There's a chance that they might be on the tracks, and will jump off them at the last second, but I think I need to at least warn them on the inherent danger of the train.
That's my modification to the analogy, still imperfect, but better. I still maintain that it is not a threat.
The problem with this is that there is no train. You just made it up in order to use it as a threat against them. You say there is a train? Prove it.
"And I'm like, Dude, it's not bullshit, it's very real, there are definitely problems making iTunes work with Vista, and I should know, because our guys put them there. And you should have seen what we were originally gonna do -- was gonna be a popup window that says, Sorry your data got wiped out, loser. Guess you shoulda bought a Mac."
Do you have a reference for this? This would be a great bit of time-saving information, but you'll pardon me if I don't go entirely on the word of a random slashdot post.
Thanks.
Oh come on now. What could possibly go wrong?
By the way, did you know you can water your lawn with used motor oil?
Really? I do believe that 10K was the amount the now-jailed scientist got for selling nuclear secrets to the Chinese back in Clinton days.
Do you have a link for that? That just seems way too stupid to believe. Not that it's a stupid statement just that you'd have to be pretty stupid to think the cost/benefit was anything but laughable.
The theory of gravity has a lot of support these days. Almost all experimentation to date has concluded that objects attract one another proportionally relative to their masses and inversely proportional to the square root of the distance between them. For our purposes, assume we're testing the attraction between masses. So we take a bunch of objects of different masses predict the attraction between them based upon this formula, then measure the attraction between them and publish. That is science.
And if I point to your data and say that you might have wanted to try varying the distances you used since you clearly only used a distance of 1 as that's the only way you could have reached that conclusion since any other values would have shown that it's actually inversely proportional to the *square* of the distance between them then that would be peer review;-)
Exxon has produced a "bounty" for the same reason that the Clay Instition has produced a "bounty", they want to attract as many competent people to attempt to prove their hypothesis.
If you can say that with a straight face, then you know *nothing* about mathematics. They will be every bit as happy to see the hypotheses disproven. Either way, the rest of mathematics which depends on the truth or falsehood of the hypotheses will be able to proceed with confidence.
Currently, there is little focus on producing other plausable explainations and existing inconsistencies (like the correlation between sunspot activity and global temperature) are not being explained in the Global Warming camp;
Really? So the fact that those things are part of the models and are explained magically disappeared because you're ignorant of that subject as well?
Obviously there is bias to be found in most things, but all you've demonstrated is that people like yourself will believe and repeat moronic lies without even thinking about it at all. In short you have just unintentionally given an excellent demonstration of exactly why this sort of crap is bad, yet effective.
I want to build rockets. Take most of humanity to the stars.
Oh come now. That will never happen. Maybe at some point there will be more people off the earth than on it but that will only happen because most of them were born off planet.
Here's the thing. If the people submitting to Exxon/Mobil are submitting made up bullshit then it shouldn't withstand review and become a laughingstock. If nothing else, that should help to strengthen the human derived global warming stance.
The problem is that the report will be treated as gospel by the corporate media which is what determines most people's attitudes. Hell, look at how they sold the Iraq war when everybody who actually paid attention knew it was a blatantly obvious scam from the start.
Being right has very little selling power in the face of monied interests dedicated to spreading lies.
There are a lot of people who are so deeply stupid and out of touch with reality that they think Bush is a Christian. You think any amount of facts, reasoned arguments, or reality will have any affect on those people?
But what's the point in trying to expand market share, just for its own sake? Is it an ego thing?
I think for most people it's the (decreasingly) limited vendor hardware support. On top of this, with MS in a dominant position in the market they're able to force hardware vendors not to support Linux. Both of those issues would go away with a large enough market share.
It's come a long way though. I built a new computer about a year ago and Gentoo x86_64 supported *everything* out of the box. XP 64 bit only supported half of it and that was after spending hours on it.
First, there is a difference between a bad analogy and a lie- or even a mistake and a lie. Equating the two is rude.
Right. What you did was tell a lie. I called you on it and you gave a half ass retraction and still failed to provide anything to back it up as requested and even repeated the lie slightly modified. That's a lie. Sorry you have troubles with honesty, but that ain't my fault and I will not lie about that fact regardless of whether you find brutal honesty rude.
Thirdly, if you know 10% as much as you think you do, you would realize that most historians believe Jesus was a real individual, and they aren't idiots.
Care to provide any proof for your "most"? Care to provide your best estimate as to how much historian's views on the issue are skewed by the massive systematic campaign of document destruction and heretic burning by the Church over the centuries?
My best estimate? A lot.
This is mostly because we have many second hand accounts (people who met people who claimed to have met Jesus). Luke, for instance, claims to have met hundreds of such people (though he never saw Jesus himself).
So, like I said. Not one single piece of credible historical evidence. Nothing but hearsay. Who was the author of Luke? Nobody knows. So how you consider his her or their "claims" either relevant or credible is beyond me.
Paul is also supposed to have known Peter and James, who did know him.
Never heard this one, but it's another contradiction given that Paul claimed to have learned everything he knew about Jesus directly from his hallucinations. Add in the fact that Paul always spoke of Jesus as coming in the future, it's pretty bizarre that he could have met (fictional) people who actually knew Jesus. You'd figure he'd have mentioned it.
I find your article well researched, like I said- It's got much more of a factual basis than the DaVinci Code, for instance.
Well, you might find this one interesting then if just for humor value. When I went looking for the link I noticed that it's not listed on the articles page any longer. Presumably it's been superceded by the original article under discussion as the material is similar.
However, it's asking people to accept a theory that seems much less plausible than most mainstream theories. Yes, it's possible- but I don't buy it.
And a magical invisible fairy is what you consider plausible?!?
P.S. Saying Josephus is the only source worth anything, and it's obviously (fake/ accidental addition), therefore no other sources are worth anything, is called a circular argument. We all know Josephus's text isn't considered reliable enough, that doesn't invalidate everything else.
It's not a circular argument. Josephus was the only source left that was considered actual historical evidence. With that discredited, there are none remaining. Direct logical statement. Nothing circular.
P.S.S. You can believe whatever you want- and find evidence to support your own worldview. I'm just trying to warn you that no one else has to believe you. Furthermore, while you might be intelligent (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt) being insulting won't win you any debates. It will just get other fanatics riled up, and the occasional eccentric that likes conversations with fanatics interested.
I'm aware nobody even has to read a word I say (well barring a few that slip in as they're scrolling past although that's more "tough to avoid" than "have to".) let alone believe any of it. Calling things what they are is not being insulting. It's being honest. Brutally honest if you prefer, but honest nonetheless. There is no way to win a debate on religious issues. You can't reason somebody out of a position that reason didn't get them into and there's no reason involved in religious beliefs. I just like poking them with sticks from time to time to see them get all riled up over their little fantasy worlds;-)
One, if a person does not want to get pregnant, then they should not be having sex. The liberty you speak of does not free people of the concequences of their actions when it affects someone else.
Right, and a fetus isn't "someone else". It is a part of the mother. Hell, more fetuses spontaneously abort and are reabsorbed/expelled than are ever born, so you can't outlaw abortion without arresting pretty much every woman in the world and be at all consistent.
Just because a person is weak and can't survive without the help of another person doens't mean they are less of a human.
However the fact that they can't live *outside of the other person's body* does. That's a parasite, not a person. Given the harm and drastic changes to the mother's body by pregnancy, it's really ridiculous that you're trying to argue that forcing that on somebody at gunpoint isn't a horrific violation.
The point is that the federal government has no right to descide that life cannot start before the end of the first trimester. This is a decision for the state to make.
I disagree that it's the business of either entity to involve themselves with the interior of another person's body. Nothing at all gives them any right to do so. I would think that the 14th amendment would prevent the States from violating their rights in such an egregious manner though.
When the act of excersising a liberty causes the death of another person, the government must protect the life of the person. Thus, my point still stands.
Your point would only stand if you could somehow prove that a clump of cells which can not possible exist independently of its host is a person. Good luck with that.
Also, saying that your forcing someone to have an unwanted child is bs anyway
Of course it isn't. That is the goal of abortion opponents. It's irrelevant that sex causes children. The fact is that there is nothing that gives you any rights to say shit about whether or not somebody chooses to scrape a bit of gunk out of themselves in order to prevent a horrible tragedy which is what unwanted children are.
There is no god given right to sex in the constitution and no where does the constitution say that you have the right to the pursuit of happiness without concequences.
Noe does it say that you have the right to force others into having children they neither want nor can afford.
Oh look, I just found an argument that outlawing abortion that isn't an egregious assault on liberty.
Except for the failings I pointed out. Nice try though.
The constitution holds perfectly well for this situation, if people would just follow it.
Indeed it does. Nothing there grants anybody that most extreme power over another living breathing person. Clumps of cells need not apply.
Why is there no party that truly represents a pro life agenda? I want no death penalty. I want quality of life --- for everyone. I could handle very limited access to abortion. I am pro life. Where is the party that represents me?
Well, if you're into just blindly buying into stated positions then that party would be the Democrats;-)
There is no where in the constitution that says the federal goverment has this right, but the consitution does say that any right not enumerated to the federal government is reserved to the states. I would thus say that its for the states to descide when abortions are legal and when they are not.
The problem with this though is that the right to hold a gun to somebody's head in order to force them to go through 9 months of pregnancy and force another unwanted child into the world is a far more overpowering assault on liberty than saying that you are not allowed to do so.
Constitutional arguments might well indicate that, regardless, the federal government can't do that. However good luck finding any argument that outlawing abortion isn't the most egregious assault on liberty possible given the fact of what that entails.
Really? I don't think being pro-life requires being pro-capital punishment. But since you asked, a fetus is innocent while a murderer is not.
It's not a requirement, it's just that there are massive numbers of hypocrites who hold both beliefs. Similarly the overlap between the anti-sex education morons is substantial. That overlap demonstrates that "respect for life" or any of the other nonsense crap they claim to support is just that.
The biggest problem with the anti-abortion freaks is that regardless of what nonsense they like to spout, what they believe is exactly this:
They feel that it is their right to hold a gun to somebody's head and force them to go through 9 months of pregnancy and have a child which they have already determined that they can not afford financially, emotionally or otherwise. The woman in question is , of course, the only one with the necessary information to make this determination which demonstrates the plain idiocy and contempt for liberty of the anti-abortion folks. They, of course, will not pay for the kid which they would have to if they had any integrity at all. In fact, they're generally the same people who vote against any programs to either help these people or help prevent people from being in the situation where they would be faced with such a difficult choice. Don't get me wrong, they're generally not fiscally responsible people since they love those farm subsidies, utility subsidies and all those other welfare programs they feel they're entitled to pick my pocket to fund in order to avoid being productive members of society.
The fact that they are generally forcing the poor to have kids they can't afford which will keep them poor demonstrates that there is no morality whatsoever behind their motivations, just pure animosity. As further evidenced by the rest of the hate-based legislation they're so fond of supporting.
The fact that they can't have their desires without massive government power demonstrates how dead the old Republican party truly is since their primary base has as it's primary desire something that can't happen without massive police state government powers. Of course, they generally despise America and want to replace it with a fascist theocracy, so they have no problem with that. Of course, the goals of the party elite require massive police state government powers as well so they're quite happy to cater to the extremist wingnuts in this respect as the destruction of the constitution is what they have in common.
So, yes, in specific, there isn't a requirement for such things, but in general, that is how it all shakes out.
In fact, on monday of the last week at a big office, my boss told me "Don't do anything important".
If everyone invloved has a sense of humor that would have been the time to say, "Well, I'm sure not going to start now".
Coincidentally, we've got a guy here who's last day is today (he gave notice weeks and weeks ago, he's rather senior). He's still working, which makes me very nervous, because it shows it's going to be a big scramble when he goes. I feel a week's salary is a small price to pay for the assurance the transition is going to be smooth.
Depending on how important his job is it's easily worth a week's pay *per day* to get him to stay until everybody's happy.
This reminds me of some ads I've seen "BASF... We don't make the things you buy, we make the things you buy better." Remember those? It was like they were purposely saying, "99% of you within the sound of our voice, we don't care about you... you can't even choose to buy our products or not, because they're everywhere in everything. To the other 1%... look how much we can waste on this - that's how big we are."
My thought when seeing those was it was more geared towards potential investors. If you've never heard of the company you're less likely to buy stock in it yada yada. Of course, that is just what popped into my head when I tsaw the ads, so it could be completely wrong.
The view that Jesus never existed is a minority view and does not agree with the current scholarly consensus.
The idea that atoms were divisible was a minority opinion for millenia. It also didn't have the most powerful organization in the world torturing and murdering anybody who even mentioned the idea for well over a thousand years.
For example, All of the various Christian groups in the early centuries believed that Jesus was a real historical person, the fact that some believed that this Jesus was not made of "flesh" not withstanding. Price's use of that data is misleading.
And again, I ask you to make an actual point. Rather than pointing to a website with a mass of documents about various subjects. Stating that it is misleading based solely on your word is meaningless. Where specifically is the refutation of the statement from the article that early Christians did not believe in an actual living Jesus? How exactly is that misleading? Where are the actual writings of Jesus? Where is credible historical evidence?
I mean, sure, I just linked to an article, but that article was entirely about the specific topic.
The only reliable documents we have that are evidence of Jesus's existance are Christian ones.
But none of those are reliable. That's the problem.
#1. is debateable-
Well, it depends on what exactly you're debating. As for myself, I have no problem with it not being true as it's hard for somebody who never even lived to have been important. Now if you take the Christian sources to be legitimate, then clearly he was that important. Yet there are no historical mentions. The article did quite a good job of addressing this pointthough
#2 is likewise debateable-
Certainly. Christianity is made up of pieces of a lot of different religions, not just those.
#3 is hard to prove/disprove.
Well, I never claimed that there was massive amounts of editing of the actual text of documents. That would most likely be pretty obvious at this point in time. The Josephus document is the only supposed piece of historical evidence for Jesus, so that's really all I care about for this point. The major editing done was of the selection and/or rejection of the particular stories that make up the New Testament. By merely choosing different, equally valid stories they could have invented a vastly different religion. That, as far as I know, involved no modifying of existing documents (well, except for the various mistranslations).
From these assumptions (backed, of course, with evidence), it is then argued that it makes more sense for Christianity to stem from a mis-interpretation of a similar mystery religion's fiction than it does for Christianity to have stemmed from an actual person- easy enough to do when you've already dismissed all Christian sources that don't support your point as fiction.
Except that none of those are actually assumptions. They are conclusions based on the evidence. I never claimed any absolute truth to the conclusions, just that they are backed by the evidence.
I want you to realize, though, that just because an argument is well-researched and well thought out doesn't mean it's correct.
No shit. You do realise that this is the third reply you've made and it's the first time you even attempted to use any reason. You twice told bald faced lies and refused to back up anything you said or even specify any specific issue you had with the article. You might consider dealing with the fact that you're entirely unqualified to lecture me on logical reasoning.
And even though it isn't proven absolutely true, you have still to offer anything approaching a reasonable counter to *any* of the points made or the conclusions drawn.
Your agression in defending this idea is entertaining- you clearly don't want anyone disbelieving your 'one, true way' of interpreting Christian history.
Which is another lie by you. It took 3 tries before you even attempted to deal with the matter at hand. I'm perfectly willing and able to deal with the arguments on their own merit. You however haven't done anything except lie to attempt to refute anything in the article.
But the article you linked to (and the research that your responses encouraged me to do) taught me a lot of interesting things. Thanks for being annoying enough to make me learn something.
Apparently by "annoying", you mean unwilling to acdept a lie at face value and capable of recognizing bogus arguments. I'm glad if you did manage to learn something, but don't you think it might be a bit easier for you if you were to actually deal with arguments on their actual merits rather than having to be ridiculed into it? I mean when you repeatedly get caught lying and called on it before you even bother trying to pretend that you have a point it would be really embarassing to me.
I hope you realize that you are defending a minority opinion.
I hope you realize that that statement is utterly worthless as an argument. It's actually not even true if you're talking about people who actually look into the matter rather than blindly buying into a fairy tale.
I didn't even realize there were intelligent people out there who believed this before today.
OK, so you never bothered to look into the matter before. I sure as hell hope you don't consider yourself a Christian if you have so little interest in your own faith.
Keep in mind that it is the job of the extremist to prove his point, not scream at the mainstream people to disprove it.
Which is why I posted the link to a very well researched article. Taking the sane, rational view might be rare but it's hardly "extremist". You have yet to offer *anything* in support of the view that you hold in the face of *all* evidence.
If Jesus wasn't a real person, why didn't people say so? You'd think that evidence that Jesus didn't exist at all would have been noteworthy back in the day.
They did. That's addressed in detail in the very article you're claiming is mistaken in spite of the fact that you just proved that you didn't even read it. The fact is that nobody at all believed in an actual living Jesus until much later. After this, people began looking for evidence and even back then were entirely unable to find any.
You're implying that people today are smart enough to figure out that Jesus was just a story, but back then even the critics of Christianity thought they were dealing with the idiot followers of an actual (dead) person.
No I'm not. People back then figured it out as well. Many of them were tortured and murdered for heresy.
Why would people believe an allegory was true in the first place?
Any number of reasons. The most powerful IMHO is that they were generally murrdered for heresy for questioning the church leaders. The church leaders decided to go for the living Jesus idea in order to solidify power and declare those who held different views as heretics.
It's the same story on most wierd points of Christian dogma (primarily Catholic). Look at any particularly strange beliefs they have. It's a good bet that that belief was invented as part of a power play by a group of Bishops.
It's much simpler to believe that Jesus was some heretic whose deeds were greatly exagerrated than to believe that he didn't exist at all.
No, it's much simpler to believe that since there isn't now, nor ever was *any* evidence of such a thing that such a thing never was. Does there exist one single reason to believe such a thing is true? Of course not. Believing in it anyway is not the simple course. It may be *easy* since so few people actually think it through and so by saying you believe that it can make your life easier, but the amount of crap you have to buy into and spout to attempt to defend such a position hardly makes it "simple".
If you were correct, then *every* silly fairy tale should be believed. You've offered nothing to distinguish this fairy tale from any others.
No, your take on it takes far more nonsense, magic, and the like to even make reasonable whereas mine is the simple view.
My point was simply that Jesus and Ceasar are both people we have no direct proof of existing, but we have a huge number of sources supporting their existence.
But your point is wrong. We have *direct* proof of Julius Caesar. I own one of his books. Have you ever read anything written by Jesus? Has anybody? Would that make any sense if he were actually who he supposedly was (even just as a mortal)?
We have many many other sources for his existence. We have none zero zip nada for the existence of Jesus. You have yet to provide one single piece of credible historical evidence for such a person yet you keep claiming that just assuming it magically true is the simples
Slashdot Mirror
There's a chance that they might be on the tracks, and will jump off them at the last second, but I think I need to at least warn them on the inherent danger of the train.
That's my modification to the analogy, still imperfect, but better. I still maintain that it is not a threat.
The problem with this is that there is no train.
You just made it up in order to use it as a threat against them.
You say there is a train? Prove it.
The Pope can, and 500 million catholics seem to reckon he's a Christian.
;-)
I knew some Christians don't consider the pope Christian, but I wasn't aware that half of the Catholics thought that too
I have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition however this comment is too narrow to contain.
A pox on slashdot for fixing the page widening bug!
I think you mean Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.
;-)
IIRC Larry Wall actually coined that phrase too
From the parent's link:
"And I'm like, Dude, it's not bullshit, it's very real, there are definitely problems making iTunes work with Vista, and I should know, because our guys put them there. And you should have seen what we were originally gonna do -- was gonna be a popup window that says, Sorry your data got wiped out, loser. Guess you shoulda bought a Mac."
FAFD (Funny as fuck, Dude.)
Do you have a reference for this? This would be a great bit of time-saving information, but you'll pardon me if I don't go entirely on the word of a random slashdot post.
Thanks.
Oh come on now. What could possibly go wrong?
By the way, did you know you can water your lawn with used motor oil?
Really? I do believe that 10K was the amount the now-jailed scientist got for selling nuclear secrets to the Chinese back in Clinton days.
Do you have a link for that? That just seems way too stupid to believe. Not that it's a stupid statement just that you'd have to be pretty stupid to think the cost/benefit was anything but laughable.
The theory of gravity has a lot of support these days. Almost all experimentation to date has concluded that objects attract one another proportionally relative to their masses and inversely proportional to the square root of the distance between them. For our purposes, assume we're testing the attraction between masses. So we take a bunch of objects of different masses predict the attraction between them based upon this formula, then measure the attraction between them and publish. That is science.
;-)
And if I point to your data and say that you might have wanted to try varying the distances you used since you clearly only used a distance of 1 as that's the only way you could have reached that conclusion since any other values would have shown that it's actually inversely proportional to the *square* of the distance between them then that would be peer review
Exxon has produced a "bounty" for the same reason that the Clay Instition has produced a "bounty", they want to attract as many competent people to attempt to prove their hypothesis.
If you can say that with a straight face, then you know *nothing* about mathematics.
They will be every bit as happy to see the hypotheses disproven. Either way, the rest of mathematics which depends on the truth or falsehood of the hypotheses will be able to proceed with confidence.
Currently, there is little focus on producing other plausable explainations and existing inconsistencies (like the correlation between sunspot activity and global temperature) are not being explained in the Global Warming camp;
Really? So the fact that those things are part of the models and are explained magically disappeared because you're ignorant of that subject as well?
Obviously there is bias to be found in most things, but all you've demonstrated is that people like yourself will believe and repeat moronic lies without even thinking about it at all.
In short you have just unintentionally given an excellent demonstration of exactly why this sort of crap is bad, yet effective.
I want to build rockets. Take most of humanity to the stars.
Oh come now. That will never happen.
Maybe at some point there will be more people off the earth than on it but that will only happen because most of them were born off planet.
Not that that wouldn't be totally cool, mind you.
Here's the thing. If the people submitting to Exxon/Mobil are submitting made up bullshit then it shouldn't withstand review and become a laughingstock. If nothing else, that should help to strengthen the human derived global warming stance.
The problem is that the report will be treated as gospel by the corporate media which is what determines most people's attitudes.
Hell, look at how they sold the Iraq war when everybody who actually paid attention knew it was a blatantly obvious scam from the start.
Being right has very little selling power in the face of monied interests dedicated to spreading lies.
There are a lot of people who are so deeply stupid and out of touch with reality that they think Bush is a Christian. You think any amount of facts, reasoned arguments, or reality will have any affect on those people?
Linux and open source software is great, but if you work in software development on projects where there is a public interest you should be afraid.
Only if you suck at it. It's called "meritocracy" for a reason.
But what's the point in trying to expand market share, just for its own sake? Is it an ego thing?
I think for most people it's the (decreasingly) limited vendor hardware support. On top of this, with MS in a dominant position in the market they're able to force hardware vendors not to support Linux.
Both of those issues would go away with a large enough market share.
It's come a long way though. I built a new computer about a year ago and Gentoo x86_64 supported *everything* out of the box.
XP 64 bit only supported half of it and that was after spending hours on it.
There are companies where nobody dares question the official policy. Not successful companies, mind you.
Clearly Microsoft is not populated by yes-men.
Sure. Were that true then he would have bought a Mac instead of not doing so due solely to the fact that he works for MS.
First, there is a difference between a bad analogy and a lie- or even a mistake and a lie. Equating the two is rude.
;-)
Right.
What you did was tell a lie. I called you on it and you gave a half ass retraction and still failed to provide anything to back it up as requested and even repeated the lie slightly modified.
That's a lie. Sorry you have troubles with honesty, but that ain't my fault and I will not lie about that fact regardless of whether you find brutal honesty rude.
Thirdly, if you know 10% as much as you think you do, you would realize that most historians believe Jesus was a real individual, and they aren't idiots.
Care to provide any proof for your "most"?
Care to provide your best estimate as to how much historian's views on the issue are skewed by the massive systematic campaign of document destruction and heretic burning by the Church over the centuries?
My best estimate? A lot.
This is mostly because we have many second hand accounts (people who met people who claimed to have met Jesus). Luke, for instance, claims to have met hundreds of such people (though he never saw Jesus himself).
So, like I said. Not one single piece of credible historical evidence. Nothing but hearsay.
Who was the author of Luke? Nobody knows. So how you consider his her or their "claims" either relevant or credible is beyond me.
Paul is also supposed to have known Peter and James, who did know him.
Never heard this one, but it's another contradiction given that Paul claimed to have learned everything he knew about Jesus directly from his hallucinations. Add in the fact that Paul always spoke of Jesus as coming in the future, it's pretty bizarre that he could have met (fictional) people who actually knew Jesus. You'd figure he'd have mentioned it.
I find your article well researched, like I said- It's got much more of a factual basis than the DaVinci Code, for instance.
Well, you might find this one interesting then if just for humor value. When I went looking for the link I noticed that it's not listed on the articles page any longer. Presumably it's been superceded by the original article under discussion as the material is similar.
However, it's asking people to accept a theory that seems much less plausible than most mainstream theories. Yes, it's possible- but I don't buy it.
And a magical invisible fairy is what you consider plausible?!?
P.S. Saying Josephus is the only source worth anything, and it's obviously (fake/ accidental addition), therefore no other sources are worth anything, is called a circular argument. We all know Josephus's text isn't considered reliable enough, that doesn't invalidate everything else.
It's not a circular argument.
Josephus was the only source left that was considered actual historical evidence. With that discredited, there are none remaining.
Direct logical statement.
Nothing circular.
P.S.S. You can believe whatever you want- and find evidence to support your own worldview. I'm just trying to warn you that no one else has to believe you. Furthermore, while you might be intelligent (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt) being insulting won't win you any debates. It will just get other fanatics riled up, and the occasional eccentric that likes conversations with fanatics interested.
I'm aware nobody even has to read a word I say (well barring a few that slip in as they're scrolling past although that's more "tough to avoid" than "have to".) let alone believe any of it.
Calling things what they are is not being insulting. It's being honest. Brutally honest if you prefer, but honest nonetheless.
There is no way to win a debate on religious issues. You can't reason somebody out of a position that reason didn't get them into and there's no reason involved in religious beliefs. I just like poking them with sticks from time to time to see them get all riled up over their little fantasy worlds
One, if a person does not want to get pregnant, then they should not be having sex. The liberty you speak of does not free people of the concequences of their actions when it affects someone else.
Right, and a fetus isn't "someone else".
It is a part of the mother. Hell, more fetuses spontaneously abort and are reabsorbed/expelled than are ever born, so you can't outlaw abortion without arresting pretty much every woman in the world and be at all consistent.
Just because a person is weak and can't survive without the help of another person doens't mean they are less of a human.
However the fact that they can't live *outside of the other person's body* does. That's a parasite, not a person. Given the harm and drastic changes to the mother's body by pregnancy, it's really ridiculous that you're trying to argue that forcing that on somebody at gunpoint isn't a horrific violation.
The point is that the federal government has no right to descide that life cannot start before the end of the first trimester. This is a decision for the state to make.
I disagree that it's the business of either entity to involve themselves with the interior of another person's body. Nothing at all gives them any right to do so.
I would think that the 14th amendment would prevent the States from violating their rights in such an egregious manner though.
When the act of excersising a liberty causes the death of another person, the government must protect the life of the person. Thus, my point still stands.
Your point would only stand if you could somehow prove that a clump of cells which can not possible exist independently of its host is a person. Good luck with that.
Also, saying that your forcing someone to have an unwanted child is bs anyway
Of course it isn't. That is the goal of abortion opponents. It's irrelevant that sex causes children. The fact is that there is nothing that gives you any rights to say shit about whether or not somebody chooses to scrape a bit of gunk out of themselves in order to prevent a horrible tragedy which is what unwanted children are.
There is no god given right to sex in the constitution and no where does the constitution say that you have the right to the pursuit of happiness without concequences.
Noe does it say that you have the right to force others into having children they neither want nor can afford.
Oh look, I just found an argument that outlawing abortion that isn't an egregious assault on liberty.
Except for the failings I pointed out. Nice try though.
The constitution holds perfectly well for this situation, if people would just follow it.
Indeed it does. Nothing there grants anybody that most extreme power over another living breathing person. Clumps of cells need not apply.
Why is there no party that truly represents a pro life agenda? I want no death penalty. I want quality of life --- for everyone. I could handle very limited access to abortion. I am pro life. Where is the party that represents me?
;-)
Well, if you're into just blindly buying into stated positions then that party would be the Democrats
There is no where in the constitution that says the federal goverment has this right, but the consitution does say that any right not enumerated to the federal government is reserved to the states. I would thus say that its for the states to descide when abortions are legal and when they are not.
The problem with this though is that the right to hold a gun to somebody's head in order to force them to go through 9 months of pregnancy and force another unwanted child into the world is a far more overpowering assault on liberty than saying that you are not allowed to do so.
Constitutional arguments might well indicate that, regardless, the federal government can't do that.
However good luck finding any argument that outlawing abortion isn't the most egregious assault on liberty possible given the fact of what that entails.
Really? I don't think being pro-life requires being pro-capital punishment. But since you asked, a fetus is innocent while a murderer is not.
It's not a requirement, it's just that there are massive numbers of hypocrites who hold both beliefs. Similarly the overlap between the anti-sex education morons is substantial. That overlap demonstrates that "respect for life" or any of the other nonsense crap they claim to support is just that.
The biggest problem with the anti-abortion freaks is that regardless of what nonsense they like to spout, what they believe is exactly this:
They feel that it is their right to hold a gun to somebody's head and force them to go through 9 months of pregnancy and have a child which they have already determined that they can not afford financially, emotionally or otherwise. The woman in question is , of course, the only one with the necessary information to make this determination which demonstrates the plain idiocy and contempt for liberty of the anti-abortion folks.
They, of course, will not pay for the kid which they would have to if they had any integrity at all. In fact, they're generally the same people who vote against any programs to either help these people or help prevent people from being in the situation where they would be faced with such a difficult choice.
Don't get me wrong, they're generally not fiscally responsible people since they love those farm subsidies, utility subsidies and all those other welfare programs they feel they're entitled to pick my pocket to fund in order to avoid being productive members of society.
The fact that they are generally forcing the poor to have kids they can't afford which will keep them poor demonstrates that there is no morality whatsoever behind their motivations, just pure animosity. As further evidenced by the rest of the hate-based legislation they're so fond of supporting.
The fact that they can't have their desires without massive government power demonstrates how dead the old Republican party truly is since their primary base has as it's primary desire something that can't happen without massive police state government powers. Of course, they generally despise America and want to replace it with a fascist theocracy, so they have no problem with that. Of course, the goals of the party elite require massive police state government powers as well so they're quite happy to cater to the extremist wingnuts in this respect as the destruction of the constitution is what they have in common.
So, yes, in specific, there isn't a requirement for such things, but in general, that is how it all shakes out.
In fact, on monday of the last week at a big office, my boss told me "Don't do anything important".
If everyone invloved has a sense of humor that would have been the time to say, "Well, I'm sure not going to start now".
Coincidentally, we've got a guy here who's last day is today (he gave notice weeks and weeks ago, he's rather senior). He's still working, which makes me very nervous, because it shows it's going to be a big scramble when he goes. I feel a week's salary is a small price to pay for the assurance the transition is going to be smooth.
Depending on how important his job is it's easily worth a week's pay *per day* to get him to stay until everybody's happy.
This reminds me of some ads I've seen "BASF... We don't make the things you buy, we make the things you buy better." Remember those? It was like they were purposely saying, "99% of you within the sound of our voice, we don't care about you... you can't even choose to buy our products or not, because they're everywhere in everything. To the other 1%... look how much we can waste on this - that's how big we are."
My thought when seeing those was it was more geared towards potential investors. If you've never heard of the company you're less likely to buy stock in it yada yada.
Of course, that is just what popped into my head when I tsaw the ads, so it could be completely wrong.
The view that Jesus never existed is a minority view and does not agree with the current scholarly consensus.
The idea that atoms were divisible was a minority opinion for millenia. It also didn't have the most powerful organization in the world torturing and murdering anybody who even mentioned the idea for well over a thousand years.
For example, All of the various Christian groups in the early centuries believed that Jesus was a real historical person, the fact that some believed that this Jesus was not made of "flesh" not withstanding. Price's use of that data is misleading.
And again, I ask you to make an actual point. Rather than pointing to a website with a mass of documents about various subjects.
Stating that it is misleading based solely on your word is meaningless. Where specifically is the refutation of the statement from the article that early Christians did not believe in an actual living Jesus?
How exactly is that misleading? Where are the actual writings of Jesus? Where is credible historical evidence?
I mean, sure, I just linked to an article, but that article was entirely about the specific topic.
The only reliable documents we have that are evidence of Jesus's existance are Christian ones.
But none of those are reliable. That's the problem.
#1. is debateable-
Well, it depends on what exactly you're debating. As for myself, I have no problem with it not being true as it's hard for somebody who never even lived to have been important.
Now if you take the Christian sources to be legitimate, then clearly he was that important. Yet there are no historical mentions.
The article did quite a good job of addressing this pointthough
#2 is likewise debateable-
Certainly. Christianity is made up of pieces of a lot of different religions, not just those.
#3 is hard to prove/disprove.
Well, I never claimed that there was massive amounts of editing of the actual text of documents. That would most likely be pretty obvious at this point in time.
The Josephus document is the only supposed piece of historical evidence for Jesus, so that's really all I care about for this point. The major editing done was of the selection and/or rejection of the particular stories that make up the New Testament. By merely choosing different, equally valid stories they could have invented a vastly different religion. That, as far as I know, involved no modifying of existing documents (well, except for the various mistranslations).
From these assumptions (backed, of course, with evidence), it is then argued that it makes more sense for Christianity to stem from a mis-interpretation of a similar mystery religion's fiction than it does for Christianity to have stemmed from an actual person- easy enough to do when you've already dismissed all Christian sources that don't support your point as fiction.
Except that none of those are actually assumptions. They are conclusions based on the evidence.
I never claimed any absolute truth to the conclusions, just that they are backed by the evidence.
I want you to realize, though, that just because an argument is well-researched and well thought out doesn't mean it's correct.
No shit. You do realise that this is the third reply you've made and it's the first time you even attempted to use any reason. You twice told bald faced lies and refused to back up anything you said or even specify any specific issue you had with the article. You might consider dealing with the fact that you're entirely unqualified to lecture me on logical reasoning.
And even though it isn't proven absolutely true, you have still to offer anything approaching a reasonable counter to *any* of the points made or the conclusions drawn.
Your agression in defending this idea is entertaining- you clearly don't want anyone disbelieving your 'one, true way' of interpreting Christian history.
Which is another lie by you.
It took 3 tries before you even attempted to deal with the matter at hand. I'm perfectly willing and able to deal with the arguments on their own merit. You however haven't done anything except lie to attempt to refute anything in the article.
But the article you linked to (and the research that your responses encouraged me to do) taught me a lot of interesting things. Thanks for being annoying enough to make me learn something.
Apparently by "annoying", you mean unwilling to acdept a lie at face value and capable of recognizing bogus arguments.
I'm glad if you did manage to learn something, but don't you think it might be a bit easier for you if you were to actually deal with arguments on their actual merits rather than having to be ridiculed into it? I mean when you repeatedly get caught lying and called on it before you even bother trying to pretend that you have a point it would be really embarassing to me.
I hope you realize that you are defending a minority opinion.
I hope you realize that that statement is utterly worthless as an argument.
It's actually not even true if you're talking about people who actually look into the matter rather than blindly buying into a fairy tale.
I didn't even realize there were intelligent people out there who believed this before today.
OK, so you never bothered to look into the matter before. I sure as hell hope you don't consider yourself a Christian if you have so little interest in your own faith.
Keep in mind that it is the job of the extremist to prove his point, not scream at the mainstream people to disprove it.
Which is why I posted the link to a very well researched article.
Taking the sane, rational view might be rare but it's hardly "extremist". You have yet to offer *anything* in support of the view that you hold in the face of *all* evidence.
If Jesus wasn't a real person, why didn't people say so? You'd think that evidence that Jesus didn't exist at all would have been noteworthy back in the day.
They did. That's addressed in detail in the very article you're claiming is mistaken in spite of the fact that you just proved that you didn't even read it.
The fact is that nobody at all believed in an actual living Jesus until much later. After this, people began looking for evidence and even back then were entirely unable to find any.
You're implying that people today are smart enough to figure out that Jesus was just a story, but back then even the critics of Christianity thought they were dealing with the idiot followers of an actual (dead) person.
No I'm not. People back then figured it out as well.
Many of them were tortured and murdered for heresy.
Why would people believe an allegory was true in the first place?
Any number of reasons. The most powerful IMHO is that they were generally murrdered for heresy for questioning the church leaders. The church leaders decided to go for the living Jesus idea in order to solidify power and declare those who held different views as heretics.
It's the same story on most wierd points of Christian dogma (primarily Catholic). Look at any particularly strange beliefs they have. It's a good bet that that belief was invented as part of a power play by a group of Bishops.
It's much simpler to believe that Jesus was some heretic whose deeds were greatly exagerrated than to believe that he didn't exist at all.
No, it's much simpler to believe that since there isn't now, nor ever was *any* evidence of such a thing that such a thing never was. Does there exist one single reason to believe such a thing is true? Of course not. Believing in it anyway is not the simple course. It may be *easy* since so few people actually think it through and so by saying you believe that it can make your life easier, but the amount of crap you have to buy into and spout to attempt to defend such a position hardly makes it "simple".
If you were correct, then *every* silly fairy tale should be believed.
You've offered nothing to distinguish this fairy tale from any others.
No, your take on it takes far more nonsense, magic, and the like to even make reasonable whereas mine is the simple view.
My point was simply that Jesus and Ceasar are both people we have no direct proof of existing, but we have a huge number of sources supporting their existence.
But your point is wrong.
We have *direct* proof of Julius Caesar. I own one of his books.
Have you ever read anything written by Jesus? Has anybody? Would that make any sense if he were actually who he supposedly was (even just as a mortal)?
We have many many other sources for his existence.
We have none zero zip nada for the existence of Jesus. You have yet to provide one single piece of credible historical evidence for such a person yet you keep claiming that just assuming it magically true is the simples