Religions are ideas developed by well meaning people who think that the population will be happier and behave better if they believe in something. For example, believing that if they're good they go to heaven when they die. Well... it may make people happier in the short-term... as might putting sedatives in their water supply. It doesn't mean it's a good idea.
It has nothing to do with "being good." We are incapable of "being good." We are selfish and hate God. That is why we need God to intervene on our behalf. We don't believe in God because we are naive, well-meaning people. We believe in God because he reached out to us. Our belief does not stem from what we read in a book, rather it is through this book that God reaches into our hearts and converts us. The unconverted cannot understand God or turn to him. All men are dead in sins until God resurrects a person individually, without regard to anything that person has done or believed. We are all undeserving of God's grace, yet some of us receive it, and that is where our faith comes from. It is not of ourselves, but of God.
By real job, do you mean like "President of the United States"?
And actually, I'm thinking of Jimmy Carter here, not George W. Bush. Not all Christians are theocrats. Some of us think the moral changes have to be effected from the bottom-up, not from the top-down and give priority to things like feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless over enforcing morality by law. But I guess it's okay to generalize all Christians as being far-right Republican party-liners. It's amazing the kind of intolerance that proceeds from the mouths of the "tolerant."
There really is not as much "room for interpretation" as you might imagine. Yes, Hebrew is ordinarily not written with vowel points, and vowel points did not even get introduced to written Hebrew until several centuries A.D. However, we know a lot about the meaning of the passages that are somewhat ambiguous by looking at Jewish translations into Greek and Aramaic, as well as other verses of Scripture which shed light on them.
There is no question that the Israelites held the Scriptures to be the inerrant Word of God. They were not so careful about its preservation and learning because it is "just" an historical document of their tradition. To this day, Jewish boys are expected to memorize a parshah of the Torah when they become Bar Mitzvah. This is because everyone, not just the rabbis, was expected to know the law and practice it. Because it literally came from God to Moses and was written down. Orthodox Jews would hold that every single Hebrew letter came directly from God. The Christian Church, being the New Covenant extension of Israel, would not have viewed Scripture any differently. In fact, Jesus' criticism of the Pharisees was not because they did not take the Word of God literally, but because they went beyond the Word of God and put up their own, man-made doctrines up to be equal with God's.
We, as Christians, believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God that was given by God to His People for our instruction and edification. The Muslims believe the Qur'an is the Word of God in the sense of it is the uncreated speech of God and is therefore, itself, divine. That is a huge difference. While both would say that our respective scriptures are binding on man and free from error, our primary focus is on God's relationship to His People and this is what the Bible's focus is. The Qur'an is seen by Muslims as more of a guidebook for all of mankind that is to be followed by the letter for salvation, and while it contains large sections purporting to be history, the law is primary in Islam, not the history of sin and God's redemption for His chosen ones as is the motif in the Bible.
From your use of the female pronoun to describe God, I can tell that we are not talking about the same thing. There is what God has described in his revealed word, and then there is the human imagination. Until we can agree on the former, it is useless to even have a discussion about God at all.
I agree. ID is for folks who don't want to talk to their kids and tell them the truth about God's creation when they come home from school and ask what all this evolution stuff's about. What happened to our Christian duty as parents to be responsible for our children's education? If they're teaching my son something in school I don't agree with, I can counsel him at home, or he can learn it in Sunday School. But I don't have to try to offer some watered-down godless alternative to present to the public.
The problem is that some people actually think this is evangelism. Evangelism is not trying to convince people rationally that there is a God. Evangelism is conveying the Gospel message of sinful humanity, the perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ, once and for all, that covers all sins, and that man can be reconciled to God by Jesus' perfect life and his death and resurrection. If they don't believe this, nothing else matters. They will still die and go to hell, whether they believe in evolution or ID.
This is the same guy who advocated assassinating the President of Venezuela.
He is just symptomatic of a larger disease in evangelicalism today. It is that we have largely sold out our faith to marketing and conservative politics and have lost sight of Jesus' death to save sinners and reconcile a sinful world to God. Maybe we need another fundamentalism in this country. Back to basics. None of this other stuff masquerading itself as Christianity. No Joel Osteen, no Joyce Meyer, no Pat Robertson, no decision theology, no dispensationalism, no purpose-driven church, no emerging new age church, no psychology gospel, no prosperity gospel, no word of faith, no charismatic neo-montanist garbage, no Benny Hinn, no Kenneth Copeland, none of this... Back to the Bible!
I always wonder why people seem to think that the Vatican speaks for all Christians. Don't they realize that Protestants outnumber Catholics in this country (the U.S.), and that more than a small number of Protestants think the Pope is the Antichrist? What the Vatican says about evolution does not hold any weight with me; if anything, it only bolsters my belief that the Roman Catholic Church is the whore of Babylon.
Have you no understanding of history at all? The Pilgrims were fleeing religious, fiscal and political intolerance.
Yes, they were. They were fleeing the intolerance of the Anglican Church because the Pilgrims, being Puritan Separatists, would not conform to the more liberal established church in England. They were Calvinists who felt that the English Church had not done enough to root out Romish practices in the Church.
As a "religious wack job," let me assure you that I don't disagree that evolution happens. What I disagree with is that evolution crosses species, particularly in any sexual organism. Obviously, micro-evolution happens. Genetic traits evolve over time that adapt to changes in environment, as well as miscellaneous other mutations. And in asexual reproduction, since every offspring is a clone, it goes without saying that any kind of mutation would be a form of evolution provided that the mutant thrives and reproduces.
However, what I fail to understand is how people who are supposed biologists can put so much credence in a theory that flies in the face of other established "facts." It is a fact that two different species, when mated, cannot produce reproductible offspring. It has never happened. There is no evidence to indicate that this has ever happened. Yet, somehow evolutionists want us to believe that not only can one species mutate into another, but that they do this in male-female pairs!
I don't know about you, but I think it is a far greater stretch of the imagination to believe that every species derives from a male-female pair of a predecessor species which somehow mutated simultaneously, spontaneously, and identically, and that this happens over and over again throughout history such that it involves every species of life in the universe. The alternative of there being an omniscient and almighty creator that made the universe according to his pleasure and for his good purpose seems a lot more plausible.
Absolutely shameful. I'm almost ashamed to be a Christian...and I'm definitely ashamed of being an American. Exactly when was it that my country decide to abdicate rationality in favor of wanton superstition, reprehensible pseudoscience, and gross ignorance? Or was America ever rational to begin with?
I may sound rather strident on this issue, but as you'll understand, this hits rather close to home. You see, in my church there is a Sunday school class where ID is being taught as a viable alternative to evolutionary theory. Every time I hear the teacher talking about such intellectually bankrupt concepts as 'irreducible complexity' I want to scream, but I'm not sure how to approach this without alienating the rest of the church. Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
The real problem is that most churches have abandoned the Bible and have no clear authority so that anything goes. Without an established standard of doctrine, the church is left to the whims of sinful human beings with their own prejudices and imaginings. This is exactly why I left the Episcopal Church. It's become a theology zoo with every crazy idea expressed and scripture becomes only an afterthought, which even when it is consulted, is reconstructed and made to mean exactly something other than what the inspired writers meant when they put quill to paper. Most churches today are so infested with liberal theology, or its evil cousin, neo-Orthodoxy, that debates like this even take place. God's word used to mean something once. In most churches, it doesn't anymore.
Religious extremism come in many flavors folks, and if we are not careful, we are going to lose our edge. Remember, this country is only a couple hundred years old. Those societies that have embraced education and science historically are those societies that survive.
Yes, and it was founded by us "religious extremists"... Or, as we celebrate Thanksgiving Day this week, have you forgotten who the Pilgrims actually were?
I don't even buy CD's anymore. It's not worth the trouble of wondering what it's going to do to my Windows machine, having to run downstairs to rip it on my Slackware box, or wondering if it's going to play in my DVD player or car stereo. Since I've managed to get to the point where I have enough accessories for my iPod that I can play that anywhere, even in the car, I just buy all my music from iTMS. I've had to buy a couple of things from MSN Music that I couldn't find on iTMS, but I just burn that to CD-R and rip it Apple Lossless and get the same effect. It's not perfect, but it's good enough for me.
They produced a gaming console. It works. You put a game in and it plays. It was in every way visible to the user a standard gaming console. Who cares if the parts inside are Intel and IDE and so forth? They produced a good console with some good games, so people sold it. They didn't dupe anyone.
Well, I don't know if it's "duping" anyone. I agree, that's going a bit overboard to say that. But I will say, that the one thing that kept me from buying an Xbox was that it basically was just a Pentium III with 64 megs of RAM and a GeForce3 video card. All I had to do was wait a few months and get a PC with better hardware than that for very little more money. True, there are some Xbox-exclusive games, but nothing that would justify my spending $300 on one. The PC is "good enough" for me. I suppose that if I didn't already have a PC or didn't have a need for a PC, then the Xbox might be attractive. But I just could not see having both from a "spending my money wisely" POV.
Lest you forget, they also make an Operating System. They also make media apps. Why are you upset about greater competition in the console market? That should benefit all of us.
I can't wait.. Microsoft Bob for Xbox 360... SWEEEET!!
This is the history of Christmas Toys. Cabbage patch kids, various DVDs, etc. A shortage creates a frenzy. Where people wouldn't normally have given the object a second look, they now feel they must have one. Great stuff if you're the seller.
And people beating each other in the aisles and spending 10x what it's worth.. it's sickening. This is a game, not food! A shortage shouldn't create this kind of hysteria. Yet another reason not to do Christmas.
The problem with Microsoft's reasoning is that there isn't usually any good reason to upgrade a Unixish system unless you need better hardware support. Sometimes there are new features available, but you can usually get these without needing to upgrade your kernel and OS userland. For instance, at my old job, we were running Solaris 7 on a couple of servers. We had no need to upgrade to Solaris 8 or 9. We upgraded sendmail and bind on one of them, but that's the nice thing about Unix. It's very modular and flexible. If you needed to upgrade your Windows name server, your only option is to upgrade your version of Windows unless you're using some third-party DNS, which is almost never the case.
I imagine sometimes the integration that Windows offers can be convenient, but it's more of an inconvenience when you just need a new feature in one part of the system. With Windows, you need to upgrade the whole kit and caboodle!
This person has spoken the truth. The lawyers will probably get 33% off the top for their services. This means if $100 million dollars is awarded to everyone then the lawyers could get $33 million dollars.
Somehow, I don't think that the attorney general and his staff lawyers are entitled to a commission based on how much money they get in court. Do you really think that the Texas AG is doing this so he and his minions can get a cut of the dough? In case you hadn't heard, Texas is a state, not a law firm.
CSI may be pretty far from reality in terms of the time it takes to analyze data or the kind of equipment available in your typical crime lab, but at least they are dealing with technology that exists, for the most part. Just not widely used, and definitely not within the time frame they use it in the show.
Bones, on the other hand, is downright ridiculous and should almost be classified as science fiction with the kinds of analyses they do on that show! Criminal Minds is pure fantasy, too. But Bones is definitely the champ here!
The reason why C/C++ lacks any standard way of doing threads or graphics is precisely because they were meant to be portable. That's where libraries come in. To do all the specialized stuff that varies according to the hardware being used. You probably wouldn't use the same graphics libraries on a digital computer watch that you would on an animation workstation. Likewise, threading is going to be much different on a Z80 (which is still a widely used CPU) than on a PowerPC. Hardware has different capabilities, and while it might be nice to think that you could have a general interface to those capabilities that is standardized and transcends different architectures, the truth is that sometimes the differences require an altogether different approach and hence, libraries that reflect these approaches, in order to get the job done.
You know how sometimes they make X-rated movies and name them after Hollywood films.. like "Saving Private Ryan" becomes "Saving Ryan's Privates"... well, do you think anyone ever considered turning "Tron" into "Pr0n"? Think about it.. machines having (byte)sex.. Think of the marketing... "Pr0n - where the only viruses are sexually transmitted"..
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It has nothing to do with "being good." We are incapable of "being good." We are selfish and hate God. That is why we need God to intervene on our behalf. We don't believe in God because we are naive, well-meaning people. We believe in God because he reached out to us. Our belief does not stem from what we read in a book, rather it is through this book that God reaches into our hearts and converts us. The unconverted cannot understand God or turn to him. All men are dead in sins until God resurrects a person individually, without regard to anything that person has done or believed. We are all undeserving of God's grace, yet some of us receive it, and that is where our faith comes from. It is not of ourselves, but of God.
And actually, I'm thinking of Jimmy Carter here, not George W. Bush. Not all Christians are theocrats. Some of us think the moral changes have to be effected from the bottom-up, not from the top-down and give priority to things like feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless over enforcing morality by law. But I guess it's okay to generalize all Christians as being far-right Republican party-liners. It's amazing the kind of intolerance that proceeds from the mouths of the "tolerant."
There is no question that the Israelites held the Scriptures to be the inerrant Word of God. They were not so careful about its preservation and learning because it is "just" an historical document of their tradition. To this day, Jewish boys are expected to memorize a parshah of the Torah when they become Bar Mitzvah. This is because everyone, not just the rabbis, was expected to know the law and practice it. Because it literally came from God to Moses and was written down. Orthodox Jews would hold that every single Hebrew letter came directly from God. The Christian Church, being the New Covenant extension of Israel, would not have viewed Scripture any differently. In fact, Jesus' criticism of the Pharisees was not because they did not take the Word of God literally, but because they went beyond the Word of God and put up their own, man-made doctrines up to be equal with God's.
We, as Christians, believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God that was given by God to His People for our instruction and edification. The Muslims believe the Qur'an is the Word of God in the sense of it is the uncreated speech of God and is therefore, itself, divine. That is a huge difference. While both would say that our respective scriptures are binding on man and free from error, our primary focus is on God's relationship to His People and this is what the Bible's focus is. The Qur'an is seen by Muslims as more of a guidebook for all of mankind that is to be followed by the letter for salvation, and while it contains large sections purporting to be history, the law is primary in Islam, not the history of sin and God's redemption for His chosen ones as is the motif in the Bible.
From your use of the female pronoun to describe God, I can tell that we are not talking about the same thing. There is what God has described in his revealed word, and then there is the human imagination. Until we can agree on the former, it is useless to even have a discussion about God at all.
The problem is that some people actually think this is evangelism. Evangelism is not trying to convince people rationally that there is a God. Evangelism is conveying the Gospel message of sinful humanity, the perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ, once and for all, that covers all sins, and that man can be reconciled to God by Jesus' perfect life and his death and resurrection. If they don't believe this, nothing else matters. They will still die and go to hell, whether they believe in evolution or ID.
He is just symptomatic of a larger disease in evangelicalism today. It is that we have largely sold out our faith to marketing and conservative politics and have lost sight of Jesus' death to save sinners and reconcile a sinful world to God. Maybe we need another fundamentalism in this country. Back to basics. None of this other stuff masquerading itself as Christianity. No Joel Osteen, no Joyce Meyer, no Pat Robertson, no decision theology, no dispensationalism, no purpose-driven church, no emerging new age church, no psychology gospel, no prosperity gospel, no word of faith, no charismatic neo-montanist garbage, no Benny Hinn, no Kenneth Copeland, none of this... Back to the Bible!
I always wonder why people seem to think that the Vatican speaks for all Christians. Don't they realize that Protestants outnumber Catholics in this country (the U.S.), and that more than a small number of Protestants think the Pope is the Antichrist? What the Vatican says about evolution does not hold any weight with me; if anything, it only bolsters my belief that the Roman Catholic Church is the whore of Babylon.
Yes, they were. They were fleeing the intolerance of the Anglican Church because the Pilgrims, being Puritan Separatists, would not conform to the more liberal established church in England. They were Calvinists who felt that the English Church had not done enough to root out Romish practices in the Church.
However, what I fail to understand is how people who are supposed biologists can put so much credence in a theory that flies in the face of other established "facts." It is a fact that two different species, when mated, cannot produce reproductible offspring. It has never happened. There is no evidence to indicate that this has ever happened. Yet, somehow evolutionists want us to believe that not only can one species mutate into another, but that they do this in male-female pairs!
I don't know about you, but I think it is a far greater stretch of the imagination to believe that every species derives from a male-female pair of a predecessor species which somehow mutated simultaneously, spontaneously, and identically, and that this happens over and over again throughout history such that it involves every species of life in the universe. The alternative of there being an omniscient and almighty creator that made the universe according to his pleasure and for his good purpose seems a lot more plausible.
The real problem is that most churches have abandoned the Bible and have no clear authority so that anything goes. Without an established standard of doctrine, the church is left to the whims of sinful human beings with their own prejudices and imaginings. This is exactly why I left the Episcopal Church. It's become a theology zoo with every crazy idea expressed and scripture becomes only an afterthought, which even when it is consulted, is reconstructed and made to mean exactly something other than what the inspired writers meant when they put quill to paper. Most churches today are so infested with liberal theology, or its evil cousin, neo-Orthodoxy, that debates like this even take place. God's word used to mean something once. In most churches, it doesn't anymore.
Yes, and it was founded by us "religious extremists"... Or, as we celebrate Thanksgiving Day this week, have you forgotten who the Pilgrims actually were?
Yes, and I would like to point out that Luther and Calvin have pointed out that the Pope is completely incompatible with the Christian faith.
I don't even buy CD's anymore. It's not worth the trouble of wondering what it's going to do to my Windows machine, having to run downstairs to rip it on my Slackware box, or wondering if it's going to play in my DVD player or car stereo. Since I've managed to get to the point where I have enough accessories for my iPod that I can play that anywhere, even in the car, I just buy all my music from iTMS. I've had to buy a couple of things from MSN Music that I couldn't find on iTMS, but I just burn that to CD-R and rip it Apple Lossless and get the same effect. It's not perfect, but it's good enough for me.
Sony VAIOs will now ship without shift keys...
Well, I don't know if it's "duping" anyone. I agree, that's going a bit overboard to say that. But I will say, that the one thing that kept me from buying an Xbox was that it basically was just a Pentium III with 64 megs of RAM and a GeForce3 video card. All I had to do was wait a few months and get a PC with better hardware than that for very little more money. True, there are some Xbox-exclusive games, but nothing that would justify my spending $300 on one. The PC is "good enough" for me. I suppose that if I didn't already have a PC or didn't have a need for a PC, then the Xbox might be attractive. But I just could not see having both from a "spending my money wisely" POV.
I can't wait.. Microsoft Bob for Xbox 360... SWEEEET!!
And people beating each other in the aisles and spending 10x what it's worth.. it's sickening. This is a game, not food! A shortage shouldn't create this kind of hysteria. Yet another reason not to do Christmas.
...I love TiVo. I haven't seen a single Xbox 360 ad yet! :-)
Can you guys like try to bust the myth that you can't read Slashdot and get laid?
I imagine sometimes the integration that Windows offers can be convenient, but it's more of an inconvenience when you just need a new feature in one part of the system. With Windows, you need to upgrade the whole kit and caboodle!
Somehow, I don't think that the attorney general and his staff lawyers are entitled to a commission based on how much money they get in court. Do you really think that the Texas AG is doing this so he and his minions can get a cut of the dough? In case you hadn't heard, Texas is a state, not a law firm.
Bones, on the other hand, is downright ridiculous and should almost be classified as science fiction with the kinds of analyses they do on that show! Criminal Minds is pure fantasy, too. But Bones is definitely the champ here!
Didn't Law & Order: SVU do this just last week?
The reason why C/C++ lacks any standard way of doing threads or graphics is precisely because they were meant to be portable. That's where libraries come in. To do all the specialized stuff that varies according to the hardware being used. You probably wouldn't use the same graphics libraries on a digital computer watch that you would on an animation workstation. Likewise, threading is going to be much different on a Z80 (which is still a widely used CPU) than on a PowerPC. Hardware has different capabilities, and while it might be nice to think that you could have a general interface to those capabilities that is standardized and transcends different architectures, the truth is that sometimes the differences require an altogether different approach and hence, libraries that reflect these approaches, in order to get the job done.
You know how sometimes they make X-rated movies and name them after Hollywood films.. like "Saving Private Ryan" becomes "Saving Ryan's Privates"... well, do you think anyone ever considered turning "Tron" into "Pr0n"? Think about it.. machines having (byte)sex.. Think of the marketing... "Pr0n - where the only viruses are sexually transmitted"..