Did you kknow marriage wasn't a religious sacrement in Christianity before the 1700s?
Wrong. If marriage wasn't a sacrament before the 1700s, then Martin Luther couldn't have rejected it as a sacrament nearly two centuries earlier. Are you unaware of this debate among the first Protestants? Anyway, as it happens, liturgical texts for marriage as a sacrament go back to the early Byzantine era (mid-first millennium).
Ladies and gentlemen, it's roman_mir, turning any Slashdot news post into a soapbox for his libertarian hobby-horse since 200X (or whenever exactly UIDs were in the low six digits).
These Belgian swine aren't legally permitted to charge children to BORROW these same books from the library and read them THEMSELVES
I don't know about Belgium, but in many European countries libraries pay an annual fee to copyright holders to partly compensate them for perceived lost sales. Also, some European cities don't have the concept of free public libraries, and some kind of annual membership fee is required. Thus, even if the children aren't paying anything, their parents are.
By the way, on Slashdot you can use the bold and italic HTML tags for the sake of emphasis, not need to write in caps which looks like SHOUTING.
There may well be a market for that. I drink Red Bull for the taste, but I don't need the energy effects (and in any event, my body has long since built up a tolerance to the caffeine). Thus I think it would be nice if there were a caffeine-free version of this drink.
Let me introduce you to Facebook: The Missing Manual, an earlier installment in this same series from O'Reilly. Amazon also shows several other Facebook manuals in print. Eventually there's a market for Facebook help.
"Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power." -Benito Mussolini
Besides the fact that Mussolini's use of the term "corporate" in other contexts does not refer to businesses in the sense we use it, this particular quote seems to be spurious and it's likely that he said no such thing. Please don't perpetuate false quotations.
They booed Ron Paul when he said we should follow the Golden Rule in foreign policy. (Treat others the way you would want to be treated - do not bomb and kill them.)
Like any ancient text, the Bible is open to any number of interpretations. A reliable way to choose an interpretation is to look at the continual tradition of Christian practice. However, even going back to the very beginnings, there is no support in that tradition for pacifism. Jesus took soldiers among his followers without asking them to give up their professions, and once Christianity spread outside of the Holy Land, the Roman army was one of the places it gained a foothold throughout the Roman Empire. Soldiers could continue to serve in the expansionist campaigns of Rome and remain good Christians. Some of these soldiers are among the earliest saints.
The Church has considered moral commandments like the Golden Rule as binding on interpersonal relationships, not the relationships between states.
Fundamental to Buddhism is that by right thinking and right practices we can be freed from our illusions about the world, and when we become free we see that there is no afterlife and no reincarnation, and can therefore be free of suffering. I think you are confusing certain versions of Buddhism with the teachings of the Buddha.
The very earliest attestations of Buddhism, well before the accretion of most of the mythos around the Buddha, is clear that suffering and samsara (the cycle of rebirths) are one and the same, and that the end of suffering and nirvana (the end of the cycle of rebirths) are one and the same. Nowhere in the canon did Buddha claim there is no cycle of rebirth. If you want to guess that Buddha taught exactly a way of life palatable to contemporary skeptics and this message was immediately corrupted before textual transmission, that's your right, but at least admit it's a guess.
Considering the 3 of the main religions on earth(christianity, islam, and judaism)
Judaism is a "main religion" on Earth? The total Jewish population (that is, both the observant minority and the non-observant majority) is completely dwarfed by the amount of observant Hindus or Buddhists.
Meh, content creation is sooooo passé. All the cool kids today are consuming content provided by others, such as large media conglomerates desperate to get you to download their app. Don't you want to be cool?
Hopefully open sourcing it will give it new life. It would be nice to have a REAL open source platform, and not the pseudo open source with have with Android... I wouldn't mind buying a used Android handset or even an iphone 4S and wiping and re-imaging with Webos. Finally a good quality OS on good hardware.
One of the reasons that Android is not entirely open source is because that good hardware isn't well documented, and therefore you end up having to rely on proprietary drivers and binary blobs. A "good-quality OS" isn't necessarily any good for the hardware you're thinking about.
"Give me controll of a nation's money supply and i care who not sets its laws...."
That is a spurious quotation. There's no evidence Rothschild ever said such a thing. And considering that a great many instances of that quotation on the web are from white supremacist websites, by perpetuating it you don't make yourself look too good (though perhaps that's why you're an AC).
I tried telling my iPhone that it was highly favoured with the Lord, and, behold, it shall conceive in its womb, and bring forth a son. Unfortunately, nothing happened. Maybe I should have more clearly enunciated?
They could, as an alternative, start playing avant-modern classical, like... Xenakis. The subway station with the least crime is the one with no patrons at all.
Xenakis' concerts regularly sell out, and classical journalists note an impressive number of young people. The installations he set up in Paris (for La legende d'Eer) and Shiraz (for Polytope) attracted tens of thousands of ordinary people. Not a good example of contemporary classical music that drives people away.
A bill from 1960 is probably removed from circulation once it hits a bank, but you would still be able to use it to purchase things anywhere.
That's not true for most Eastern European countries. I have occasionally found in an old drawer or between the pages of an old book Hungarian and Romanian currency from 15 years ago, but no shop today would accept it, and there's some uncertainty whether even the national bank in the capital would exchange it these days.
Even the gnostic heresies, whether in the first two centuries or the ones that arose in the medieval era, believed that Christ was born of a virgin and was the incarnation of the Logos. So, your post is irrelevant to the discussion above.
I apologize in advance if I am incorrect, but you seem to state that as though it's a bad thing, while I think that it cannot be such. For those that believe that unalienable rights are given by a Creator, they can continue to do so. Those that believe that they come from simply being human can do so as well. So long as all of us fight for them, seek to preserve them, we all benefit, no?
"Unalienable rights" are rights that do not change, ever. In modern societies, it is recognized that the rights an individual has may change depending on the needs of society at that particular time.
Islam has had a number of reform figures. The Druze and the Agakhani Ismailis are just two groups who arose when some began to question preexisting orthodoxies and claim they had access to some original revelation that mainstream Islam overlooked. Now both sects are pretty content to keep to themselves and they look favourably on many Western customs.
Sure, I think most people in the West would agree that the Arab world could use another reformer, but Islam certainly has had its Martin Luthers.
Many Muslims are pederasts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacha_bazi)
The use of boys for sex in Pashtunistan is a custom that predates Islam by centuries. You might have enough objectionable things within Islam itself to point to, and you only weaken your argument by talking about pre-Muslim customs that linger on.
Depends on what branch of Christianity you're thinking of. Some believe Christ was an ordinary person touched by divinity but not of mystical origin. Such a claim would not be blasphemous to them.
Even Arianism, Nestorianism and classical Unitarianism held that Christ was born of a virgin. The first two still believed he carried out his work as the incarnate Logos, the second person of the Trinity. You are right that for pretty much any view there is a denomination for it, but that wild diversity is a development from only the last two or three centuries. Before that, the orthodox faith and the various heresies agreed on more than they disputed.
The concept of unalienable rights is a product of the 18th century and inextricably linked to religious belief: rights are inalienable because they are endowed by a Creator. Since modern societies find it increasingly unlikely that there is a Creator, that religious basis is no longer tenable and most of the West (with rising nations like China) now follows some variant of utilitarianism where rights are a convenient and mutable legal fiction to ensure general quality of life.
Buddhism believes in gods. It inherited the entire Vedic pantheon. See, for example, the Avatamsaka Sutra where Buddha ascends to Mt. Sumeru to speak with Indra and his buddies. Sure, Buddhism believes that the gods are stuck in samsara, and the Buddha-nature is higher than them, but it has 2500 years of belief in supernatural forces.
It is insulting that you think people do good things just because they are afraid of the great CCTV in the sky.
How is Christians' motivations to do good works for the reward of heaven any different than Buddhists' attempts at right action in order to end the cycle of rebirth?
You're supposed to worship it. For most of its existence, only a selected few could read it anyway.
That's a very Western European-centric view. While literacy rates collapsed there after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, they remained high in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire until its fall in 1453, and literacy followed with Byzantine missionaries' expansion into other parts of Europe and the near east. The controversies that led to the various ecumenical councils were driven by the masses arguing over their interpretation of what they were reading. The Bible was a popular text for most of Christendom.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. If marriage wasn't a sacrament before the 1700s, then Martin Luther couldn't have rejected it as a sacrament nearly two centuries earlier. Are you unaware of this debate among the first Protestants? Anyway, as it happens, liturgical texts for marriage as a sacrament go back to the early Byzantine era (mid-first millennium).
Ladies and gentlemen, it's roman_mir, turning any Slashdot news post into a soapbox for his libertarian hobby-horse since 200X (or whenever exactly UIDs were in the low six digits).
Hebrew University is a secular insitution.
I don't know about Belgium, but in many European countries libraries pay an annual fee to copyright holders to partly compensate them for perceived lost sales. Also, some European cities don't have the concept of free public libraries, and some kind of annual membership fee is required. Thus, even if the children aren't paying anything, their parents are.
By the way, on Slashdot you can use the bold and italic HTML tags for the sake of emphasis, not need to write in caps which looks like SHOUTING.
There may well be a market for that. I drink Red Bull for the taste, but I don't need the energy effects (and in any event, my body has long since built up a tolerance to the caffeine). Thus I think it would be nice if there were a caffeine-free version of this drink.
Let me introduce you to Facebook: The Missing Manual , an earlier installment in this same series from O'Reilly. Amazon also shows several other Facebook manuals in print. Eventually there's a market for Facebook help.
Low-quality genre fiction is nice and all, but it does not fulfill all of a society's needs for literature. Geez, man, get some sense of perspective.
Besides the fact that Mussolini's use of the term "corporate" in other contexts does not refer to businesses in the sense we use it, this particular quote seems to be spurious and it's likely that he said no such thing. Please don't perpetuate false quotations.
Like any ancient text, the Bible is open to any number of interpretations. A reliable way to choose an interpretation is to look at the continual tradition of Christian practice. However, even going back to the very beginnings, there is no support in that tradition for pacifism. Jesus took soldiers among his followers without asking them to give up their professions, and once Christianity spread outside of the Holy Land, the Roman army was one of the places it gained a foothold throughout the Roman Empire. Soldiers could continue to serve in the expansionist campaigns of Rome and remain good Christians. Some of these soldiers are among the earliest saints.
The Church has considered moral commandments like the Golden Rule as binding on interpersonal relationships, not the relationships between states.
The very earliest attestations of Buddhism, well before the accretion of most of the mythos around the Buddha, is clear that suffering and samsara (the cycle of rebirths) are one and the same, and that the end of suffering and nirvana (the end of the cycle of rebirths) are one and the same. Nowhere in the canon did Buddha claim there is no cycle of rebirth. If you want to guess that Buddha taught exactly a way of life palatable to contemporary skeptics and this message was immediately corrupted before textual transmission, that's your right, but at least admit it's a guess.
Judaism is a "main religion" on Earth? The total Jewish population (that is, both the observant minority and the non-observant majority) is completely dwarfed by the amount of observant Hindus or Buddhists.
Meh, content creation is sooooo passé. All the cool kids today are consuming content provided by others, such as large media conglomerates desperate to get you to download their app. Don't you want to be cool?
One of the reasons that Android is not entirely open source is because that good hardware isn't well documented, and therefore you end up having to rely on proprietary drivers and binary blobs. A "good-quality OS" isn't necessarily any good for the hardware you're thinking about.
That is a spurious quotation. There's no evidence Rothschild ever said such a thing. And considering that a great many instances of that quotation on the web are from white supremacist websites, by perpetuating it you don't make yourself look too good (though perhaps that's why you're an AC).
I tried telling my iPhone that it was highly favoured with the Lord, and, behold, it shall conceive in its womb, and bring forth a son. Unfortunately, nothing happened. Maybe I should have more clearly enunciated?
Xenakis' concerts regularly sell out, and classical journalists note an impressive number of young people. The installations he set up in Paris (for La legende d'Eer) and Shiraz (for Polytope) attracted tens of thousands of ordinary people. Not a good example of contemporary classical music that drives people away.
That's not true for most Eastern European countries. I have occasionally found in an old drawer or between the pages of an old book Hungarian and Romanian currency from 15 years ago, but no shop today would accept it, and there's some uncertainty whether even the national bank in the capital would exchange it these days.
Even the gnostic heresies, whether in the first two centuries or the ones that arose in the medieval era, believed that Christ was born of a virgin and was the incarnation of the Logos. So, your post is irrelevant to the discussion above.
"Unalienable rights" are rights that do not change, ever. In modern societies, it is recognized that the rights an individual has may change depending on the needs of society at that particular time.
Islam has had a number of reform figures. The Druze and the Agakhani Ismailis are just two groups who arose when some began to question preexisting orthodoxies and claim they had access to some original revelation that mainstream Islam overlooked. Now both sects are pretty content to keep to themselves and they look favourably on many Western customs.
Sure, I think most people in the West would agree that the Arab world could use another reformer, but Islam certainly has had its Martin Luthers.
The use of boys for sex in Pashtunistan is a custom that predates Islam by centuries. You might have enough objectionable things within Islam itself to point to, and you only weaken your argument by talking about pre-Muslim customs that linger on.
Even Arianism, Nestorianism and classical Unitarianism held that Christ was born of a virgin. The first two still believed he carried out his work as the incarnate Logos, the second person of the Trinity. You are right that for pretty much any view there is a denomination for it, but that wild diversity is a development from only the last two or three centuries. Before that, the orthodox faith and the various heresies agreed on more than they disputed.
The concept of unalienable rights is a product of the 18th century and inextricably linked to religious belief: rights are inalienable because they are endowed by a Creator. Since modern societies find it increasingly unlikely that there is a Creator, that religious basis is no longer tenable and most of the West (with rising nations like China) now follows some variant of utilitarianism where rights are a convenient and mutable legal fiction to ensure general quality of life.
Buddhism believes in gods. It inherited the entire Vedic pantheon. See, for example, the Avatamsaka Sutra where Buddha ascends to Mt. Sumeru to speak with Indra and his buddies. Sure, Buddhism believes that the gods are stuck in samsara, and the Buddha-nature is higher than them, but it has 2500 years of belief in supernatural forces.
How is Christians' motivations to do good works for the reward of heaven any different than Buddhists' attempts at right action in order to end the cycle of rebirth?
That's a very Western European-centric view. While literacy rates collapsed there after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, they remained high in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire until its fall in 1453, and literacy followed with Byzantine missionaries' expansion into other parts of Europe and the near east. The controversies that led to the various ecumenical councils were driven by the masses arguing over their interpretation of what they were reading. The Bible was a popular text for most of Christendom.