Yeah, I know. But if it actually has any effect at all then that means god alters how helpful he is based on this. Think about what that means for the anonymous sufferers who don't have people praying for them - "I'm sorry, I would have helped ease your suffering more, but you didn't have petitioners praying for you like that one famous guy who died did."
The only way for me to imagine a benevolent god is to imagine one for whom this sort of prayer has no effect because he's *already* doing all he can to help and the interceeding prayers aren't adding anything on top of that.
On this we can agree. Nothing angers me faster than people lying about the opinions of others in order to advance their own causes. In my opinion it's the worst thing you could do to a person short of actual violence, and it might even be worse than some milder forms of violence too. (I'd sooner take one punch in the face than have someone use the tactic of lying about what I have said to make my argument look weaker.)
Yes, I read that. It does nothing to address the question. Why is it that person A, who doesn't have people praying for him, is less likely to repent than person B, who does have people praying for him? Why is it that this is considered a system put in place by a fair and just God? Basically, there are two possibilities: 1 - the prayer has no effect on the person's likelyhood to repent, in which case why bother, or 2 - the prayer does have an effect on the person's likelyhood to repent, in which case this is a system that assigns benefits to popularity, and thus is against the alleged goals of this alleged god.
That's why this type of prayer makes no sense at all - its not even internally consistent within the bounds of its own belief system.
Not being a soldier, but being an avid roleplayer, I'd say the scenario rules should be laid out in two sections. First, OUT of game, OUT of character, the *real* unbreakable rules are given to the players. That would include things like "no live ammo", and "this is the limit of our excercise area". Those are the rules that if you break them, you have just cheated, and they would be akin to the RPG rules like "I won't allow the such-and-such rulebook supplement to be used". Then, "in-game" is where the intelligence briefing that says "they don't have CS gas" should be given, because then the soldiers are "in character".
If the information was given out-of-character during the rules engagement briefing, then it was not a good test of the soldiers' skills. If it was given in-character during a briefing once the gmae was on, then it was.
To have been a fair test, the information should have been split into two sections - first, before the game is on, the people are told what the *real* hard and fast unbreakable rules are (like, no live ammunition, or "when you see this blinking light it means you've been hit and if you keep participating after that you're cheating.", or "This zone is the boundry of the game area - go outside it and you are disqualified.") Then, second, there should be an in-game briefing, once the clock is ticking and the soldiers are acting "in character", and that is where the possibly faulty intelligence is handed out.
Otherwise there's no way for the soldier to tell the difference between rules that are breakable without getting into trouble and rules that aren't. What's the difference between using a banned piece of equipment versus, say, getting up and walking around after the laser gun equpiment says you're supposed to be dead?
But the nature of wargames (as opposed to actual fighting) is that a lot of rules exist beyond what would normally exist in actual fighting. And the last thing you want is for the wargammers to assume all those rules are breakable. I'm pretty sure that "no live ammunition will be used" was also one of the rules, and I'm pretty sure that none of the soldiers involved thought that rule would be broken either. How is the use of CS in violation of the rules any different, than, say, one side using twice as many soldiers as the scenario called for?
Expecting the soldiers to anticipate a break in the engagement rules is unreasonable. The set of engagement rules is what makes these war games workable in the first place and not just a pointless one-sided slaughter. The engagement rules are there to make the odds more even so there's a point to the whole excercise.
Thanks for making me waste my time reading that. The question it answered is "WHAT is intercessory player", which I already knew. It doesn't address the issue of WHY people feel it is worthwhile to do it, given the very important objection I raised. Do you believe in a god that would give less attention to someone who had less friends praying for him? Saying your prayer makes a difference equates to saying god favors popular people.
The problem is that when a believer says they don't have any hope of understanding god's plan, I never seem them act like they really mean it. If they really meant that, then it would be *just* as wrong to claim (for example) that god is all good, just as wrong as it would be to claim that god is doing evil by letting evil exist. If you don't know god's mind, then you can't say god is good. You just don't know.
If you are a 100% omnipotent and omnipresent being, then there is zero difference between predicting something and planning something. You can cause anything you like to occur, and you can stop anything you like from occurring. Therefore everything that happens happens with your blessing and approval.
Most of the realistic evacuation scenarios involve having to comandeer every cargo freighter up and down the coast and sending them all into Puget sound to offload people - it's a high-bandwith, but high-latency solution to getting people out (as opposed to using planes, trains, or automobiles, which is low-latency, but low bandwith). The problem is mostly social rather than technical. For the plan to work, people have to be panicked enough to follow it a few weeks before the explosion, and that includes companies allowing their ships to be comandeered for this purpose, and residents willingly leaving town, all based on the warnings of a few scientists that the eruption is likely but not guaranteed to happen in a couple of weeks.
The big problem with the evacuation is that by the time the need for it is 100% certain, it's too late to execute it, and you don't want to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people unless you really know you need to.
For some reason I never did understand, the practice of building houses with basements underneath isn't as common in tornado alley as it is in the northern midwest (where tornados exist but are less frequent). Up here, any house without a basement would be considered rather incomplete by most residents who have just come to expect basements. It's a nice place to put your stuff, and it doesn't cost any more real-estate, so why not have one?
It's a very large, but spread-out magma hot spot. Basically, magma hotspots are the things that are under volcanoes, but the difference between Yellowstone and a volcano is that in a volcano the magma is capped and under pressure, so it can only leak up in a few spots, and it does so with quite a bit of force, enough to push land up, and trigger earthquakes. The magma at yellowstone, however, is spread evenly over a large area, and can bleed off heat a little at a time all over the place. But it is a very large hotspot, and it's been around a while. It's been shifting position relative to the plates in the crust - such that it's the same magma spot that once created Devils' Tower, and the Black Hills, hundreds of miles away.
It did take a direct hit and survive. What it wasn't designed for was the heat of the fire (when steel is cold it is rigid, but when steel gets hot it gets soft). If it was possible to form a fire by someone smuggling a compareable number of barrels of airplane fuel into one of the floors of the building, and setting it on fire, that would have had the same effect even without the airplanes' impacts.
You're not thinking long-term - the cone of Mt. St. Helens was only a few tens of thousands of years old, it will rebuild itself in the next few millennia. In the meantime, sit back and watch the mountain heal itself.
That's small consolation to someone who won't be alive 10,000 years from now, and is mourning the loss of some pretty scenery.
People die. Often enough that in a small city of, say, 50,000 people, there's someone dying once a day at least. The community of open source developers is large enough that, just like in the city of 50,000, by random chance someone important will die rather frequently.
"If you are in group X, you should do Y" - It might not make sense for someone who is not in group X to be offended by this, but it does make sense for someone who is in group X to be offended if they don't think they should do Y - why assume "being religions" equals "you should pray"? That command is not appropriate to all religions.
Frankly I don't understand why a Christian would think that God would alter his behaviour based on them praying for someone else - Do they believe that their god's love is affected by popularity, or that their god cares more about famous sufferers than anonymous ones?
If a person's mindstream ceases when he or she dies, then anything you do after that moment has no relevance to that person
What would your opinion about posthumous misrepresentation be? (putting words in someone's mouth after they are dead, such as false claims of deathbed conversions). I'd say such a thing still has very detrimental effect even when the person himself doesn't care anymore.
Any Christians (or other faiths, for that matter) should say a quick prayer for everyone involved.
Why? Being an outsider to religion, this is one of the notions about it that always seemed self-contradictory to me. The god as described by most religions wouldn't re-assign his distribution of benevolence based on a popular vote. To say that a lot of people praying for someone else has an effect on that person leads directly to the conclusion that god cares more about famous sufferers than anonymous ones. And that doesn't fit the personality most religions ascribe to their god. It just doesn't seem consistent at all to me.
Now, praying about other people's misfortunes might be a way to demonstrate to your god that you aren't selfish, but according to the tenets of most religions, it really shouldn't have any effect on them at all, but maybe it would have some effect on you, and make *you* feel better about it.
Yeah, because nobody would ever use any of the well known IE exploits to make a website do something without telling the user about it. That would never happen. People dumb enough to browse the net using IE should expect that looking at a JPEG image file will result in a compramised system. Yeah, that's perfectly reasonable.
You're implying that I'm not being honest. Care to explain where and why?
I'm not the original poster, but I'd say it's where you claimed that Foo is better when its the events surrounding Foo that are better. It's like claiming that one railroad gauge is "better" than another just because it happens to be the one most of the railroad tracks were built for, when there is nothing inherently better about it. It's just the choice that causes the least hassle. It's like you've never heard of the idea of an "arbitrary decision". Sometimes everyone benefits by everyone picking the same arbitrary decision, even when there is nothing whatsoever that is better about that decision other than the fact that it's the same decision other people are making.
If we are making up a new secret code to use with telegraphs, and there are two other people in our club who have already started saying that "1 beep = yes, 2 beeps = no", then it would be advantageous for us to also pick the same rule instead of going the other way around. But even so it would still be incredibly dishonest to say that "1 beep for yes is a better system than 2 beeps for yes". It's not better. It's just a consistent arbitrary choice - just like the way the industry has standardized on Windows.
Since you don't want me to call you a liar, then that would have to mean you actually know what this software does and actually therefore believe that a company would consider a software package to be a mere toy when it is in charge of all their distribution centers, and that if the software were to fail and therefore the company wouldn't ever be able to ship a single product to a single customer, that this would just be no big deal to them. The ability to run their distribution center is, after all, just a toy, right?
If you don't want me to assume you are lying, then I have to assume you believe what you're saying, which makes you really dumb. Frankly, thinking of you as a liar is more flattering.
The cost of income tax vastly overshadows the cost of buying a PC. Get a sense of perspective - the difference between federal income tax and computer microsoft tax is purely one of scale, not of type.
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Yeah, I know. But if it actually has any effect at all then that means god alters how helpful he is based on this. Think about what that means for the anonymous sufferers who don't have people praying for them - "I'm sorry, I would have helped ease your suffering more, but you didn't have petitioners praying for you like that one famous guy who died did."
The only way for me to imagine a benevolent god is to imagine one for whom this sort of prayer has no effect because he's *already* doing all he can to help and the interceeding prayers aren't adding anything on top of that.
On this we can agree. Nothing angers me faster than people lying about the opinions of others in order to advance their own causes. In my opinion it's the worst thing you could do to a person short of actual violence, and it might even be worse than some milder forms of violence too. (I'd sooner take one punch in the face than have someone use the tactic of lying about what I have said to make my argument look weaker.)
Yes, I read that. It does nothing to address the question. Why is it that person A, who doesn't have people praying for him, is less likely to repent than person B, who does have people praying for him? Why is it that this is considered a system put in place by a fair and just God? Basically, there are two possibilities: 1 - the prayer has no effect on the person's likelyhood to repent, in which case why bother, or 2 - the prayer does have an effect on the person's likelyhood to repent, in which case this is a system that assigns benefits to popularity, and thus is against the alleged goals of this alleged god.
That's why this type of prayer makes no sense at all - its not even internally consistent within the bounds of its own belief system.
Not being a soldier, but being an avid roleplayer, I'd say the scenario rules should be laid out in two sections. First, OUT of game, OUT of character, the *real* unbreakable rules are given to the players. That would include things like "no live ammo", and "this is the limit of our excercise area". Those are the rules that if you break them, you have just cheated, and they would be akin to the RPG rules like "I won't allow the such-and-such rulebook supplement to be used". Then, "in-game" is where the intelligence briefing that says "they don't have CS gas" should be given, because then the soldiers are "in character".
If the information was given out-of-character during the rules engagement briefing, then it was not a good test of the soldiers' skills. If it was given in-character during a briefing once the gmae was on, then it was.
To have been a fair test, the information should have been split into two sections - first, before the game is on, the people are told what the *real* hard and fast unbreakable rules are (like, no live ammunition, or "when you see this blinking light it means you've been hit and if you keep participating after that you're cheating.", or "This zone is the boundry of the game area - go outside it and you are disqualified.") Then, second, there should be an in-game briefing, once the clock is ticking and the soldiers are acting "in character", and that is where the possibly faulty intelligence is handed out.
Otherwise there's no way for the soldier to tell the difference between rules that are breakable without getting into trouble and rules that aren't. What's the difference between using a banned piece of equipment versus, say, getting up and walking around after the laser gun equpiment says you're supposed to be dead?
But the nature of wargames (as opposed to actual fighting) is that a lot of rules exist beyond what would normally exist in actual fighting. And the last thing you want is for the wargammers to assume all those rules are breakable. I'm pretty sure that "no live ammunition will be used" was also one of the rules, and I'm pretty sure that none of the soldiers involved thought that rule would be broken either. How is the use of CS in violation of the rules any different, than, say, one side using twice as many soldiers as the scenario called for?
Expecting the soldiers to anticipate a break in the engagement rules is unreasonable. The set of engagement rules is what makes these war games workable in the first place and not just a pointless one-sided slaughter. The engagement rules are there to make the odds more even so there's a point to the whole excercise.
Thanks for making me waste my time reading that. The question it answered is "WHAT is intercessory player", which I already knew. It doesn't address the issue of WHY people feel it is worthwhile to do it, given the very important objection I raised. Do you believe in a god that would give less attention to someone who had less friends praying for him? Saying your prayer makes a difference equates to saying god favors popular people.
Yes it's redundant, which is why the original poster should have known better and needed to be corrected.
The problem is that when a believer says they don't have any hope of understanding god's plan, I never seem them act like they really mean it. If they really meant that, then it would be *just* as wrong to claim (for example) that god is all good, just as wrong as it would be to claim that god is doing evil by letting evil exist. If you don't know god's mind, then you can't say god is good. You just don't know.
If you are a 100% omnipotent and omnipresent being, then there is zero difference between predicting something and planning something. You can cause anything you like to occur, and you can stop anything you like from occurring. Therefore everything that happens happens with your blessing and approval.
Most of the realistic evacuation scenarios involve having to comandeer every cargo freighter up and down the coast and sending them all into Puget sound to offload people - it's a high-bandwith, but high-latency solution to getting people out (as opposed to using planes, trains, or automobiles, which is low-latency, but low bandwith). The problem is mostly social rather than technical. For the plan to work, people have to be panicked enough to follow it a few weeks before the explosion, and that includes companies allowing their ships to be comandeered for this purpose, and residents willingly leaving town, all based on the warnings of a few scientists that the eruption is likely but not guaranteed to happen in a couple of weeks.
The big problem with the evacuation is that by the time the need for it is 100% certain, it's too late to execute it, and you don't want to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people unless you really know you need to.
For some reason I never did understand, the practice of building houses with basements underneath isn't as common in tornado alley as it is in the northern midwest (where tornados exist but are less frequent). Up here, any house without a basement would be considered rather incomplete by most residents who have just come to expect basements. It's a nice place to put your stuff, and it doesn't cost any more real-estate, so why not have one?
It's a very large, but spread-out magma hot spot. Basically, magma hotspots are the things that are under volcanoes, but the difference between Yellowstone and a volcano is that in a volcano the magma is capped and under pressure, so it can only leak up in a few spots, and it does so with quite a bit of force, enough to push land up, and trigger earthquakes. The magma at yellowstone, however, is spread evenly over a large area, and can bleed off heat a little at a time all over the place. But it is a very large hotspot, and it's been around a while. It's been shifting position relative to the plates in the crust - such that it's the same magma spot that once created Devils' Tower, and the Black Hills, hundreds of miles away.
It did take a direct hit and survive. What it wasn't designed for was the heat of the fire (when steel is cold it is rigid, but when steel gets hot it gets soft). If it was possible to form a fire by someone smuggling a compareable number of barrels of airplane fuel into one of the floors of the building, and setting it on fire, that would have had the same effect even without the airplanes' impacts.
You're not thinking long-term - the cone of Mt. St. Helens was only a few tens of thousands of years old, it will rebuild itself in the next few millennia. In the meantime, sit back and watch the mountain heal itself.
That's small consolation to someone who won't be alive 10,000 years from now, and is mourning the loss of some pretty scenery.
The guy who *did* die was an important advocate too. That alone makes it newsworthy with or without RMS being involved.
People die. Often enough that in a small city of, say, 50,000 people, there's someone dying once a day at least. The community of open source developers is large enough that, just like in the city of 50,000, by random chance someone important will die rather frequently.
"If you are in group X, you should do Y" - It might not make sense for someone who is not in group X to be offended by this, but it does make sense for someone who is in group X to be offended if they don't think they should do Y - why assume "being religions" equals "you should pray"? That command is not appropriate to all religions.
Frankly I don't understand why a Christian would think that God would alter his behaviour based on them praying for someone else - Do they believe that their god's love is affected by popularity, or that their god cares more about famous sufferers than anonymous ones?
If a person's mindstream ceases when he or she dies, then anything you do after that moment has no relevance to that person
What would your opinion about posthumous misrepresentation be? (putting words in someone's mouth after they are dead, such as false claims of deathbed conversions). I'd say such a thing still has very detrimental effect even when the person himself doesn't care anymore.
Any Christians (or other faiths, for that matter) should say a quick prayer for everyone involved.
Why? Being an outsider to religion, this is one of the notions about it that always seemed self-contradictory to me. The god as described by most religions wouldn't re-assign his distribution of benevolence based on a popular vote. To say that a lot of people praying for someone else has an effect on that person leads directly to the conclusion that god cares more about famous sufferers than anonymous ones. And that doesn't fit the personality most religions ascribe to their god. It just doesn't seem consistent at all to me.
Now, praying about other people's misfortunes might be a way to demonstrate to your god that you aren't selfish, but according to the tenets of most religions, it really shouldn't have any effect on them at all, but maybe it would have some effect on you, and make *you* feel better about it.
Yeah, because nobody would ever use any of the well known IE exploits to make a website do something without telling the user about it. That would never happen. People dumb enough to browse the net using IE should expect that looking at a JPEG image file will result in a compramised system. Yeah, that's perfectly reasonable.
You're implying that I'm not being honest. Care to explain where and why?
I'm not the original poster, but I'd say it's where you claimed that Foo is better when its the events surrounding Foo that are better. It's like claiming that one railroad gauge is "better" than another just because it happens to be the one most of the railroad tracks were built for, when there is nothing inherently better about it. It's just the choice that causes the least hassle. It's like you've never heard of the idea of an "arbitrary decision". Sometimes everyone benefits by everyone picking the same arbitrary decision, even when there is nothing whatsoever that is better about that decision other than the fact that it's the same decision other people are making.
If we are making up a new secret code to use with telegraphs, and there are two other people in our club who have already started saying that "1 beep = yes, 2 beeps = no", then it would be advantageous for us to also pick the same rule instead of going the other way around. But even so it would still be incredibly dishonest to say that "1 beep for yes is a better system than 2 beeps for yes". It's not better. It's just a consistent arbitrary choice - just like the way the industry has standardized on Windows.
False. You could buy IBM's version of DOS in stores.
Since you don't want me to call you a liar, then that would have to mean you actually know what this software does and actually therefore believe that a company would consider a software package to be a mere toy when it is in charge of all their distribution centers, and that if the software were to fail and therefore the company wouldn't ever be able to ship a single product to a single customer, that this would just be no big deal to them. The ability to run their distribution center is, after all, just a toy, right?
If you don't want me to assume you are lying, then I have to assume you believe what you're saying, which makes you really dumb. Frankly, thinking of you as a liar is more flattering.
The cost of income tax vastly overshadows the cost of buying a PC. Get a sense of perspective - the difference between federal income tax and computer microsoft tax is purely one of scale, not of type.