...what said innocent Egyptians were already doing to the Israelites. The Assyrians and others too.
Said God wiped out at least a million foot-soldiers only a few weeks later, too. The foot-soldiers were en route to wiping out 4-6 million Israelites including women and children.
It was not a nice time and place to live in. That's what happens when we are essentially left in charge of a planet.
if you assume God can arbitrarily fiddle with anything at point, there is no room left for science at all. You can't make useful predictions or theories if everything depends on the will of an omniscient, unpredictable supernatural being.
Yeah? How many scientists burn incense at the altar of Murphy?
If all else fails, study when and where $DIETY intervenes.
If you're talking about the scriptural God, He laid out rules and generally works to them. In fact, it's astonishing that this universe should have any serious rules at all. Why doesn't the speed of light vary with location? Why do van der Waals forces exist? That kind of scructure by itself is evidence for supernature.
Many scientific studies have been done of God working to rule. Note that I didn't say "of God performing like a trained parrot" since that would not be working to rule. Such a God would be useless.
the world was created from water 6000 years ago, which is on the face of it a ridiculous assertion, given that there are continuous human civilizations older than that
No, there aren't.
Even going back to Egypt, circa 3000 years ago give or take some, the commonly used dating system is based on something called "the Sothic cycle". Nobody is absolutely sure what that means, but lining up common events between Egypt and the nations around it against verifiable astronomic events show that the dating system currently in use based on it is long by a goodly chunk of a thousand years before it even gets as far back as 4000 years ago. Yet the Sothic cycle is still widely used because of adamant support by gradualist researchers.
If you're talking about direct radiometric dating, run the samples through an AMS and try again. Even if you think you can guarantee a lack of inclusions etc.
Merely making one prediction which happens to turn out true does not make you a scientist
Correct. Mr Baumgardner has indeed made many predictions, as have several of his compatriots. He wrote TERRA as part of his day job, apon which much earth science has been based. This is not a dumb bunny we're dealing with here. He lacks a Paul Allen paying to produce animated movies about his work, and neither do said compatriots.
A snowflake is an expression of quite intricate pre-existent structure.
if you have billions of grains of sand and raindrops and millions of waves and lighting bolts and billions of years, the odds of something extremely simple happening once are not that low
There's considerable difference in complexity between an accidental 2-input NAND gate and an accidental computer, even a seriously dumb one like ENIAC or a transistor-era semi-programmable calculator.
So also in the real universe. We fall a very, very long way short of having enough time, atoms and interaction in the entire universe to accidentally produce even something as "simple" as a virus, fairy tales from Dawkins notwithstanding.
It doesn't require faith to posit that God or $DEITY exists for the purposes of scientific modelling.
The only fly in the ointment is that if $DEITY is to be of much use as a source of authority, $DEITY is not going to perform on demand. Countering this in some degree, unless $DEITY is as random and capricious as, say, Jupiter, Vesta or Mithra, then $DIETY ain't gunner feel offended if we do experiments on the nature of $DIETY's reality.
If you scientifically model a $DEITY-containing world carelessly, your results will be as useless as any other carelessly assembled scientific model. I suspect that this may have killed a good-many half-hearted experiments on supernature.
Sea creatures at the bottom (bottom-dwellers like the trilobite and horseshoe crab at the bottom-bottom subsumed only by worms and the like), lightest (mammals etc) at the top. Po: reptiles came before mammals because they're denser not older.
Size also works, to some degree. Certainly within individual "boneyards" where the deposition wasn't sufficiently violent to totally scramble everything.
Boneyards don't form today, because there are no catastrophes big enough to round up, kill, inter and cover so many animals at once. That makes observation hard.
I still doubt that a person using the scientific method (which IS proven) could possibly come to the conclusion that the universe is 6000 years old.
This is one of several ways in which you can have your cake and eat it too. As well as young-earth creationists, both materialist scientists and progressive creationists have long known about it. And yes, the rebuttals have been themselves rebutted.
Also, I'd appreciate a little less anonymity, if you could see your way clear to that?
You made a bunch of assumptions (along the lines of "science == materialism") at the start and did not acknowledge any of them.
Acknowledgement does not equal validation, but if you're not aware of your assumptions you're building logical castles in the clouds.
In order for the billions-of-years cluster of processes to work, you must assume (without proof) materialism or something so close to it that the differences are, pardon the word choice but it seems so appropriate, immaterial. Likewise someone postulating Creationism needs to postulate a (by definition) supernatural creator.
What I'm postulating is assuming neither, and seeing where the evidence takes us. You do without a guarantee of materialism and I'll do without a Bible.
What the evidence says in geology is that an awful lot of rock was emplaced and removed very rapidly, essentially in a single operation in most cases.
What the evidence says in paleontology is that the nice fossil sequences don't always occur, sometimes the'yre reversed without evidence of intrusion, reworking or en-bloc inversion. Sometimes they're essentially random. Outside materialist assumptions, there is no evidence that paraconformities exist. There are also alternative explanations for fossil ordering which make much more empirical sense than gradual deposition, but which are canonically discarded out of respect for the same materialist assumptions.
And so on.
Yet until you stop majoring on the minors and temporarily renounce your materialism, you won't even consider actual observations like those.
Now you say that even though there is a pile of evidence a hundred miles high stating that the world is more than 6000 years old, that ONE piece of evidence in that pile may or may not be valid, the whole pile is invalid?
Think not in terms of a pile in terms of a disordered heap, but a pile in terms of a house of cards. If a few of the cards at the bottom prove defective, the whole house can fall.
Take, for example, fossils. These are dated according to the rocks they're in, and the rocks are dated by index fossils they contain. This neat circular piece of reasoning existed before radiometric dating, so when that came along it got kind of calibrated with one eye on the existing situation. Where did the original geologic column come from? A few maniacs with an agenda waved a thumb at it and pulled the figures out of their asses. The first few rounds of guesses were insanely low by today's standards, almost lining up with the 75Ma proposed by people who sound (for the sake of reducing search-engine hits and the ensuing bunfights) like "sighyentollujusts".
Now if it happens that these dates are more or less right, well and good. However, AMS dating says they're not - which should be blindingly obvious anyway, when people are C14-dating stuff that should have hit equilibrium millions of years ago. Many conventionally acquired datings disagree with each other, depsite the discarding of many "wild" readings. Many fossils and rock layers are found in the "wrong" order without possibility of intrusion, reworking or inversion en bloc. Then there's polystrate fossils, the whole OOPART clan, the problem of fresh "fossils", the missing bones and assorted non-equilibria. And more.
Don't even ask about the fragile pillar of assumptions holding up the ice-core dating department, either.
So the dating systems appear to be a bit of a snafu when you have a close look at them. People going wrong with confidence left and right. Why hasn't this been examined and fixed? Because too many people are scared to rock the boat lest they let a "Divine Foot" in the door; they'd rather press on, knowing in the back of their minds that the intellectual palace they're building stands on false foundations, than risk finding out that their whole philosophy is wrong. They can't imagine a reasonable alternative explanation besides creationism ("it's turtles, all the way down!"), so they regularly rearrange the deckchairs on the scientific Titanic and declare the iceberg problem solved.
This is not to assert that creationism actually is the only alternative to orthodox dating dogma, simply that nobody mainstream has yet come up with a reasonable-sounding alternative, and very few are prepared to risk derision by even trying to. The like of Dawkins and his imaginitive and entertaining but ultimately pointless just-so stories are very popular because the alternative is real career risk and hard work.
OK, so where does that get us? Three dating cards crumple, marked "radio-dating", "index fossils" and "reference strata". They're right at the bottom of the heap.
It's a huge heap, and being braced up by many very determined people, so it may take a while to collapse as it should, but it's doomed to fall flat in the end unless some viable replacement cards are found. The heap is not called "science" but "materialism", which makes finding an acceptable replacement more difficult. The ricepaper of imagination will not do, for these cards carry a heavy load and need to be pressed from the stiff card of unbiased observation.
Will new cards be found, or will the heap collapse? Stay tuned, but whatever you do don't blunder around asserting that it's all proven and the battle is over.
Maybe it helps to simply avoid this kind of labels, which are indeed easily misused.
If they were generally only being misused rather than being frighteningly accurate, the whole discussion would make a lot more sense.
Going beyond reasoning to rationalisation is pretty much guaranteed to end the usefulness of something which is essentially bigger than any of us. This rationalisation presumes that we are in some way in control of the situation, that it is entirely understandable and explicable through the lens of our finite experience. If, however, the facts as stated are rational, then they are not going to be rationalisable.
Or to put it another way, if you are keeping your head while those about you are losing theirs, then you haven't fully grasped the situation. (-:
I replace one assumption with zero assumptions (at least on the spectrum under discussion). Read what I actually wrote, not what you thought it meant, then yes, we might have some progress.
Many people replace that one assumption with another but practically all of those are obviously aware of it, whereas few materialists are.
I've seen ancient ('70s origin) PCBs with most of the resistors printed onto them (the exceptions being extreme values and high power components). Not easily repairable but if you could print a new one, who cares?
At well-controlled inkjet resolutions, at least some resistors and capacitors (e.g. power rail decouplers) should be printable as well.
The argument is that since real structure cannot sensibly arise from randomness (e.g. beaches aren't turned into computers by the action of wind, waves, rain or lightning) and we think rationally (or at least we think we do... but down that recursive path lies madness) our presence here cannot be accidental.
He's not questioning the scientific method, he's questioning our ability to apply it, firstly at all in a random universe and secondly with overriding philosophical constraints. Creationists use the scientific method just like anyone else, the only difference being that they don't make an a priori assumption of materialism (the doctrine that there can be no supernatural effects). Some of them make an assumption of little-d deism but that's not actually necessary to avoid materialistic pitfalls.
Supernatural effects can be measured and and studied scientifically just like anything else. You can only assert otherwise based on just such an a priori assumption.
Materialistic assumptions have been shown to be capable of leading mainstream science badly astray. Note in particular the Baker quote from Ref 11.
...the demoroniser. Be warned that you might not get anything out the other end. This guy looks like being such a waste of half a square meter of Earth's surface that even hate is overspending on him. D'ohl's unsuspected secret twin.
This week we have annelida sharing vertebrate opsin and even further admissions from conservative geologists that the Grand Canyon may have formed relatively suddenly (at the same time as they're trying to remove a book from the GC bookstore which says exactly the same thing). That's one more pointer among thousands that are aimed towards a matrix of characteristics, not a tree or forest of them; and one more admission among hundreds hinting that gigayears aren't needed to explain geology as we know it. In fact, you cannot successfully explain thick untainted rock strata in near-gigayear terms because our planet is quite obviously not that tranquil.
In the absence of any materialist explanation which comes even close to fitting the data, it becomes appropriate to begin considering non-materialist explanations - but you seem to be missing this important and obvious step.
The OT quotes the devil, which doesn't invalidate it. The Bible (including the OT) also quotes people telling lies, which also doesn't invalidate it. Finally, the Bible quotes rules which are still helpful despite being targeted principally at ancient Hebrews (e.g. the Jews survived so well during the Black Plague simply because of blindly following laws generally considered stupid, irrelevant and/or outdated that their neighbours burned them at the stake for being in league with the devil (tells you a lot about the theology of the time, too)). The passage of time hasn't made the principles behind the rules any less effective.
I'm not suggesting that we should start stoning homosexuals or other adulterers (although I have seen good arguments made for it, said arguments neglect a lot of unfortunate attributes of human nature). However it is clear from the nature of the punishment prescribed that homosexuality is unarguably regarded as badly wrong, not a mere misdemeanour.
You're also still stuck with the fact that the NT (which extensively fulfills and records the fulfillment of OT prophecy) still explicitly states, categorically, that neither effeminate nor dominant male homosexuals, nor female homosexuals, will see heaven. As a Christian, you have a duty to change that (lots of implications there, not including a requirement to tackle individual cases head-on or rancorously) in exactly the same way you would address stealing or polyandry or any of the many things listed alongside homosexuality as showstoppers.
Your 4th point is addressing a strawman. The liberal view of the Bible is that it was thrown together by men to address their need for religion. This is entirely inconsistent with what the Bible actually says, does and is. This is also different from reading the Bible intelligently, which is essentially you're proposing above. By upholding reasonable reading, you are not upholding the liberal view proposed by your parent poster.
Well, if adult stem cells can cure blindness and retard Parkinson's Disease, why don't we give them a couple more years first before rushing to promote the trade in baby flesh?
This is exactly what will happen when people in poorer countries realise that they can sell a newborn or unborn baby (whom they don't or hardly know, or in some cases don't care about anyway) for more than several year's wages.
And the answer to "why don't we push funds towards adult stem cells which are known to be productive?" is very simple: because some people don't want to. They want a reason, a justification, to excuse the murder of any of those little inconveniences which from time to time pop up.
And really, what's the difference between you and a baby? How about ten minutes before the baby's born? Ten days? Ten weeks? A local hospital is able to save and raise babies more than 20 weeks premature who grow up to be normal adults. The answer is clearly "there is no practical difference". Yet some people are hell-bent on creating one.
The Catholic church of the time was focussed around various forms of Mithraism and Zoroastrian-like groups, although it later absorbed the cult of Vesta (ever heard of Vestal Virgins?) and half a dozen others before conquering much of the Christian movement by a kind of internal takeover. The canon existed pretty much as the Protestants use it long before the Catholic Church officially endorsed it - and IRL their endorsement varied from accepted practice and was varied a couple of times.
The New Testament states flat-out that homosexuals (very carefully differentiates between butch and limp-wristed blokes too, and also lesbians, then groups them all together with thieves and liars and such) will not be found in heaven, so if you're a Christian and your "love" leads someone to miss their chance, were you really loving them, or were you just being weak at a different level? The Old Testament is even blunter, prescribing stoning to death for homosexuals.
Of course, if you hate homosexuals, you're also going to miss out. If you can put together a coherent world-view which incorporates both facts, then you're pretty much on the right track.
If the goal here is to supplant proprietary apps with free alternatives, the developers need to be chasing down the people that USE the proprietary apps and asking them what they need their free alternative to do. You can't fucking expect a graphics geek or a video editor to give enough of a shit about the GIMP to create a buzilla account and start filing reports- especially when so many of the issues with the GIMP that keep Professionals from using it are either walled off by patents (Pantone, etc) or considered "features" by the developers.
The goal is loftier than that, it's to be better than the proprietary app ever will be.
In the shorter term: begin! What do you need The GIMP to do that it doesn't? Load huge files? Load.psd more faithfully? Manage colourspaces?
I'll submit bugzilla reports for you. Grab yourself a copy (preferably of 2.0.5 'coz that's what I'll be using to try to replicate any breakage), load some things up in your spare time, fire away.
CC'ed via email so you can tell me where to fetch your test images from.
Dang, that was hard And yes, access denied from a Western Australian ISP.
IPOF gutenberg.net.au blocks access from North America to the Australian ex-copyright materials which might still have a legal millstone around their collective necks in the USA. Same old, same old.
Slashdot Mirror
...what happened and compare it to what should have happened.
Paleontology and Geology are, after all, whole branches of science based on non-repeatable events.
...what said innocent Egyptians were already doing to the Israelites. The Assyrians and others too.
Said God wiped out at least a million foot-soldiers only a few weeks later, too. The foot-soldiers were en route to wiping out 4-6 million Israelites including women and children.
It was not a nice time and place to live in. That's what happens when we are essentially left in charge of a planet.
You got it wrong. An Earth inside a white hole would - you should pardon the term in context - naturally possess the required properties.
If all else fails, study when and where $DIETY intervenes.
If you're talking about the scriptural God, He laid out rules and generally works to them. In fact, it's astonishing that this universe should have any serious rules at all. Why doesn't the speed of light vary with location? Why do van der Waals forces exist? That kind of scructure by itself is evidence for supernature.
Many scientific studies have been done of God working to rule. Note that I didn't say "of God performing like a trained parrot" since that would not be working to rule. Such a God would be useless.
Even going back to Egypt, circa 3000 years ago give or take some, the commonly used dating system is based on something called "the Sothic cycle". Nobody is absolutely sure what that means, but lining up common events between Egypt and the nations around it against verifiable astronomic events show that the dating system currently in use based on it is long by a goodly chunk of a thousand years before it even gets as far back as 4000 years ago. Yet the Sothic cycle is still widely used because of adamant support by gradualist researchers.
If you're talking about direct radiometric dating, run the samples through an AMS and try again. Even if you think you can guarantee a lack of inclusions etc.
Correct. Mr Baumgardner has indeed made many predictions, as have several of his compatriots. He wrote TERRA as part of his day job, apon which much earth science has been based. This is not a dumb bunny we're dealing with here. He lacks a Paul Allen paying to produce animated movies about his work, and neither do said compatriots.
There's considerable difference in complexity between an accidental 2-input NAND gate and an accidental computer, even a seriously dumb one like ENIAC or a transistor-era semi-programmable calculator.
So also in the real universe. We fall a very, very long way short of having enough time, atoms and interaction in the entire universe to accidentally produce even something as "simple" as a virus, fairy tales from Dawkins notwithstanding.
It doesn't require faith to posit that God or $DEITY exists for the purposes of scientific modelling.
The only fly in the ointment is that if $DEITY is to be of much use as a source of authority, $DEITY is not going to perform on demand. Countering this in some degree, unless $DEITY is as random and capricious as, say, Jupiter, Vesta or Mithra, then $DIETY ain't gunner feel offended if we do experiments on the nature of $DIETY's reality.
If you scientifically model a $DEITY-containing world carelessly, your results will be as useless as any other carelessly assembled scientific model. I suspect that this may have killed a good-many half-hearted experiments on supernature.
Sea creatures at the bottom (bottom-dwellers like the trilobite and horseshoe crab at the bottom-bottom subsumed only by worms and the like), lightest (mammals etc) at the top. Po: reptiles came before mammals because they're denser not older.
Size also works, to some degree. Certainly within individual "boneyards" where the deposition wasn't sufficiently violent to totally scramble everything.
Boneyards don't form today, because there are no catastrophes big enough to round up, kill, inter and cover so many animals at once. That makes observation hard.
Also, I'd appreciate a little less anonymity, if you could see your way clear to that?
You made a bunch of assumptions (along the lines of "science == materialism") at the start and did not acknowledge any of them.
Acknowledgement does not equal validation, but if you're not aware of your assumptions you're building logical castles in the clouds.
In order for the billions-of-years cluster of processes to work, you must assume (without proof) materialism or something so close to it that the differences are, pardon the word choice but it seems so appropriate, immaterial. Likewise someone postulating Creationism needs to postulate a (by definition) supernatural creator.
What I'm postulating is assuming neither, and seeing where the evidence takes us. You do without a guarantee of materialism and I'll do without a Bible.
What the evidence says in geology is that an awful lot of rock was emplaced and removed very rapidly, essentially in a single operation in most cases.
What the evidence says in paleontology is that the nice fossil sequences don't always occur, sometimes the'yre reversed without evidence of intrusion, reworking or en-bloc inversion. Sometimes they're essentially random. Outside materialist assumptions, there is no evidence that paraconformities exist. There are also alternative explanations for fossil ordering which make much more empirical sense than gradual deposition, but which are canonically discarded out of respect for the same materialist assumptions.
And so on.
Yet until you stop majoring on the minors and temporarily renounce your materialism, you won't even consider actual observations like those.
The floor is yours, feel free to impress us all with your rolling oratory. (-:
Take, for example, fossils. These are dated according to the rocks they're in, and the rocks are dated by index fossils they contain. This neat circular piece of reasoning existed before radiometric dating, so when that came along it got kind of calibrated with one eye on the existing situation. Where did the original geologic column come from? A few maniacs with an agenda waved a thumb at it and pulled the figures out of their asses. The first few rounds of guesses were insanely low by today's standards, almost lining up with the 75Ma proposed by people who sound (for the sake of reducing search-engine hits and the ensuing bunfights) like "sighyentollujusts".
Now if it happens that these dates are more or less right, well and good. However, AMS dating says they're not - which should be blindingly obvious anyway, when people are C14-dating stuff that should have hit equilibrium millions of years ago. Many conventionally acquired datings disagree with each other, depsite the discarding of many "wild" readings. Many fossils and rock layers are found in the "wrong" order without possibility of intrusion, reworking or inversion en bloc. Then there's polystrate fossils, the whole OOPART clan, the problem of fresh "fossils", the missing bones and assorted non-equilibria. And more.
Don't even ask about the fragile pillar of assumptions holding up the ice-core dating department, either.
So the dating systems appear to be a bit of a snafu when you have a close look at them. People going wrong with confidence left and right. Why hasn't this been examined and fixed? Because too many people are scared to rock the boat lest they let a "Divine Foot" in the door; they'd rather press on, knowing in the back of their minds that the intellectual palace they're building stands on false foundations, than risk finding out that their whole philosophy is wrong. They can't imagine a reasonable alternative explanation besides creationism ("it's turtles, all the way down!"), so they regularly rearrange the deckchairs on the scientific Titanic and declare the iceberg problem solved.
This is not to assert that creationism actually is the only alternative to orthodox dating dogma, simply that nobody mainstream has yet come up with a reasonable-sounding alternative, and very few are prepared to risk derision by even trying to. The like of Dawkins and his imaginitive and entertaining but ultimately pointless just-so stories are very popular because the alternative is real career risk and hard work.
OK, so where does that get us? Three dating cards crumple, marked "radio-dating", "index fossils" and "reference strata". They're right at the bottom of the heap.
It's a huge heap, and being braced up by many very determined people, so it may take a while to collapse as it should, but it's doomed to fall flat in the end unless some viable replacement cards are found. The heap is not called "science" but "materialism", which makes finding an acceptable replacement more difficult. The ricepaper of imagination will not do, for these cards carry a heavy load and need to be pressed from the stiff card of unbiased observation.
Will new cards be found, or will the heap collapse? Stay tuned, but whatever you do don't blunder around asserting that it's all proven and the battle is over.
Going beyond reasoning to rationalisation is pretty much guaranteed to end the usefulness of something which is essentially bigger than any of us. This rationalisation presumes that we are in some way in control of the situation, that it is entirely understandable and explicable through the lens of our finite experience. If, however, the facts as stated are rational, then they are not going to be rationalisable.
Or to put it another way, if you are keeping your head while those about you are losing theirs, then you haven't fully grasped the situation. (-:
I replace one assumption with zero assumptions (at least on the spectrum under discussion). Read what I actually wrote, not what you thought it meant, then yes, we might have some progress.
Many people replace that one assumption with another but practically all of those are obviously aware of it, whereas few materialists are.
I've seen ancient ('70s origin) PCBs with most of the resistors printed onto them (the exceptions being extreme values and high power components). Not easily repairable but if you could print a new one, who cares?
At well-controlled inkjet resolutions, at least some resistors and capacitors (e.g. power rail decouplers) should be printable as well.
Compare the post tallies for this article and others near it, and spot the not-so-hidden agenda. (-:
The argument is that since real structure cannot sensibly arise from randomness (e.g. beaches aren't turned into computers by the action of wind, waves, rain or lightning) and we think rationally (or at least we think we do... but down that recursive path lies madness) our presence here cannot be accidental.
He's not questioning the scientific method, he's questioning our ability to apply it, firstly at all in a random universe and secondly with overriding philosophical constraints. Creationists use the scientific method just like anyone else, the only difference being that they don't make an a priori assumption of materialism (the doctrine that there can be no supernatural effects). Some of them make an assumption of little-d deism but that's not actually necessary to avoid materialistic pitfalls.
Supernatural effects can be measured and and studied scientifically just like anything else. You can only assert otherwise based on just such an a priori assumption.
Materialistic assumptions have been shown to be capable of leading mainstream science badly astray. Note in particular the Baker quote from Ref 11.
...the demoroniser. Be warned that you might not get anything out the other end. This guy looks like being such a waste of half a square meter of Earth's surface that even hate is overspending on him. D'ohl's unsuspected secret twin.
This week we have annelida sharing vertebrate opsin and even further admissions from conservative geologists that the Grand Canyon may have formed relatively suddenly (at the same time as they're trying to remove a book from the GC bookstore which says exactly the same thing). That's one more pointer among thousands that are aimed towards a matrix of characteristics, not a tree or forest of them; and one more admission among hundreds hinting that gigayears aren't needed to explain geology as we know it. In fact, you cannot successfully explain thick untainted rock strata in near-gigayear terms because our planet is quite obviously not that tranquil.
In the absence of any materialist explanation which comes even close to fitting the data, it becomes appropriate to begin considering non-materialist explanations - but you seem to be missing this important and obvious step.
No wonder you posted as an AC.
The OT quotes the devil, which doesn't invalidate it. The Bible (including the OT) also quotes people telling lies, which also doesn't invalidate it. Finally, the Bible quotes rules which are still helpful despite being targeted principally at ancient Hebrews (e.g. the Jews survived so well during the Black Plague simply because of blindly following laws generally considered stupid, irrelevant and/or outdated that their neighbours burned them at the stake for being in league with the devil (tells you a lot about the theology of the time, too)). The passage of time hasn't made the principles behind the rules any less effective.
I'm not suggesting that we should start stoning homosexuals or other adulterers (although I have seen good arguments made for it, said arguments neglect a lot of unfortunate attributes of human nature). However it is clear from the nature of the punishment prescribed that homosexuality is unarguably regarded as badly wrong, not a mere misdemeanour.
You're also still stuck with the fact that the NT (which extensively fulfills and records the fulfillment of OT prophecy) still explicitly states, categorically, that neither effeminate nor dominant male homosexuals, nor female homosexuals, will see heaven. As a Christian, you have a duty to change that (lots of implications there, not including a requirement to tackle individual cases head-on or rancorously) in exactly the same way you would address stealing or polyandry or any of the many things listed alongside homosexuality as showstoppers.
Your 4th point is addressing a strawman. The liberal view of the Bible is that it was thrown together by men to address their need for religion. This is entirely inconsistent with what the Bible actually says, does and is. This is also different from reading the Bible intelligently, which is essentially you're proposing above. By upholding reasonable reading, you are not upholding the liberal view proposed by your parent poster.
Well, if adult stem cells can cure blindness and retard Parkinson's Disease, why don't we give them a couple more years first before rushing to promote the trade in baby flesh?
This is exactly what will happen when people in poorer countries realise that they can sell a newborn or unborn baby (whom they don't or hardly know, or in some cases don't care about anyway) for more than several year's wages.
And the answer to "why don't we push funds towards adult stem cells which are known to be productive?" is very simple: because some people don't want to. They want a reason, a justification, to excuse the murder of any of those little inconveniences which from time to time pop up.
And really, what's the difference between you and a baby? How about ten minutes before the baby's born? Ten days? Ten weeks? A local hospital is able to save and raise babies more than 20 weeks premature who grow up to be normal adults. The answer is clearly "there is no practical difference". Yet some people are hell-bent on creating one.
The Catholic church of the time was focussed around various forms of Mithraism and Zoroastrian-like groups, although it later absorbed the cult of Vesta (ever heard of Vestal Virgins?) and half a dozen others before conquering much of the Christian movement by a kind of internal takeover. The canon existed pretty much as the Protestants use it long before the Catholic Church officially endorsed it - and IRL their endorsement varied from accepted practice and was varied a couple of times.
The New Testament states flat-out that homosexuals (very carefully differentiates between butch and limp-wristed blokes too, and also lesbians, then groups them all together with thieves and liars and such) will not be found in heaven, so if you're a Christian and your "love" leads someone to miss their chance, were you really loving them, or were you just being weak at a different level? The Old Testament is even blunter, prescribing stoning to death for homosexuals.
Of course, if you hate homosexuals, you're also going to miss out. If you can put together a coherent world-view which incorporates both facts, then you're pretty much on the right track.
In the shorter term: begin! What do you need The GIMP to do that it doesn't? Load huge files? Load
I'll submit bugzilla reports for you. Grab yourself a copy (preferably of 2.0.5 'coz that's what I'll be using to try to replicate any breakage), load some things up in your spare time, fire away.
CC'ed via email so you can tell me where to fetch your test images from.
Dang, that was hard And yes, access denied from a Western Australian ISP.
IPOF gutenberg.net.au blocks access from North America to the Australian ex-copyright materials which might still have a legal millstone around their collective necks in the USA. Same old, same old.
The GIMP is $0, so is CinePaint ...and so on...
Kontour is $0
Cinelerra is $0
So how long are these other programs going to remain overpriced?