many other Biblical quotes supporting slavery or foreigners.
Below is something I wrote recently [slashdot.org] which attempts to explain how I view "God". I attempt to use science and extrapolate known facts to explain a larger unknown. It's very primitive and can be improved upon but I think it'll click with a number of you.
You don't use anything resembling science. You use pseudoscientific methodologies by invoking scientific sounding terms with no actual idea of their ramifications in real life while ignoring some of the most fundamental laws of physics. If you know nothing about science, then you shouldn't be commenting on it or trying to use it to justify your beliefs.
God and science are mutually exclusive concepts. God is supernatural, while the scientific method assumes a natural mechanism for every phenomenon. There is no way to measure, test, or make predictions from a hypothesis which includes the "God" term, so it is scientifically useless and utterly redundant.
elieving in a being more powerful than us, composed of us, is not "primitive." It is, in my mind at least, enlightened.
Believing in that which you cannot observe with your senses is generally classified as delusional.
Think of us as cells. There are 10-100 trillion cells [yahoo.com] in the human body. Each cell, if it had consciousness, could be thinking, "I'm an individual. There is no Thing 1!"
And it wouldn't matter to me whether my cells believed in me or not, as long as they were acting to further my interests. As soon as one or more turn cancerous (and I notice), they're outta there.
Flawed analogy. Just because you know you exist, and your hypothetical cells wouldn't have to buy into that belief doesn't mean that there is merit in claiming that we must, therefore, be a part of something larger.
I believe that humans are the "cells" of God. God is a quantum structure, created by quantum effects which our collective brains produce. One example follows, which is how I learned to believe in the possibility of telepathy a few years ago.
Please refrain from invoking pseudoscientific terms to try and lend credibility to your beliefs. Science is concerned strictly with the observable universe.
There were two articles I read, separated by about 2 weeks. The first said we had isolated a quantum effect in the laboratory, that of entanglement, and we had proven that information could be transmitted at a distance of up to 10 km (perhaps more, that's the greatest distance they tested) using entangled particles.
The second article said that the human brain works not only on chemical, biological, and electrical principles, but also on the quantum level.
So if the human brain can use quantum effects, and one quantum effect is transmission of information at a distance, and evolution tends to take advantage of existing phenomena -- then I believe that telepathy is possible.
In order for you to pick up what is happening in another person's mind, that person's head must be broadcasting a signal. That signal must reach anywhere in the world almost instantly if the telepathy people are to be believed. This means that it travels at the speed of light and its carrier is a massless particle. This particle must also be an interactive particle in order for you to receive the signal. However, if the signal is not obscured by buildings, or matter in its path of travel, it must be weakly interacting or many orders of magnitude stronger than radio signals. Particles with such high energy as to not be measurably affected by obstructions like concrete walls or interaction with the air over distances in the thousands of kilometers on curved paths would be cancerous. So, this the claims of these telepathy people generate predictions we can test. Are people like Miss Cleo coming down with brain cancer? Is everyone emanating extremely energetic massless particles from their heads, aside from the re
For one, Muslims believe that the old testament is corrupted and that the Qur'an is the only perfect text.
Wrong. They only recognize the writings of Moses and David in the Old Testament, while the rest of it was considered to be corrupted by the Christians. The writings concerning David and Moses are perfectly relevant to examples I gave of Moses being a terrorist (and a raving lunatic who talked to bushes, but that's a different story).
Obviously you know little about Islam or you would know that. Second, taking quotes out of context isn't going to work here. God had commanded them not to worship idols. They did anyway. Moses asked him not to kill them, and God agreed. Then Moses saw what they were doing and realized God was right.
How can you take "It's acceptable to kill people if they don't worship God" out of context? Under which context is this behavior acceptable? If they were warned beforehand? So if I warn someone that I'll snap his neck if he steps on my lawn, I'm justified in that action?
They were well warned. If you could put aside your skepticism for a moment and assume that God (an omnipotent being) was literally in the presence of these people and they still disobeyed, then at least the penalty is technically justified, if subjectively brutal.
You're asking me to actually subscribe to the belief system to objectively evaluate it, and that's patently absurd; do you even know what objectivity is? When I look at that text from a neutral standpoint, the only lesson I can glean is that the Bible supports and encourages killing non-believers. The passage makes it clear that God has no problem with mass-murder of people who aren't worshipping him, and does in fact, encourage it. Whether or not he was actually there or actually exists is totally irrelevant. We know that, according to the Bible, God gets turned on by mass-slaughter.
By the way, that commandment is properly translated "You shall not murder". Murder is not the same as killing.
Fine, that's a minor difference. The actions of Moses make it clear that the indiscriminate killing of people who don't worship God is perfectly acceptable.
Did you ever think that some of us actually still believe in God? We're not talking about an outdated protocol connecting two machines here.
Actually, the situations are plenty analagous. We've developed to the point where we don't need threats of eternal damnation to keep society in line; we have the concept of human rights and respecting those rights, which is completely independent of any religion. We also have science to explain the universe for us. We don't need religion anymore.
And would you make the same broad swipes against other forms of beliefs because *gasp* you found out that people skewed the message to fit their own agenda? You'd be making a lot of broad swipes friend.
"Other forms of belief"? What exactly are you referring to?
You show ignorance by labeling all religions as merely mind control.
Really? Then why are children indoctrinated into religion at a very early age, when it's easiest to get them to accept ideas which would seem utterly preposterous to any thinking adult? Just a coincidence? As time goes on, they stick with those ideas because of low-level brainwashing techniques (prayer, going to church, mindlessly reciting allegiances to gods, whatever). If religion isn't about control, then why do so many religions try and control the conduct of their members?
I've seen first hand what a church can do to help people in a real and meaningful way. And I'm not just talking about "Now you believe so you will go to heaven" type of help. I'm talking about "Hey you didn't have food and now you do" type of help. "Hey your house got blown down by a tornado, don't worry we'll help you rebuild it" kind of help. Real world love and hope, not idealogical bullshit. Some churches teach faith, love, and hope.. as crazy as that might sound.
Perhaps you should read what I wrote before. I didn't say that religions don't do any good, I said they don't do any replaceable good. What makes a religious charity any different from a secular one? Are the dollars it hands out blessed? Worth more? No. Religious charities could all be replaced by secular charities tomorrow, and it'd make no difference. So again, what exclusive, irreplaceable contributions does religion make? Killing people in the name of Allah? Kidnapping children, brainwashing them and possibly raping them in the name of Jesus (see Elizabeth Smart)? Being responsible for the perpetuation of slavery in America well into the 18th century? Perpetuating racism? Hitler's Holocaust, which was inspired by Martin Luther's On Jews and Their Lies? I'm not seeing a whole lot of exclusive value for religion, here.
And another thing - religion didn't invent nor does it hold the patent on evil deeds. Evil is part of humanity. If you get rid of religion it will accomplish nothing.
I never claimed getting rid of religion would completely eliminate evil, but it would greatly reduce it. If there was no religion, we wouldn't have had the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the Holocaust or the World Trade Center attacks, to name a few. That's tens of millions of lives saved right there.
Meet the new boss same as the old boss. We would then have killing in the name of "pure, unadulterated secular humanism and secular ethics" instead.
Don't be absurd. Secular humanism has no infallible authority to appeal to, unlike religions, which state, "This is what God said, so it must be right, no questions asked." Secular humanism grants every human inalienable rights, and any act which causes pain and suffering or a violation of those rights is immoral. How exactly can that be used to justify something like the World Trade Center attacks?
Use your head.
Nothing would change. You are framing the world in the context of the ideal, but try and frame the same arguments in the context of reality and you'll see it's flawed. There wil
See the sons of Ham, specifically Canaan, who was cursed by Noah. The story of Noah's dark-skinned descendents (the sons of Ham) being singled out to serve the lighter-skinned ones is one of biggest reasons that slavery lasted as long in the United States as it did.
Genesis 9:26-27:
He also said, "Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem! May Canaan be the slave of Shem. May God extend the territory of Japheth; may Japheth live in the tents of Shem, and may Canaan be his slave."
Because Ham saw Noah's nakedness, Noah cursed his son, Canaan. This verse (along with others which state that the Israelites are allowed to take slaves as long as they're foreigners) was used to keep slavery around for a long time.
Interesting essay on the history of Christianity and slavery here: http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_slav1.htm
Of course, it IS true that Islam is very... prone to such beliefs what with the 'slay them [infidels] wherever you find them' type verses and they DO sincerely believe Islam however misguidedly, but I honestly think they'd still hate us just about as much even if there was no Islam.
Then you're deluded. You're underestimating the power of religious indoctrination. Religion was originally created as a way for people to claim power by virtue of divine right; so yes, it began as an excuse to justify whatever actions people wanted, but that's changed. Osama bin Laden really, truly believes what he is doing is morally justifiable, and even if HE didn't, the people under him, carrying out the attacks, do.
Do you honestly think that the men who flew the planes into the World Trade Center didn't sincerely believe that they were going to be met by 72 virgins in Heaven for sacrificing themselves to kill the infidels? Don't be absurd. You don't die for a belief system you don't believe in or are just using as an excuse to hate people. You die for it because you're utterly convinced that it's true.
I'm sick of this idiotic "sacred cow" mentality toward religion. Religion is NOT inherently good, and in the case of the Judeo-Christian-Islam triumverate of intolerance, it is irrevocably flawed in numerous ways that have led to untold millions of deaths over the past two millennia. Religion has given us nothing good that couldn't be easily replaced by pure, unadulterated secular humanism and secular ethics, while giving incredible amounts of evil at the same time. The intrinsic value of religion this day in age is a negative quantity. It's a legacy. Time to get rid of the Invisible Man and grow up.
How is it "twisting"? The Old Testament, which is a part of the Muslim faith, advocates the mass-slaughter of unbelievers and heretics. See Exodus, when Moses kills 3,000 of his own people for worshipping a golden calf, straight after receiving the Ten Commandments which included "thou shalt not kill."
Actions speak more loudly than words. Osama is merely following Moses' example on how to get what you want.
Guess where the oppressive beliefs King was fighting against came from?
That's right. The Bible.
Re:Separating Content from Presentation a Good Thi
on
Office 2003 and XML
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That's because the HTML export was meant for the web, so bloat matters. An XML document format is meant for easy readability, so bloat doesn't matter quite as much. This is an extremely obvious distinction.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why they're laws of nature. If we observe a phenomenon that doesn't conform to our understanding of natural law, then we must modify our understanding of natural law to accomodate that phenomenon. The idea of metaphysics is patently absurd and pseudoscientific.
Maybe the finale will involve Rick Berman and Brannon Braga being tied to a fence post and being whipped with flails. They've managed to take a legendary franchise and turn it into a soap opera in space diluted with weekly writer wankfests over "frequencies" and "phases" as solutions to every problem in existence. I can't bring myself to watch it due to the massive amounts of pseudoscience permeating every episode.
I love this idea. In fact, I think that we should start raiding the Bush daughters' rooms and throw them in jail for 3 years. You can't tell me that those two aren't illegally downloading music.
If not them, then certainly the children of representatives and senators. If this guy wants to show how truly just he is, then I'm sure he'd be more than happy to make his children examples of what happens when you don't follow the law.
Oh, and when in doubt, blame college students!
Granted, it never explicitly states that the curse applies to all of Ham's descendents, but Canaan's descendents were treated much worse than his other sons', so that doesn't really help matters much, nor does it excuse the many other Biblical quotes supporting slavery or foreigners.
You don't use anything resembling science. You use pseudoscientific methodologies by invoking scientific sounding terms with no actual idea of their ramifications in real life while ignoring some of the most fundamental laws of physics. If you know nothing about science, then you shouldn't be commenting on it or trying to use it to justify your beliefs.
God and science are mutually exclusive concepts. God is supernatural, while the scientific method assumes a natural mechanism for every phenomenon. There is no way to measure, test, or make predictions from a hypothesis which includes the "God" term, so it is scientifically useless and utterly redundant.
Believing in that which you cannot observe with your senses is generally classified as delusional.
Flawed analogy. Just because you know you exist, and your hypothetical cells wouldn't have to buy into that belief doesn't mean that there is merit in claiming that we must, therefore, be a part of something larger.
Please refrain from invoking pseudoscientific terms to try and lend credibility to your beliefs. Science is concerned strictly with the observable universe.
In order for you to pick up what is happening in another person's mind, that person's head must be broadcasting a signal. That signal must reach anywhere in the world almost instantly if the telepathy people are to be believed. This means that it travels at the speed of light and its carrier is a massless particle. This particle must also be an interactive particle in order for you to receive the signal. However, if the signal is not obscured by buildings, or matter in its path of travel, it must be weakly interacting or many orders of magnitude stronger than radio signals. Particles with such high energy as to not be measurably affected by obstructions like concrete walls or interaction with the air over distances in the thousands of kilometers on curved paths would be cancerous. So, this the claims of these telepathy people generate predictions we can test. Are people like Miss Cleo coming down with brain cancer? Is everyone emanating extremely energetic massless particles from their heads, aside from the re
Actually, the situations are plenty analagous. We've developed to the point where we don't need threats of eternal damnation to keep society in line; we have the concept of human rights and respecting those rights, which is completely independent of any religion. We also have science to explain the universe for us. We don't need religion anymore.
"Other forms of belief"? What exactly are you referring to?
Really? Then why are children indoctrinated into religion at a very early age, when it's easiest to get them to accept ideas which would seem utterly preposterous to any thinking adult? Just a coincidence? As time goes on, they stick with those ideas because of low-level brainwashing techniques (prayer, going to church, mindlessly reciting allegiances to gods, whatever). If religion isn't about control, then why do so many religions try and control the conduct of their members?
Perhaps you should read what I wrote before. I didn't say that religions don't do any good, I said they don't do any replaceable good. What makes a religious charity any different from a secular one? Are the dollars it hands out blessed? Worth more? No. Religious charities could all be replaced by secular charities tomorrow, and it'd make no difference. So again, what exclusive, irreplaceable contributions does religion make? Killing people in the name of Allah? Kidnapping children, brainwashing them and possibly raping them in the name of Jesus (see Elizabeth Smart)? Being responsible for the perpetuation of slavery in America well into the 18th century? Perpetuating racism? Hitler's Holocaust, which was inspired by Martin Luther's On Jews and Their Lies? I'm not seeing a whole lot of exclusive value for religion, here.
I never claimed getting rid of religion would completely eliminate evil, but it would greatly reduce it. If there was no religion, we wouldn't have had the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the Holocaust or the World Trade Center attacks, to name a few. That's tens of millions of lives saved right there.
Don't be absurd. Secular humanism has no infallible authority to appeal to, unlike religions, which state, "This is what God said, so it must be right, no questions asked." Secular humanism grants every human inalienable rights, and any act which causes pain and suffering or a violation of those rights is immoral. How exactly can that be used to justify something like the World Trade Center attacks? Use your head.
How is it "twisting"? The Old Testament, which is a part of the Muslim faith, advocates the mass-slaughter of unbelievers and heretics. See Exodus, when Moses kills 3,000 of his own people for worshipping a golden calf, straight after receiving the Ten Commandments which included "thou shalt not kill." Actions speak more loudly than words. Osama is merely following Moses' example on how to get what you want.
Guess where the oppressive beliefs King was fighting against came from? That's right. The Bible.
That's because the HTML export was meant for the web, so bloat matters. An XML document format is meant for easy readability, so bloat doesn't matter quite as much. This is an extremely obvious distinction.