Yes, Gore is a politician. Yes, politicians makes literal falsehoods. No, this is not an excuse.
You're simply refusing to accept Cerf and Andreesen's evidence. Stop lying. I never refused that their evidence exists. What I refused was the claim that it was relevant. Unless you pretend that in addition to being good at computer science they are also good at reading Gore's mind, they have zero authority to clarify his statements for him.
I am firmly convinced that you BELIEVE I'm being irrational. And I firmly believe you are wrong. Statements are literal BY DEFAULT, and gore's statement contained no reason to differ from that default.
PS American naval successes were largely limited to the Great Lakes, not the Atlantic as you suggest. Britain continued to be the pre-eminent world naval power until the 1870s at the very least.
I never claimed the US defeated the British navy's capacity for world domination. I also never claimed the victories were on the Atlantic. (I already knew the majority of the fighting was on the great lakes, by the way). The war of 1812 (western hemisphere) was but a small fraction of what Britain was involved in in that other war of 1812. Therefore Britian losing naval battles with the US does not have to imply they are no longer going to be able to be a world naval power afterward, and I never said it did.
You made a good argument against the claim that the US ended British naval power in the war of 1812, but it was a claim I never made.
As to the other points - we're not disagreeing on the known facts. We're disagreeing on the motivations that causeed them.
The war was fought over Britain's insistence that their colonies are not allowed to trade with anyone other than Britain. The fact that they were not alone in this sort of colonial must-go-to-the-mother-country policy, The US could not trade with any of its neighbors, all of whom were still colonies. Madison saw this as an attempt to starve out the US economically by doing what essentaily amounts to "sanctions" and preventing the US economy from growing naturally.
The war of 1812 was actually mostly done out at sea - trying to break up naval blockades.
The fact that after it was over, the US COULD start trading with other colonies ended up meaning it worked. As far as "burning of the white house, loss of Detroit, etc", there really isn't much of an "etc" there. In the "larger context" - it was a tie. Britain lost handily at New Orleans, and had a number of embarassing defeats at sea to smaller US vessels. (This was the beginning of the end of the big giant ship-of-the-line. The US ships were smaller and more lightly armed, but much faster and more maneuverable. Partly this was due to the availability of high quality lumber.)
Your position is untenable if you examine it in good conscience.
The postion that the evidence is contrary to is never one I claimed to uphold. The position I actually hold, the one I already described, is not contradicted by the evidence in the slightest.
I don't have to defend a position that is a strawman version of the one I actually mentioned and actually hold. Just to repeat for the hard of thinking, I didn't say Gore didn't contribute. In fact I said just the exact opposite.
The problem is that the phrase "believe in [noun]" is actually a shorthand. The problem is that it's a shorthand for vastly different things that have nothing to do with each other:
"believe in [noun] existing" : "I believe in the moon landing."
"believe in the trustworthiness of [noun]" : "I believe in my spouse"
"believe in the competence of [noun]" : "believe in yourself! You can do it!"
One of the most frustrating things about speaking with many people is that they will engage in the false equivocation fallacy of switching between those totally unrelated things and keep using the same phrase for all of them, thereby propping up all sorts of fallacies about nonbelievers.
Octopuses being te chosen people? It sounds absurd, doesn't it? Which makes it just as believable as most of the rest of the garbage spewed out by the religious. The human eye shows evidence of being a system slowly built on top of and altered again and again and again - NOT of being something designed to work the way it does from the get-go. If there is an intelligent designer behind it, then that designer was working with the biological equivilent of duct tape, chewing gum, bailing wire, and one Macguyver to help put it together.
Yes, it sounds absurd. That doesn't stop it from being the intended meaning. Lots of people were, and are, ignorant of where and how the internet began. Gore could be among them.
The only role the instrument plays in the passage is when it can help shed light on the intent.
Which it can't.
suffice to say that you have yet to display sufficient knowledge of the Bible and its heritage to be qualified to make that statement.
The people who spend the most time studying the bible are the ones who aren't turned off by it when they start and see the first few problems with it. Thus insisting that people need to be well versed in every aspecrt of it acts as a filter against disbelievers who stopped well before that point.
Checking the veracity of the Bible is like stringing together boolean terms with "AND". It's a waste of time to continue calculating after you've hit the first false term. Some people will continue a little bit further for curiosity, but it starts to become an excercise in pointlessness very fast.
If I was a historian, I'd be more interested in it for that purpose. As a guide to life, however, it's useless.
The above statements don't contradict what I said so stop pretending they do. In fact I already said Gore did a lot to help expand the internet. But his statement claimed he had a hand in funding the CREATION of it. And unless you're one of those idiots who things "the internet" equals "web browsing", the internet predates the legislation in question.
How ignorant are YOU? The things on Vint's list are not what Gore's statement claimed. His statement claimed not that he funded an improvement of the internet, or an expansion of it, but that it was created after his involvement. That cannot be true. It already existed. Gore didn't have a time machine.
You can't say "I struck him with a sword, but I didn't mean for him to die". but you can say "I was working on the roof and dropped that hammer" or "I struck him with this soft object, I didn't expect him to die".
The problem is that all these old laws attack the symptoms and not the root problem. If the root problem is whether the attack was intentional, then talking about the type of weapon used is not relevant to the issue. It might be harder to have a circumstance in which a sword kills accidentally rather than a hammer, but it is still possible. Also, a hammer can be a deliberate weapon too. In fact, that's pretty much what a mace is. The only difference between a wood handle with a hammer head on it and a wood handle with a round mace head on it is the shape of the head - they're made from the exact same materials.
The bible is an interesting study to see what weird things people used to believe, and to see how people used to live - in exactly the same way that studying the classic greek myths is. it's too bad people today don't realize that that's ALL it's good for.
He deserves credit for realizing how useful an ALREADY EXISTING system was, and realizing it would be economically useful to expand it greatly. He does not deserve credit in any way for funding, legislating, or 'creating the initiative' that CREATED it, which is what he claimed in his statement. You cant create the funding to start making a thing that is ALREADY THERE. It ticks me off how people keep fixating on the strawman "You're misquoting him. He didn't say he actually created it" as if that was all there was to the complaint. The complaint is that the claim he did make, that he started off the FUNDING for making he internet is STILL wrong, since the internet already existed. His funding EXPANDED, not CREATED the internet. It's a huge difference. Why is it so important? Becuase by claiming it didn't exist before then, he's not giving proper due credit to people like Vint Cerf, who's work predated his funding.
The problem is that the way the transfer between rolling friction and sliding friction and visa versa works, once you start sliding you have to let off to a point much less than the point where the sliding started in the first place in order for it to roll again. It's like, if it was rolling up to the pedal-half-down point and then start slipping, it's not good enough to pull back to the pedal-half-down point again to make it catch and roll. You might have to go all the way back to something like the pedal-one-quarter-way-down point before it will catch, and then you can ease it down and try to hold it just shy of the pedal-half-way-down point. That's the optimal breaking point. But the road conditions can change in a few feet and the next section might have more traction and let you brake harder. Therefore you need to test where the threshold is again once or twice a second, so you push a little further until it slips again and the let off and press it to that new point and hold. Thus you only spend about 20% of your time with the car sliding, instead of 50%.
What I don't understand is why don't ABS systems use THAT algoritm instead of the brute-force "just wiggle back and forth across the threshold of slippage" method.
a discouragingly large number of Americans apparently are unaware that the Earth revolves around the sun, if polls can be believed.
I see that more as proof that polls can be rigged by careful wording and dishonest summarizing of the results, rather than proof that people are actually dumb enough to believe that.
Consider if I did the classic joke poll of asking people if "dihydrogen monoxide" should be banned - or better yet, that we need to demand that our fine city's sewage treatment plant begin filtering it out of the sewage instead of letting it pass right through like it does today. Then I report on it afterward as "15% of people in this city are so dumb they want the sewage treatment plants to capture all the water and not pass it through." That's dishonest reporting - the truth being more that 15% of respondants didn't realize what dihydrogen monoxide meant.
I suspect this poll was something like that. I'd like to see what the actual question was.
The more I learn of the bible (I was not brought up Christian and only know of it from an outsider's perspective), the sillier it seems. The distinction between murder and acceptable killing is based on what the weapon was made of??? WTF? What about intent? What about defensive versus offensive killing?
Thanks for the bit about the hebrew language, though.
ABS can pump a brake an aweful lot faster than a human leg
Yes it can. The problem is that pumping can't achieve optimal braking. The best-case scenario is if you had some psychic ability to guess where the slip is about to happen, and hold the brake pedal steady just shy of that threshold where it's about to slip but hasn't yet. The problem is that you can't do that, and letting the brake slip is the only way to find that threshold. So what you're supposed to do when you don't have ABS is push until you feel ths slip, then back off until it catches, and then gently push back down just shy of where you felt it slip the first time and then hold it there. If it starts to slip, back off and try again.
The advice to "pump the breaks" is a nice approximation of that that works good enough for everyone, regardless of how good they are at driving, and it's not complicated to explain it. That's why it's the advice that's universally given out. It is not, however, "optimal". It's just the best comprimise between "works best" and "easy enough that everyone can do it."
When I press the brake as hard as possible in an ABS car on ice (which unlike with normal brakes, is what you're supposed to do with ABS), I can feel in the brake pedal what the ABS system is doing - I can feel the jitter as it engages and disengages the break repeatedly. And here's what I feel - the brake is only engaged about 50% of the time - the duration of the engaged times and the duration of the pauses between them is the same. But manually, without ABS, I can back off when I feel that slippage and thus end up with effective breaking something like 75 to 80% of the time. It graphs something like this:
time---> brake on catch...........slip..catch............slip..catch.......... DOING IT MYSELF
Maybe the cars I've used just had bad implementations of ABS, but it didn't do a better job overall because it keeps crossing the threshold back and forth and spending 50% of the time on the "slip" side of that threshold.
If this is true (that the word kill and murder are distinguishable in writing), then I'd like to see a reference about it so I don't spread that falsehood any longer. But given the nature of the topic it's going to take more than a single post by one person I don't know to make me accept that what I've been told many times by others is wrong.
Not only is Hebrew not "completely phonetic"
I didn't say it was. I said it's written form doesn't record the vowel sounds. Is this not true?
Now, of course, if it does unambiguously say "thou shalt not murder" then it opens up another problem - being that the defintion of murder as unlawful killing, and the 10 commandments as being the law of god according to the mytholgy, renders that commandment into a useless tautology - "What does god's law say about killing? Don't kill in ways god says are unlawful. Great, that really helps. Thanks."
(So, by that definition, is every individual ameoba, that reproduces by splitting itself, it's own independant species, or all all asexual splitting-type creatures in on giant species together?) That definition of species breaks down for asexual critters that don't "mate" in the first place.
That's still an arbitrary defintion. Just as much of one as say, 'has different kind of hair (feathers versus fur)" or "gives live birth versus lays eggs" any other such arbitrary decision as to which properties are important to distinguish on. It's just that biologists decided they thought ability to breed was an important factor to differentiate on.
Another problem is that IDiots are claiming that for evolution to be correct, a mutation must create a new species in JUST one generation. Obviously that's not predicted at all by evolution. If only one child in a new species exists so far because it's a mutation, it won't have anyone to reproduce with, by the definition of species, and thus the species would die out right away (unless it reproduces asexually, in which case the entire defintion of "species" can't work in the first place). What is predicted by evolution is that a slow drift can eventually produce a POPULATION of many offspring that no longer could breed with another large population of "cousins", thousands of times removed.
Evolution doesn't claim "one species gives birth to a new one". It claims "one species eventually splits into two over enough generations."
If what you say was right, two Christians wouldn't be able to disagree so strongly on morality and BOTH be using the bible. The slavery abolitionists backed up their argument with the bible - and so did the slavery proponents. And both were absolutely convinced they were right. I say eliminate the middleman and actually argue the merits of morality directly. It's more honest that way.
There are those who seriously think through what they bible says and find themselves believing in God. If that does not make sense to you, then OK, but it is true.
I will have no part in insanity, be it a socially acceptable form of it or not.
Yes. But most likely the sort of lying you are doing isn't the dishonest type, but rather it's the "lying to yourself" type. People who interpret the bible figuratively (who is NOT whom the poster was talking about, despite your claim to the contrary), are essentially using the following thinking path:
step 1 - decide what is morally right.
step 2 - read the bible.
step 3 - creatively interpret the bible to match what you came up with in step 1. But the whole while they will claim that what they are really doing is:
step 1 - read the bible
step 2 - interpret which parts are literal and which are not.
step 3 - derive morality from that. Becuase that gives a false air of extra legitimacy to what are essentially their OWN beliefs that are just as human and mortal as are mine.
I don't have any respect for that practice, becuase it's an attempt to craft an appeal to authority to get around having to defend your moral beliefs on their own terrestrial merits.
Slashdot Mirror
And I don't see how this is a sign of google being evil. They simply want to enter a large market but must play by China's rules.
When it comes to censorship, "playing along" with it for the purpose of profit *is* evil.
Yes, Gore is a politician. Yes, politicians makes literal falsehoods. No, this is not an excuse.
You're simply refusing to accept Cerf and Andreesen's evidence.
Stop lying. I never refused that their evidence exists. What I refused was the claim that it was relevant. Unless you pretend that in addition to being good at computer science they are also good at reading Gore's mind, they have zero authority to clarify his statements for him.
I am firmly convinced that you BELIEVE I'm being irrational. And I firmly believe you are wrong. Statements are literal BY DEFAULT, and gore's statement contained no reason to differ from that default.
PS American naval successes were largely limited to the Great Lakes, not the Atlantic as you suggest. Britain continued to be the pre-eminent world naval power until the 1870s at the very least.
I never claimed the US defeated the British navy's capacity for world domination. I also never claimed the victories were on the Atlantic. (I already knew the majority of the fighting was on the great lakes, by the way). The war of 1812 (western hemisphere) was but a small fraction of what Britain was involved in in that other war of 1812. Therefore Britian losing naval battles with the US does not have to imply they are no longer going to be able to be a world naval power afterward, and I never said it did.
You made a good argument against the claim that the US ended British naval power in the war of 1812, but it was a claim I never made.
As to the other points - we're not disagreeing on the known facts. We're disagreeing on the motivations that causeed them.
The war was fought over Britain's insistence that their colonies are not allowed to trade with anyone other than Britain. The fact that they were not alone in this sort of colonial must-go-to-the-mother-country policy, The US could not trade with any of its neighbors, all of whom were still colonies. Madison saw this as an attempt to starve out the US economically by doing what essentaily amounts to "sanctions" and preventing the US economy from growing naturally.
The war of 1812 was actually mostly done out at sea - trying to break up naval blockades.
The fact that after it was over, the US COULD start trading with other colonies ended up meaning it worked. As far as "burning of the white house, loss of Detroit, etc", there really isn't much of an "etc" there. In the "larger context" - it was a tie. Britain lost handily at New Orleans, and had a number of embarassing defeats at sea to smaller US vessels. (This was the beginning of the end of the big giant ship-of-the-line. The US ships were smaller and more lightly armed, but much faster and more maneuverable. Partly this was due to the availability of high quality lumber.)
Cerf and Andressen are not Gore. THEY tried fixing up his statement. Not him. THEIR fixing of his statement says nothing about Gore's own intentions.
Yes, Gore's statement was "vague", and too much vagueness results in falsehood.
If you say a falsehood, it was still false even when someone else helps you fix it up afterward.
Your position is untenable if you examine it in good conscience.
The postion that the evidence is contrary to is never one I claimed to uphold. The position I actually hold, the one I already described, is not contradicted by the evidence in the slightest.
I don't have to defend a position that is a strawman version of the one I actually mentioned and actually hold. Just to repeat for the hard of thinking, I didn't say Gore didn't contribute. In fact I said just the exact opposite.
The problem is that the phrase "believe in [noun]" is actually a shorthand. The problem is that it's a shorthand for vastly different things that have nothing to do with each other:
"believe in [noun] existing" : "I believe in the moon landing."
"believe in the trustworthiness of [noun]" : "I believe in my spouse"
"believe in the competence of [noun]" : "believe in yourself! You can do it!"
One of the most frustrating things about speaking with many people is that they will engage in the false equivocation fallacy of switching between those totally unrelated things and keep using the same phrase for all of them, thereby propping up all sorts of fallacies about nonbelievers.
... or are you just happy to see me?
Octopuses being te chosen people? It sounds absurd, doesn't it?
Which makes it just as believable as most of the rest of the garbage spewed out by the religious.
The human eye shows evidence of being a system slowly built on top of and altered again and again and again - NOT of being something designed to work the way it does from the get-go. If there is an intelligent designer behind it, then that designer was working with the biological equivilent of duct tape, chewing gum, bailing wire, and one Macguyver to help put it together.
Yes, it sounds absurd. That doesn't stop it from being the intended meaning. Lots of people were, and are, ignorant of where and how the internet began. Gore could be among them.
The only role the instrument plays in the passage is when it can help shed light on the intent.
Which it can't.
suffice to say that you have yet to display sufficient knowledge of the Bible and its heritage to be qualified to make that statement.
The people who spend the most time studying the bible are the ones who aren't turned off by it when they start and see the first few problems with it. Thus insisting that people need to be well versed in every aspecrt of it acts as a filter against disbelievers who stopped well before that point.
Checking the veracity of the Bible is like stringing together boolean terms with "AND". It's a waste of time to continue calculating after you've hit the first false term. Some people will continue a little bit further for curiosity, but it starts to become an excercise in pointlessness very fast.
If I was a historian, I'd be more interested in it for that purpose. As a guide to life, however, it's useless.
His statement is accurate in it's intended context.
No. It's accurate in the context he applied after the fact to try backpedalling.
I don't tolerate strawman arguments.
The above statements don't contradict what I said so stop pretending they do. In fact I already said Gore did a lot to help expand the internet. But his statement claimed he had a hand in funding the CREATION of it. And unless you're one of those idiots who things "the internet" equals "web browsing", the internet predates the legislation in question.
Gore did not have a time machine.
How ignorant are YOU? The things on Vint's list are not what Gore's statement claimed. His statement claimed not that he funded an improvement of the internet, or an expansion of it, but that it was created after his involvement. That cannot be true. It already existed. Gore didn't have a time machine.
You can't say "I struck him with a sword, but I didn't mean for him to die". but you can say "I was working on the roof and dropped that hammer" or "I struck him with this soft object, I didn't expect him to die".
The problem is that all these old laws attack the symptoms and not the root problem. If the root problem is whether the attack was intentional, then talking about the type of weapon used is not relevant to the issue. It might be harder to have a circumstance in which a sword kills accidentally rather than a hammer, but it is still possible. Also, a hammer can be a deliberate weapon too. In fact, that's pretty much what a mace is. The only difference between a wood handle with a hammer head on it and a wood handle with a round mace head on it is the shape of the head - they're made from the exact same materials.
The bible is an interesting study to see what weird things people used to believe, and to see how people used to live - in exactly the same way that studying the classic greek myths is. it's too bad people today don't realize that that's ALL it's good for.
He deserves credit for realizing how useful an ALREADY EXISTING system was, and realizing it would be economically useful to expand it greatly. He does not deserve credit in any way for funding, legislating, or 'creating the initiative' that CREATED it, which is what he claimed in his statement. You cant create the funding to start making a thing that is ALREADY THERE.
It ticks me off how people keep fixating on the strawman "You're misquoting him. He didn't say he actually created it" as if that was all there was to the complaint. The complaint is that the claim he did make, that he started off the FUNDING for making he internet is STILL wrong, since the internet already existed. His funding EXPANDED, not CREATED the internet. It's a huge difference. Why is it so important? Becuase by claiming it didn't exist before then, he's not giving proper due credit to people like Vint Cerf, who's work predated his funding.
The problem is that the way the transfer between rolling friction and sliding friction and visa versa works, once you start sliding you have to let off to a point much less than the point where the sliding started in the first place in order for it to roll again. It's like, if it was rolling up to the pedal-half-down point and then start slipping, it's not good enough to pull back to the pedal-half-down point again to make it catch and roll. You might have to go all the way back to something like the pedal-one-quarter-way-down point before it will catch, and then you can ease it down and try to hold it just shy of the pedal-half-way-down point. That's the optimal breaking point. But the road conditions can change in a few feet and the next section might have more traction and let you brake harder. Therefore you need to test where the threshold is again once or twice a second, so you push a little further until it slips again and the let off and press it to that new point and hold. Thus you only spend about 20% of your time with the car sliding, instead of 50%.
What I don't understand is why don't ABS systems use THAT algoritm instead of the brute-force "just wiggle back and forth across the threshold of slippage" method.
a discouragingly large number of Americans apparently are unaware that the Earth revolves around the sun, if polls can be believed.
I see that more as proof that polls can be rigged by careful wording and dishonest summarizing of the results, rather than proof that people are actually dumb enough to believe that.
Consider if I did the classic joke poll of asking people if "dihydrogen monoxide" should be banned - or better yet, that we need to demand that our fine city's sewage treatment plant begin filtering it out of the sewage instead of letting it pass right through like it does today. Then I report on it afterward as "15% of people in this city are so dumb they want the sewage treatment plants to capture all the water and not pass it through." That's dishonest reporting - the truth being more that 15% of respondants didn't realize what dihydrogen monoxide meant.
I suspect this poll was something like that. I'd like to see what the actual question was.
The more I learn of the bible (I was not brought up Christian and only know of it from an outsider's perspective), the sillier it seems. The distinction between murder and acceptable killing is based on what the weapon was made of??? WTF? What about intent? What about defensive versus offensive killing?
Thanks for the bit about the hebrew language, though.
ABS can pump a brake an aweful lot faster than a human leg
Yes it can. The problem is that pumping can't achieve optimal braking. The best-case scenario is if you had some psychic ability to guess where the slip is about to happen, and hold the brake pedal steady just shy of that threshold where it's about to slip but hasn't yet. The problem is that you can't do that, and letting the brake slip is the only way to find that threshold. So what you're supposed to do when you don't have ABS is push until you feel ths slip, then back off until it catches, and then gently push back down just shy of where you felt it slip the first time and then hold it there. If it starts to slip, back off and try again.
The advice to "pump the breaks" is a nice approximation of that that works good enough for everyone, regardless of how good they are at driving, and it's not complicated to explain it. That's why it's the advice that's universally given out. It is not, however, "optimal". It's just the best comprimise between "works best" and "easy enough that everyone can do it."
When I press the brake as hard as possible in an ABS car on ice (which unlike with normal brakes, is what you're supposed to do with ABS), I can feel in the brake pedal what the ABS system is doing - I can feel the jitter as it engages and disengages the break repeatedly. And here's what I feel - the brake is only engaged about 50% of the time - the duration of the engaged times and the duration of the pauses between them is the same. But manually, without ABS, I can back off when I feel that slippage and thus end up with effective breaking something like 75 to 80% of the time. It graphs something like this:
p ..catch..slip
h ..........
time--->
brakes: catch..slip..catch..slip..catch..slip..catch..sli
ABS BRAKING
time--->
brake on catch...........slip..catch............slip..catc
DOING IT MYSELF
Maybe the cars I've used just had bad implementations of ABS, but it didn't do a better job overall because it keeps crossing the threshold back and forth and spending 50% of the time on the "slip" side of that threshold.
If this is true (that the word kill and murder are distinguishable in writing), then I'd like to see a reference about it so I don't spread that falsehood any longer. But given the nature of the topic it's going to take more than a single post by one person I don't know to make me accept that what I've been told many times by others is wrong.
Not only is Hebrew not "completely phonetic"
I didn't say it was. I said it's written form doesn't record the vowel sounds. Is this not true?
Now, of course, if it does unambiguously say "thou shalt not murder" then it opens up another problem - being that the defintion of murder as unlawful killing, and the 10 commandments as being the law of god according to the mytholgy, renders that commandment into a useless tautology - "What does god's law say about killing? Don't kill in ways god says are unlawful. Great, that really helps. Thanks."
(So, by that definition, is every individual ameoba, that reproduces by splitting itself, it's own independant species, or all all asexual splitting-type creatures in on giant species together?) That definition of species breaks down for asexual critters that don't "mate" in the first place.
That's still an arbitrary defintion. Just as much of one as say, 'has different kind of hair (feathers versus fur)" or "gives live birth versus lays eggs" any other such arbitrary decision as to which properties are important to distinguish on. It's just that biologists decided they thought ability to breed was an important factor to differentiate on.
Another problem is that IDiots are claiming that for evolution to be correct, a mutation must create a new species in JUST one generation. Obviously that's not predicted at all by evolution. If only one child in a new species exists so far because it's a mutation, it won't have anyone to reproduce with, by the definition of species, and thus the species would die out right away (unless it reproduces asexually, in which case the entire defintion of "species" can't work in the first place). What is predicted by evolution is that a slow drift can eventually produce a POPULATION of many offspring that no longer could breed with another large population of "cousins", thousands of times removed.
Evolution doesn't claim "one species gives birth to a new one". It claims "one species eventually splits into two over enough generations."
If what you say was right, two Christians wouldn't be able to disagree so strongly on morality and BOTH be using the bible. The slavery abolitionists backed up their argument with the bible - and so did the slavery proponents. And both were absolutely convinced they were right. I say eliminate the middleman and actually argue the merits of morality directly. It's more honest that way.
There are those who seriously think through what they bible says and find themselves believing in God. If that does not make sense to you, then OK, but it is true.
I will have no part in insanity, be it a socially acceptable form of it or not.
Does this mean I am lying or really really dumb?
Yes. But most likely the sort of lying you are doing isn't the dishonest type, but rather it's the "lying to yourself" type. People who interpret the bible figuratively (who is NOT whom the poster was talking about, despite your claim to the contrary), are essentially using the following thinking path:
step 1 - decide what is morally right.
step 2 - read the bible.
step 3 - creatively interpret the bible to match what you came up with in step 1.
But the whole while they will claim that what they are really doing is:
step 1 - read the bible
step 2 - interpret which parts are literal and which are not.
step 3 - derive morality from that.
Becuase that gives a false air of extra legitimacy to what are essentially their OWN beliefs that are just as human and mortal as are mine.
I don't have any respect for that practice, becuase it's an attempt to craft an appeal to authority to get around having to defend your moral beliefs on their own terrestrial merits.