Ha! You couldn't have picked a worse example of how to use a computer in the classroom. Even in business PowerPoint has done more to inuslate upper management, which has generally been duped into believing that a business process can be accurately summarized in 5 PowerPoint bullet points or less, from what's actually going on in their companies than anything else. And now you're asking us to believe that a pre-canned PP presentation is better for students than a teacher personally explaining a subject and able to modify the visual aids to suit the pace of the class as he goes. Ridiculous!
Not before computers became common household items it wasn't. If your house had a TTY clacking away in the corner, connected up to the good ol' Data General Nova (my high school's computer lab setup before they dumped it for a room full of TRS-80s) then you had an extremely unusual childhood.
I'm a Christian and I'm studying these topics. It's difficult to avoid this kind of theorizing in an academic environment even among conservative Christians. (Academia, even in theological schools, lives by "publish or perish" which means you have to have something new to publish.) You were wondering how "El/Elohim" crept in to Scripture; I gave you modern scholarship's best guess. I don't adhere to this viewpoint myself; even if it were true it's not terribly useful. But I have to know it for the program I'm in.
I notice I committed one error: Gen 1:1-2:3 is generally attributed to the P source, not the E source. A better example would be the story of Isaac's binding in Gen 22.
That's true to a degree, except they were called "pardoners" back then. Their main stock in trade was indulgences, but a fake relic or two was always good for a few shillings. It was abuses like this that set people like Martin Luther on the theological warpath.
However, for it's internal offical purposes the Church of Rome keeps very careful records, and absolutely will not certify a relic as authentic without the correct paperwork. When it comes to the Cross, there's a specific cross unearthed by St. Helena in Jerusalem that at the time was taken as the True Cross. How believable you find that will depend on how believable you find the story of it's discovery, but the point is that any relic of the True Cross is a fragment of the cross she found which has a very well-documented history. It was kept intact in Jerusalem from its finding in the 4th Century until it was captured by the Persians in the 8th; on its recapture it was parted out and Rome got a big piece. When they took a fragment off of it, the paperwork followed. I'm not sure how much of it they have left. (There was a fairly brisk trade in real relics too. St. Peter's didn't build itself, after all!)
This kind of thing was never a problem in the Christian East outside Rome's sphere of control, where relics were (and are) either given away or not given out at all.
They'd use either "El" or "Elohim", which is just the plural of the same word. It could also mean "god" or "gods" (small "g") so you have to infer from the context which is meant, much as we would have to today if we lacked the capital/small letter distinction as they did. With "Elohim" that's fairly easy because when it's intended to mean "God" (capital "G") it's treated gramatically as a singular. (Christians naturally see it as an adumbration of the Trinity.) "El" isn't often used by itself when referring to capital-G-God, but is accompanied by an epithet e.g.: El Elyon, "God Most High" in Gen 14.
The timeline of how the Pentateuch was assembled will depend on who you ask. Historical-Critical method scholars place the achievement of its final form in the 5th Century BC where the Jerusalem priesthood put together a number of independent textual sources or traditions: the "J", or "Yahwist" from Judah, the "E", or "Elohist" from Ephraim, the "P" or "Priestly" source reflecting Temple traditions, and the "D" or "Deuteronomist." The E source is characterized in particular by the use of "Elohim" for God instead of the YHVH of J, and is considered the origin of, for example, the primary creation story in Gen 1:1-2:3.
Well, it would tend to explain that second comma which isn't really otherwise explicable. I know that, back in those days, they'd use far more commas, than we do today, but that one doesn't otherwise make much sense, even by their rules.
"Well-regulated" as well-equipped is a secondary meaning, but I've seen some conservative commentators overstate the case and try to claim it was the exclusive meaning of the phrase back then. It wasn't, but that doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't the intended meaning in this place either.
The usual thing to do when trying to discern what the phrasing of part of the Constitution was understood to mean when written is to look at contemporary discussion about it, but I don't know of any about the 2nd Amendment -- other than that atttempts to restrict gun ownership outside the government's military are a purely modern phenomenon. Do you know of any?
That said, I guess Arabian christians speaking in their native tounge would have to use that word.
Yes. It's not really all that different from how the ancient Hebrews ended up using "El" as their word for God even though it's also the proper name for a different Semitic deity. (I can't remember which one now. Something's telling me it's Phoenecian, but that's probably mistaken.) "Allah" is in origin the name of one of the many gods worshiped by the pagan Arabs, and Mohammed took it for the name of his one god when he wrote the Koran.
The Christian population of the Middle East was, of course, not Arab to begin with, but that was prior to the 8th Century. They've had over a thousand years since to become acculturated, and they lost their original Syriac and Aramiac languages a very long time ago.
This is a good example, perhaps, of why the First Amendment is "misunderstood." The plain meaning of the words will not give you a sense of how broadly it's been applied.
Had the intent been to allow all manner of free expression by any method whatsoever, the authors of the amendment wouldn't have felt the need to enumerate several kinds of expression as they did, but simply allowed them all to stand under the rubric "speech". But they didn't. The amendment forbids governmental interference with religion, and restrictions on the right to speech, the press, free assembly, and petitioning the government. If flag-burning can be regarded as "speech" why not all the rest of these? That the authors thought "speech" was inadequate to cover all the forms of expression they mentioned suggests strongly they took the words they were using at face value.
At face value, speech is verbal expression. It's only through years of indoctrination that flag-burning or any other non-verbal act can be commonly regarded as a form of speech.
When "speech" no longer means the spoken word, is it any wonder there's some confusion about what it does mean?
Well-regulated doesn't look like an ambigious phrase to modern eyes, but at the time it was written it was. We tend to regard it as meaning "well-ordered" exclusively, but it had, at the time, an alternative meaning of "well-equipped." You have to discern the meaning from the context.
How do you do that here? Well, this is one of the few amendments where the purpose is spelled out, so the right it guarantees must have something to do with the stated purpose. If "well-regulated" meant "well-ordered" here, we would expect the rest of the amdendment to address that, perhaps by guaranteeing the right of the people to self-organize as a militia or giving some government body the responsibility for doing so. Instead, it guarantees the right to bear arms, and so address the issue of equipping the militia. "Well-regulated" is most likely therefore to be interpreted in the second sense.
Lord, I get tired of the spineless panic-mongering around here. We are not unique, and other countries have been dealing with this kind of thing for a long time. For crying out loud, get a grip!
You're right, I didn't. But even in context it's at least moderately ignorant to use "Arab" for "Muslim" as if they were equivalent. They're not.
And etymology aside, Christian Arabs do use "Allah" for the Christian God. If you mean to say that Muslims and Christians don't worship the same God I'll agree with you, but to imply "Allah" means exclusively the Muslim god is also ignorant.
Consider most of what you think you know about science. The website you link to as your homepage points to a law firm's site, so I'm going to assume you're in the legal profession and therefore in the same situation as the rest of us when it comes to actual scientific experimentation.
Which is to say you don't actually carry out any yourself. I'm not saying you're not knowlegeable about science; you probably are. But how did you come by that knowledge? Did you perform the experiments yourself? Apart from some small amount of experimentation in lab courses while in school probably not, and those were to give you experience in lab work and not to actually expand the bounds of knowledge. You know what you know about science because you read about it in a book or magazine, not from your direct experience.
You might reply that at least your sources are credible, that the data in them has been peer-reviewed and verified, and that you don't need to perform the experiments yourself. You trust your sources and that's sufficient. And to be fair, it's not reasonable to expect any scientific layman to conduct an experiment himself. Who can, with his own resources, operate a particle accelerator, explore the bottom of the ocean, take and analyze core samples from an Antarctic glacier, conduct observations with the HST?
What you don't realize is that Christianity doesn't rely on the Bible or any other ancient source alone for verification. (And I should mention here that I'm an Eastern Orthodox Christian, which claims to be the original Church founded by Christ and which has a spirituality distinct from that of the West. Ame-Tsuchi in the comment just above yours quotes from some Eastern fathers so he's at least familiar with Orthodoxy even though, to judge from his website, he's a Zen Buddhist.) Our faith is a living, breathing faith; and experiential faith. When a person is in the Holy Spirit he knows it, in no uncertain terms.
Have I ever experienced this? No, not personally, at least not in any but the most attenuated fashion. But there are many who have, and who have written and spoken about it. I trust my sources. Just as a scientist has equipment and methods that aren't accessible (or even necessarily comprehensible) to a scientific layman, a saint in God has spiritual senses and methods inaccessible, or even necessarily comprehensible, to a poor sinner like me. Like a scientific laymen learning about the results of scientific investigation, I trust my sources. They may not be peer-reviewed in the same way as a scientific paper, but they all tend to agree with and confirm each other and become widely accepted in the Church, such acceptance being regarded as a touchstone.
Science, of course, often produces tangible results other than papers: our technology is based on it and none of it would work if the underlying theories were faulty. Christianity isn't all that different. Faith produces tangible results. I might go to a church and venerate an icon I can see with my own eyes is gushing myrrh; I can go to a particular shrine and see fires spontaneously breaking out all over the place; I can see a miraculous healing taking place as I watch. (All but the second one were first-hand; for the second very famous example I have a number of second-hand accounts mainly because I've never made the trip myself.) Holy men are lifted up off the floor as they pray, light splashes around an altar when the offering is made, an elder and his flock walk on air to cross a ravine and escape certain death, a lizard speaks with a human voice and confesses belief in God -- these I have all from written or third-hand source I have no more reason to distrust than I have "National Geographic" or "Discover". (An
The article is not mainly about the date of composition, although it obviously mentions it, and comes up with a date earlier than either scholarly or mainstream traditional opinion places it, which is no earlier than the 90s. I didn't cite it for its argument about the date, but about authorship.
I'm sure it's convenient for you to date the Gospels that late, but you're picking dates late in the range. Mainstream opinion puts them rather earlier. And you're conveniently ignoring the Pauline epistles which are generally ackowledged as the earliest documents in the NT canon, from the 50s, and which mention the Resurrection.
St. John's Gospel is universally acknowledged, both by scholarship and tradition, to be relatively late. So what? John was the youngest of the 12 Apostles, and he wrote it when it was a very old man. Good arguments have been made for its actual Johannine authorship.
Aha, finally a Christian comes up with a testable theory! Let's see.
No, that's not the theory. C.S. Lewis stated it clearly. It's not that Christians believe ourselves to be better than other people, it's that we believe we're better than we would be if we weren't Christian. Christ said, "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentence."
Although there are nowhere near as many as there used to be -- many of them decided that being caught between two warring sides was not a good place to be and emmigrated to places like the United States -- the people of the Church of Jerusalem are almost entirely Arab. (Excepting the hierarchy, which is ethnically Greek.)
Please educate yourself before spouting off. You see a great deal of ignorant commentary on/. about a great many subjects, but few of them elicit as much ignorant commentary as religion.
The Koran SPECIFICLY mentions Jesus as the Son of God.
Good Lord, you're ignorant. The Koran decries the idea that God could ever have a son, and views it as an abominable teaching. It's the main difference between Islam and Christianity.
Islam teaches that Jesus was the Christ and a prophet, born of a virgin, and will come again to judge the living and the dead. There's some doubt as to his Resurrection, and the notion that he might have been the Son of God is denied in extremely strong language.
No, most Protestant groups believe in the Trinity. They seperated from Rome over other issues. Belief in the Trinity is nearly universal among those who call themselves "Christian".
there were literally tons of wood that was supposedly from the cross that jesus was supposedly nailed to.
This is a popular fiction with no evidence whatsoever to back it up. As someone else mentioned, most relics of the True Cross are smaller than a splinter. The total volume of all known True Cross relics is about.004 cu. m out of an estimated volume for the entire Cross of.174 cu. m. See both Wikipedia and The Catholic Encyclopedia.
Well, I knew what he meant; I was just tweaking him. He should have said "longer". 35mm still photography takes place "sideways" on the film compared to cinematography, so you really could get a wider image by exposing a longer piece of film than normal -- or you could, if the panoramic camera makers were being honest. Width of the film means the size measured from edge to edge across the perfs.
I wouldn't expect a counter drone even at the Air & Space Museum to know what he or she was talking about though. When it comes to photography they'd be no more qualified than your average 7-11 clerk. They just dress and smell better.
You actually make a good point even if someone were to disagree with most of what you said. The boy has cried "Wolf!" an awful lot in the past. Chicken Little has been screaming about the sky for some time now. The world has repeatedly failed to end on schedule.
Assuming the worst, and assuming this report is correct, why should people believe it? Forecasts like this have been wrong so often now that many reject them out of hand. It'll be far too easy to miss the one that might be right.
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Ha! You couldn't have picked a worse example of how to use a computer in the classroom. Even in business PowerPoint has done more to inuslate upper management, which has generally been duped into believing that a business process can be accurately summarized in 5 PowerPoint bullet points or less, from what's actually going on in their companies than anything else. And now you're asking us to believe that a pre-canned PP presentation is better for students than a teacher personally explaining a subject and able to modify the visual aids to suit the pace of the class as he goes. Ridiculous!
Not before computers became common household items it wasn't. If your house had a TTY clacking away in the corner, connected up to the good ol' Data General Nova (my high school's computer lab setup before they dumped it for a room full of TRS-80s) then you had an extremely unusual childhood.
I notice I committed one error: Gen 1:1-2:3 is generally attributed to the P source, not the E source. A better example would be the story of Isaac's binding in Gen 22.
However, for it's internal offical purposes the Church of Rome keeps very careful records, and absolutely will not certify a relic as authentic without the correct paperwork. When it comes to the Cross, there's a specific cross unearthed by St. Helena in Jerusalem that at the time was taken as the True Cross. How believable you find that will depend on how believable you find the story of it's discovery, but the point is that any relic of the True Cross is a fragment of the cross she found which has a very well-documented history. It was kept intact in Jerusalem from its finding in the 4th Century until it was captured by the Persians in the 8th; on its recapture it was parted out and Rome got a big piece. When they took a fragment off of it, the paperwork followed. I'm not sure how much of it they have left. (There was a fairly brisk trade in real relics too. St. Peter's didn't build itself, after all!)
This kind of thing was never a problem in the Christian East outside Rome's sphere of control, where relics were (and are) either given away or not given out at all.
The timeline of how the Pentateuch was assembled will depend on who you ask. Historical-Critical method scholars place the achievement of its final form in the 5th Century BC where the Jerusalem priesthood put together a number of independent textual sources or traditions: the "J", or "Yahwist" from Judah, the "E", or "Elohist" from Ephraim, the "P" or "Priestly" source reflecting Temple traditions, and the "D" or "Deuteronomist." The E source is characterized in particular by the use of "Elohim" for God instead of the YHVH of J, and is considered the origin of, for example, the primary creation story in Gen 1:1-2:3.
For what it's worth.
"Well-regulated" as well-equipped is a secondary meaning, but I've seen some conservative commentators overstate the case and try to claim it was the exclusive meaning of the phrase back then. It wasn't, but that doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't the intended meaning in this place either.
The usual thing to do when trying to discern what the phrasing of part of the Constitution was understood to mean when written is to look at contemporary discussion about it, but I don't know of any about the 2nd Amendment -- other than that atttempts to restrict gun ownership outside the government's military are a purely modern phenomenon. Do you know of any?
Yes. It's not really all that different from how the ancient Hebrews ended up using "El" as their word for God even though it's also the proper name for a different Semitic deity. (I can't remember which one now. Something's telling me it's Phoenecian, but that's probably mistaken.) "Allah" is in origin the name of one of the many gods worshiped by the pagan Arabs, and Mohammed took it for the name of his one god when he wrote the Koran.
The Christian population of the Middle East was, of course, not Arab to begin with, but that was prior to the 8th Century. They've had over a thousand years since to become acculturated, and they lost their original Syriac and Aramiac languages a very long time ago.
Had the intent been to allow all manner of free expression by any method whatsoever, the authors of the amendment wouldn't have felt the need to enumerate several kinds of expression as they did, but simply allowed them all to stand under the rubric "speech". But they didn't. The amendment forbids governmental interference with religion, and restrictions on the right to speech, the press, free assembly, and petitioning the government. If flag-burning can be regarded as "speech" why not all the rest of these? That the authors thought "speech" was inadequate to cover all the forms of expression they mentioned suggests strongly they took the words they were using at face value.
At face value, speech is verbal expression. It's only through years of indoctrination that flag-burning or any other non-verbal act can be commonly regarded as a form of speech.
When "speech" no longer means the spoken word, is it any wonder there's some confusion about what it does mean?
Well-regulated doesn't look like an ambigious phrase to modern eyes, but at the time it was written it was. We tend to regard it as meaning "well-ordered" exclusively, but it had, at the time, an alternative meaning of "well-equipped." You have to discern the meaning from the context.
How do you do that here? Well, this is one of the few amendments where the purpose is spelled out, so the right it guarantees must have something to do with the stated purpose. If "well-regulated" meant "well-ordered" here, we would expect the rest of the amdendment to address that, perhaps by guaranteeing the right of the people to self-organize as a militia or giving some government body the responsibility for doing so. Instead, it guarantees the right to bear arms, and so address the issue of equipping the militia. "Well-regulated" is most likely therefore to be interpreted in the second sense.
Lord, I get tired of the spineless panic-mongering around here. We are not unique, and other countries have been dealing with this kind of thing for a long time. For crying out loud, get a grip!
And etymology aside, Christian Arabs do use "Allah" for the Christian God. If you mean to say that Muslims and Christians don't worship the same God I'll agree with you, but to imply "Allah" means exclusively the Muslim god is also ignorant.
Which is to say you don't actually carry out any yourself. I'm not saying you're not knowlegeable about science; you probably are. But how did you come by that knowledge? Did you perform the experiments yourself? Apart from some small amount of experimentation in lab courses while in school probably not, and those were to give you experience in lab work and not to actually expand the bounds of knowledge. You know what you know about science because you read about it in a book or magazine, not from your direct experience.
You might reply that at least your sources are credible, that the data in them has been peer-reviewed and verified, and that you don't need to perform the experiments yourself. You trust your sources and that's sufficient. And to be fair, it's not reasonable to expect any scientific layman to conduct an experiment himself. Who can, with his own resources, operate a particle accelerator, explore the bottom of the ocean, take and analyze core samples from an Antarctic glacier, conduct observations with the HST?
What you don't realize is that Christianity doesn't rely on the Bible or any other ancient source alone for verification. (And I should mention here that I'm an Eastern Orthodox Christian, which claims to be the original Church founded by Christ and which has a spirituality distinct from that of the West. Ame-Tsuchi in the comment just above yours quotes from some Eastern fathers so he's at least familiar with Orthodoxy even though, to judge from his website, he's a Zen Buddhist.) Our faith is a living, breathing faith; and experiential faith. When a person is in the Holy Spirit he knows it, in no uncertain terms.
Have I ever experienced this? No, not personally, at least not in any but the most attenuated fashion. But there are many who have, and who have written and spoken about it. I trust my sources. Just as a scientist has equipment and methods that aren't accessible (or even necessarily comprehensible) to a scientific layman, a saint in God has spiritual senses and methods inaccessible, or even necessarily comprehensible, to a poor sinner like me. Like a scientific laymen learning about the results of scientific investigation, I trust my sources. They may not be peer-reviewed in the same way as a scientific paper, but they all tend to agree with and confirm each other and become widely accepted in the Church, such acceptance being regarded as a touchstone.
Science, of course, often produces tangible results other than papers: our technology is based on it and none of it would work if the underlying theories were faulty. Christianity isn't all that different. Faith produces tangible results. I might go to a church and venerate an icon I can see with my own eyes is gushing myrrh; I can go to a particular shrine and see fires spontaneously breaking out all over the place; I can see a miraculous healing taking place as I watch. (All but the second one were first-hand; for the second very famous example I have a number of second-hand accounts mainly because I've never made the trip myself.) Holy men are lifted up off the floor as they pray, light splashes around an altar when the offering is made, an elder and his flock walk on air to cross a ravine and escape certain death, a lizard speaks with a human voice and confesses belief in God -- these I have all from written or third-hand source I have no more reason to distrust than I have "National Geographic" or "Discover". (An
The argument for a late or early date?
The article is not mainly about the date of composition, although it obviously mentions it, and comes up with a date earlier than either scholarly or mainstream traditional opinion places it, which is no earlier than the 90s. I didn't cite it for its argument about the date, but about authorship.
Um, no.
St. John's Gospel is universally acknowledged, both by scholarship and tradition, to be relatively late. So what? John was the youngest of the 12 Apostles, and he wrote it when it was a very old man. Good arguments have been made for its actual Johannine authorship.
No, that's not the theory. C.S. Lewis stated it clearly. It's not that Christians believe ourselves to be better than other people, it's that we believe we're better than we would be if we weren't Christian. Christ said, "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentence."
Please educate yourself before spouting off. You see a great deal of ignorant commentary on /. about a great many subjects, but few of them elicit as much ignorant commentary as religion.
Good Lord, you're ignorant. The Koran decries the idea that God could ever have a son, and views it as an abominable teaching. It's the main difference between Islam and Christianity.
Islam teaches that Jesus was the Christ and a prophet, born of a virgin, and will come again to judge the living and the dead. There's some doubt as to his Resurrection, and the notion that he might have been the Son of God is denied in extremely strong language.
No, most Protestant groups believe in the Trinity. They seperated from Rome over other issues. Belief in the Trinity is nearly universal among those who call themselves "Christian".
This is a popular fiction with no evidence whatsoever to back it up. As someone else mentioned, most relics of the True Cross are smaller than a splinter. The total volume of all known True Cross relics is about .004 cu. m out of an estimated volume for the entire Cross of .174 cu. m. See both Wikipedia and The Catholic Encyclopedia.
I wouldn't expect a counter drone even at the Air & Space Museum to know what he or she was talking about though. When it comes to photography they'd be no more qualified than your average 7-11 clerk. They just dress and smell better.
What camera store is this? I think I want to avoid any such place where the employees think that 35mm film can ever be wider than 35mm.
Assuming the worst, and assuming this report is correct, why should people believe it? Forecasts like this have been wrong so often now that many reject them out of hand. It'll be far too easy to miss the one that might be right.
(Limbaugh, not the band.)