Well, exactly. My point wasn't that the church was a bastion of tolerance. Rather, I was disputing the claims that 'It took several hundred years of wars to get the Catholic Church under control' and 'We might have had the Industrial Revolution a thousand years earlier without it', neither of which have a basis in fact.
In fact, technology developed faster in medieval Europe than in most other areas, and it developed the fastest during the crusades, when military technology had to evolve in response to the tactics employed by one's enemies.
The Galileo affair was a blip on the radar, albeit an important one for symbolic reasons. In the end, Galileo's views prevailed, and the church did not go an anti-technology rampage (instead, it went on an anti-witch and anti-heretic rampage).
My major point is that if we want to criticize the church, it must be on a factual basis. It would be tragic if the 'Net brought about a new dark ages in which people believe and repeat unfounded claims just because they read someone's website.
And where in the world did you get your ideas about the Dark Ages?!
It would be really helpful for you to read up on the Dark Ages and realize that much of what you have been told about the Catholic Church (and I'm not Catholic, so don't start) is wrong. For example: the reason that Rome didn't develop large private organizations has nothing to do with churches. They didn't develop because Rome was sacked, repeatedly, by barbarians.
Probably Christians too, for all I know, since that was certainly spread by the sword too.
I don't suppose facts might modify your views? Until the Edict of Milan in 313, Christianity was illegal in the Roman Empire. During that time, it spread throughout the empire by means of evangelism. After the Edict of Milan, which legalized all religions in the Empire but gave some preference to Christianity, evangelism continued to be the method by which that religion spread. Saint Patrick's foray into Ireland is a good example of that.
Under some of the late Roman emperors, beginning with Theodosius, the pagan religions within the empire were shut down. But belief was not forced; rather, the temples were closed and the property given over to Christians. It was not until Charlemagne's crowning in 800 that Christianity was spread at all by the sword. And even then, Charlemagne's campaign into Saxony is the only significant instance of Christianity 'spreading by the sword' that I'm aware of.
Even the much-reviled (rightly so!) crusades were all about, to the extent that they were religious, grabbing Jerusalem for the sake of pilgrims: hardly a war of conversion.
Now, if you want to talk about Christians enforcing belief by the sword amongst those already nominally Christian, you'll have more to work with...
Anyone at all is allowed to get away with that argument. The point is that guilt-by-association is a logical fallacy. Just because Eric Rudolph fulfills *someone's* definition of Christian and does reprehensible things does not mean that Christians in general are likely to do reprehensible things.
It all simply turns on an ambiguity in the English language:
'Christians blow up abortion clinics' might mean that there exist some who are both Christian and who blow up clinics, or it might mean that all who are Christian will necessarily blow up clinics. Unfortunately, many confuse the two and take people like Rudolph as evidence for the second statement. He isn't. He's in the news precisely because he's unusual.
The fact is that when you start delegating responsibility to your invisible sky-daddy, then you become capable of justifying a great deal of irrational behaviour. Whether it's refusing condom use in areas where AIDS is rife, refusing to eat certain kinds of animal certain days of the week, or blowing people up is simply a matter of degree.
Your statement is itself irrational bigotry. The justification of actions is a function of ethical norms, not a function of who takes responsibility for the consequences.
Do you have any records of Puritans burning people for being witches? Perhaps during the limited time during Cromwell's protectorate, a few might have been burned. But the Puritans in the U.S. burned no 'witches.' They hanged 16 people in Salem on suspicion of witchcraft or related charges, and then stopped the witch trials entirely when they realized that 'spectral evidence' doesn't carry any real weight.
If you're gonna trash people, at least trash them for factual reasons.
What?! It's the opposite of splitting my attention: I have a coding area; I have a compiling and running area. When I code, I'm focused on the code. When I test, I'm focused on the test results.
Do you somehow think it's *more* focused to have all of your windows on one desktop?
How do you develop code, then? I'm forever having 8 code windows up on one desktop, then compiling and running on another (when working on Linux machines).
I would encourage taking religioustolerance.org with a grain of salt. The writers of that site have a rather strong agenda, and some of the scholarship is quite loose. The article that you linked to has a large amount of FUD.
An excellent place to get the the raw data is to find a Greek NT and read the notes on the textual apparatus. The scholars who edit -- Aland, Metzger, etc. -- are not fundamentalists by a long mile, and their work is highly regarded in the *academic* community. Looking at the textual apparatus can give you the sense of how the New Testament took the form that it has today. The second thing you can do is to get Comfort's book, "Early Manuscripts and Modern Translations", which explains the finds of the last 100 years and how those finds have affected modern interpretive work.
Particular factual inaccuracies in the site above:
In *all* cases, the originals are lost, but we do not rely on translations of those originals, but rather copies. Some of those copies are better, some are worse; but there are so blasted many of them that we have an excellent idea of the originals.
It is false that more accurate renderings are withheld because they would upset the sensibilities of people. Most modern translation work is done by committee, and differences of opinion are usually conducted on scholarly grounds. I am not aware of *any* modern translations which are deliberately misleading on any point whatsoever, and religioustolerance.org does not provide any evidence of such.
The section on "Forgeries in the Bible" is a mixture of well-known later additions: John 7, Mark 16, and the tag on the Lord's Prayer; along with passages which are alleged to have been forged but have no manuscript evidence to confirm such forgery: Matt. 17.11, 1 Cor 14.34 - 35, and John 21. What RT.org does not mention is that during the 19th and 20th centuries, German scholarship (which includes Conzelmann) basically declared that *most* of the New Testament was the work of later writers. Their conclusions were not based on manuscript evidence, but on subjective judgments about tone, flow of thought, and agreement with the rest of the work. Those opinions are continually being revised as more data is uncovered -- and usually, the revisions are in favor of authentic authorship.
Passages in the first category (John 7, Mark 16) are either omitted in modern translations, or included together with large, obvious signs that the passages are likely unoriginal. Passages in the second category (Matt. 17.11, 1 Cor 14.34 - 35, etc.) are retained because there is insufficient manuscript evidence to sustain a charge of forgery or later addition.
It is false that we don't know what Paul's "arsenokoite" term means. The term is clearly attested in the Septuagint in Lev. 18 and 20; it is well-known that Paul quotes the Septuagint frequently; hence, there is little mystery as to where he gets the term or what he means. The protestations of Boswell and McNeill notwithstanding, Paul used "arsenokoite" to refer to homosexuals. Now, you can do with that what you will -- but *Paul's* opinion was clear. This article is, IMO, overly polemic, but it contains valuable information about real scholars. Here is the critique of the first which condemns his conclusions but agrees with his understanding of arsenokoite.
In short, Bible scholarship is serious and careful stuff, and to characterize it as "we don't know anything, and everyone's guessing" is a vast overstatement.
I don't know the GP, but I think I understood what he meant. The term "Fundamentalist" has morphed a long way from its original meaning. Therefore, it is possible to affirm the five fundamentals (thus, being technically a "fundamentalist") without affirming other items of faith commonly attributed to "fundamentalists" -- such as young earth Creationism, for instance, or more to the point, without affirming that gays should be executed.
I don't see how it is anything but prudent and sensible for a gay person to assume that a fundamentalist would happily stone them to death, when they have heard these sentiments bandied about quite happily.
Prudent and sensible, yes... except that gays have to actually live with fundamentalists and acknowledge their existence as human beings in our society. If they can't do that, then they have become the bigots that they despise.
So no, it is not acceptable for someone gay to use an arbitrary religious label as an excuse to treat someone else as if he were a menace to society.
Rich Mullins in concert used to tell this story: he walked into a bar and sat down next to another guy, who eventually asked for a lift. As they were driving off, the guy said, "I'm gay... I hope you're OK with that." Rich responded, "I'm Christian... I hope you're OK with that."
You cannot assume that Jerry Falwell and Fred Phelps speak for Christians. They speaks for themselves, and their followers, ONLY. The rest of us would love to fire them, but we never hired them in the first place.
And, ironically (and thankfully), he died *not* courting danger. According to this, he died while on a low-risk swim filming stuff for a show for his daughter.
I felt bad for being terse and snippy. Sorry; my only excuse is that dinner was on and my daughters were eager to eat.
The possibilities mentioned there are intentionally fanciful; a much more realistic set, like forcing us to build more efficient cars, could better serve a cost-benefit analysis.
This is a very narrow answer to your very broad question, but here goes:
Some crops -- corn in particular -- have been GMed to produce their own biotoxin called Bt. Bt is fairly selective, targeting only lepidoptera -- butterflies and moths. The intended target is the corn borer, a moth caterpillar.
Here's a site that lists the possible problems with Bt. Warning: it's a scare site, so take all claims with a grain of salt.
Nevertheless, there is one claim it makes that I can speak to. Butterflies and moths that nectar in or near the corn field are alleged to be at risk from Bt. Wiki has a good summary of the issue. As it turns out, the risk is relatively low in this case.* However, issues like this raise our general distrust of GM crops because we fear the law of unintended consequences.
* It should be noted with great displeasure that Bt is also sprayed in areas in order to wipe out the Gypsy moth. In that case, unlike the GM crop case, most butterflies and moths in the sprayed area die.
Yes, he made a bunch of unfounded assertions in that regard. In fact, the evidence for global warming is compelling, there is widespread scientific agreement on the matter, and his charges of intellectual dishonesty are baseless.
I tend to agree in general that there is much more data to support human influence on global warming. In *this* specific case, the charge seems slightly better than baseless.
My point is that even if his charges were true, it still wouldn't matter.
I understood your point and responded to it. Intellectual honesty matters, and *if* his charges were true, it would matter, if only because bad behavior provides ammunition for the other side.
Your basic assumption is wrong in that reducing carbon emissions actually has economic benefits to society at large: it means more investments, more jobs, more economic activity, higher productivity, lower defense expenditures. Therefore, we know that reducing carbon emissions is the right course of action.
I don't disagree, but I'm not willing to fully agree until I see hard numbers. For example, it would matter who received the economic benefits over against who would pay for them.
I'm in your shoes, except that my students are ages 15 - 18. I'm teaching a computer programming course for the first time, and I refused to use Visual Basic because it seems to encourage bad programming habits.
My candidate languages were C++, which matches my own programming experience best; Java, which is used on the CompSci AP exam; and Python, which was recommended by an acquaintance.
Python won out, for the following reasons:
An interpreted language gives instant syntax feedback, which is really important for newbie learners.
An object-oriented language teaches better encapsulation and abstraction thought processes than a functional language like C; therefore, I wanted something OO. Python's classes have a significantly lower barrier to understanding than Java's or C++'s.
Python is freeware, which means that the kids can legally install the interpreter at home and work at home on their code. Not so for Visual Studio or most other C++ frameworks that allow students to get graphics up and running.
I wanted my students to be able to create GUIs and even games. Python has lots of packages available for that which are easier to use than corresponding Java or C++ packages.
Documentation and forums are online and accessible to students.
Here is my primary text, and here and here are my supplemental texts.
You should look at this, then. Python has reasonably nice packages that are much easier to program than the equivalent Visual blah packages. And the default, Tkinter, is cross-platform.
It doesn't have to be "better". Because the potential downsides are so huge, it's sufficient for people who are concerned about global warming to demonstrate that it is a plausible possibility and that it has significant costs. That has clearly been done. Furthermore, we know that the costs of carbon emission reductions are small in comparison to the costs resulting from global warming if global warming is occurring.
First, the GP was not talking about "better" in terms of correctness; he was talking about "better" in terms of intellectual honesty. So, no, anyone speaking to this issue or any other should never get a pass just because he's on the right side.
But let's suppose that GP were talking about correctness, as you assume. Does your analysis hold?
I don't think so. Let's say that the cost of reducing carbon emissions is $1e12, and that the cost of global warming would be $1e14. Now, let's suppose that the % contribution of human activity to global warming is %30. So far, reducing carbon emissions saves us $2.9e13.
But... we aren't guaranteed those numbers; instead, we only have a "plausible possibility." Indeed, we have three different "plausible possibilities"
the projected cost of reducing carbon emissions (which might have hidden downsides, like preventing developing countries from being able to develop, or leading to wars over oil or emission quotas; or else might have hidden upsides, like leading us all to go solar or hydrogen fusion, thus shutting off the flow of money and arms to the Middle East)
the projected cost of global warming (which might have hidden upsides, like longer growing seasons; or hidden downsides, like sending Europe into another 14th century-style cold snap), and
the projected contribution of human activity to global warming.
If either (1) is significantly higher than expected, or else any of (2) or (3) is lower than expected, then your analysis fails. In particular, if (3) gets highballed, then we will spend money on carbon emission reduction, only to have to turn around and spend even more money on mitigating global warming.
In short, "plausible possibility" is not enough. You need numbers, and they have to be right.
So yes, there are two sides: the one side must demonstrate conclusively that global warming will cost us thus-and-so, and that doing X, Y, and Z can cost-effectively solve the problem. The other side must demonstrate conclusively that doing nothing is more cost-effective.
Where we can agree, I think, is that getting off of oil would be a Good Thing regardless of which side is correct. Go fusion!
1) Virus writers will write exactly the same code, unless the boys at Consumer Reports are dedicated enough to come up with truly innovative virus variations. So there's no fear that someone out there will "get ideas."
2) Why not vet your software against somebody else's test suite? If CR wants to function as an extension of Symantec's R&D, let 'em. It's a win-win.
Interestingly, being open source may prevent "killer app-erature." After all, if Debian released a killer app, would not MS essentially co-opt it the next day?
...with the article summary, which implies that Linux is going to have to "be compatible" with technology X in order to appeal to the masses. In point of fact, if Linux adopts that strategy it will *never* appeal to the masses, because it will always be catching up.
The only way to have significant appeal is to offer something that the masses want, that Windows can't. Hint: rock-solid security is not something the masses *want*. Yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, exactly. My point wasn't that the church was a bastion of tolerance. Rather, I was disputing the claims that 'It took several hundred years of wars to get the Catholic Church under control' and 'We might have had the Industrial Revolution a thousand years earlier without it', neither of which have a basis in fact.
In fact, technology developed faster in medieval Europe than in most other areas, and it developed the fastest during the crusades, when military technology had to evolve in response to the tactics employed by one's enemies.
The Galileo affair was a blip on the radar, albeit an important one for symbolic reasons. In the end, Galileo's views prevailed, and the church did not go an anti-technology rampage (instead, it went on an anti-witch and anti-heretic rampage).
My major point is that if we want to criticize the church, it must be on a factual basis. It would be tragic if the 'Net brought about a new dark ages in which people believe and repeat unfounded claims just because they read someone's website.
Which wars do you have in mind?
And where in the world did you get your ideas about the Dark Ages?!
It would be really helpful for you to read up on the Dark Ages and realize that much of what you have been told about the Catholic Church (and I'm not Catholic, so don't start) is wrong. For example: the reason that Rome didn't develop large private organizations has nothing to do with churches. They didn't develop because Rome was sacked, repeatedly, by barbarians.
Under some of the late Roman emperors, beginning with Theodosius, the pagan religions within the empire were shut down. But belief was not forced; rather, the temples were closed and the property given over to Christians. It was not until Charlemagne's crowning in 800 that Christianity was spread at all by the sword. And even then, Charlemagne's campaign into Saxony is the only significant instance of Christianity 'spreading by the sword' that I'm aware of.
Even the much-reviled (rightly so!) crusades were all about, to the extent that they were religious, grabbing Jerusalem for the sake of pilgrims: hardly a war of conversion.
Now, if you want to talk about Christians enforcing belief by the sword amongst those already nominally Christian, you'll have more to work with...
It all simply turns on an ambiguity in the English language:
'Christians blow up abortion clinics' might mean that there exist some who are both Christian and who blow up clinics, or it might mean that all who are Christian will necessarily blow up clinics. Unfortunately, many confuse the two and take people like Rudolph as evidence for the second statement. He isn't. He's in the news precisely because he's unusual.
Your statement is itself irrational bigotry. The justification of actions is a function of ethical norms, not a function of who takes responsibility for the consequences.
Do you have any records of Puritans burning people for being witches? Perhaps during the limited time during Cromwell's protectorate, a few might have been burned. But the Puritans in the U.S. burned no 'witches.' They hanged 16 people in Salem on suspicion of witchcraft or related charges, and then stopped the witch trials entirely when they realized that 'spectral evidence' doesn't carry any real weight.
If you're gonna trash people, at least trash them for factual reasons.
What?! It's the opposite of splitting my attention: I have a coding area; I have a compiling and running area. When I code, I'm focused on the code. When I test, I'm focused on the test results.
Do you somehow think it's *more* focused to have all of your windows on one desktop?
How do you develop code, then? I'm forever having 8 code windows up on one desktop, then compiling and running on another (when working on Linux machines).
An excellent place to get the the raw data is to find a Greek NT and read the notes on the textual apparatus. The scholars who edit -- Aland, Metzger, etc. -- are not fundamentalists by a long mile, and their work is highly regarded in the *academic* community. Looking at the textual apparatus can give you the sense of how the New Testament took the form that it has today. The second thing you can do is to get Comfort's book, "Early Manuscripts and Modern Translations", which explains the finds of the last 100 years and how those finds have affected modern interpretive work.
Particular factual inaccuracies in the site above:
- In *all* cases, the originals are lost, but we do not rely on translations of those originals, but rather copies. Some of those copies are better, some are worse; but there are so blasted many of them that we have an excellent idea of the originals.
- It is false that more accurate renderings are withheld because they would upset the sensibilities of people. Most modern translation work is done by committee, and differences of opinion are usually conducted on scholarly grounds. I am not aware of *any* modern translations which are deliberately misleading on any point whatsoever, and religioustolerance.org does not provide any evidence of such.
- The section on "Forgeries in the Bible" is a mixture of well-known later additions: John 7, Mark 16, and the tag on the Lord's Prayer; along with passages which are alleged to have been forged but have no manuscript evidence to confirm such forgery: Matt. 17.11, 1 Cor 14.34 - 35, and John 21. What RT.org does not mention is that during the 19th and 20th centuries, German scholarship (which includes Conzelmann) basically declared that *most* of the New Testament was the work of later writers. Their conclusions were not based on manuscript evidence, but on subjective judgments about tone, flow of thought, and agreement with the rest of the work. Those opinions are continually being revised as more data is uncovered -- and usually, the revisions are in favor of authentic authorship.
- It is false that we don't know what Paul's "arsenokoite" term means. The term is clearly attested in the Septuagint in Lev. 18 and 20; it is well-known that Paul quotes the Septuagint frequently; hence, there is little mystery as to where he gets the term or what he means. The protestations of Boswell and McNeill notwithstanding, Paul used "arsenokoite" to refer to homosexuals. Now, you can do with that what you will -- but *Paul's* opinion was clear. This article is, IMO, overly polemic, but it contains valuable information about real scholars. Here is the critique of the first which condemns his conclusions but agrees with his understanding of arsenokoite.
In short, Bible scholarship is serious and careful stuff, and to characterize it as "we don't know anything, and everyone's guessing" is a vast overstatement.Passages in the first category (John 7, Mark 16) are either omitted in modern translations, or included together with large, obvious signs that the passages are likely unoriginal. Passages in the second category (Matt. 17.11, 1 Cor 14.34 - 35, etc.) are retained because there is insufficient manuscript evidence to sustain a charge of forgery or later addition.
So no, it is not acceptable for someone gay to use an arbitrary religious label as an excuse to treat someone else as if he were a menace to society.
Rich Mullins in concert used to tell this story: he walked into a bar and sat down next to another guy, who eventually asked for a lift. As they were driving off, the guy said, "I'm gay
You cannot assume that Jerry Falwell and Fred Phelps speak for Christians. They speaks for themselves, and their followers, ONLY. The rest of us would love to fire them, but we never hired them in the first place.
And, ironically (and thankfully), he died *not* courting danger. According to this, he died while on a low-risk swim filming stuff for a show for his daughter.
So that means I can commit the uncolicit act either before or during the first party, or during or after the second, but not between the two?
It's amazing how specific the English language is.
I felt bad for being terse and snippy. Sorry; my only excuse is that dinner was on and my daughters were eager to eat.
The possibilities mentioned there are intentionally fanciful; a much more realistic set, like forcing us to build more efficient cars, could better serve a cost-benefit analysis.
Anyway, no blood, no foul.
This is a very narrow answer to your very broad question, but here goes: Some crops -- corn in particular -- have been GMed to produce their own biotoxin called Bt. Bt is fairly selective, targeting only lepidoptera -- butterflies and moths. The intended target is the corn borer, a moth caterpillar.
Here's a site that lists the possible problems with Bt. Warning: it's a scare site, so take all claims with a grain of salt.
Nevertheless, there is one claim it makes that I can speak to. Butterflies and moths that nectar in or near the corn field are alleged to be at risk from Bt. Wiki has a good summary of the issue. As it turns out, the risk is relatively low in this case.* However, issues like this raise our general distrust of GM crops because we fear the law of unintended consequences.
* It should be noted with great displeasure that Bt is also sprayed in areas in order to wipe out the Gypsy moth. In that case, unlike the GM crop case, most butterflies and moths in the sprayed area die.
Re-read the post.
My candidate languages were C++, which matches my own programming experience best; Java, which is used on the CompSci AP exam; and Python, which was recommended by an acquaintance.
Python won out, for the following reasons:
Here is my primary text, and here and here are my supplemental texts.
You should look at this, then. Python has reasonably nice packages that are much easier to program than the equivalent Visual blah packages. And the default, Tkinter, is cross-platform.
Yeah, but wouldn't it be cool if your cell phone *were* rotary dial? Better yet, a rotary Blackberry!
But let's suppose that GP were talking about correctness, as you assume. Does your analysis hold?
I don't think so. Let's say that the cost of reducing carbon emissions is $1e12, and that the cost of global warming would be $1e14. Now, let's suppose that the % contribution of human activity to global warming is %30. So far, reducing carbon emissions saves us $2.9e13.
But
- the projected cost of reducing carbon emissions (which might have hidden downsides, like preventing developing countries from being able to develop, or leading to wars over oil or emission quotas; or else might have hidden upsides, like leading us all to go solar or hydrogen fusion, thus shutting off the flow of money and arms to the Middle East)
- the projected cost of global warming (which might have hidden upsides, like longer growing seasons; or hidden downsides, like sending Europe into another 14th century-style cold snap), and
- the projected contribution of human activity to global warming.
If either (1) is significantly higher than expected, or else any of (2) or (3) is lower than expected, then your analysis fails. In particular, if (3) gets highballed, then we will spend money on carbon emission reduction, only to have to turn around and spend even more money on mitigating global warming.In short, "plausible possibility" is not enough. You need numbers, and they have to be right.
So yes, there are two sides: the one side must demonstrate conclusively that global warming will cost us thus-and-so, and that doing X, Y, and Z can cost-effectively solve the problem. The other side must demonstrate conclusively that doing nothing is more cost-effective.
Where we can agree, I think, is that getting off of oil would be a Good Thing regardless of which side is correct. Go fusion!
1) Virus writers will write exactly the same code, unless the boys at Consumer Reports are dedicated enough to come up with truly innovative virus variations. So there's no fear that someone out there will "get ideas."
2) Why not vet your software against somebody else's test suite? If CR wants to function as an extension of Symantec's R&D, let 'em. It's a win-win.
Interestingly, being open source may prevent "killer app-erature." After all, if Debian released a killer app, would not MS essentially co-opt it the next day?
</snark> Just kidding.
...with the article summary, which implies that Linux is going to have to "be compatible" with technology X in order to appeal to the masses. In point of fact, if Linux adopts that strategy it will *never* appeal to the masses, because it will always be catching up.
The only way to have significant appeal is to offer something that the masses want, that Windows can't. Hint: rock-solid security is not something the masses *want*. Yet.