I don't think it's fair to equate authoritarianism with christianity. As far as I can tell, christianity is directly opposed authoritarianism. Don't get me wrong, many who claim to be christian advocate authoritarianism, but is it really fair to say that someone subscribes to a philosophy when they either fail to grasp one of it's basic tenants, willfully ignore it, or are lying specifically to give the false impression they subscribe to the philosophy?
Like the other poster said, how can someone claim to be a Christian if they want to ban alcohol? The Bible specifically instructs people to drink it. And it also specifically opposes using force to manipulate the behavior of others. Christianity should not have to own this dark chapter of history, rather it should disown the bastards who perpetrated it.
I'm not sure if you are talking about logical discourse, but I am not trying to assert that adult males do not masturbate. Rather, I am asserting that the distinction between boys and men is about more than age, and that turning regularly to pornography is not something I believe a mature adult should do. So this is not a "No True Scotsman" argument.
If you consider my comment more carefully, you may come to realize that I don't think rape is about sex, nor is pornography or masturbation. That is my entire point.
The rapist does not consider their urges, beyond thinking of them as a need to be filled. This is the pathology of the sociopath: the inappropriate view that other people exist so satisfy his personal needs.
To that extent pornography and masturbation exist to the same end, to allow the viewer/masturbating person to imagine using someone to fulfill their "natural" sexual urges. Though this does not directly injure another person the way rape does, it does injure the person doing the viewing/masturbating. It allows them gain personal gratification from entertaining a false image of reality, thereby disconnecting them from true reality.
But that's the government, you can trust the government. Google puts the information out there for everyone to see. You can't trust the average person, that's why you need the government.
P.S. The sarcasm is implied, but I have written this sentence to explicitly declare it.
That's right, that would be the fair thing to do. Seriously, isn't universal application generally considered an extremely important aspect of maintaining The Rule of Law (TM)?
I love it when the government writes a law forcing someone else to do something, then the government officials who drafted the law take credit for it. Hilarious! As if those idiots ever did anything other than sit around and talk!
Are you kidding me?! If you are sitting out somewhere where john Q public can walk by and see you in the buff, how much could you possibly really care about your privacy? Hey, if you don't want people to know that you sit naked on your porch, stop doing it! They can see you!
Other gospels, as far as I am aware, do not focus on giving an account of the life of Jesus, but rater give accounts of "secret" wisdom given to some of his disciples, myths and parables used to describe christian teaching, and parables and phrases given by Jesus. I just purchased a book containing all the other early works recovered to date, so I'll know better what they say after I've read them.
As far as the gospels go, most believe that Matthew and Luke were written from Mark (and some believe from the "Q-document", a hypothetical collection if phrases and parables spoken by Jesus). If you read John, you'll notice that it is completely different from the other three, both in form, and in terms of which events are described (though it does not contradict them). John reads like a personal account from a close friend, while the other three read like biography.
I was researching the Gnostic gospels because of your comment, and I came across a claim that John was included because it was widely accepted among Gnostics, and extremely important to them, but not considered heretical by the orthodox church. I think it is fitting that the gospel that speaks the most about love would be used in such a way, though it is just a hypothesis.
I don't think it's reasonable to characterize the Bible as a suspicious. The Bible in it's present compiled form has been subject to rigorous literary criticism for sixteen hundred years(and the majority of the Bible has been subject to this treatment for significantly longer than that, with the law of Moses being some three thousand and five hundred years old). I've not heard challenge to it's credibility that would warrant the description you have provided here. I can't prove that those who wrote it were telling the truth, but there is good reason to believe it was written when it claims to have been written.
Likewise, there is good reason to believe these have been used as holy texts for that whole time, and that the books which are presented in the new testament give an accurate account of the early christian movement and philosophy associated with it. Even if the books themselves were not written by the saints, they were definitely written by people associated with the movement, when it was first taking shape. Books which meet that description are generally considered to be a reliable source of historical information (most of the literature doccumenting antiquity is significantly less reliable than that).
Apart from the claims of supernatural occurrences, do you have any reason to believe it is incredible? Whether or not someone will accept it as true has a lot to do with their life experiences when they learn of it, so someone else who has personally experienced some of the things the Bible speaks of will be convinced, while if you have not, you probably won't find it believable.
The Bible is not like the book or Mormon, which makes claims to have been written thousands of years ago and have been recently translated, but offering no proof of the matter. All indications are that it has been continually in use since it's creation, and describes historical events which are supported by archeological investigations and other historical texts.
Seeing as when they compiled the bible, they packed together all of authoritative, trustworthy written documents that gave an account of Jesus' life or spoke of the man, I'd say it's probably going to be pretty hard to find a "authoritative" source which is not present in the Bible. Of course, there are other written documents which mention then man. If you are looking for physical evidence, what kind of evidence are you looking for? He was a guy that lived 2000 years ago. He didn't build or have built monuments in his name, and he spoke out against such things (not that it's stopped "Christians" from doing it since then, but that's another argument). Literature is pretty much the only proof we have that any people in history really existed (we have bones in tombs, but how do we know they are who the literature says they are, and even if we did know, how would that verify other aspects of the literature). If you want to throw out the Bible as proof, what's to stop you from throwing out other literature?
when we classified coin tosses into a "heads" group and a "tails" group, we found that the "heads" group contained 100% heads results, no matter how many times the coin was tossed... we conclude therefore that randomness is an illusion.
Ironically, that is not a bad conclusion given the evidence. Don't ask me to explain, 'cause I won't. But I agree, this study did not tell us anything new.
The reason we have stupid laws is because we have stupid and/or corrupt politicians.
Nope, thanks to The Principle of Democracy(tm) we, the people, are responsible for our stupid laws. The US, congress as a whole, typically has an approval rating in the high '20s or low '30s, and voters are always saying we need to change 'em out. But if you ask them about their own representative, the approval rating is more likely to be in the '60s or '70s. The problem is that voters do not see past their own personal situation when voting, so they vote what's best for them. It is easy for them to see how they have been negatively effected by others' voting, but they fail to see how their votes have negatively effected others.
The evidence suggests she was present at the apartment, which is not at all surprising, because she lived there. It does not in any way suggest she was present in the apartment during the murder.
Uh...no, they really were obviously innocent. There is simply no other way to interpret the physical evidence. And fuck you, by the way, for not caring about the physical evidence. That kind of thinking makes the world hell for many people living today.
It's all well and good to say that they had wildly differing stories, or try to psychoanalyze their stories, but you've got to understand that everyone will act strangely when they are thrust into a situation they don't understand, because they are set up to fail. In the US, we claim that that you have a right to sit down with your attorney before you are questioned because you need to understand what is going on if you have any hope of acting appropriately.
You are simply hypothesizing about what may or may not have been possible when you say "it is entirely possible for more than one person to participate in a murder." That hypothesis has no value in the face of the actual evidence, and facts in the case. You develop a hypothesis to explain evidence, you don't develop a hypothesis and then look for evidence. That's backwards, and it's what was done in this case.
P.S. I am really sorry about the swearing, but your attitude about sending people, who were almost certainly innocent in the face of the facts, to jail because they acted strangely and changed their story is so morally repugnant and appalling to me that if I met you on the street I would probably punch you in the face. I am a pacifist, BTW.
It's not any more common for women to lack sexual urges. But they do tend to work it out differently. My complaint is not so much about masterbation as it is about pornography and, more importantly, fantasy.
What I'm saying is that I, a real man, will acknowledge that something is wrong and do something about it, while a boy might escape into a fantasy to ignore their problem.
I think fantasy can be a reasonable survival mechanism for abused children, but it doesn't have a place in the life of a mature adult, who should be taking proactive action to resolve their problem, or asking for help from others.
Sexual urges are not desires that need to be filled (as one periodically needs to empty their bladder), and I think it's really bad to look at sexuality that way. But I guess we live in a society where people have needs and then they fill them, rather than thoughtfully considering their actions. They have a headache, and instead of asking "what does my headache mean?" they reach for the aspirin or whatever. They want to have sex with someone, but instead of asking what it means and resolving it, they just have sex with them, or they go home and masterbate.
People ask "what is wrong with rapists that they do such things?". Well, the simple fact is that a rapist views his sexual urges as a need to be filled, and then he goes out an fills them they same way our society tells us to fill any other urges. I figured this out a year ago, and I told all my friends about it. It's been a very enlightening experience for me, because women for the most part avoid me entirely (some don't). I'm just like "wow, what would they do if they knew that all men have this problem?!". Society is fucked up, but I'm a lot better of now than I was before. It's no wonder half or marriages end in divorce, if this is how well men and women understand each others' problems going into it.
They also have a preview button. I have mine set so that I have to preview all my posts before submitting them. It saves me from making a lot of the errors I'd make otherwise.
That's the main thing that distresses me, Apple's choices here are likely to lead to a situation where the inferior solution wins out. Just like they way everyone was using dos and windows for the last two decades, we're going to be stuck with something inferior to the app store because Apple won't suck it up and relinquish control.
This is not flaimbait, this is just me stating my opinion (which a lot of people seem to disagree with) based on personal experience. And why does everyone think I'm a woman. I'm a man!
It's basically a coping mechanism. It allows people to be disconnected from reality rather than dealing with it. So you see a lot of lonely people or people who are sexually frustrated doing it, when they should be seeking out real companionship and social interaction. It also can build expectations which can hinder real intimacy when people get into relationships, and bring about unhealthy attitudes toward sex (such as "it's just sex" or the idea that you should accumulate sexual partners).
Ok, that's not what I said, that's the opposite of what I said. I said that the problem with censorship is that it enables parents to think there is not a problem, when there really is one. Does that sound like a pro-censorship standpoint to you?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it's fair to equate authoritarianism with christianity. As far as I can tell, christianity is directly opposed authoritarianism. Don't get me wrong, many who claim to be christian advocate authoritarianism, but is it really fair to say that someone subscribes to a philosophy when they either fail to grasp one of it's basic tenants, willfully ignore it, or are lying specifically to give the false impression they subscribe to the philosophy?
Like the other poster said, how can someone claim to be a Christian if they want to ban alcohol? The Bible specifically instructs people to drink it. And it also specifically opposes using force to manipulate the behavior of others. Christianity should not have to own this dark chapter of history, rather it should disown the bastards who perpetrated it.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
A more apt question is this: What is Entropy?
I'm not sure if you are talking about logical discourse, but I am not trying to assert that adult males do not masturbate. Rather, I am asserting that the distinction between boys and men is about more than age, and that turning regularly to pornography is not something I believe a mature adult should do. So this is not a "No True Scotsman" argument.
If you consider my comment more carefully, you may come to realize that I don't think rape is about sex, nor is pornography or masturbation. That is my entire point.
The rapist does not consider their urges, beyond thinking of them as a need to be filled. This is the pathology of the sociopath: the inappropriate view that other people exist so satisfy his personal needs.
To that extent pornography and masturbation exist to the same end, to allow the viewer/masturbating person to imagine using someone to fulfill their "natural" sexual urges. Though this does not directly injure another person the way rape does, it does injure the person doing the viewing/masturbating. It allows them gain personal gratification from entertaining a false image of reality, thereby disconnecting them from true reality.
I see, did they ask the Google to take down the photos and Google refused to comply or something?
But that's the government, you can trust the government. Google puts the information out there for everyone to see. You can't trust the average person, that's why you need the government.
P.S. The sarcasm is implied, but I have written this sentence to explicitly declare it.
That's right, that would be the fair thing to do. Seriously, isn't universal application generally considered an extremely important aspect of maintaining The Rule of Law (TM)?
I love it when the government writes a law forcing someone else to do something, then the government officials who drafted the law take credit for it. Hilarious! As if those idiots ever did anything other than sit around and talk!
Are you kidding me?! If you are sitting out somewhere where john Q public can walk by and see you in the buff, how much could you possibly really care about your privacy? Hey, if you don't want people to know that you sit naked on your porch, stop doing it! They can see you!
Other gospels, as far as I am aware, do not focus on giving an account of the life of Jesus, but rater give accounts of "secret" wisdom given to some of his disciples, myths and parables used to describe christian teaching, and parables and phrases given by Jesus. I just purchased a book containing all the other early works recovered to date, so I'll know better what they say after I've read them.
As far as the gospels go, most believe that Matthew and Luke were written from Mark (and some believe from the "Q-document", a hypothetical collection if phrases and parables spoken by Jesus). If you read John, you'll notice that it is completely different from the other three, both in form, and in terms of which events are described (though it does not contradict them). John reads like a personal account from a close friend, while the other three read like biography.
I was researching the Gnostic gospels because of your comment, and I came across a claim that John was included because it was widely accepted among Gnostics, and extremely important to them, but not considered heretical by the orthodox church. I think it is fitting that the gospel that speaks the most about love would be used in such a way, though it is just a hypothesis.
I don't think it's reasonable to characterize the Bible as a suspicious. The Bible in it's present compiled form has been subject to rigorous literary criticism for sixteen hundred years(and the majority of the Bible has been subject to this treatment for significantly longer than that, with the law of Moses being some three thousand and five hundred years old). I've not heard challenge to it's credibility that would warrant the description you have provided here. I can't prove that those who wrote it were telling the truth, but there is good reason to believe it was written when it claims to have been written.
Likewise, there is good reason to believe these have been used as holy texts for that whole time, and that the books which are presented in the new testament give an accurate account of the early christian movement and philosophy associated with it. Even if the books themselves were not written by the saints, they were definitely written by people associated with the movement, when it was first taking shape. Books which meet that description are generally considered to be a reliable source of historical information (most of the literature doccumenting antiquity is significantly less reliable than that).
Apart from the claims of supernatural occurrences, do you have any reason to believe it is incredible? Whether or not someone will accept it as true has a lot to do with their life experiences when they learn of it, so someone else who has personally experienced some of the things the Bible speaks of will be convinced, while if you have not, you probably won't find it believable.
The Bible is not like the book or Mormon, which makes claims to have been written thousands of years ago and have been recently translated, but offering no proof of the matter. All indications are that it has been continually in use since it's creation, and describes historical events which are supported by archeological investigations and other historical texts.
The vision, though, is likely massive budget cuts and the end of the program. So, it's understandable that they haven't announced it.
I like these questions, Slashdot needs a like button.
Seeing as when they compiled the bible, they packed together all of authoritative, trustworthy written documents that gave an account of Jesus' life or spoke of the man, I'd say it's probably going to be pretty hard to find a "authoritative" source which is not present in the Bible. Of course, there are other written documents which mention then man. If you are looking for physical evidence, what kind of evidence are you looking for? He was a guy that lived 2000 years ago. He didn't build or have built monuments in his name, and he spoke out against such things (not that it's stopped "Christians" from doing it since then, but that's another argument). Literature is pretty much the only proof we have that any people in history really existed (we have bones in tombs, but how do we know they are who the literature says they are, and even if we did know, how would that verify other aspects of the literature). If you want to throw out the Bible as proof, what's to stop you from throwing out other literature?
Ironically, that is not a bad conclusion given the evidence. Don't ask me to explain, 'cause I won't. But I agree, this study did not tell us anything new.
Nope, thanks to The Principle of Democracy(tm) we, the people, are responsible for our stupid laws. The US, congress as a whole, typically has an approval rating in the high '20s or low '30s, and voters are always saying we need to change 'em out. But if you ask them about their own representative, the approval rating is more likely to be in the '60s or '70s. The problem is that voters do not see past their own personal situation when voting, so they vote what's best for them. It is easy for them to see how they have been negatively effected by others' voting, but they fail to see how their votes have negatively effected others.
The evidence suggests she was present at the apartment, which is not at all surprising, because she lived there. It does not in any way suggest she was present in the apartment during the murder.
Uh...no, they really were obviously innocent. There is simply no other way to interpret the physical evidence. And fuck you, by the way, for not caring about the physical evidence. That kind of thinking makes the world hell for many people living today.
It's all well and good to say that they had wildly differing stories, or try to psychoanalyze their stories, but you've got to understand that everyone will act strangely when they are thrust into a situation they don't understand, because they are set up to fail. In the US, we claim that that you have a right to sit down with your attorney before you are questioned because you need to understand what is going on if you have any hope of acting appropriately.
You are simply hypothesizing about what may or may not have been possible when you say "it is entirely possible for more than one person to participate in a murder." That hypothesis has no value in the face of the actual evidence, and facts in the case. You develop a hypothesis to explain evidence, you don't develop a hypothesis and then look for evidence. That's backwards, and it's what was done in this case.
P.S. I am really sorry about the swearing, but your attitude about sending people, who were almost certainly innocent in the face of the facts, to jail because they acted strangely and changed their story is so morally repugnant and appalling to me that if I met you on the street I would probably punch you in the face. I am a pacifist, BTW.
It's not any more common for women to lack sexual urges. But they do tend to work it out differently. My complaint is not so much about masterbation as it is about pornography and, more importantly, fantasy.
What I'm saying is that I, a real man, will acknowledge that something is wrong and do something about it, while a boy might escape into a fantasy to ignore their problem.
I think fantasy can be a reasonable survival mechanism for abused children, but it doesn't have a place in the life of a mature adult, who should be taking proactive action to resolve their problem, or asking for help from others.
Sexual urges are not desires that need to be filled (as one periodically needs to empty their bladder), and I think it's really bad to look at sexuality that way. But I guess we live in a society where people have needs and then they fill them, rather than thoughtfully considering their actions. They have a headache, and instead of asking "what does my headache mean?" they reach for the aspirin or whatever. They want to have sex with someone, but instead of asking what it means and resolving it, they just have sex with them, or they go home and masterbate.
People ask "what is wrong with rapists that they do such things?". Well, the simple fact is that a rapist views his sexual urges as a need to be filled, and then he goes out an fills them they same way our society tells us to fill any other urges. I figured this out a year ago, and I told all my friends about it. It's been a very enlightening experience for me, because women for the most part avoid me entirely (some don't). I'm just like "wow, what would they do if they knew that all men have this problem?!". Society is fucked up, but I'm a lot better of now than I was before. It's no wonder half or marriages end in divorce, if this is how well men and women understand each others' problems going into it.
They also have a preview button. I have mine set so that I have to preview all my posts before submitting them. It saves me from making a lot of the errors I'd make otherwise.
That's the main thing that distresses me, Apple's choices here are likely to lead to a situation where the inferior solution wins out. Just like they way everyone was using dos and windows for the last two decades, we're going to be stuck with something inferior to the app store because Apple won't suck it up and relinquish control.
This is not flaimbait, this is just me stating my opinion (which a lot of people seem to disagree with) based on personal experience. And why does everyone think I'm a woman. I'm a man!
It's basically a coping mechanism. It allows people to be disconnected from reality rather than dealing with it. So you see a lot of lonely people or people who are sexually frustrated doing it, when they should be seeking out real companionship and social interaction. It also can build expectations which can hinder real intimacy when people get into relationships, and bring about unhealthy attitudes toward sex (such as "it's just sex" or the idea that you should accumulate sexual partners).
Why do you think you'd have to be a woman to not be interested in dating? I'd say that as a whole women are just as interested in it as men.
Ok, that's not what I said, that's the opposite of what I said. I said that the problem with censorship is that it enables parents to think there is not a problem, when there really is one. Does that sound like a pro-censorship standpoint to you?