....How is that different from having one password for all logins?....
There is only ONE good password stored in a secure place, your brain, rather than the same one in many different places. All other things being equal, it is less likely that one password will be found out if it is a decently secure, not easily guessed one.
.....about the effectiveness of your legal system at determining truth by this method.....
If you are ever accused of a crime, you better hope that the legal system tries to determine the truth of that accusation. At least that would be the case if you are wrongfully accused. In a sense, all legal matters are historical in that a court tries to determine what truly happened in the past. Supposedly the purpose of a criminal court trial is to weigh the evidence, present it to a body of 12 people, and let them decide whether to BELIEVE one side or the other of a case according to what they perceive to be the truth based on what was presented to them in court.
What Dr. Greenleaf has done is to apply the methods of sifting and examining evidence that is used in every American court to the record and witness of the Gospels as they have come down to us.
You then, the reader acts as the jury and must decide whether the evidence presented (not your own opinion) convinces you of the truth of the Gospels or not. Read his book and the gospels as an impartial juror, with no preconceived ideas about the merits of the case.
....But you must admit that through the vast majority of human history, that race and ethnicity have been overwhelming factors in religious affiliation, correct?....
You, like many are mixing up the things that have been said and done by religious types of all kinds with what Jesus actually said and did.
(.....Why would you say that Christ didn't come to China? Africa? The New World......)
Jesus came in fulfilment of promises that God made to Abraham. God said that through Abraham ALL nations of the world would be blessed. Jesus came to deal with the sin problem of ALL mankind. The apostle Paul deals with that at length in the letter to the Romans.
(.....Deism holds that it would be inconsistant omnipotent and omniscient good God to create evil.....)
We are not told much explicitly in the Bible about the origin of evil other than it had its origin in the pride of a created Angelic being. Evidently, God did not create the Angelic beings nor humans as deterministic entities, such as we do with machines and computers. This property of non-determinism allows for the existence of love and choice. Philosophers have argued for ages about this kind of thing. We do not have enough information really, to be dogmatic about these things.
The fact is, however evil came to be, God had to deal with it. The Bible tells us that God is totally just. Unlike Adam, Satan was NOT deceived and so God figured out a way that He could get mankind back in His camp, yet not simply sweep man's rebellion and sin under the celestial rug. There is this principle of a sacrifice that runs through so many religions. In God's economy, a qualified one who is innocent is able to take the punishment due the violator of God's perfect justice. Since there was no other innocent human available and animals were insuffiecient, God Himself became human in order to do this sacrifice once and for all. The punishment decreed is eternal death, which is an exclusion from the loving presence of God for all eternity. That is why Jesus cried out in anguish as He hung on that cross: "My God my God, why have you forsaken me?" Jesus experienced being cut off from God and His love. What that REALLY was, no man can say. God loves all mankind so much that he could not bear to have that cutting off happen. However, He doesn't just automagically include everybody, but only those who freely choose by faith to accept the offer of life given through Jesus. That is the essence of John 3:16. It is this turning around of all religiosity, where God seeks man, rather than in ALL other religions of man seeking after God.
(.....In Revelation, Jesus states that he is the Morning Star.....)
The Bible, like other writing often uses pictures to try to convey a message. We are told that God will deal with Satan, LUCIFER, the old dragon etc. according to His justice. However he deals with us humans willing to accept it, according to his mercy. There are basically two paths. You can let God deal with you according to His justice or you can accept His mercy extended to you in Jesus. I know for myself, that if God would deal with me according to His justice, I would be shut away from Him in this life and for all eternity. However I HAVE accepted His mercy, and on the basis of that mercy I have peace and joy now and will be able to enter into His presence when I depart this third rock from the sun.
.....your Jesus character is highly unlikely to have existed as portrayed in your Bible.....
On the other hand, millions of people do believe that the accounts in the Bible are true. Everything in life cannot be intellectually grasped. In the case of Jesus and some of the things He said, there are three possibilities. 1) He was crazy, 2) He deceived, 3) He told the truth. The writers either chronicled actual history or invented pure fiction. We have way more ancient written material about Jesus and the early church history than we do of the Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato. There are also a number of references to Jesus by other historians, such as Josephus. Even back then, the enemies of Jesus would have dearly loved to demolish the claim of Jesus' followers concerning the resurrection. All they would have to do is produce the broken, mutilated body.
Dr. Simon Greenleaf, one of the founders of Harvard Law School wrote a lawyerly treatise called; "The Testimony of the Evangelists" Every lawyer in every American law school still studies Greenleaf's voluminous "A treatise on the Law of Evidence". These rules are what every law court of our land still follows. Mr. Greenleaf used these rules to determine if the testimony of the Gospels could stand up in a court of law.
If you are not afraid to have your ideas expressed in your post and other erroneous ones about the veracity of the Gospel accounts as we find them today refuted, as they would be in a court of law, get a copy of that book. The ISBN = 0-8254-2747-9. However, since the original writing is in the public domain, you may find it online in one of the public text sites
....I personally refuse to believe that a God who is supposedly Good and Omnipotent would reserve the afterlife primarily on the basis of race......
The best known, most of cited verse in the Bible, John 3:16 contains the word 'whosoever'. That means anyone, regardless of race, color or creed. It includes you. Perhaps someday you will accept the invitation of Jesus. This not about religion, but about a personal relationship you are invited to have with the only true and living God.
.....somewhere in the world, there's a corpse of a seagull that has been buried and is starting to fossilize....
Try an experiment. Bury a seagull or any other corpse. Dig it up again in say 5 or 10 years, or even one year in some places and see if you have the beginnings of a fossil. Do whatever it takes to artificially make a fossil. You'll need to sterilize the corpse so the existing micro-organisms don't cause decay and keep new micro-organisma and oxygen away for whatever time you think it might take to make a fossil or turn the organic matter into coal, oil or gas.
Who knows what carbon was in the atmosphere at any given time. All carbon, whether all at once or over time had to be accessible to the ancient life forms. We do know that there were sudden cataclysms, such as asteriod hits for example, in the past that wiped out vast stretches of life and buried that life under immense layers of rocks and mud. The eruption of St. Helens buried large portions of the surrounding forests under deep layers of hot ash and mud. That was a relatively small eruption as far as even known vocanoes go.
.....Again, it is not so much that I disagree with Christianity....
Agreeing or disagreeing with any particular religion or having any religion at all is not what I was trying to communicate. All religion is man's attempt to somehow reach out beyond themselves to a higher power, God if you will. There is only one message, the message that Jesus brought that reverses this in that God is reaching down to man. In Jesus, God cloaked His divine nature under a human covering in order to communicate to us, not a new religion, but a relationship with Himself. None of the other religious figures that have come and gone throughout the ages was able or even claimed to conquer the chief enemy of man -- death.
Jesus said: " Because I live, you shall live also" (John 14:19) This life is not only while we dwell here in a body of flesh and blood under the constraints of time and space, but in realities in dimensions beyond. Jesus talks a lot about eternal life. Most of us, when we hear the word 'eternal' think of time, lot of never ending time. Jesus defines the term "eternal life" as knowing the only true God. (John 17:3)
Cast aside all philosophy and religiosity and ask Jesus in a simple, from the heart prayer if you too, as I have, can come into a personal love relationship with the everlasting God through Him. Jesus has dealt with all your failures and shortcomings so that you are able to have a relationship with a just and perfect God whom you can then address as YOUR Father.
.....If we were to attempt to defer such ethical issues to the Christian clergy, why should we expect the results to be any different?.....
First off, thank you for your very thoughtful and polite reply.
I expect and history demonstrates that it would not be any different. It was the religious rulers of Israel that brought Jesus before the Roman Governor to be crucified. When Jesus was asked by those religious types what the most important law of theirs was, he replied that it was to love God and your neighbor as yourself. He then explained that by giving what Christians have called the golden rule. However you want others to treat you, you treat them like that also. Never do to someone else what you would not like done to you.
That includes very much not trying to force any kind of religion down people's throats as has been and is still being done so much today. Jesus said "If many man will...." He did warn what the consequences would be for those who do not will.
Although all analogies break down at some point, it is a bit like this:
Suppose you are drifting down in a little boat on a river you have never been on before and I see you and warn you not that a few miles downriver there is a 200 foot waterfall you are heading towards, what would you think of me? The river is smooth as glass and you don't believe me. I throw you a rope with a life preserver attached, but you spurn it. However, soon the river gets swift and you begin to wonder whether I may have been right after all. However, by the time you hear the roar of the falls it is too late. The river is too swift for your best efforts to save yourself and you are inexorably swept to your destruction.
The river is our life, which none of us have navigated before. Jesus, God in human form, knows that river and tells us that unless we grab that life preserver we will get swept over the falls of death to eternal destruction. He did not come to found another religion as if the world needed to add another one. Jesus himself is in fact that life preserver. I suggest you get a copy of the Gospel of John and read it carefully and consider the claims of Jesus therein afresh and apart from any religious stuff and any churchianity you may have heard thus far in your life. After you have seriously considered and thought about what you read there, you may or may not accept it as truth and act accordingly.
....scientists who see multiple cause for global warming,....
Climate goes in cycles, like so many things in nature. Human written records attest to warmer as well as cooler times. I too think that natural causes, such as the variation in solar output have much more effect than mankind putting back some carbon atoms into the atmosphere that were there ages ago when the fossils and fossil fuels were buried in the ground. The carbon in the fossil fuels must have at some point been available to the living creatures that converted the sunshine of ancient times into plant and animal matter. One or more sudden burials of many of those living organisms made the fossils and the fossil fuels. Today no fossils are being made, since upon death living organisms are reduced to their basic constituents by the micro-organisms of decay.
Even for systems that do NOT get the login info "automatically", and send it onto the servers, you can still store your password in the keychain. Then if you do forget a password, you an retrieve it and dispay it using the keychain.
....Because it does not work when you have 10 or 20 different systems...
Computers are much better at remembering stuff like passwords than most of us. Let the computer remember all your passwords in an encrypted password file. Then all you have to remember the ONE very good password that unlocks that file. Macs come with a nifty thing called keychain, where all password are stored. Many Internet sites and other servers get the password from the keychain automatically if it is already unlocked. The default is to unlock your keychain with the same password when you log in to the Mac. However, that may be changed by the user. A separate password can be used for the keychain. I am sure there must be similar schemes available for Windows. Of course, this doesn't help anyone who must log in from many different computers in various places. Here is an opportunity for someone to come up with a cheap, calculator type gadget that stores passwords securely. It can then display the login data on a screen or feed it directly to a computer via a USB plug or bluetooth wireless. Such a function could easily be added to a cell phone.
.....Darwin said, was that you just put the rules.....
The issue that Darwin and his disciples never address is the question: Where do the rules "that run the soup" come from? Rules imply thought, programming, the product of mind. Software is not physical, although it can be carried by physical means.
For a collection of parts (atoms) to become organized in a certain way requires the input of information. Observation shows that time is the enemy of organization through a principle called entropy. Never, ever has it been observed that a disorganized, random pile of parts became orderly without the input of BOTH information and energy. It has been shown scientifically and in everybody's experience that adding time does not EVER result in an increse of order, but all things tend to disorder and decay and death as time moves forward.
So far at least, by the best efforts, man has not come anywhere close to even make a single living cell from non-living material. Yet you, and many others are willing to ascribe to blind chance over immense periods of time something that the best intelligence of scientists has not been able to duplicate. Is it not humiliating to think that impersonal blind chance is better at creating life than the best efforts of intelligent human scientists? I prefer to believe that a super-intelligent being, God, created and sustains us and everything we observe all around us. There is no way to "prove" there is or there is no God. Belief in a loving, personal God just makes a more satisfying explanation of what we observe all around than blind, impersonal chance.
.....the Framers of the Constitution looked to the (pagan) examples of republican Rome....
Actually, the writers of the founding documents, from the Decaration of Independence on, made many references to the Judeo-Christian God. In Europe the idea was that the rulers had divine rights and the people got whatever rights the rulers might have condescended to give them. The founding fathers had the idea that ALL people had divinely bestowed inalienable rights. They codified these rights in a document called the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Your rights do not stem from a piece of paper with things written thereon, but from the Creator of the Universe.
Take the idea of land. In some cultures, such as ancient Israel and those who lived on this continent before the Europeans came, considered the land to belong to the One who created it. In other cultures, such as in Europe, the land belongs to the king and he may or may not allow the use of it by anyone else. This system is still in use in our culture today. Nobody owns any land nor gets the use thereof unless the government allows it, usually for some kind of payment. If the king was a God fearing, good, just and generous one, those that were subject to him were well off. However if the king was ungodly, unjust, proud and greedy, the subjects were miserable.
Our culture, a mix of Roman and Judeo-Christian elements, gives all land and rights to the king still, who in the case of the USA happens to be the majority of voters. The godless secular ones who are rich and powerful have become very adept at manipulating these voters, thereby pushing and bending the rules in their favor.
Any engineer dealing with control systems knows that an EXTERNAL unchangeable reference value must be established against which all the variables of the system are measured and adjusted. If that reference value shifts the entire system gets upset and no longer operates properly.
In the same way, human societies stop funtioning well if there is no external, unchangeable reference of what is good and what is bad. A ship that has no anchor may be OK in calm seas, but when the storms come it may end up on the rocks.
....even if the majority wants you arrested for burning a flag, that that is your right.....
Who says that is your right? Do rights come from government or from other humans? The writers of the Declaration of Independence were correct in recognizing that "all human beings are endowed by their Creator of certain inalienable rights." A government or your neighbor or any other human being cannot give you any rights, only take them away. Usually, your rights are taken away by those in power and given to others. The US Supreme Court took the right to decide over life and death from the unborn and gave it to the mother. Since God and His absolute decrees are no longer considered in our ethics discussions, the final decider of rights is the one with the biggest gun. Mao was right on that one.
....Silicon chip computers will be life from scratch, as soon as they get the capability to replicate themselves....
Such a ridiculous statement can only come from someone who has no idea how complex even a single cell, such as an amoeba is. All the computers in the world put together don't have as many individual parts all working together as one of these. Figure out how many atoms are in a single cell and all their interactions. Even the atoms themselves are complex devices operating according to exact, pre-established principles. A computer also consists of more than just a bunch of electronic parts. There is the matter of the software, created in the intelligent MIND of the programmer. In the same way, there is more to life than just an arrangemnt of atoms. There is a software program, if you will, that determines the operation of the living system, the biological hardware. Intimately knowing the physical construction of a computer reveals nothing about the function of its software. The same is true of living systems.
....Perhaps the "first" civilizations were intelligently designed......
That just pushes the problem back one or more levels. Where did these conjectured civilizations come from? The choice of origins is either randomness or ID. Even by having life all around us as an example, human intelligence so far has been insufficient to come up with anything even close to creating life from "scratch". It reminds me of the story where some scientists of the future came before God, claiming they had created human being. God said: "Very interesting, show me how you did that." The scientists proceeded to take some dirt and were about to manipulate it into a human form when God stopped them with: "Hey wait a minute! You create your own dirt!"
The Bible portrays the Creator God as the trancendant, "I am", the eternally self existing one. The concept of such a being is beyond our human logic or understanding and that is why God tells us that "Without faith it is impossible to please God" He can neither be proven nor disproven by human thinking.
Those promulgating random impersonal processes over ID often mention that these processes operate by "natural laws" but are at a loss to explain how these laws came to be and how they all seem to fit together so exquistely to allow us to be here and question the existence of Giver of these laws.
.... it is an access to data / law / infromation issue.....
Joe teacher would likey have high speed access at his school where he could download whatever data he needs. Any other Joe who doesn't have fast access through work can go where all Joes have gone before the internet came along --- namely his local library. Even in our small town of 3000, our local library has a fast internet connection.
.....unless we create some ethical standards for certain positions.....
Exactly WHO is going to create these standards and what will they be based on? Who will enforce them? The Enron and Worldcom crooks had standards -- their pocket book fattening-- so whose standards shall we apply? In the natural world, the standards or laws are imposed by God, or if you prefer "nature" and we humans cannot adjust these to our liking. We either accept and obey these natural laws or face the consequences of choosing not to.
Since the also God given, absolute moral and ethical laws, (such as the Ten Commandments) have been thrown out by the modern relativism, it becomes a real problem to determine whose ethics and morals should be chosen to be enforced and by whom. Will the standards be what the majority thinks? If the majority would believe it is OK to murder, rape or steal, does that then become the standard we enforce on all? Jews and certain others in Nazi Germany were not considered human. Many, though not all Germans were of that opinion and many of them did wrongly accuse Jews with the result that they were shipped off to the execution camps. Others, who were not liked were wrongly accused (sometimes by their own relatives) of being mentally ill and locked up. Blacks in the USA were legally only some property that a slave owner could treat however he decided. Unborn children are considered fetuses, rather than persons with rights of their own. The mother is allowed to decide over life and death thereof even after 6 months and that is perfectly legal.
When people make up their own standards of morality, or allow their government to do it for them, the results can be as terrible as if we humans were allowed to mess with the laws of physics. Thankfully, the latter have been barred by the Creator (or nature of you prefer) from human authority.
....Have you ever tried to defend yourself without access to the tax code?.....
You don't seem to get my point! All activities you mentioned are BUSINESS uses professional is likely to do. If the IRS audits me, I'll hire a tax lawyer or accountant. He will likely have high speed service. If you're running a business you NEED a high speed connection. For most consumers that is simply NOT the case. Once high speed service costs less or the same as dial-up, the average dial-up customer will switch eventually. Most people say: " If it ain't broken, don't fix it!" Dial up is not broken, just slower than some people need or want and those are willing to pay extra. The rest are happy with the use they are getting with a dialed connection.
....Now, the tax code runs in excess of 200 volumes and the regs are three times that.....
So who needs to have access to the entire tax code anyway. This whole article is about the large numbers of ordinary people who use the Internet. I doubt there is even one person who gets any kind of Internet service that thinks 'Oh Whoopee! Now I can file my tax return electronically! Anyone who uses the Internet professionally is definitely well served by a high speed connection. Anyone who hires a tax professional is not likely to need any kind of Internet connection at all to file the taxes, since the tax preparer is the one that does that as well. The whole point is that for many people there is no really compelling reason to pay $400+ annually for a high speed Internet service. Half of that or less for dial-up will do just fine for a very large fraction of the population.
.....but anybody who itemizes (*anybody with a mortgage*) will be booted off of the IRS......
You make it sound as if the average tax return, even a moderately complex one has 50 or 100 MB of data to transmit to the IRS. I'd wager that the text of even the most complicated returns is less than 2MB. The text of the entire Bible only occupies about 7MB on my HD. Why should someone pay $400+ for a broadband service just to file their taxes when they can do it for one or two postage stamps?
High bandwidth is very compelling though for someone who wants to download entertainment to their computersin order to fill up their ipod. Even so, existing entertainment delivery systems are still much better (satellite TV, DVD rental, library CDs) and significantly cheaper over all. Most people I know don't watch movies on their computers, but in their living room big screen TV. Listening to music while doing other computer tasks is a bit more common.
Those phone lines you were using, perhaps in a rural area may be getting towards their century mark in age. We have pretty old wires here in the wilds of the Siskiyou mountains of Southern Oregon. Until the phone co. put in digitizing devices in numerous big green boxes in the area, there were still folks on party lines and noise was quite noticeable. Now with the new digital electronics, the same old wires have gotten a new lease on life and we have clean, good service just as we had before we moved here from the Bay Area.
Phones were rather ubiqutous in this country long before most German residents for example even dreamed of having a phone in their house. In the 50s, most Americans had flat rate local phone service in their homes, especially in cities and towns. At that time none of my relatives anywhere in Germany had phone service because it was so costly. Anyone who did have a phone, (mostly businesses) had to pay for every minute of every call, even across the street. We also have a cell phone now, but get no service whatsoever here at home. It is only useful while travelling. The I5 freeway is pretty well covered, even in the mountains, although there are some dead spots.
....but true Broadband has made a great difference in my business life......
Since you are in business, your time is measured much more directly in $$ and therefore the cost of a fast Internet connection will pay off very quickly. However, for the average citizen time is generally not so directly translated into money and dial-up is certainly adequate for filing taxes, filling forms, and buying stuff on line. Right now, the only compelling need for consumers to have a broadband connection is to download entertainment. The existing entertainment delivery systems are perfectly adequate and cost effective for a large segment of the general population. Going to a video or book store and physically handling the media will always have its attractions, just as eating a satisfying meal at fine restaurant beats a TV dinner.
......The U.S. doesn't have gasoline riots and it won't have broadband riots.....
Another reason that many people are not clamoring for broadband is the fact that the main internet application -- still e-mail-- doesn't really require extraordinarily high speed for most people. Even ordering an occasional book from Amazon or looking at stuff on e-bay works fairly well over a dial up. Even the best, fanciest broadband video streaming doesn't come close to a satellite TV broadcast and most people would not watch programs on their computers anyway. If we rent a DVD, it gets watched in the living room, not in the den where the computers are.
Outside of rural areas, most people can get faster that dial access if they have enough use thereof to justify its higher cost. Spending $400/year or more is not cost effective for the type of use many people have for the internet. Dial-up at half or less than the cost of broadband is good enough. Also, malware prone windows boxes are much less susceptiple on an intermittent dial connection that an always connected PC on a fast path to the wilds of the internet.
As for cell phones, the US has a very well developed landline phone infrastructure, much better than places like S. Korea and most other countries. When our daughters, who only have cell phones, call us, their calls are often dropped and they have to re-dial. This seldom if ever happens for those who call us on their POTS phones. Cell phones, even in a home environment are STILL much less reliable, although extremely convenient. Just because a technology appears to be the latest and greatest, it is not always the best suited for many people, especially if the extra cost cannot be justified.
.....And if it goes in for service, the drive is backed up to an external and erased first....
So the computer won't boot and you're going to back up the drive? Just take the drive out and replace it with another temporarily if the computer is dead. That and a re-install of the OS thereon may obviate a trip to the repair shop. A new cheap drive is likely less than the repair bill. Another solution is to routinely encrypt all the folders containing your deep dark secret files. On Macs, just turn on the "File Vault" option and all your data in your account is safely encrypted. You can make a special account that contains all your private data and another, normal non-encrpted account for the stuff you don't mind anyone looking at.
Slashdot Mirror
....How is that different from having one password for all logins?....
There is only ONE good password stored in a secure place, your brain, rather than the same one in many different places. All other things being equal, it is less likely that one password will be found out if it is a decently secure, not easily guessed one.
.....about the effectiveness of your legal system at determining truth by this method. ....
If you are ever accused of a crime, you better hope that the legal system tries to determine the truth of that accusation. At least that would be the case if you are wrongfully accused. In a sense, all legal matters are historical in that a court tries to determine what truly happened in the past. Supposedly the purpose of a criminal court trial is to weigh the evidence, present it to a body of 12 people, and let them decide whether to BELIEVE one side or the other of a case according to what they perceive to be the truth based on what was presented to them in court.
What Dr. Greenleaf has done is to apply the methods of sifting and examining evidence that is used in every American court to the record and witness of the Gospels as they have come down to us.
You then, the reader acts as the jury and must decide whether the evidence presented (not your own opinion) convinces you of the truth of the Gospels or not. Read his book and the gospels as an impartial juror, with no preconceived ideas about the merits of the case.
....But you must admit that through the vast majority of human history, that race and ethnicity have been overwhelming factors in religious affiliation, correct?....
You, like many are mixing up the things that have been said and done by religious types of all kinds with what Jesus actually said and did.
(.....Why would you say that Christ didn't come to China? Africa? The New World......)
Jesus came in fulfilment of promises that God made to Abraham. God said that through Abraham ALL nations of the world would be blessed. Jesus came to deal with the sin problem of ALL mankind. The apostle Paul deals with that at length in the letter to the Romans.
(.....Deism holds that it would be inconsistant omnipotent and omniscient good God to create evil.....)
We are not told much explicitly in the Bible about the origin of evil other than it had its origin in the pride of a created Angelic being. Evidently, God did not create the Angelic beings nor humans as deterministic entities, such as we do with machines and computers. This property of non-determinism allows for the existence of love and choice. Philosophers have argued for ages about this kind of thing. We do not have enough information really, to be dogmatic about these things.
The fact is, however evil came to be, God had to deal with it. The Bible tells us that God is totally just. Unlike Adam, Satan was NOT deceived and so God figured out a way that He could get mankind back in His camp, yet not simply sweep man's rebellion and sin under the celestial rug. There is this principle of a sacrifice that runs through so many religions. In God's economy, a qualified one who is innocent is able to take the punishment due the violator of God's perfect justice. Since there was no other innocent human available and animals were insuffiecient, God Himself became human in order to do this sacrifice once and for all. The punishment decreed is eternal death, which is an exclusion from the loving presence of God for all eternity. That is why Jesus cried out in anguish as He hung on that cross: "My God my God, why have you forsaken me?" Jesus experienced being cut off from God and His love. What that REALLY was, no man can say. God loves all mankind so much that he could not bear to have that cutting off happen. However, He doesn't just automagically include everybody, but only those who freely choose by faith to accept the offer of life given through Jesus. That is the essence of John 3:16. It is this turning around of all religiosity, where God seeks man, rather than in ALL other religions of man seeking after God.
(.....In Revelation, Jesus states that he is the Morning Star.....)
The Bible, like other writing often uses pictures to try to convey a message. We are told that God will deal with Satan, LUCIFER, the old dragon etc. according to His justice. However he deals with us humans willing to accept it, according to his mercy. There are basically two paths. You can let God deal with you according to His justice or you can accept His mercy extended to you in Jesus. I know for myself, that if God would deal with me according to His justice, I would be shut away from Him in this life and for all eternity. However I HAVE accepted His mercy, and on the basis of that mercy I have peace and joy now and will be able to enter into His presence when I depart this third rock from the sun.
.....your Jesus character is highly unlikely to have existed as portrayed in your Bible.....
On the other hand, millions of people do believe that the accounts in the Bible are true. Everything in life cannot be intellectually grasped. In the case of Jesus and some of the things He said, there are three possibilities. 1) He was crazy, 2) He deceived, 3) He told the truth. The writers either chronicled actual history or invented pure fiction. We have way more ancient written material about Jesus and the early church history than we do of the Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato. There are also a number of references to Jesus by other historians, such as Josephus. Even back then, the enemies of Jesus would have dearly loved to demolish the claim of Jesus' followers concerning the resurrection. All they would have to do is produce the broken, mutilated body.
Dr. Simon Greenleaf, one of the founders of Harvard Law School wrote a lawyerly treatise called; "The Testimony of the Evangelists" Every lawyer in every American law school still studies Greenleaf's voluminous "A treatise on the Law of Evidence". These rules are what every law court of our land still follows. Mr. Greenleaf used these rules to determine if the testimony of the Gospels could stand up in a court of law.
If you are not afraid to have your ideas expressed in your post and other erroneous ones about the veracity of the Gospel accounts as we find them today refuted, as they would be in a court of law, get a copy of that book. The ISBN = 0-8254-2747-9. However, since the original writing is in the public domain, you may find it online in one of the public text sites
....I personally refuse to believe that a God who is supposedly Good and Omnipotent would reserve the afterlife primarily on the basis of race......
The best known, most of cited verse in the Bible, John 3:16 contains the word 'whosoever'. That means anyone, regardless of race, color or creed. It includes you. Perhaps someday you will accept the invitation of Jesus. This not about religion, but about a personal relationship you are invited to have with the only true and living God.
.....somewhere in the world, there's a corpse of a seagull that has been buried and is starting to fossilize....
Try an experiment. Bury a seagull or any other corpse. Dig it up again in say 5 or 10 years, or even one year in some places and see if you have the beginnings of a fossil. Do whatever it takes to artificially make a fossil. You'll need to sterilize the corpse so the existing micro-organisms don't cause decay and keep new micro-organisma and oxygen away for whatever time you think it might take to make a fossil or turn the organic matter into coal, oil or gas.
Who knows what carbon was in the atmosphere at any given time. All carbon, whether all at once or over time had to be accessible to the ancient life forms. We do know that there were sudden cataclysms, such as asteriod hits for example, in the past that wiped out vast stretches of life and buried that life under immense layers of rocks and mud. The eruption of St. Helens buried large portions of the surrounding forests under deep layers of hot ash and mud. That was a relatively small eruption as far as even known vocanoes go.
.....Again, it is not so much that I disagree with Christianity....
Agreeing or disagreeing with any particular religion or having any religion at all is not what I was trying to communicate. All religion is man's attempt to somehow reach out beyond themselves to a higher power, God if you will. There is only one message, the message that Jesus brought that reverses this in that God is reaching down to man. In Jesus, God cloaked His divine nature under a human covering in order to communicate to us, not a new religion, but a relationship with Himself. None of the other religious figures that have come and gone throughout the ages was able or even claimed to conquer the chief enemy of man -- death.
Jesus said: " Because I live, you shall live also" (John 14:19) This life is not only while we dwell here in a body of flesh and blood under the constraints of time and space, but in realities in dimensions beyond. Jesus talks a lot about eternal life. Most of us, when we hear the word 'eternal' think of time, lot of never ending time. Jesus defines the term "eternal life" as knowing the only true God. (John 17:3)
Cast aside all philosophy and religiosity and ask Jesus in a simple, from the heart prayer if you too, as I have, can come into a personal love relationship with the everlasting God through Him. Jesus has dealt with all your failures and shortcomings so that you are able to have a relationship with a just and perfect God whom you can then address as YOUR Father.
.....If we were to attempt to defer such ethical issues to the Christian clergy, why should we expect the results to be any different?.....
First off, thank you for your very thoughtful and polite reply.
I expect and history demonstrates that it would not be any different. It was the religious rulers of Israel that brought Jesus before the Roman Governor to be crucified. When Jesus was asked by those religious types what the most important law of theirs was, he replied that it was to love God and your neighbor as yourself. He then explained that by giving what Christians have called the golden rule. However you want others to treat you, you treat them like that also. Never do to someone else what you would not like done to you.
That includes very much not trying to force any kind of religion down people's throats as has been and is still being done so much today. Jesus said "If many man will...." He did warn what the consequences would be for those who do not will.
Although all analogies break down at some point, it is a bit like this:
Suppose you are drifting down in a little boat on a river you have never been on before and I see you and warn you not that a few miles downriver there is a 200 foot waterfall you are heading towards, what would you think of me? The river is smooth as glass and you don't believe me. I throw you a rope with a life preserver attached, but you spurn it. However, soon the river gets swift and you begin to wonder whether I may have been right after all. However, by the time you hear the roar of the falls it is too late. The river is too swift for your best efforts to save yourself and you are inexorably swept to your destruction.
The river is our life, which none of us have navigated before. Jesus, God in human form, knows that river and tells us that unless we grab that life preserver we will get swept over the falls of death to eternal destruction. He did not come to found another religion as if the world needed to add another one. Jesus himself is in fact that life preserver. I suggest you get a copy of the Gospel of John and read it carefully and consider the claims of Jesus therein afresh and apart from any religious stuff and any churchianity you may have heard thus far in your life. After you have seriously considered and thought about what you read there, you may or may not accept it as truth and act accordingly.
....scientists who see multiple cause for global warming,....
Climate goes in cycles, like so many things in nature. Human written records attest to warmer as well as cooler times. I too think that natural causes, such as the variation in solar output have much more effect than mankind putting back some carbon atoms into the atmosphere that were there ages ago when the fossils and fossil fuels were buried in the ground. The carbon in the fossil fuels must have at some point been available to the living creatures that converted the sunshine of ancient times into plant and animal matter. One or more sudden burials of many of those living organisms made the fossils and the fossil fuels. Today no fossils are being made, since upon death living organisms are reduced to their basic constituents by the micro-organisms of decay.
....Of which I can put 3 into keychain....
Even for systems that do NOT get the login info "automatically", and send it onto the servers, you can still store your password in the keychain. Then if you do forget a password, you an retrieve it and dispay it using the keychain.
....Because it does not work when you have 10 or 20 different systems...
Computers are much better at remembering stuff like passwords than most of us. Let the computer remember all your passwords in an encrypted password file. Then all you have to remember the ONE very good password that unlocks that file. Macs come with a nifty thing called keychain, where all password are stored. Many Internet sites and other servers get the password from the keychain automatically if it is already unlocked. The default is to unlock your keychain with the same password when you log in to the Mac. However, that may be changed by the user. A separate password can be used for the keychain. I am sure there must be similar schemes available for Windows. Of course, this doesn't help anyone who must log in from many different computers in various places. Here is an opportunity for someone to come up with a cheap, calculator type gadget that stores passwords securely. It can then display the login data on a screen or feed it directly to a computer via a USB plug or bluetooth wireless. Such a function could easily be added to a cell phone.
.....Darwin said, was that you just put the rules.....
The issue that Darwin and his disciples never address is the question: Where do the rules "that run the soup" come from? Rules imply thought, programming, the product of mind. Software is not physical, although it can be carried by physical means.
For a collection of parts (atoms) to become organized in a certain way requires the input of information. Observation shows that time is the enemy of organization through a principle called entropy. Never, ever has it been observed that a disorganized, random pile of parts became orderly without the input of BOTH information and energy. It has been shown scientifically and in everybody's experience that adding time does not EVER result in an increse of order, but all things tend to disorder and decay and death as time moves forward.
So far at least, by the best efforts, man has not come anywhere close to even make a single living cell from non-living material. Yet you, and many others are willing to ascribe to blind chance over immense periods of time something that the best intelligence of scientists has not been able to duplicate. Is it not humiliating to think that impersonal blind chance is better at creating life than the best efforts of intelligent human scientists? I prefer to believe that a super-intelligent being, God, created and sustains us and everything we observe all around us. There is no way to "prove" there is or there is no God. Belief in a loving, personal God just makes a more satisfying explanation of what we observe all around than blind, impersonal chance.
.....the Framers of the Constitution looked to the (pagan) examples of republican Rome....
Actually, the writers of the founding documents, from the Decaration of Independence on, made many references to the Judeo-Christian God. In Europe the idea was that the rulers had divine rights and the people got whatever rights the rulers might have condescended to give them. The founding fathers had the idea that ALL people had divinely bestowed inalienable rights. They codified these rights in a document called the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Your rights do not stem from a piece of paper with things written thereon, but from the Creator of the Universe.
Take the idea of land. In some cultures, such as ancient Israel and those who lived on this continent before the Europeans came, considered the land to belong to the One who created it. In other cultures, such as in Europe, the land belongs to the king and he may or may not allow the use of it by anyone else. This system is still in use in our culture today. Nobody owns any land nor gets the use thereof unless the government allows it, usually for some kind of payment. If the king was a God fearing, good, just and generous one, those that were subject to him were well off. However if the king was ungodly, unjust, proud and greedy, the subjects were miserable.
Our culture, a mix of Roman and Judeo-Christian elements, gives all land and rights to the king still, who in the case of the USA happens to be the majority of voters. The godless secular ones who are rich and powerful have become very adept at manipulating these voters, thereby pushing and bending the rules in their favor.
Any engineer dealing with control systems knows that an EXTERNAL unchangeable reference value must be established against which all the variables of the system are measured and adjusted. If that reference value shifts the entire system gets upset and no longer operates properly.
In the same way, human societies stop funtioning well if there is no external, unchangeable reference of what is good and what is bad. A ship that has no anchor may be OK in calm seas, but when the storms come it may end up on the rocks.
....even if the majority wants you arrested for burning a flag, that that is your right.....
Who says that is your right? Do rights come from government or from other humans? The writers of the Declaration of Independence were correct in recognizing that "all human beings are endowed by their Creator of certain inalienable rights." A government or your neighbor or any other human being cannot give you any rights, only take them away. Usually, your rights are taken away by those in power and given to others. The US Supreme Court took the right to decide over life and death from the unborn and gave it to the mother. Since God and His absolute decrees are no longer considered in our ethics discussions, the final decider of rights is the one with the biggest gun. Mao was right on that one.
....Silicon chip computers will be life from scratch, as soon as they get the capability to replicate themselves....
Such a ridiculous statement can only come from someone who has no idea how complex even a single cell, such as an amoeba is. All the computers in the world put together don't have as many individual parts all working together as one of these. Figure out how many atoms are in a single cell and all their interactions. Even the atoms themselves are complex devices operating according to exact, pre-established principles. A computer also consists of more than just a bunch of electronic parts. There is the matter of the software, created in the intelligent MIND of the programmer. In the same way, there is more to life than just an arrangemnt of atoms. There is a software program, if you will, that determines the operation of the living system, the biological hardware. Intimately knowing the physical construction of a computer reveals nothing about the function of its software. The same is true of living systems.
....Perhaps the "first" civilizations were intelligently designed......
That just pushes the problem back one or more levels. Where did these conjectured civilizations come from? The choice of origins is either randomness or ID. Even by having life all around us as an example, human intelligence so far has been insufficient to come up with anything even close to creating life from "scratch". It reminds me of the story where some scientists of the future came before God, claiming they had created human being. God said: "Very interesting, show me how you did that." The scientists proceeded to take some dirt and were about to manipulate it into a human form when God stopped them with: "Hey wait a minute! You create your own dirt!"
The Bible portrays the Creator God as the trancendant, "I am", the eternally self existing one. The concept of such a being is beyond our human logic or understanding and that is why God tells us that "Without faith it is impossible to please God" He can neither be proven nor disproven by human thinking.
Those promulgating random impersonal processes over ID often mention that these processes operate by "natural laws" but are at a loss to explain how these laws came to be and how they all seem to fit together so exquistely to allow us to be here and question the existence of Giver of these laws.
.... it is an access to data / law / infromation issue.....
Joe teacher would likey have high speed access at his school where he could download whatever data he needs. Any other Joe who doesn't have fast access through work can go where all Joes have gone before the internet came along --- namely his local library. Even in our small town of 3000, our local library has a fast internet connection.
.....unless we create some ethical standards for certain positions .....
Exactly WHO is going to create these standards and what will they be based on? Who will enforce them? The Enron and Worldcom crooks had standards -- their pocket book fattening-- so whose standards shall we apply? In the natural world, the standards or laws are imposed by God, or if you prefer "nature" and we humans cannot adjust these to our liking. We either accept and obey these natural laws or face the consequences of choosing not to.
Since the also God given, absolute moral and ethical laws, (such as the Ten Commandments) have been thrown out by the modern relativism, it becomes a real problem to determine whose ethics and morals should be chosen to be enforced and by whom. Will the standards be what the majority thinks? If the majority would believe it is OK to murder, rape or steal, does that then become the standard we enforce on all? Jews and certain others in Nazi Germany were not considered human. Many, though not all Germans were of that opinion and many of them did wrongly accuse Jews with the result that they were shipped off to the execution camps. Others, who were not liked were wrongly accused (sometimes by their own relatives) of being mentally ill and locked up. Blacks in the USA were legally only some property that a slave owner could treat however he decided. Unborn children are considered fetuses, rather than persons with rights of their own. The mother is allowed to decide over life and death thereof even after 6 months and that is perfectly legal.
When people make up their own standards of morality, or allow their government to do it for them, the results can be as terrible as if we humans were allowed to mess with the laws of physics. Thankfully, the latter have been barred by the Creator (or nature of you prefer) from human authority.
....Have you ever tried to defend yourself without access to the tax code?.....
You don't seem to get my point! All activities you mentioned are BUSINESS uses professional is likely to do. If the IRS audits me, I'll hire a tax lawyer or accountant. He will likely have high speed service. If you're running a business you NEED a high speed connection. For most consumers that is simply NOT the case. Once high speed service costs less or the same as dial-up, the average dial-up customer will switch eventually. Most people say: " If it ain't broken, don't fix it!" Dial up is not broken, just slower than some people need or want and those are willing to pay extra. The rest are happy with the use they are getting with a dialed connection.
....Now, the tax code runs in excess of 200 volumes and the regs are three times that.....
So who needs to have access to the entire tax code anyway. This whole article is about the large numbers of ordinary people who use the Internet. I doubt there is even one person who gets any kind of Internet service that thinks 'Oh Whoopee! Now I can file my tax return electronically! Anyone who uses the Internet professionally is definitely well served by a high speed connection. Anyone who hires a tax professional is not likely to need any kind of Internet connection at all to file the taxes, since the tax preparer is the one that does that as well. The whole point is that for many people there is no really compelling reason to pay $400+ annually for a high speed Internet service. Half of that or less for dial-up will do just fine for a very large fraction of the population.
.....but anybody who itemizes (*anybody with a mortgage*) will be booted off of the IRS......
You make it sound as if the average tax return, even a moderately complex one has 50 or 100 MB of data to transmit to the IRS. I'd wager that the text of even the most complicated returns is less than 2MB. The text of the entire Bible only occupies about 7MB on my HD. Why should someone pay $400+ for a broadband service just to file their taxes when they can do it for one or two postage stamps?
High bandwidth is very compelling though for someone who wants to download entertainment to their computersin order to fill up their ipod. Even so, existing entertainment delivery systems are still much better (satellite TV, DVD rental, library CDs) and significantly cheaper over all. Most people I know don't watch movies on their computers, but in their living room big screen TV. Listening to music while doing other computer tasks is a bit more common.
....I'm currently in the New England area....
Those phone lines you were using, perhaps in a rural area may be getting towards their century mark in age. We have pretty old wires here in the wilds of the Siskiyou mountains of Southern Oregon. Until the phone co. put in digitizing devices in numerous big green boxes in the area, there were still folks on party lines and noise was quite noticeable. Now with the new digital electronics, the same old wires have gotten a new lease on life and we have clean, good service just as we had before we moved here from the Bay Area.
Phones were rather ubiqutous in this country long before most German residents for example even dreamed of having a phone in their house. In the 50s, most Americans had flat rate local phone service in their homes, especially in cities and towns. At that time none of my relatives anywhere in Germany had phone service because it was so costly. Anyone who did have a phone, (mostly businesses) had to pay for every minute of every call, even across the street. We also have a cell phone now, but get no service whatsoever here at home. It is only useful while travelling. The I5 freeway is pretty well covered, even in the mountains, although there are some dead spots.
....but true Broadband has made a great difference in my business life......
Since you are in business, your time is measured much more directly in $$ and therefore the cost of a fast Internet connection will pay off very quickly. However, for the average citizen time is generally not so directly translated into money and dial-up is certainly adequate for filing taxes, filling forms, and buying stuff on line. Right now, the only compelling need for consumers to have a broadband connection is to download entertainment. The existing entertainment delivery systems are perfectly adequate and cost effective for a large segment of the general population. Going to a video or book store and physically handling the media will always have its attractions, just as eating a satisfying meal at fine restaurant beats a TV dinner.
......The U.S. doesn't have gasoline riots and it won't have broadband riots .....
Another reason that many people are not clamoring for broadband is the fact that the main internet application -- still e-mail-- doesn't really require extraordinarily high speed for most people. Even ordering an occasional book from Amazon or looking at stuff on e-bay works fairly well over a dial up. Even the best, fanciest broadband video streaming doesn't come close to a satellite TV broadcast and most people would not watch programs on their computers anyway. If we rent a DVD, it gets watched in the living room, not in the den where the computers are.
Outside of rural areas, most people can get faster that dial access if they have enough use thereof to justify its higher cost. Spending $400/year or more is not cost effective for the type of use many people have for the internet. Dial-up at half or less than the cost of broadband is good enough. Also, malware prone windows boxes are much less susceptiple on an intermittent dial connection that an always connected PC on a fast path to the wilds of the internet.
As for cell phones, the US has a very well developed landline phone infrastructure, much better than places like S. Korea and most other countries. When our daughters, who only have cell phones, call us, their calls are often dropped and they have to re-dial. This seldom if ever happens for those who call us on their POTS phones. Cell phones, even in a home environment are STILL much less reliable, although extremely convenient. Just because a technology appears to be the latest and greatest, it is not always the best suited for many people, especially if the extra cost cannot be justified.
.....And if it goes in for service, the drive is backed up to an external and erased first....
So the computer won't boot and you're going to back up the drive? Just take the drive out and replace it with another temporarily if the computer is dead. That and a re-install of the OS thereon may obviate a trip to the repair shop. A new cheap drive is likely less than the repair bill. Another solution is to routinely encrypt all the folders containing your deep dark secret files. On Macs, just turn on the "File Vault" option and all your data in your account is safely encrypted. You can make a special account that contains all your private data and another, normal non-encrpted account for the stuff you don't mind anyone looking at.