While I respect your distinction between faith and belief, and consider it something of a good accomodation of the modern Catholic redemption doctrine with evangelical practice, it would be incorrect, I think, to describe your belief as the mainstream evangelical one, and many posters on this thread alone seem to agree.
I have studied the Bible and it didn't make me a believing Christian any more than studying the Upanishads made me a believing Hindu. Texts are simply texts - without an external reason to credit one as being distinct from others, there's no reason to attribute to it any special ontological status. Considering the variform and tortured history of that one text, it would take an almost acrobatic act of - ahem - faith to believe that somehow, after all the synods and councils and debates and purges, it was the Word of God.
It would be like reading Shakespeare and then believing that it was unfallable history, that Romeo and Juliet were exactly what they were described to be in the play, and that a man named Bottom was indeed turned into an ass.
Well, I am not only not a Bible literalist, I'm not a Christian. You know that the history of the Bible is part of the history of the Church - it's a human history. But let's go back to the original Aramaic for Mark, and tell me what the word that the KJV is translating as "belief" is.
I don't attribute hate to Wall or any evangelical Christian per se, I just hold that the evangelical version of the doctrine of redemption is screwed up. I think Wall's Christianity is fairly humanistic except for that element. The doctrine of redemption is too central to most all forms of Christianity to be hand-waved around, yet that is exactly what most thinking evangelicals do: they hand-wave around the issue.
A modern Catholic perspective (what I was trained/taught, although I'm a non-theist now) is the whole "salvation by faith or acts" question is distorted by the fact that belief, especially the evangelist's version of belief, *is* an act. The theological correct answer is that salvation occurs by grace alone - neither belief nor action "merits" salvation, but it is by the sacrifice of Christ that salvation is dispensed to all. That actions will reveal and witness to the stance of the soul and its openess to grace, but that those actions aren't ever enough to merit salvation themselves. The doctrine of purgatory does, however, indicated that the nature of purgatory is determined by the number and character of your unconfessed sins, so you can be "damned" (or at least punished relative to their severity) for your actions, if not saved by them.
I don't think it's an accident that Catholic theology has become more flexible and more progressive over the centuries - they learned from the Inquisition, the Counter-Reformation, from Galileo and their other mistakes. It's sad that their lessons have been largely lost on other Christians.
I don't care about the Bible. You already have to be a believing Christian to care about the Bible, and even many believing Christians don't put the Bible first. It's just a book with a complex, human, politicized history. And it's been questionably translated several times over. I'm an agnostic/athiest, albeit one who recieved substantial theological training from Jesuits and Dominicans, and read his share of Barth, Tillich and the like.
What is "just" about making assent to a single doctrine the basis of eternal damnation? If "the law of God is writ in the heart of Man", could such a morally counter-intuitive stance really be the law of God?
It's a good thing? What could be more arbitrary than what one happens to believe? Like Larry himself noted, that's far more a function of your background and environment than of anything else.
The Catholic doctrine of salvation is far more inclusive than the evangelical one. The Catholics believe in "baptism by desire" - meaning that if you simply have an attitude that would be open to salvation if you knew it existed, you would be saved (i.e., your spiritual stance, which is distinct from your spiritual health) - then you are saved. (Yes, they believe that the sacrifice and resurrection is the mechanism of salvation, but that the salvific force of the resurrection doesn't require explicit belief.)
I really can't understand how anyone could sustain the cognitive dissonance of the evangelical doctrine of redemption. It's like Bible literalism - so infantile, so pathetic.
If I shot everyone who doesn't believe that I'm the smartest kid on my block - even if I *am* the smartest kid on my block - I'm an asshole. If God damns to eternal punishment everyone who doesn't believe that he incarnated as a carpenter 2000 years ago, and not as a blue shephard 3000 years ago, then he's a far, far bigger asshole. What one believes is fairly arbitrary - belief is just that, a suspicion that a claim is true.
Again, a God who behaves like that is an infantile jerk.
The truest part of his statement is his honesty in admitting that he was raised in a very religious environment, and that his own personal religiousity was a way of trying to consolidate and preserve as much of that as he can (which is often part and parcel of preserving a relationship with one's family of origin) while still maintaining some logical consistency.
For any truly intelligent, open-minded evangelical Christian, the hard question is "so, you really believe that all the Buddhists, Jews, Hindus and secularists are all damned to hell, and that only people in the Born-Again Club get in?" Because this is such a counter-intuitive notion to anyone who would attribute any compassion to God, that salvation hinge not on the stance of your spirit but on your doctrinal commitments, that many cannot really bring themselves to say it.
For me, the saddest bit of it is that a true authentic sense of spiritual feeling, compassion, and expansiveness becomes burdened with exclusionary and sanctimonious doctrines and attitudes. Larry Wall seems like a truly wonderful person, almost despite his creeds as much as because of them.
Except that the Netherlands get their patent law from the EU, I believe. I think he might be from Slovenia. Or even Serbia (which would explain his reluctance to share the name of his country.)
There's fame and there's fame. Britney Spears is probably more popular *now* than Jimi Hendrix is. And the Bay City Rollers in their heyday were also hugely popular, and bigger in their day than Jimi Hendrix. And 6 years ago, the Spice Girls were bigger than Jimi Hendrix, or Nirvana. How big are the Spice Girls now? Tiffany? The Bay City Rollers? Air Supply? All those pre-fab pop sensations are briefly huge - and then disappear utterly. Many never-as-huge musicians have a lot more longevity in their careers, and their cumulative fame over time may be comparable - musicians like Richard Thompson, Bonnie Raitt, Randy Newman, even Iggy Pop and Elvis Costello, and most every decent jazz musician. 15 years from now, Britney will probably be playing at county fairs.
All they need is critical mass, and DRM will sell. It's brute force: they crowd out any options, have enough DRM-crippled content that enough people want, and that's it - it's done. They have time and money, they *will* win.
If he was at all thinking about it, he'd use a proximity sensor coupled with a clock ("it's morning, he's heading to the shower, and the shower hasn't been used today, therefore I'll turn on") and have the shower come on when he's right outside the bath room. Same with "turning on the lights" - can't a light sensor determine whether there's enough light to be had by opening the shades before it switched on the lights?
I would *not* want this guy automating my house. No imagination.
Microsoft alone is sitting on enough cash that they could pretty much hand these out to everyone and still have cash left in the bank. Also, the content owners (the Sonys, Disneys, Warners et. al.) of the world have a strong vested interest in making sure that only strong-DRM hardware gets into the public's hands.
So we have a bunch of people who are willing to shell out a lot of money to make sure that no one could really make a living building and selling weak-DRM hardware. Any would-be competitors will find themselves completely underpriced, as content owners subsidize the hardware that protects their "property." I think strong-DRM hardware is pretty much inevitable, considering the cash clout of its backers - they can pretty much control the market.
In just about every case that there is a mininum wage and an 8 hour work day, there was a labor movement, often a labor party, and a history of political conflict. Your statement is also true mostly for first-world countries, not for third-world countries.
The figure I've heard for average human productivity is actually lower, by the way - more like four- to five- hours of productivity per day, typically. It's simply that those productive hours are dispersed among, and indeed depend on, the non-productive time that sandwiches them. And "availability" has advantages to an employer, too.
You do not understand how a "race to the bottom" happens.
As long as there is no industry or regulatory standard for how long people in a given job in a given industry works, and as long as sales people get commissions for promising more, faster to customers (and not getting contracts unless they do) then more, rather then fewer, jobs will be in permanent crisis mode. It's a sort of inflationary economy. Only when there is universal expectation that any given worker is going to work 40 hours, then bids will go out with that assumption. Otherwise, there's a race to hire only those who can work 50, 60 or more hours a week - and if you can't, you get pushed out of your career by someone with no family or other life outside work.
The best policy - and I've seen companies do this - is that if a contract is sold to a customer that the technical team says would require overtime, or if there's *any* scope drift that requires overtime, then a. the sales person acts as the account manager for the life of the contract, and b. at least 50 percent of the commission goes back to the development team.
Re:You said no nation threatened the US since 1800
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I said no such thing. Try reading again, and then shut up.
8 hours was defined as a work day for a reason- it's the point of diminishing returns.
No, eight hours was defined as a work day in the US because of the efforts of the labor movement, beginning the middle of the 19th century and, after a great deal of struggle, culminating in FDR's passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which was then struck down by the SCOTUS, and then partially replaced by the Wagner Act. The eight-hour work-day came at the expense of workers who were beatened, imprisoned, and killed trying to win it.
Re:Uh, hello, you're wrong....what about WWII?
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The civilian casualties from Pearl Harbor numbered, I think, in the 20's or 30's. We did more damage to Panama City in our little adventure against Noriega than the Japanese ever did to the US itself. The US pretty much got out of WW2 unscathed. 40,000 Russian civilians were killed in the first raid on Stalingrad - hundreds of thousands of Russians were killed in that battle alone. In comparison, the US lost 300,000 people - almost entirely combatants - in the entire war. Poland lost 18% of its pre-war population, almost 7 million. Chinese dead totalled over 11 million, the Japanese lost about 2 million, and the German lost 5 million. The USSR lost over 17 million, with incredible devestation to its infrastructure. There is no comparison.
Also, please refer to Dr. Doolittle for evidence that we can, in fact, talk to the animals, including chatting to a chimp in chimpanzee.(Doolittle, 1958).
Ultimately, the difference between 'true' capitalism and 'true' communism is about just what is in the commons and what isn't; what can and cannot be owned. Communism holds that the means of productions are a public good. Not all communism calls for centrally planned economies - even the early Soviet Union worked with local workers councils that would negotiate with each other regarding goods that would be shipped around.
At the core of the simplest versions of many economic theories are ideas about the social fictions underlying "property." Our social fictions currently have very different ideas of real property, intellectual property, control of air-space, people as property, and personal property, and different notions of the ability of contract law to define them (contracts can limit, for example, what you do with personal "property" - i.e., the DMCA, EULAs, and the like - and no contract can make humans a property).
Re:One of my favourite quotes...
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There's a little mix up, and perhaps my casual use of the word "rhetoric" is partly to blame: even as Lincoln cited democracy and liberty as the values for which the war was being fought (is the rhetoric for the war on terrorism any different?) he did, in fact, suspend the right of habeas corpus and otherwise curtailed a number of civil liberties in the exercise of the war. Understandably, I think - far more understandably than anything Ashcroft and his goons are doing now.
Creationism, in terms of the discussion that we really care about, is the belief that if you go up the ancestral tree of humans, you will never reach something that isn't a human. There are those who believe in theistically guided evolution - that's not what we're talking about, we are talking about the origins of the human (and other) species.
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While I respect your distinction between faith and belief, and consider it something of a good accomodation of the modern Catholic redemption doctrine with evangelical practice, it would be incorrect, I think, to describe your belief as the mainstream evangelical one, and many posters on this thread alone seem to agree.
It would be like reading Shakespeare and then believing that it was unfallable history, that Romeo and Juliet were exactly what they were described to be in the play, and that a man named Bottom was indeed turned into an ass.
Well, I am not only not a Bible literalist, I'm not a Christian. You know that the history of the Bible is part of the history of the Church - it's a human history. But let's go back to the original Aramaic for Mark, and tell me what the word that the KJV is translating as "belief" is.
A modern Catholic perspective (what I was trained/taught, although I'm a non-theist now) is the whole "salvation by faith or acts" question is distorted by the fact that belief, especially the evangelist's version of belief, *is* an act. The theological correct answer is that salvation occurs by grace alone - neither belief nor action "merits" salvation, but it is by the sacrifice of Christ that salvation is dispensed to all. That actions will reveal and witness to the stance of the soul and its openess to grace, but that those actions aren't ever enough to merit salvation themselves. The doctrine of purgatory does, however, indicated that the nature of purgatory is determined by the number and character of your unconfessed sins, so you can be "damned" (or at least punished relative to their severity) for your actions, if not saved by them.
I don't think it's an accident that Catholic theology has become more flexible and more progressive over the centuries - they learned from the Inquisition, the Counter-Reformation, from Galileo and their other mistakes. It's sad that their lessons have been largely lost on other Christians.
What is "just" about making assent to a single doctrine the basis of eternal damnation? If "the law of God is writ in the heart of Man", could such a morally counter-intuitive stance really be the law of God?
The Catholic doctrine of salvation is far more inclusive than the evangelical one. The Catholics believe in "baptism by desire" - meaning that if you simply have an attitude that would be open to salvation if you knew it existed, you would be saved (i.e., your spiritual stance, which is distinct from your spiritual health) - then you are saved. (Yes, they believe that the sacrifice and resurrection is the mechanism of salvation, but that the salvific force of the resurrection doesn't require explicit belief.)
I really can't understand how anyone could sustain the cognitive dissonance of the evangelical doctrine of redemption. It's like Bible literalism - so infantile, so pathetic.
Again, a God who behaves like that is an infantile jerk.
For any truly intelligent, open-minded evangelical Christian, the hard question is "so, you really believe that all the Buddhists, Jews, Hindus and secularists are all damned to hell, and that only people in the Born-Again Club get in?" Because this is such a counter-intuitive notion to anyone who would attribute any compassion to God, that salvation hinge not on the stance of your spirit but on your doctrinal commitments, that many cannot really bring themselves to say it.
For me, the saddest bit of it is that a true authentic sense of spiritual feeling, compassion, and expansiveness becomes burdened with exclusionary and sanctimonious doctrines and attitudes. Larry Wall seems like a truly wonderful person, almost despite his creeds as much as because of them.
Except that the Netherlands get their patent law from the EU, I believe. I think he might be from Slovenia. Or even Serbia (which would explain his reluctance to share the name of his country.)
For many of us, it would simply be a miracle.
There's fame and there's fame. Britney Spears is probably more popular *now* than Jimi Hendrix is. And the Bay City Rollers in their heyday were also hugely popular, and bigger in their day than Jimi Hendrix. And 6 years ago, the Spice Girls were bigger than Jimi Hendrix, or Nirvana. How big are the Spice Girls now? Tiffany? The Bay City Rollers? Air Supply? All those pre-fab pop sensations are briefly huge - and then disappear utterly. Many never-as-huge musicians have a lot more longevity in their careers, and their cumulative fame over time may be comparable - musicians like Richard Thompson, Bonnie Raitt, Randy Newman, even Iggy Pop and Elvis Costello, and most every decent jazz musician. 15 years from now, Britney will probably be playing at county fairs.
All they need is critical mass, and DRM will sell. It's brute force: they crowd out any options, have enough DRM-crippled content that enough people want, and that's it - it's done. They have time and money, they *will* win.
I would *not* want this guy automating my house. No imagination.
So we have a bunch of people who are willing to shell out a lot of money to make sure that no one could really make a living building and selling weak-DRM hardware. Any would-be competitors will find themselves completely underpriced, as content owners subsidize the hardware that protects their "property." I think strong-DRM hardware is pretty much inevitable, considering the cash clout of its backers - they can pretty much control the market.
I think that's more a question of generational demographics than of notoriety. You might be surprised how well known Janis Ian is.
The figure I've heard for average human productivity is actually lower, by the way - more like four- to five- hours of productivity per day, typically. It's simply that those productive hours are dispersed among, and indeed depend on, the non-productive time that sandwiches them. And "availability" has advantages to an employer, too.
As long as there is no industry or regulatory standard for how long people in a given job in a given industry works, and as long as sales people get commissions for promising more, faster to customers (and not getting contracts unless they do) then more, rather then fewer, jobs will be in permanent crisis mode. It's a sort of inflationary economy. Only when there is universal expectation that any given worker is going to work 40 hours, then bids will go out with that assumption. Otherwise, there's a race to hire only those who can work 50, 60 or more hours a week - and if you can't, you get pushed out of your career by someone with no family or other life outside work.
The best policy - and I've seen companies do this - is that if a contract is sold to a customer that the technical team says would require overtime, or if there's *any* scope drift that requires overtime, then a. the sales person acts as the account manager for the life of the contract, and b. at least 50 percent of the commission goes back to the development team.
I said no such thing. Try reading again, and then shut up.
No, eight hours was defined as a work day in the US because of the efforts of the labor movement, beginning the middle of the 19th century and, after a great deal of struggle, culminating in FDR's passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which was then struck down by the SCOTUS, and then partially replaced by the Wagner Act. The eight-hour work-day came at the expense of workers who were beatened, imprisoned, and killed trying to win it.
The civilian casualties from Pearl Harbor numbered, I think, in the 20's or 30's. We did more damage to Panama City in our little adventure against Noriega than the Japanese ever did to the US itself. The US pretty much got out of WW2 unscathed. 40,000 Russian civilians were killed in the first raid on Stalingrad - hundreds of thousands of Russians were killed in that battle alone. In comparison, the US lost 300,000 people - almost entirely combatants - in the entire war. Poland lost 18% of its pre-war population, almost 7 million. Chinese dead totalled over 11 million, the Japanese lost about 2 million, and the German lost 5 million. The USSR lost over 17 million, with incredible devestation to its infrastructure. There is no comparison.
Also, please refer to Dr. Doolittle for evidence that we can, in fact, talk to the animals, including chatting to a chimp in chimpanzee.(Doolittle, 1958).
At the core of the simplest versions of many economic theories are ideas about the social fictions underlying "property." Our social fictions currently have very different ideas of real property, intellectual property, control of air-space, people as property, and personal property, and different notions of the ability of contract law to define them (contracts can limit, for example, what you do with personal "property" - i.e., the DMCA, EULAs, and the like - and no contract can make humans a property).
There's a little mix up, and perhaps my casual use of the word "rhetoric" is partly to blame: even as Lincoln cited democracy and liberty as the values for which the war was being fought (is the rhetoric for the war on terrorism any different?) he did, in fact, suspend the right of habeas corpus and otherwise curtailed a number of civil liberties in the exercise of the war. Understandably, I think - far more understandably than anything Ashcroft and his goons are doing now.
Creationism, in terms of the discussion that we really care about, is the belief that if you go up the ancestral tree of humans, you will never reach something that isn't a human. There are those who believe in theistically guided evolution - that's not what we're talking about, we are talking about the origins of the human (and other) species.