A word processor has both editing and displaying components. It doesn't have to be WYSIWYG, but it does have to have SOMETHING that lets the user edit the text. The program in question didn't have that. It was a text markup and displayer only. The text had to be edited on some other software.
Last I looked (and I use Evolution really) KMail lets me save attached files just fine, regardless of what they contain. And then I can open them by double-clicking on them in Nautilus. Maybe you're mistaken twitter - this is not an automatic "the executable runs when I read the message" deal. But maybe you missed that.
Attachments that are saved from a unix e-mail client are saved with the execute permission bit turned on by default, unless the user went out of his way to set his umask differently than the default. Therefore executable content requires an additional step (and some degree of understanding of the OS) to run - a step that is NOT required for a file which is just data for an application to read (and therefore does not need its execute bit set on). Save a PDF file from kmail and then it's double-clickable but what you are actually running is acrobat reader, and the filename is just passed as a parameter for acrobat reader to open. Save an ELF exceutable and double-click on it and you get permission denied errors until you change the permissions on the file.
This distinction between "I am using some application to view this file" and "This file is an executable program" is a distinction that is hidden (deliberately, becuase they think it makes things easier) from the user in Windows. And this lack of differentiation is precisely the cause of so many e-mail trojans (you're right that they are not viruses) in Windows. Even the terminology supports this - people say "To prevent viruses, don't open attachments that you don't know what they are." - Notice that it doesn't say "don't run" - it says "don't open". In reality, opening attachments is quite a bit safer than running them - but in Windows that distinction was deliberately removed from the user's experience - so now you've got people just as afraid of opening a PDF as they are of opening an EXE. The fact that Windows' use of filename extensions is rather weird just makes the problem worse (naming files with two extensions like "blah.exe.pdf" is a way to trick the user into thinking it's a different kind of file than it is - because some tools read the extension one way and some read it the other way - so it looks like a PDF to some tools and looks like an EXE to others.)
This sloppy design is not the fault of dumb end-users.
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1
So, you find "I believe in God" to be an arrogant statement?
Yes. You don't have that information. If so, is it any less arrogant than "I know that God doesn't exist?"
No. It is more arrogant. "god doesn't exist" is falsifiable hypothesis, and "god does exist" is not.
One of the basic tenets of the Republican Party is that they favor 'smaller government'.
They give lip service to the idea, but they are just as in favor of big government as the democrats are. With the big two parties, whether they favor big, central control or whether they favor local control depends entirely on which approach gives their own party more power. When the localities are more republican than democrat, the republicans will talk about more localized control being a good thing. When the localities are more democrat that republican, the democrats will talk about more localized control being a good thing.
As proof that the parties have flipped in the past on this issue, the famous president that convinced people that big government is worth having a civil war to preserve, was the first Reublican president. (Although I don't believe that was his actual reason, that was the rhetoric used to make everyone go along with the idea. Just like today when the big two parties talk of big vs small governments, it's a smokescreen for the issues they really are interested in.)
then why assume that social/cultural evolution cannot maintain traits in its own right,
That's an irrelevant question since I never made that assumption. Your post, however, *DID* make the opposite implicit assumption - that social/cultural evolution ALWAYS maintains traits without help from physical evolution. The truth is that sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.
I don't buy this. The body has two modes of travel, and one is painful and the other is not. Nature will tend to make you go with the less painful one. Besides, even feral children do eventually start walking bipedally - just not with as great a frequency as non-feral children.
Nice try trying to change the topic, but you didn't say "modern internet" until just now. You (and Gore) said just plain "internet". Gore's money appropriation did not create UDP,. or TCP. It did not create sockets, server/client models, bind, or any of that. The internet existed already when he appropriated money to expand its scope and size.
No, it's nothing like Daimler claiming to invent the car when the engine existed already. It's like Daimler claiming to invent the car when the CAR existed already. He didn't invent it - he just improved it.
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
Religious people have managed to talk about the anti-religion lobby without sounding like arrogant bastards
What planet do you live on??? They *always* sound arrogant because their position is inherently arrogant. Changing the phrasing to be polite is irrelevant to how arrogant they are being.
I do not subscribe to the notion that the arrogance level of something is lessened by saying the exact same thing in a more polite manner. This is because the arrogance is inherent in the position being put forth, not in the phrasing of that position.
You are looking at the problem backward. You seem to be thinking, "Wow, look at the exact parameters needed to support earth's life - how rare is that! The chance of that occurring again elsewhere is nearly nil." The problem is that we aren't looking for EARTH life. We're just looking for any life. It doesn't even have to be carbon based. The reason earth life is so specific to only work in earth's environment is because earth is where it evolved. Life that evolvled elsewhere would have a completely different biology altogether. In fact the only thing that would make us recognize it as life would be in the patterns of the motion of objects seeming to have some sense to them.
The thing I keep finding again and again is that evolution requires far more faith than religion.
Evolution is not incompatable with religion. Your argument has been about the initial generation of life. Evolution is about what happens once life gets going, not about how it got started in the first place.
athiest to so vehemenently deny the clear facts.
What are these allegedly "clear" facts that you think atheists are denying?
I'm more inclined to believe the "born premature" theory, because a baby's head grows out of proportion to the rest of it for the first few months after birth, and that would seem to support the theory that it was born while the brain was still developing.
And another interesting thing to note is that the utter helplessness of human babies is a major reason for the existence of the family unit, and the community of families together, which in turn helps lead to more intelligence. The problem with figuring out which came first is that once a little bit of intelligence is added, there are so many other factors that start to quickly snowball and feed off each other.
Because, basically, intelligence can be used to solve the same problems that evolution solves, but it does them so much faster. Once a species gets a certain level of intelligence, it is likely that physical improvements will slow down as culture is a faster way to increase survival than waiting around for the body to change is.
Pretty easy to do when we're the only ones that have any kind of opinion of ourselves at all. Not only do we have the highest opinion of ourselves, but we also have the middlest opinion of ourselves and the worst opinion of ourselves.
You are ignoring the fact that social evolution can quickly *cause* natural selection. For example, a change in the culture's definition of what counts as "beautiful" can lead to a procreation pattern that favors those physical traits. And a decision to make people stand upright for some social reason will eventually lead to physical selection for a body that does better at that practice.
Only if it lasts more than a few generations. A behavior that is learned purely to compensate for a sickness won't cause an evolution of the body unless that sickness is a common continuing factor for hundreds and hundreds of generations. If the children are unlikely to get the sickness passed on to them, then they don't have a reason to adopt the behavior, and it goes away in one generation before evolution has time to do anything.
It's true that this isn't an example of evolution in action. However, it *does* show that it is possible for a primate other than a human to learn to walk erect if there is sufficient reason to bother with it. And *that* is signifigant even if this particular trigger isn't the kind that would pass on to the next generation. This opens up the possibility of there having been *some* kind of trigger that might have lasted a long enough time for this practice to trigger an evolutionary change. This particular disease wouldn't be it, however.
Next time try reading at least all the way to the third paragraph before replying to someone's post in a dismissive demeaning fashion. Apparently you didn't see this part that appeared later in that person's post:
But don't let this confuse you. Having a larger brain did not cause us to go bipedal just so we could hold our heads up. Evolution doesn't work that way
Most primates are omnivores that get most sustenance from plants, and only supplement it with meat from time to time, and that meat is typically just bugs. So I have a hard time believing that hunting was important to an unintelligent ancestor (now, once intelligence starts creeping in, it gets different, as that means diet can be deliberately changed at will).
But there are several other possible advantages to being bipedal:
- The ability to see far was probably more of a defensive than an offensive thing. A predator using the grass as cover has a harder time sneaking up on the creature who can see from a taller vantage point down into the grass.
- Some primates other than humans do use some primitive tools. It could be that simple tool-use (i.e. a stick) predates (and caused) intelligence, and that the fact that a stick is easier to wield when you don't need your hands to walk might have been the trigger for bipedalism.
- Climbing trees is easier when you can stand on your hind legs and hold your balance while reaching for the next branches. The irony if this was the reason for bipedalism, is that bipedalism is what made us not need to bother with all the tree climbing in the first place.
If it was by nature, then walking on all fours wouldn't be several times more uncomfortable than walking bipedally. Try it some time. The fact that there is a physical predisposition to standing upright is blatantly obvious when you try using your hands and feet to walk on all fours. NOTE - i said hands and FEET, not hands and KNEES (which is what we call "crawling). Use your hands and feet and your torso ends up angled downward so much that you can't see in front of you without straining your neck severly.
If your proportions are like a typical human, then your legs are signifigantly longer than your arms. Thus when you try to walk on all fours you actually end up crawling on your knees, and using your entire lower leg below the knees as just one overly long "foot". No, our bodies are not physically condusive to walking on all fours. Not even close. When you try, your long legs and up angling your butt up in the air, and your torso is angled downward toward the front, so you can't see where you're going without hurting your neck.
Also, look at that "5% other" category. What "other" OS is there that wasn't in the list? One possible thing is that the "other" refers to systems that it was unable to determine what the OS was with certainty. When the stats have an "other" category that is five times larger than the known linux category, there's a good chance some of those "others" are really linux - and that it can only detect linux with certainty on some specific setups. Also note that this is based on the user agent string - which is spoofable, and *NEEDS* to be spoofed to be windows and IE to hit some sites that practice OS predjudice - so more Linux users probably have spoofed user agent strings than users of other OS's.
But all that aside the most likely explanation is that the "other" sites are actually indirect access not being done by a normal web browser, and thus have strange user agent strings - for example another search engine hitting google, or a program that hits google, pulls some stas from it, and then publishes them. If this is the case, and those hits are reaching numbers of 5%, then that means the entire survey is bogus since it isn't about desktop users at all but about hits from any sort of client of any kind be it a desktop or not.
Also keep in mind that it only measures hits to google. That means that someone who has google as the homepage is artificially upping those stats, and linux users are more likely to have some other page as their homepage than windows users are (who generally think of the web as a place to go surfing on keywords).
What I did say was more like sorry that's the way it is if you don't like it start a start a campaign to change it.
The first step of any such campaign would be to talk about the problem with others to see if there are enough like-minded people to have such a campaign. But that's hard to do when some jerk is gets all pissy about it and lambasts people for talking about the problem. Telling people to stop talking about the problem and instead do something about it is an oxymoron - talking about it is the first step of "doing something about it".
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
The only way for me not to sound arrogant when talking about religious people is for me to lie. Sometimes honesty *is* arrogant.
One thing that is a problem when talking about "Christianity" is that that word does not have a clear definition because the book on which it is based (The bible) is taken differently by different people - there will be some who say that "Parts A, B and C are literal and D, E, and F are metaphorical", while others say "No, that's all wrong. D, E, and F are the literal parts and A, B, and C are the metaphorical parts." and still others who say "No, all of them are literal, A B C D E and F", and so on. Through these kinds of games people can make their own worldview be whatever the heck they feel like and still claim to be Christian. (Which is why I try not to assume anything about a person's morality when they claim to be Christian. The zillions of variations on the theme make it so that that statement tells me almost nothing at all about them. You can end up with both Martin Luther King Jr and some dumb hick white supremicist both claiming to be true Christians even though their concepts of what is moral are completely opposite from each other.)
Anyway, with that preamble aside, the point is that when I say the Christian god cannot possibly exist, I am referring to the one you would get if you interpreted every part of the bible 100% literally. The type of god envisioned by a literalist interpretation of every bible verse. It cannot exist because the bible has contradictory descriptions of his properties. It's like someone describing some shape he saw, and claiming it is both a triangle and a square.
(One contradictory pair of properties is that god gives us free will, yet is also 100% guaranteed to know what our future moral choices will be. For example, he allegedly knows if you will make the right decision to be saved or not since before you were even born. This sets up the situation where I am simultaneously fated to make certain choices and free to make those choices - and that is contradictory just like a square triangle.)
(It also claims Jesus is the SON of god, and that Jesus *IS* God.)
(It also claims that god won't punish the sons for the sins of the father and also that God sent a plague to kill the firstborn sons in Egypt for what their families did.)
In addition to the INTERNAL inconsistencies like that, there is also several external ones - like the age of the earth, and the order in which genesis said the components of creation were made is out of order with what has been discovered since then. (Even if you take the 6 days of creation as a metaphor (And this is one of the only places where that kind of interpretation is logical, since there is no such thing as a "day" without a rotating earth and a sun yet.), there is still the problem that the events are described out of order.)
As far as Jesus existing, that is insufficient evidence for claiming anything about the religion is true. After all, Mohummed is a historical figure that existed. The Buddha is a historical figure that existed. And yet it is impossible for Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism to be simultaneously true.
Note that Jesus's existence predates the recording of any of new testament quite a number of years, and so he wasn't around to refute any of the stories people were saying about him. Josh McDowell's "Lord Lunatic or Liar" argument is really, really naive because it ignores the more likely explanation - "misrepresented".
Slashdot Mirror
A word processor has both editing and displaying components. It doesn't have to be WYSIWYG, but it does have to have SOMETHING that lets the user edit the text. The program in question didn't have that. It was a text markup and displayer only. The text had to be edited on some other software.
Last I looked (and I use Evolution really) KMail lets me save attached files just fine, regardless of what they contain. And then I can open them by double-clicking on them in Nautilus. Maybe you're mistaken twitter - this is not an automatic "the executable runs when I read the message" deal. But maybe you missed that.
Attachments that are saved from a unix e-mail client are saved with the execute permission bit turned on by default, unless the user went out of his way to set his umask differently than the default. Therefore executable content requires an additional step (and some degree of understanding of the OS) to run - a step that is NOT required for a file which is just data for an application to read (and therefore does not need its execute bit set on). Save a PDF file from kmail and then it's double-clickable but what you are actually running is acrobat reader, and the filename is just passed as a parameter for acrobat reader to open. Save an ELF exceutable and double-click on it and you get permission denied errors until you change the permissions on the file.
This distinction between "I am using some application to view this file" and "This file is an executable program" is a distinction that is hidden (deliberately, becuase they think it makes things easier) from the user in Windows. And this lack of differentiation is precisely the cause of so many e-mail trojans (you're right that they are not viruses) in Windows. Even the terminology supports this - people say "To prevent viruses, don't open attachments that you don't know what they are." - Notice that it doesn't say "don't run" - it says "don't open". In reality, opening attachments is quite a bit safer than running them - but in Windows that distinction was deliberately removed from the user's experience - so now you've got people just as afraid of opening a PDF as they are of opening an EXE. The fact that Windows' use of filename extensions is rather weird just makes the problem worse (naming files with two extensions like "blah.exe.pdf" is a way to trick the user into thinking it's a different kind of file than it is - because some tools read the extension one way and some read it the other way - so it looks like a PDF to some tools and looks like an EXE to others.)
This sloppy design is not the fault of dumb end-users.
So, you find "I believe in God" to be an arrogant statement?
Yes. You don't have that information.
If so, is it any less arrogant than "I know that God doesn't exist?"
No. It is more arrogant. "god doesn't exist" is falsifiable hypothesis, and "god does exist" is not.
As such, it should be examined and studied like any other theory.
It's a good thing then that it *IS*.
dispite continuous evidence that macro evolution does not occour in nature
There can be no such thing as evidence that a thing doesn't occur - only a lack of evidence that it *does* occur.
There is hasn't been a single fossile record recovered that shows reasonable evidence of macro evolution.
True. Because it's ALL of them taken together that do, not a "single" one taken in isolation.
If you want proof that athiests deny the facts, read some of these posts.
You are beyond hope. I stopped reading at this point.
One of the basic tenets of the Republican Party is that they favor 'smaller government'.
They give lip service to the idea, but they are just as in favor of big government as the democrats are. With the big two parties, whether they favor big, central control or whether they favor local control depends entirely on which approach gives their own party more power. When the localities are more republican than democrat, the republicans will talk about more localized control being a good thing. When the localities are more democrat that republican, the democrats will talk about more localized control being a good thing.
As proof that the parties have flipped in the past on this issue, the famous president that convinced people that big government is worth having a civil war to preserve, was the first Reublican president. (Although I don't believe that was his actual reason, that was the rhetoric used to make everyone go along with the idea. Just like today when the big two parties talk of big vs small governments, it's a smokescreen for the issues they really are interested in.)
then why assume that social/cultural evolution cannot maintain traits in its own right,
That's an irrelevant question since I never made that assumption. Your post, however, *DID* make the opposite implicit assumption - that social/cultural evolution ALWAYS maintains traits without help from physical evolution. The truth is that sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.
this statement does NOT limit the statement in the 1st paragraph.
The statement in the 1st paragraph doesn't mean what you strawmanned it to mean.
In the alternate universe where your version of what was said was actually what was said, the rest of your post might have made some sense.
I don't buy this. The body has two modes of travel, and one is painful and the other is not. Nature will tend to make you go with the less painful one. Besides, even feral children do eventually start walking bipedally - just not with as great a frequency as non-feral children.
Nice try trying to change the topic, but you didn't say "modern internet" until just now. You (and Gore) said just plain "internet". Gore's money appropriation did not create UDP,. or TCP. It did not create sockets, server/client models, bind, or any of that. The internet existed already when he appropriated money to expand its scope and size.
No, it's nothing like Daimler claiming to invent the car when the engine existed already. It's like Daimler claiming to invent the car when the CAR existed already. He didn't invent it - he just improved it.
Religious people have managed to talk about the anti-religion lobby without sounding like arrogant bastards
What planet do you live on??? They *always* sound arrogant because their position is inherently arrogant. Changing the phrasing to be polite is irrelevant to how arrogant they are being.
I do not subscribe to the notion that the arrogance level of something is lessened by saying the exact same thing in a more polite manner. This is because the arrogance is inherent in the position being put forth, not in the phrasing of that position.
You are looking at the problem backward. You seem to be thinking, "Wow, look at the exact parameters needed to support earth's life - how rare is that! The chance of that occurring again elsewhere is nearly nil." The problem is that we aren't looking for EARTH life. We're just looking for any life. It doesn't even have to be carbon based. The reason earth life is so specific to only work in earth's environment is because earth is where it evolved. Life that evolvled elsewhere would have a completely different biology altogether. In fact the only thing that would make us recognize it as life would be in the patterns of the motion of objects seeming to have some sense to them.
The thing I keep finding again and again is that evolution requires far more faith than religion.
Evolution is not incompatable with religion. Your argument has been about the initial generation of life. Evolution is about what happens once life gets going, not about how it got started in the first place.
athiest to so vehemenently deny the clear facts.
What are these allegedly "clear" facts that you think atheists are denying?
Hey...Pssst....It's a *she*. It doesn't have any yarbles.
I'm more inclined to believe the "born premature" theory, because a baby's head grows out of proportion to the rest of it for the first few months after birth, and that would seem to support the theory that it was born while the brain was still developing.
And another interesting thing to note is that the utter helplessness of human babies is a major reason for the existence of the family unit, and the community of families together, which in turn helps lead to more intelligence. The problem with figuring out which came first is that once a little bit of intelligence is added, there are so many other factors that start to quickly snowball and feed off each other.
Because, basically, intelligence can be used to solve the same problems that evolution solves, but it does them so much faster. Once a species gets a certain level of intelligence, it is likely that physical improvements will slow down as culture is a faster way to increase survival than waiting around for the body to change is.
we merely have the highest opinion of ourselves
Pretty easy to do when we're the only ones that have any kind of opinion of ourselves at all. Not only do we have the highest opinion of ourselves, but we also have the middlest opinion of ourselves and the worst opinion of ourselves.
You are ignoring the fact that social evolution can quickly *cause* natural selection. For example, a change in the culture's definition of what counts as "beautiful" can lead to a procreation pattern that favors those physical traits. And a decision to make people stand upright for some social reason will eventually lead to physical selection for a body that does better at that practice.
Only if it lasts more than a few generations. A behavior that is learned purely to compensate for a sickness won't cause an evolution of the body unless that sickness is a common continuing factor for hundreds and hundreds of generations. If the children are unlikely to get the sickness passed on to them, then they don't have a reason to adopt the behavior, and it goes away in one generation before evolution has time to do anything.
It's true that this isn't an example of evolution in action. However, it *does* show that it is possible for a primate other than a human to learn to walk erect if there is sufficient reason to bother with it. And *that* is signifigant even if this particular trigger isn't the kind that would pass on to the next generation. This opens up the possibility of there having been *some* kind of trigger that might have lasted a long enough time for this practice to trigger an evolutionary change. This particular disease wouldn't be it, however.
Next time try reading at least all the way to the third paragraph before replying to someone's post in a dismissive demeaning fashion. Apparently you didn't see this part that appeared later in that person's post:
But don't let this confuse you. Having a larger brain did not cause us to go bipedal just so we could hold our heads up. Evolution doesn't work that way
because it was a hunting advantage..
Most primates are omnivores that get most sustenance from plants, and only supplement it with meat from time to time, and that meat is typically just bugs. So I have a hard time believing that hunting was important to an unintelligent ancestor (now, once intelligence starts creeping in, it gets different, as that means diet can be deliberately changed at will).
But there are several other possible advantages to being bipedal:
- The ability to see far was probably more of a defensive than an offensive thing. A predator using the grass as cover has a harder time sneaking up on the creature who can see from a taller vantage point down into the grass.
- Some primates other than humans do use some primitive tools. It could be that simple tool-use (i.e. a stick) predates (and caused) intelligence, and that the fact that a stick is easier to wield when you don't need your hands to walk might have been the trigger for bipedalism.
- Climbing trees is easier when you can stand on your hind legs and hold your balance while reaching for the next branches. The irony if this was the reason for bipedalism, is that bipedalism is what made us not need to bother with all the tree climbing in the first place.
If it was by nature, then walking on all fours wouldn't be several times more uncomfortable than walking bipedally. Try it some time. The fact that there is a physical predisposition to standing upright is blatantly obvious when you try using your hands and feet to walk on all fours. NOTE - i said hands and FEET, not hands and KNEES (which is what we call "crawling). Use your hands and feet and your torso ends up angled downward so much that you can't see in front of you without straining your neck severly.
If your proportions are like a typical human, then your legs are signifigantly longer than your arms. Thus when you try to walk on all fours you actually end up crawling on your knees, and using your entire lower leg below the knees as just one overly long "foot". No, our bodies are not physically condusive to walking on all fours. Not even close. When you try, your long legs and up angling your butt up in the air, and your torso is angled downward toward the front, so you can't see where you're going without hurting your neck.
Also, look at that "5% other" category. What "other" OS is there that wasn't in the list? One possible thing is that the "other" refers to systems that it was unable to determine what the OS was with certainty. When the stats have an "other" category that is five times larger than the known linux category, there's a good chance some of those "others" are really linux - and that it can only detect linux with certainty on some specific setups. Also note that this is based on the user agent string - which is spoofable, and *NEEDS* to be spoofed to be windows and IE to hit some sites that practice OS predjudice - so more Linux users probably have spoofed user agent strings than users of other OS's.
But all that aside the most likely explanation is that the "other" sites are actually indirect access not being done by a normal web browser, and thus have strange user agent strings - for example another search engine hitting google, or a program that hits google, pulls some stas from it, and then publishes them. If this is the case, and those hits are reaching numbers of 5%, then that means the entire survey is bogus since it isn't about desktop users at all but about hits from any sort of client of any kind be it a desktop or not.
Also keep in mind that it only measures hits to google. That means that someone who has google as the homepage is artificially upping those stats, and linux users are more likely to have some other page as their homepage than windows users are (who generally think of the web as a place to go surfing on keywords).
What I did say was more like sorry that's the way it is if you don't like it start a start a campaign to change it.
The first step of any such campaign would be to talk about the problem with others to see if there are enough like-minded people to have such a campaign. But that's hard to do when some jerk is gets all pissy about it and lambasts people for talking about the problem. Telling people to stop talking about the problem and instead do something about it is an oxymoron - talking about it is the first step of "doing something about it".
The only way for me not to sound arrogant when talking about religious people is for me to lie. Sometimes honesty *is* arrogant.
One thing that is a problem when talking about "Christianity" is that that word does not have a clear definition because the book on which it is based (The bible) is taken differently by different people - there will be some who say that "Parts A, B and C are literal and D, E, and F are metaphorical", while others say "No, that's all wrong. D, E, and F are the literal parts and A, B, and C are the metaphorical parts." and still others who say "No, all of them are literal, A B C D E and F", and so on. Through these kinds of games people can make their own worldview be whatever the heck they feel like and still claim to be Christian. (Which is why I try not to assume anything about a person's morality when they claim to be Christian. The zillions of variations on the theme make it so that that statement tells me almost nothing at all about them. You can end up with both Martin Luther King Jr and some dumb hick white supremicist both claiming to be true Christians even though their concepts of what is moral are completely opposite from each other.)
Anyway, with that preamble aside, the point is that when I say the Christian god cannot possibly exist, I am referring to the one you would get if you interpreted every part of the bible 100% literally. The type of god envisioned by a literalist interpretation of every bible verse. It cannot exist because the bible has contradictory descriptions of his properties. It's like someone describing some shape he saw, and claiming it is both a triangle and a square.
(One contradictory pair of properties is that god gives us free will, yet is also 100% guaranteed to know what our future moral choices will be. For example, he allegedly knows if you will make the right decision to be saved or not since before you were even born. This sets up the situation where I am simultaneously fated to make certain choices and free to make those choices - and that is contradictory just like a square triangle.)
(It also claims Jesus is the SON of god, and that Jesus *IS* God.)
(It also claims that god won't punish the sons for the sins of the father and also that God sent a plague to kill the firstborn sons in Egypt for what their families did.)
In addition to the INTERNAL inconsistencies like that, there is also several external ones - like the age of the earth, and the order in which genesis said the components of creation were made is out of order with what has been discovered since then. (Even if you take the 6 days of creation as a metaphor (And this is one of the only places where that kind of interpretation is logical, since there is no such thing as a "day" without a rotating earth and a sun yet.), there is still the problem that the events are described out of order.)
As far as Jesus existing, that is insufficient evidence for claiming anything about the religion is true. After all, Mohummed is a historical figure that existed. The Buddha is a historical figure that existed. And yet it is impossible for Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism to be simultaneously true.
Note that Jesus's existence predates the recording of any of new testament quite a number of years, and so he wasn't around to refute any of the stories people were saying about him. Josh McDowell's "Lord Lunatic or Liar" argument is really, really naive because it ignores the more likely explanation - "misrepresented".
See above post.