Do you really think belief in fairy big beard or whatever makes people less likely to kill each other? Seems to me that it makes them more likely to band together with the people who believe the same bullshit as they do and kill those who don't.
So, what you're saying is that the tribe which believes in a god of some sort, will be more united and aggressive than a tribe which doesn't, and therefore have an evolutionary advantage ? And you do realize that the tribe members are less likely to kill each other, at least as long as heathen enemies exist ?
Right, because a bunch of "amateurs" without a common studio behind them can't pull something like this together. It's never happened, and OSS is but a dream.
Now that you mention it, there are indeed very few OSS games, and the few there are are mostly strategies, puzzle games and MUDs. These games can be incrementally improved, making the OSS model viable. But there are no OSS equivalents of FF7, Fate of Atlantis, or almost any other such game. The reason is simple: making such plot-based games means that someone writes the plot and the rest simply polish it. You can't create them by incremental improvement.
So yes, a bunch of amateurs - without quotation marks, for there is nothing degadatory about the term, it simply means someone who isn't doing it as his job - can indeed put a movie together, and indeed many have. But the end result is not going to be the same level than a movie studio which can hire real actors, maskers, costumers, etc. Besides, such productions tend to be parodies, based on universes already established by studio productions; getting people to do "an original sci-fi movie" is a lot harder than getting them to do "a Star Wars/Trek parody". Not to mention keeping them on the job; the biggest problem such projects face is people just plain walking out on them halfway to the finish line.
So no, the studios have nothing to worry about. Even with modern technology, getting a movie - especially a good movie - done is so difficult and work-intensive that very few people will end up doing them.
The only radar they ever pick up is the AWACS which, while unwelcome, isn't really something you can do anything about since they are able to sit a good distance back from the battlefield and you can assume they have an escort.
What happens if you aim a high-energy laser at the radar ? Could you blind it that way ? Or, for that matter, what if you simply begin bombarding the AWACS with random electromagnetic noise - would that drown out its own signals, making it essentally blind ?
U.S. Public School system. I am proof the system does not work.
Whereas Japanese public school system is geared towards manufacturing magical girls en masse. I've seen numerous documents, such as "Sailor Moon", depicting their combat capabilities. Why they feel they need a new figher jet when they already have sufficient teenage firepower to blow up the planet a hundred times over is the question here.
Magical girls, android catgirls, ninjas, martial artists, giant battle robots, and even normal people can punch you to LEO - Japan is truly a terrifying military power. It is lucky for the rest of the planet that they're under constant assault by Tentacles from Beyond, or we'd already been overrun.
I guess that's what you can achieve if you really apply yourself in school.
In no more than 10 years, the movie studios will face the same problem the music studios have today: They become obsolete for the ambitioned creator.
Not neccessarily. Movies studios have five advantages:
Skilled directors.
Skilled actors.
Skilled editors.
Skilled effect guys.
Skilled marketers.
Even in the computer age, making a good movie requires a considerable concentration of skills, and the movie studios are good at gathering those. No, I don't think they'll become obsolete; I think that they will continue making movies for theatrical distribution, and use the hobbyists as a hiring pool.
Everybody gets hung up on "life" as if it's something so fundamental, but really it's by definition nothing more than a set of characteristics (ability to reproduce, etc, etc).
All fundamental particles are just a sets of characteristics. If it has certain characteristics, it's a photon, if another, it's a proton, yet another, it's an electron. The same is true of everything formed from them. You, for example, have a set of characteristics: your skin color, shape, hair color, eye color, tendency to post to SLashdot...
Or to put it in another way, "by definition nothing more than a set of characteristics" is an oxymoron. It is true of absolutely every definition, by the definition of definition:).
In a world without copyright, free software has no protections. Evilcorp can take your code, extend it, release it closed source and give you the finger because you have no claim of ownership over it.
And I can take their closed-sourced program, reverse-engineer it, and distribute the resulting source code. Open-sourced NVIDIA drivers have been around for years. Debuggers and disassemblers are far more advanced, since they have far more use. Libraries can give electronic copies to the customers, so the book I want is never loaned out. And people don't get punished more heavily from copyright violations than they do for raping children.
It would be pretty ironic if that got used against Iran.
(Not that I would condone such a thing....)
Then again, I seem to recall reading a study where it was found that monkeys who engage in sex often are less aggressive than those who don't. So maybe it should be mandated that politicians get laid at least thrice per week (once per day if they have nukes) ?
How about the homeless build their own damn house? Why do people with jobs, and houses, have to support every one that does not.
Because a society without such safety nets will accumulate large amounts of disenfranchised people who have nothing to lose but their chains, and the choices at that point are brutal oppression to keep them down or a bloody revolution. And once the homeless are under the iron heel, what's stopping those higher up in the social ladder than yourself from putting you under it too ?
I, for one, prefer to live in a relatively peaceful and free society. And the only way to achieve those qualities simultaneously is to have social justice, at least enough that people have more to lose than gain by making trouble. Humans are predators, and a hungry predator is a dangerous predator, especially if it also hates your guts for the perceived injustice of being hungry and homeless while you have a job and house and refuse to share any of your resources.
"Every man for himself" might seem good on paper, but it's good to remember that when Social Darwinism rules, "cutthroat competition" stops being a metaphor.
Spirit is independent from and outside of our time-space-matter-energy universe.
This is your speculation. It may or may not be true, but it was not said by Jesus.
Through the prophet Isaiah God also tells us the "He inhabits eternity" ie. exists outside our familiar dimensions.
Again, the part after "ie" is speculation. It might seem reasonable, but is still your reasoning, not God's word. And don't forget that there was a time when the orbit of Moon was considered the dividing line between changing and unchanging, that is, "eternity". I don't know if Jews in general or Isaiah in particular held this view, so I can't say for certain if that is a possible meaning in this case.
Even logic tells us that the cause is always superior to its effect. How COULD God be subject to anything in our world or its laws. If that were so, then these laws would be above God.
If logic told you something, then clearly it wasn't God's word, and shouldn't be treated as such, right ? And in any case, you seem to be suggesting that if God resided in the universe, He would be subjet to its laws, which contradicts with your own assertion that He is superior to them.
I surely believe that a God of such capability can communicate His truth to us even using fallible human creatures. His method of choice is the gift of writing, which He has given ONLY to humans. He did this over a period of almost 2000 years using 40 different writers.
And because we are fallible, it might be a good idea to keep strictly separate what was written and what we think it means.
I think the clinical definition for your malady is called "irrational phobia". Economic deprivation kills far more people than radiation does.
Since I live in a welfare state with socialized healthcare and social security, I'm extremely unlikely to die from economic deprivation. The only realistic chance for that to happen is a major catastrophe which shatters the structure of society, such as an ecological catastrophe.
I think what the parent meant is that there is no small amount of hubris on the part of people who think they can "fix" the Earth when they can't handle more fundamental things like balancing a personal checking account, or, on the aggregate, run a balanced national budget.
I think not being poisoned and irradiated to death is more a more fundamental concern than the balance of my (nonexistent) checking account, but maybe I just have screwed priorities.
There are actually quite good reasons for having it reflect IR.
So it doesn't turn into a dutch oven in August?
Actually, it's the prevention of the passage of infrared waves which causes the greenhouse effect. Light enters through the glass and is absorbed into various surfaces, which heat up as a result; the warm surfaces radiate the heat away in infrared radiation, but if the glass doesn't let them through, they rebound and are reabsorbed back into the surfaces. Since energy keeps entering the system in the form of visual light, but can't exit, the system heats up.
Hey I dont know about you but if wireless signals from said devices do/can cause issues with flight instrumentation I'd rather just play it safe.
Yeah. If airplane instruments are so pathetically fragile that a signal from battery-powered cell phone or Wi-Fi can cause them to fail, better take the train or boat.
I believe there was a man who went by the name of Darwin who would have something to say about this.
Indeed: there must be some mighty fine upside for such a dangerous condition if it still persiss in the gene pool. I wonder if allergic people have stronger immune systems in general - after all, allergy is caused by an overly strong immunal reaction ? Perhaps allergic people are the ones best able to resist illness and therefore help ensure that the human race and society survives epidemics, such as the possible bird flu pandemic.
I figure it may cause a very mild immune response, which is why he hates the smell.
Or it could simply be the taste system (of which the olfactory sense is a part of) is doing the job it's supposed to do, by making him avoid something which is deadly for him. A bit like most people learn to avoid putting their hands on hot stoves.
I car-pool to work every day, and it pisses me off to no end when single occupant vehicles use the HOV lane, but then, I'm an asshole so I like to report them.
It's the people who won't obey traffick rules who are assholes, not the people who report them. I've been nearly killed numerous times by cretins who run the red light, go over the speed limit, take a shortcut through the left line in left turns, won't use the turn signal, drive through crossroads without any regard for other traffick, just have to pass the car in front of them despite there being incoming traffick, jump from line to line randomly, etc.
Fine them till they go banckrupt, then lock them away for life and throw away the key. Or at the very least take away their licenses and damn cars. The roads aren't a fucking playground, they're a public utility, and screwing up there gets people killed. The traffick rules should be enforced with the fervor appropriate to the risks breaking them causes; namely, they should be enforced as matters of life and death, since they are.
So, unless law enforcement plans to use this technology to see something it's not already capable of seeing, e.g. using it to see through the walls of your home, I don't think this is a big deal.
Dunno about you, but my home has heat insulation in the walls. And in any case, infrared is only slightly more penetrating that visible light, so it couldn't be used for seeing through opaque objects anyway.
Given that steam engines, electricity and the concept of the atom where discovered at later Hellenistic periods (around 200 years around the birth of Jesus Christ), we could be at Star Trek level of technology and civilization right now. But instead of that, we got 1500 years of no progress, thanks to religion.
Thanks to slave labor, actually. The Greek steam engine was pistonless and driven by steam jets, making it incapable of generating much power. There was no incentive to develop it into an usable state, when slaves did all the heavy work. And even if they could had, they lacked the materials and skills to make machines which could had actually used that power rather than break.
For the Greek, technology was essentially a toy, and science (philosophy, really) just a fun pasttime. They seeked harmony with nature, not mastery over it. Furthermore, the citizens who made the toys were already free from physical labor, so why should they have cared about devices which made it easier ?
The reason the Greek failed to start the Industrial Revolution was that their society simply wasn't ready for it, neither was their science nor technology. And the Middle Ages saw constant advances in technology, mainly in warfare, but also in metallurgy and irrigation, and the invention of physics.
The Greek were smart, but they had no steam engines, they had steamjet-driven toys. And their atoms have very little to do with the particles so called today.
Belief in X, obviously. The fact that you do not understand it is irrelevant to the declaration of faith. When Christians recite e.g. the Nicene Creed, "We believe... one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father", do they really understand what they are saying? I doubt most of them do, but they have faith in the word they are uttering and in the abstract idea that stands beside it, even if they cannot comprehend its essense, but merely its existence.
Hmm...
Suppose I belong in a sect which thinks that all religious proclamations should be made in Latin. I'm expected to recite the Nicene Creed, in latin of course. I don't know latin, but that's okay, since the kindly old priest holding the service has given me a slip of paper with the words on it, with a pronounciation guide. The service starts, I kneel down and recite the Creed. But I've been deceived ! The priest is actually Satan in disguise, and has slipped me a paper which contains a horrible blasphemy which shames Hell itself !
So, am I a blasphemer or am I a Christian ?
Or, more generally: If I say I belief in X, which I think means Z, and Z differs from what X actually means in a significant way, which have I confessed belief in, X or Z ?
And, to continue these thought experiments: If I install a voice synthesizer in my computer, and feed it the text of the Nicene Creed, is my computer Christian ? It doesn't understand what it said, but it did recite the confession nonetheless.
For these reasons I feel that concept of believing X without understanding what X means is absurd. This is not to say that one couldn't, say, claim a faith that Jesus spoke with the authority of God without understanding everything he said; but the claims "I belief that everything Jesus said was true" and "I believe everything Jesus said" are not equivalent. Claiming the latter without understanding said teachings means you don't even know what you're supposed to believe in. What kind of faith is that ?
Admittedly, this is just my opinion, and I could be wrong. It just seems... useless, faith without understanding. Like someone who can't read english would post a reply with a copypasted text "Parent is right, mod parent up" to my every Slashdot post because they think I'll kill them if they don't. Then again, this kind of reasoning is essentially an attempt to put myself in God's position and ask myself: "What would I do if I was God ?" It is questionable whether it can produce valid results, since after all I'm not God and really can't imagine how such a being would think. So, maybe we're supposed to be a divine sock puppet chorus; I guess we'll see.
Was He wrong when He repeatedly asserted that He came from beyond time and space into our material world.
I don't recall any passage in the Bible where Jesus (or anyone else for that matter) asserted that he became from beyond time and space. This is hardly surprising, since you need at least basic understanding of the Theory of Relativity to grasp the concept of "beyond time and space". What he asserted was that he came from beyond this world, which you then took to mean beyond spacetime and are passing on in writing here; a perfectly reasonable interpretation given modern science, but not what the text said.
This is, ironically, exactly what people mean when they point out that the Bible has been passed down by humans, and will thus inevitably reflect the worldview and understanding of said humans, which must be taken into account when interpreting it, even if one assumes it has divine origin.
Not really; you lose the ability to reason about God, but you can still take certain statements for granted (e.g. "God is merciful, because He himself said so").
Wrong, because that is reasoning. You are declaring axioms ("God says he is merciful" and the unstated "God speaks truth"), and drawing a conclusion ("God is merciful") from them. Unfortunately, if God is is above logic, then not only is your reasoning suspect (since logic itself is), but it doesn't actually say anything; after all, a God who is above logic and thus capable of having contradicting qualities is capable of being both merciful and non-merciful simultaneously, so what have we concluded ?
Statements only have meaning as long as logic stays inviolate; as soon as you declare God to be above it, the statement "God is merciful" ceases to have any meaning, since the logical connection between that statement and certain behavior or attitude is lost. If it is correct to say that transcends logic and can therefore be just and merciful simultaneously (with the IMHO false assumption that these are conflicting qualities), then it is equally correct to state that God can be merciful without actually showing the slightest shred of mercy.
Break logic and you break all comprehension, reducing any statement into meaninglessness. That was my point.
That is, after all, what faith is all about. It makes no sense to reason about the Trinity, for example - any attempt just ends either with fine but meaningless sophistry, or rejection of the constraints of formal logic and declaration of faith, "credo quia absurdum".
But if you have faith in something you don't understand, then just what do you have faith on ? If you claim to believe in X, without any comprehension what X actually is, just what have you declared ?
Having faith is all nice and good, but just what do you have it on ?
And even that is perhaps too narrow. You can still reason about God to the extent He permits you to. In other words, God does not have to act rationally, but insofar as He choses to do so, you can reason about it.
Which doesn't contradict what I said. Not that that means anything, once logic goes out of the window...
Communism not only separated Church and State, but made it a capital offense in many situations to practice a religion, thus the ultimate separation.
Actually, the various strands of communism seem like religions to me. Russians worshipped Marx, Lenin and Stalin, and the Chinese even had a holy book, Little Red Book to be precise.
Communism in USSR and China is/was simply a state religion, which outlawed all other religions on the pain of death.
Slashdot Mirror
So, what you're saying is that the tribe which believes in a god of some sort, will be more united and aggressive than a tribe which doesn't, and therefore have an evolutionary advantage ? And you do realize that the tribe members are less likely to kill each other, at least as long as heathen enemies exist ?
Now that you mention it, there are indeed very few OSS games, and the few there are are mostly strategies, puzzle games and MUDs. These games can be incrementally improved, making the OSS model viable. But there are no OSS equivalents of FF7, Fate of Atlantis, or almost any other such game. The reason is simple: making such plot-based games means that someone writes the plot and the rest simply polish it. You can't create them by incremental improvement.
So yes, a bunch of amateurs - without quotation marks, for there is nothing degadatory about the term, it simply means someone who isn't doing it as his job - can indeed put a movie together, and indeed many have. But the end result is not going to be the same level than a movie studio which can hire real actors, maskers, costumers, etc. Besides, such productions tend to be parodies, based on universes already established by studio productions; getting people to do "an original sci-fi movie" is a lot harder than getting them to do "a Star Wars/Trek parody". Not to mention keeping them on the job; the biggest problem such projects face is people just plain walking out on them halfway to the finish line.
So no, the studios have nothing to worry about. Even with modern technology, getting a movie - especially a good movie - done is so difficult and work-intensive that very few people will end up doing them.
What happens if you aim a high-energy laser at the radar ? Could you blind it that way ? Or, for that matter, what if you simply begin bombarding the AWACS with random electromagnetic noise - would that drown out its own signals, making it essentally blind ?
Whereas Japanese public school system is geared towards manufacturing magical girls en masse. I've seen numerous documents, such as "Sailor Moon", depicting their combat capabilities. Why they feel they need a new figher jet when they already have sufficient teenage firepower to blow up the planet a hundred times over is the question here.
Magical girls, android catgirls, ninjas, martial artists, giant battle robots, and even normal people can punch you to LEO - Japan is truly a terrifying military power. It is lucky for the rest of the planet that they're under constant assault by Tentacles from Beyond, or we'd already been overrun.
I guess that's what you can achieve if you really apply yourself in school.
Not neccessarily. Movies studios have five advantages:
Even in the computer age, making a good movie requires a considerable concentration of skills, and the movie studios are good at gathering those. No, I don't think they'll become obsolete; I think that they will continue making movies for theatrical distribution, and use the hobbyists as a hiring pool.
All fundamental particles are just a sets of characteristics. If it has certain characteristics, it's a photon, if another, it's a proton, yet another, it's an electron. The same is true of everything formed from them. You, for example, have a set of characteristics: your skin color, shape, hair color, eye color, tendency to post to SLashdot...
Or to put it in another way, "by definition nothing more than a set of characteristics" is an oxymoron. It is true of absolutely every definition, by the definition of definition :).
And I can take their closed-sourced program, reverse-engineer it, and distribute the resulting source code. Open-sourced NVIDIA drivers have been around for years. Debuggers and disassemblers are far more advanced, since they have far more use. Libraries can give electronic copies to the customers, so the book I want is never loaned out. And people don't get punished more heavily from copyright violations than they do for raping children.
DO WANT!
You have it backward. The first thought is: How can my fellow man use this to kill me ?
As well as it should, considering the history of human race...
Well, just why do you think the scientists are so hell-bent on creating artificial life to their specifications, mechanical or biological ?
Then again, I seem to recall reading a study where it was found that monkeys who engage in sex often are less aggressive than those who don't. So maybe it should be mandated that politicians get laid at least thrice per week (once per day if they have nukes) ?
Because a society without such safety nets will accumulate large amounts of disenfranchised people who have nothing to lose but their chains, and the choices at that point are brutal oppression to keep them down or a bloody revolution. And once the homeless are under the iron heel, what's stopping those higher up in the social ladder than yourself from putting you under it too ?
I, for one, prefer to live in a relatively peaceful and free society. And the only way to achieve those qualities simultaneously is to have social justice, at least enough that people have more to lose than gain by making trouble. Humans are predators, and a hungry predator is a dangerous predator, especially if it also hates your guts for the perceived injustice of being hungry and homeless while you have a job and house and refuse to share any of your resources.
"Every man for himself" might seem good on paper, but it's good to remember that when Social Darwinism rules, "cutthroat competition" stops being a metaphor.
Yes, so he did.
This is your speculation. It may or may not be true, but it was not said by Jesus.
Again, the part after "ie" is speculation. It might seem reasonable, but is still your reasoning, not God's word. And don't forget that there was a time when the orbit of Moon was considered the dividing line between changing and unchanging, that is, "eternity". I don't know if Jews in general or Isaiah in particular held this view, so I can't say for certain if that is a possible meaning in this case.
If logic told you something, then clearly it wasn't God's word, and shouldn't be treated as such, right ? And in any case, you seem to be suggesting that if God resided in the universe, He would be subjet to its laws, which contradicts with your own assertion that He is superior to them.
And because we are fallible, it might be a good idea to keep strictly separate what was written and what we think it means.
Since I live in a welfare state with socialized healthcare and social security, I'm extremely unlikely to die from economic deprivation. The only realistic chance for that to happen is a major catastrophe which shatters the structure of society, such as an ecological catastrophe.
I think not being poisoned and irradiated to death is more a more fundamental concern than the balance of my (nonexistent) checking account, but maybe I just have screwed priorities.
Actually, it's the prevention of the passage of infrared waves which causes the greenhouse effect. Light enters through the glass and is absorbed into various surfaces, which heat up as a result; the warm surfaces radiate the heat away in infrared radiation, but if the glass doesn't let them through, they rebound and are reabsorbed back into the surfaces. Since energy keeps entering the system in the form of visual light, but can't exit, the system heats up.
Yeah. If airplane instruments are so pathetically fragile that a signal from battery-powered cell phone or Wi-Fi can cause them to fail, better take the train or boat.
Indeed: there must be some mighty fine upside for such a dangerous condition if it still persiss in the gene pool. I wonder if allergic people have stronger immune systems in general - after all, allergy is caused by an overly strong immunal reaction ? Perhaps allergic people are the ones best able to resist illness and therefore help ensure that the human race and society survives epidemics, such as the possible bird flu pandemic.
Has this been researched ?
Or it could simply be the taste system (of which the olfactory sense is a part of) is doing the job it's supposed to do, by making him avoid something which is deadly for him. A bit like most people learn to avoid putting their hands on hot stoves.
It's the people who won't obey traffick rules who are assholes, not the people who report them. I've been nearly killed numerous times by cretins who run the red light, go over the speed limit, take a shortcut through the left line in left turns, won't use the turn signal, drive through crossroads without any regard for other traffick, just have to pass the car in front of them despite there being incoming traffick, jump from line to line randomly, etc.
Fine them till they go banckrupt, then lock them away for life and throw away the key. Or at the very least take away their licenses and damn cars. The roads aren't a fucking playground, they're a public utility, and screwing up there gets people killed. The traffick rules should be enforced with the fervor appropriate to the risks breaking them causes; namely, they should be enforced as matters of life and death, since they are.
Dunno about you, but my home has heat insulation in the walls. And in any case, infrared is only slightly more penetrating that visible light, so it couldn't be used for seeing through opaque objects anyway.
Thanks to slave labor, actually. The Greek steam engine was pistonless and driven by steam jets, making it incapable of generating much power. There was no incentive to develop it into an usable state, when slaves did all the heavy work. And even if they could had, they lacked the materials and skills to make machines which could had actually used that power rather than break.
For the Greek, technology was essentially a toy, and science (philosophy, really) just a fun pasttime. They seeked harmony with nature, not mastery over it. Furthermore, the citizens who made the toys were already free from physical labor, so why should they have cared about devices which made it easier ?
The reason the Greek failed to start the Industrial Revolution was that their society simply wasn't ready for it, neither was their science nor technology. And the Middle Ages saw constant advances in technology, mainly in warfare, but also in metallurgy and irrigation, and the invention of physics.
The Greek were smart, but they had no steam engines, they had steamjet-driven toys. And their atoms have very little to do with the particles so called today.
Hmm...
Suppose I belong in a sect which thinks that all religious proclamations should be made in Latin. I'm expected to recite the Nicene Creed, in latin of course. I don't know latin, but that's okay, since the kindly old priest holding the service has given me a slip of paper with the words on it, with a pronounciation guide. The service starts, I kneel down and recite the Creed. But I've been deceived ! The priest is actually Satan in disguise, and has slipped me a paper which contains a horrible blasphemy which shames Hell itself !
So, am I a blasphemer or am I a Christian ?
Or, more generally: If I say I belief in X, which I think means Z, and Z differs from what X actually means in a significant way, which have I confessed belief in, X or Z ?
And, to continue these thought experiments: If I install a voice synthesizer in my computer, and feed it the text of the Nicene Creed, is my computer Christian ? It doesn't understand what it said, but it did recite the confession nonetheless.
For these reasons I feel that concept of believing X without understanding what X means is absurd. This is not to say that one couldn't, say, claim a faith that Jesus spoke with the authority of God without understanding everything he said; but the claims "I belief that everything Jesus said was true" and "I believe everything Jesus said" are not equivalent. Claiming the latter without understanding said teachings means you don't even know what you're supposed to believe in. What kind of faith is that ?
Admittedly, this is just my opinion, and I could be wrong. It just seems... useless, faith without understanding. Like someone who can't read english would post a reply with a copypasted text "Parent is right, mod parent up" to my every Slashdot post because they think I'll kill them if they don't. Then again, this kind of reasoning is essentially an attempt to put myself in God's position and ask myself: "What would I do if I was God ?" It is questionable whether it can produce valid results, since after all I'm not God and really can't imagine how such a being would think. So, maybe we're supposed to be a divine sock puppet chorus; I guess we'll see.
I don't recall any passage in the Bible where Jesus (or anyone else for that matter) asserted that he became from beyond time and space. This is hardly surprising, since you need at least basic understanding of the Theory of Relativity to grasp the concept of "beyond time and space". What he asserted was that he came from beyond this world, which you then took to mean beyond spacetime and are passing on in writing here; a perfectly reasonable interpretation given modern science, but not what the text said.
This is, ironically, exactly what people mean when they point out that the Bible has been passed down by humans, and will thus inevitably reflect the worldview and understanding of said humans, which must be taken into account when interpreting it, even if one assumes it has divine origin.
Wrong, because that is reasoning. You are declaring axioms ("God says he is merciful" and the unstated "God speaks truth"), and drawing a conclusion ("God is merciful") from them. Unfortunately, if God is is above logic, then not only is your reasoning suspect (since logic itself is), but it doesn't actually say anything; after all, a God who is above logic and thus capable of having contradicting qualities is capable of being both merciful and non-merciful simultaneously, so what have we concluded ?
Statements only have meaning as long as logic stays inviolate; as soon as you declare God to be above it, the statement "God is merciful" ceases to have any meaning, since the logical connection between that statement and certain behavior or attitude is lost. If it is correct to say that transcends logic and can therefore be just and merciful simultaneously (with the IMHO false assumption that these are conflicting qualities), then it is equally correct to state that God can be merciful without actually showing the slightest shred of mercy.
Break logic and you break all comprehension, reducing any statement into meaninglessness. That was my point.
But if you have faith in something you don't understand, then just what do you have faith on ? If you claim to believe in X, without any comprehension what X actually is, just what have you declared ?
Having faith is all nice and good, but just what do you have it on ?
Which doesn't contradict what I said. Not that that means anything, once logic goes out of the window...
Actually, the various strands of communism seem like religions to me. Russians worshipped Marx, Lenin and Stalin, and the Chinese even had a holy book, Little Red Book to be precise.
Communism in USSR and China is/was simply a state religion, which outlawed all other religions on the pain of death.