The reason all (mentally healthy, well adjusted) humans are moral is simply down to human nature; we all do better working as a group than if we're at each others throats.
Hmm, it couldn't be because moral law has been "written into our hearts", as Christianity says? That we were created with a basic desire to strive for God, even if we don't fully cooperate with this desire at all times?
If people actually followed the Bible literally people would be into stonings, witch hunts, eyes for eyes, daughters for sale, slavery, etc.
Stonings? Not if one studies the Bible in its entirety. While the consequences of sin is by its nature, deadly, the concept of mercy was gradually introduced to those whose hearts weren't too hard to accept it. Truth was revealed in stages, appropriate to what a civilization was able to tolerate. If God had skipped the Old Testament after Genesis 1 and 2 entirely and immediately sent Christ, it's very difficult to see how any of the teachings would have become accepted. That's why divorce is described by Christ as having been "tolerated" because hearts were just too hard at one time to accept a new teaching about divorce.
I do not see evidence of the imperative to hold witch hunts in the Bible.
The early introduction of "eye for an eye" was actually instituted to put limitations on revenge--the revenge people would wage against one another was actually much worse at the time. But revelation came in stages, and when humanity was ready, revenge was revealed as something to be out of line with the will of God. Justice was fine, but not revenge. (Hence, "turn the other cheek"--which also is NOT a blanket order to be a doormat. You have to study revelation in its entirety to piece together the principles correctly.)
And when you see anything else in the bible where people do wrong, do not make the mistake of assuming that the Bible prescribes such sinful behavior, even when the author, while focusing on another intended message, neglects to mention that said behavior is sinful. To say the writing style was different back then is an understatement. As to slavery, The Book of Philemon, for example, is a plea by St. Paul to have a slave freed, though his language only subtly alludes to his intent out of concerns for the safety of slaves of that time, whose fate would be a very ugly one.
On the flip side religious people are just as often homosexual, masturbate just as much, have affairs just as much, take drugs just as much (okay other than Haggard I can't back these up with evidence, but I'd be surprised to find evidence to the contrary).
This is the old illogic of, "If you fail to live up to your ideology, then the ideology must not be true". The fact that people sin has no bearing on whether the ideals of a religion are actually true.
If morality was based on religion why are atheists just as moral, and why do all religions have more or less the same moral code?
You are not in a qualified position to judge the moral standing of every individual atheist or theist, and all religions do NOT have more or less the same moral code, outside of an orientation towards truth which is written into our hearts. Coincidences in teachings likely just come from the truth written into our hearts, but it does need elaboration and guidance, as humans are intellectual beings with complex problem to solve.
Apologetics can answer a lot of your concerns. While I may not have all of the answers, I'm accustomed to always being able to find them. Just don't stop searching whenever an idea pops into your head and assume that you've stumbled upon some Achilles heel without digging further to test your assumptions.
also, could you ever REALLY trust someone who believes they will remain eligible to spend eternity in paradise as long as he feels bad about his sins sometime before death.
Where would be the moral imperative to trust someone such as this? Religion surely wouldn't require you to. You need to make an informed decision about who to trust, and reason from what you know. This isn't an argument against religion.
According to Christian mythology Hitler could go to heaven if he repented an hour before death, but a non-Christian philanthropist who dedicates his life to the bettering of human society will burn in hell forever.
If Hitler were finally aligned with the Truth, and were to have made this final decision, he would no longer be separated from the Truth. That's the what God is. You may not like it, but it's not a matter of what a creature "deserves". No one "deserves" Heaven on their own merit. The just "punishment" for sin is the naturally-following consequence of spiritual death, because sin is so repugnant and at odds with Truth, Love, and Life. The problem being, we persist in not understanding this or in being very desensitized to this. God, however, is merciful. You'd just have to choose Him and accept the mercy, which He grants freely out of love which can surpass any sin, or you can choose something else. The decision is not God's; he gives the power to decide for or against Him, to each of us. What one creature thinks another "deserves" is irrelevant. It comes down to a choice for an eternity in alignment with Truth, Life and Love or else selfishness and spiritual death. You get whichever you prefer. It suspect that it would be pretty difficult, however, to have such an epiphany as to be remorseful and choose God when on the brink of death after a lifetime of choosing selfishness, unless God really worked to move someone. It is possible but only by being granted a very particular and powerful grace from God.
That's not to say sin won't have its temporal consequences on Earth or in the afterlife. Catholicism also teaches that there is also purgatory, and the evidence for it in the Bible is implicit if not completely explicit, and it is something that can be deduced. Purification would have to take place, since, for one example of support, nothing impure enters heaven, and the purification could well be very painful. The nature of Purgatory has not been revealed in detail. Catholicism also does not teach that the invincibly ignorant are punished for not having had a chance to know God in the fullness He has revealed (and I doubt that many lifetimes is enough to understand everything which has been revealed, nevermind the fact that much has not been revealed in the first place).
Believing that justification for war can exist does not make a theology hypocritical. Sad to say, war is sometimes justified. "Hypocritical" as a notion in argumentation is very misused today. It would be hypocritical if a religion preached absolutely against all war, yet waged war anyway.
What would also be hypocritical, would be the case where a religion preaches that some war is justified, but its adherents knowingly went on to have a war that was not justified, whether or not it was in the name of God. That would be hypocritical. HOWEVER...
One does not determine the truth of an ideology based on evidence that people sometimes do not live up to that truth. That is illogical, and this is what you are doing. For another example, just because some people murder, and thereby do not live up to an ideal, does not mean that the principle not to murder found in any given religion, is untrue. Nor does it mean that a religion that preaches against murder is a false religion. Christianity even teaches this. Christ did not tell his followers not to listen to the hypocrites when they were preaching the truth. He is quoted as telling them not to follow their hypocritical examples, where they were not living up to the truth they preached.
That's because you haven't figured it out. If the human "right" not to be murdered is predicated upon the inclinations of humans, there will be no absolutes, and therefore no inherent right at all. Moral relativists deny absolutes. Does society give you the right not to be murdered? Society can take that right away. Do you give yourself the right not to be murdered? Another person's inclination to believe you don't have that right, negates yours. No "inherent" rights at all, then. When genocide happens, it's because a whole group of people decide that another group doesn't have the right not to be murdered. And it would be those who believe in absolutes, by their nature inherent and dependent on something greater, who would defend people's absolute, inherent right not to be murdered. This "golden rule" you describe only works when you follow it through to its source.
Having similarities to a symbiont, or parasite, however, is still not the criteria by which we discriminate what we can kill. An infant still maintains a dependent relationship and does not give anything back, yet we do not consider infants expendable and do protect infants from being murdered based on THIS.
How do they count these downloads? Couldn't many of them be people who are already Firefox users downloading updated versions? New versions seem to come out about every month and a half or so.
We need some sort of David Toma-type http://www.davidtoma.com/ to adapt that essay as a speech and deliver it to schools around the U.S. It seems to be spot on.
Besides keeping track of the MAC address (probably the best idea along with "personalizing" the laptop to reduce the chance it'll be a target), if you also want to know the current/last IP address a machine had, you can silently run a dynamic DNS client and let it check and update its IP address with a dynamic DNS service such as zoneedit.com or dyndns.org (there are others).
Basically, you go to one of those sites first. Let's say we want to use dyndns.org. You pick a name for the machine such as mydaughter.dyndns.org and sign up.
Then on the machine, you set up a dynamic dns client to keep running in the background. Look here for some possible client programs: http://www.dyndns.org/support/clients/
Have the software check its IP address at startup and at regular intervals. (Just don't pound the dynamic DNS service with updates that are too frequent; they don't like that. Read their policy for how frequent is considered too frequent. Most seem to be okay with checking your IP every 5 minutes.)
When an IP address change is detected, your program client "phones home" to dyndns.org to report its new IP address.
If the unthinkable happens, then:
Simply log into your account at dyndns.org to find out when the last IP address change was, and what the last IP was. Then go to samspade.org or a comparable site where you can run a WhoIS query on that IP address to find out what network the machine is/was connected to, and the contact information for that ISP/network.
If the machine's on the campus network, call up the campus's IT people and give them the MAC address. If the machine's on another ISP, at least you probably now have that ISP's contact information and you can pass along the MAC address and IP address (with the time of the last IP update) to that ISP (and hope they'll cooperate with you and the police.)
Make sure your daughter understands what the program is and understands not to remove the program. And make sure she's okay with this whole thing and doesn't see it as micromanaging.
This "phoning home" idea really only goes so far, so consider the rest of the good advice as well.
Damn. At first glance, I thought that this story was about the appeal of nerdy women (the summary could have read that way). I was about to send it to my girly-girl bitch relatives who I don't talk to anymore because when I do, I get this "You're not feminine and not a real woman!" vibe from them. You know, the "Computers are Hard! I can't Sit At This Stupid Thing!" kinda women.
Would have loved to shove such an article up their a*rses. Damn.
(No, I'm not frumpy or ugly either)
Slashdot Mirror
Just hope that the criminal who steals your computer is thoughtful enough to go into your iTunes and do that for you.
The reason all (mentally healthy, well adjusted) humans are moral is simply down to human nature; we all do better working as a group than if we're at each others throats.
Hmm, it couldn't be because moral law has been "written into our hearts", as Christianity says? That we were created with a basic desire to strive for God, even if we don't fully cooperate with this desire at all times?
If people actually followed the Bible literally people would be into stonings, witch hunts, eyes for eyes, daughters for sale, slavery, etc.
Stonings? Not if one studies the Bible in its entirety. While the consequences of sin is by its nature, deadly, the concept of mercy was gradually introduced to those whose hearts weren't too hard to accept it. Truth was revealed in stages, appropriate to what a civilization was able to tolerate. If God had skipped the Old Testament after Genesis 1 and 2 entirely and immediately sent Christ, it's very difficult to see how any of the teachings would have become accepted. That's why divorce is described by Christ as having been "tolerated" because hearts were just too hard at one time to accept a new teaching about divorce.
I do not see evidence of the imperative to hold witch hunts in the Bible.
The early introduction of "eye for an eye" was actually instituted to put limitations on revenge--the revenge people would wage against one another was actually much worse at the time. But revelation came in stages, and when humanity was ready, revenge was revealed as something to be out of line with the will of God. Justice was fine, but not revenge. (Hence, "turn the other cheek"--which also is NOT a blanket order to be a doormat. You have to study revelation in its entirety to piece together the principles correctly.)
And when you see anything else in the bible where people do wrong, do not make the mistake of assuming that the Bible prescribes such sinful behavior, even when the author, while focusing on another intended message, neglects to mention that said behavior is sinful. To say the writing style was different back then is an understatement. As to slavery, The Book of Philemon, for example, is a plea by St. Paul to have a slave freed, though his language only subtly alludes to his intent out of concerns for the safety of slaves of that time, whose fate would be a very ugly one.
On the flip side religious people are just as often homosexual, masturbate just as much, have affairs just as much, take drugs just as much (okay other than Haggard I can't back these up with evidence, but I'd be surprised to find evidence to the contrary).
This is the old illogic of, "If you fail to live up to your ideology, then the ideology must not be true". The fact that people sin has no bearing on whether the ideals of a religion are actually true.
If morality was based on religion why are atheists just as moral, and why do all religions have more or less the same moral code?
You are not in a qualified position to judge the moral standing of every individual atheist or theist, and all religions do NOT have more or less the same moral code, outside of an orientation towards truth which is written into our hearts. Coincidences in teachings likely just come from the truth written into our hearts, but it does need elaboration and guidance, as humans are intellectual beings with complex problem to solve. Apologetics can answer a lot of your concerns. While I may not have all of the answers, I'm accustomed to always being able to find them. Just don't stop searching whenever an idea pops into your head and assume that you've stumbled upon some Achilles heel without digging further to test your assumptions.
also, could you ever REALLY trust someone who believes they will remain eligible to spend eternity in paradise as long as he feels bad about his sins sometime before death.
Where would be the moral imperative to trust someone such as this? Religion surely wouldn't require you to. You need to make an informed decision about who to trust, and reason from what you know. This isn't an argument against religion. According to Christian mythology Hitler could go to heaven if he repented an hour before death, but a non-Christian philanthropist who dedicates his life to the bettering of human society will burn in hell forever.
If Hitler were finally aligned with the Truth, and were to have made this final decision, he would no longer be separated from the Truth. That's the what God is. You may not like it, but it's not a matter of what a creature "deserves". No one "deserves" Heaven on their own merit. The just "punishment" for sin is the naturally-following consequence of spiritual death, because sin is so repugnant and at odds with Truth, Love, and Life. The problem being, we persist in not understanding this or in being very desensitized to this. God, however, is merciful. You'd just have to choose Him and accept the mercy, which He grants freely out of love which can surpass any sin, or you can choose something else. The decision is not God's; he gives the power to decide for or against Him, to each of us. What one creature thinks another "deserves" is irrelevant. It comes down to a choice for an eternity in alignment with Truth, Life and Love or else selfishness and spiritual death. You get whichever you prefer. It suspect that it would be pretty difficult, however, to have such an epiphany as to be remorseful and choose God when on the brink of death after a lifetime of choosing selfishness, unless God really worked to move someone. It is possible but only by being granted a very particular and powerful grace from God.
That's not to say sin won't have its temporal consequences on Earth or in the afterlife. Catholicism also teaches that there is also purgatory, and the evidence for it in the Bible is implicit if not completely explicit, and it is something that can be deduced. Purification would have to take place, since, for one example of support, nothing impure enters heaven, and the purification could well be very painful. The nature of Purgatory has not been revealed in detail. Catholicism also does not teach that the invincibly ignorant are punished for not having had a chance to know God in the fullness He has revealed (and I doubt that many lifetimes is enough to understand everything which has been revealed, nevermind the fact that much has not been revealed in the first place).
Believing that justification for war can exist does not make a theology hypocritical. Sad to say, war is sometimes justified. "Hypocritical" as a notion in argumentation is very misused today. It would be hypocritical if a religion preached absolutely against all war, yet waged war anyway. What would also be hypocritical, would be the case where a religion preaches that some war is justified, but its adherents knowingly went on to have a war that was not justified, whether or not it was in the name of God. That would be hypocritical. HOWEVER... One does not determine the truth of an ideology based on evidence that people sometimes do not live up to that truth. That is illogical, and this is what you are doing. For another example, just because some people murder, and thereby do not live up to an ideal, does not mean that the principle not to murder found in any given religion, is untrue. Nor does it mean that a religion that preaches against murder is a false religion. Christianity even teaches this. Christ did not tell his followers not to listen to the hypocrites when they were preaching the truth. He is quoted as telling them not to follow their hypocritical examples, where they were not living up to the truth they preached.
That's because you haven't figured it out. If the human "right" not to be murdered is predicated upon the inclinations of humans, there will be no absolutes, and therefore no inherent right at all. Moral relativists deny absolutes. Does society give you the right not to be murdered? Society can take that right away. Do you give yourself the right not to be murdered? Another person's inclination to believe you don't have that right, negates yours. No "inherent" rights at all, then. When genocide happens, it's because a whole group of people decide that another group doesn't have the right not to be murdered. And it would be those who believe in absolutes, by their nature inherent and dependent on something greater, who would defend people's absolute, inherent right not to be murdered. This "golden rule" you describe only works when you follow it through to its source.
Having similarities to a symbiont, or parasite, however, is still not the criteria by which we discriminate what we can kill. An infant still maintains a dependent relationship and does not give anything back, yet we do not consider infants expendable and do protect infants from being murdered based on THIS.
How do they count these downloads? Couldn't many of them be people who are already Firefox users downloading updated versions? New versions seem to come out about every month and a half or so.
We need some sort of David Toma-type http://www.davidtoma.com/ to adapt that essay as a speech and deliver it to schools around the U.S. It seems to be spot on.
I patched this already.
Besides keeping track of the MAC address (probably the best idea along with "personalizing" the laptop to reduce the chance it'll be a target), if you also want to know the current/last IP address a machine had, you can silently run a dynamic DNS client and let it check and update its IP address with a dynamic DNS service such as zoneedit.com or dyndns.org (there are others).
Basically, you go to one of those sites first. Let's say we want to use dyndns.org. You pick a name for the machine such as mydaughter.dyndns.org and sign up.
Then on the machine, you set up a dynamic dns client to keep running in the background. Look here for some possible client programs: http://www.dyndns.org/support/clients/
Have the software check its IP address at startup and at regular intervals. (Just don't pound the dynamic DNS service with updates that are too frequent; they don't like that. Read their policy for how frequent is considered too frequent. Most seem to be okay with checking your IP every 5 minutes.)
When an IP address change is detected, your program client "phones home" to dyndns.org to report its new IP address.
If the unthinkable happens, then: Simply log into your account at dyndns.org to find out when the last IP address change was, and what the last IP was. Then go to samspade.org or a comparable site where you can run a WhoIS query on that IP address to find out what network the machine is/was connected to, and the contact information for that ISP/network.
If the machine's on the campus network, call up the campus's IT people and give them the MAC address. If the machine's on another ISP, at least you probably now have that ISP's contact information and you can pass along the MAC address and IP address (with the time of the last IP update) to that ISP (and hope they'll cooperate with you and the police.)
Make sure your daughter understands what the program is and understands not to remove the program. And make sure she's okay with this whole thing and doesn't see it as micromanaging.
This "phoning home" idea really only goes so far, so consider the rest of the good advice as well.
Damn. At first glance, I thought that this story was about the appeal of nerdy women (the summary could have read that way). I was about to send it to my girly-girl bitch relatives who I don't talk to anymore because when I do, I get this "You're not feminine and not a real woman!" vibe from them. You know, the "Computers are Hard! I can't Sit At This Stupid Thing!" kinda women. Would have loved to shove such an article up their a*rses. Damn. (No, I'm not frumpy or ugly either)