Good point. I guess the fact that I never have my cell on me might explain why I didn't think of this... or I could just be denser than I think I am.:-)
Slight quibble -- cell phones allow you to be more consistently connected. I never used to have the option of using a land line from, say, aisle 12 of the supermarket. Mind you, I'm not clear on how this makes it "more attractive to meet people in the flesh", but it is a significant difference between cell and land phones.
Another slight quibble: having a pen pal can be more appealing than adding another social engagement to an already overloaded schedule. I can keep in touch with pen pals in a few minutes a week, whereas face-to-face meetings pretty much take a minimum of an hour of your time, and usually more. For us overworked introverts, having someone to correspond with long-distance can satisfy some of our need for social interaction without taxing our rival need for solitude.
If you seriously believe that the harm you inflict on others can always be mended, then I feel for the other people in your life, whoever they may be. Wounds can often (although not always) be healed, but they always scar, even if the scar can't be seen.
Do you know anyone who does not continue to make mistakes over and over? I don't believe I've ever had the privilege of meeting such a person. It's rare, in my experience, even to meet someone who doesn't make the same mistakes over and over, when it comes to interpersonal relationships.
I agree, minimizing your mistakes is a laudable goal. But it doesn't go far enough.
I don't treat any part of the Bible literally. I treat it as a collection of stories, with a grain of truth at the core. The four Gospels don't even all agree on details -- but they agree in broad scope and in theme. But one thing that the fundamentalists (and most Protestants, and many Catholics) forget is that Christianity is NOT derived from scripture. Scripture is derived from Christianity. In my view, the Bible is the collection of stories that come closest to explaining -- and NOT in a literal way -- the core idea of the faith.
Yes, I suppose one could call it a "God of the gaps" argument. I'm okay with that. I don't think all the gaps will ever go away. Science will learn more and more, but I think that there will always be things that we don't know -- or even more strongly: that we can't know. Quantum mechanics, for instance, seems to point out that some evidence is inherently unattainable.
If you find unbelievable the notion that a God of the gaps should exist, then by all means, you are right in good conscience to (as you call it) de-convert. Myself, for various personal reasons, I find less believable the notion that no God exists. Maybe it's just wishful thinking. My brother calls me a "Christian agnostic", and I must admit there's some truth to that description. As Puddleglum puts it in The Silver Chair: "Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things--trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies playing a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."
Now, having said that -- let me add that you may not find the Aslan-less real world hollow, and if that's the case, then I see no reason why you should make the same choice as I.
Yes, those phenomena -- "causality, chaos, and random interactions" -- are often used as arguments against the existence of God; but they are insufficient to disprove it, and depending on how one looks at them, can be viewed equally easily as manifestations of God's will.
GP prefaced his statement with "I believe", not "I have proved". Faith is the decision to believe. GP has decided to believe that God directs such phenomena; you have (I'm guessing) not decided to believe so. But either decision is a judgment call. GP is not trying to convince you. Please accord him, and others like him (like myself), the same courtesy.
Though not the GP, I'm a Christian who believes in evolution myself, I'll try to tackle this if you don't object. Please excuse the brevity of the summary below; there is so much left out, I fear I've made it sound rather less structured and nuanced than it really is.
The way I look at it, the "fall" was not a one-time event that blighted the rest of us. It was, and is, and will continue to be, an over-and-over event that blights each of us individually. "Adam" is not an historical figure, but an allegorical one, a representative of our human nature.
We are human, and fallible. Not one of us makes it through life (or probably even through the day) without making some serious error of judgment that wounds another person, whether deliberately or thoughtlessly. Those errors are the things we need to atone for: our deliberately hurtful deeds, our thoughtlessness. No one is immune from this; it is a necessary consequence of our free will.
And in most cases, I think we cannot really make up for the wrong we have done. The errors create wounds that are beyond our power to heal. Yet in a just universe, evil requires an expiation.
As I see it, Christ's death provided that expiation. The salvation of Jesus is offered freely, as a pure gift -- nothing expected of us in return, except to say, "I accept." Without that acceptance, the expiation for the evil I have done then falls on myself.
(DISCLAIMER: Please understand, it's not my intent to proselytize or start a debate. I only expressed my view because the parent asked for an answer. I'm not saying that this is THE answer. I'm saying that this is AN answer, and one that I can live with. If your life, logic, and understanding have led you to a different conclusion about the world -- a different relationship with God, a different God or set of Gods, or no God at all -- and so long as you are harming no others, I won't presume to say that your view should be the same as mine. Go in peace.)
Yes, but Roman Catholicism has no problem with evolution. The previous pope declared that there is no contradiction between the Bible and the theory of evolution. (The current pope, being significantly more conservative in most respects, may someday contravene that declaration, but at present, it still stands, AFAIK.)
In my side job, I answer reference questions in a chat environment. I'm amazed at the number of students who log on and ask a question (say, "What were three major achievements of Martin Luther King") that could easily have been answered in a Google search. But when I send them web pages with the answers spelled out clearly, "They quickly scan the site. They don't see clues that specific information is located on that site" -- and then tell me that site isn't helpful. I've come to the realization that many of them don't have the reasoning skills to recognize that the answer is there unless it's phrased exactly the same way as the question: "Three major achievements of Martin Luther King were X, Y, and Z."
This isn't making excuses for the system. This is a failure of the student, and, yes, the fault of the user for their impatience and their lack of understanding.
If the user took a moment to process the info, s/he could often have the answer faster with the first site than if s/he "leaves the site, goes back to google, and looks at the next promising linked site."
What's so cool about Library of Congress is once you figure out which Letter a subject has, you can go there and just start yanking tons of books off the shelves, and educate yourself on loads of stuff right there.
And how exactly is this different from Dewey? Go to 796.357 if you want to browse the baseball books. 398.2 for folklore. 423 for English dictionaries. 133.9 for ghosts. Et cetera...
So many people are unaware of how to process information, evaluate it for quality and authority,
This is the key point being overlooked here. Google is a fantastic resource for finding information. It is an incredibly lousy resource for evaluating information.
And here is where libraries are crucial. More than anything else, librarians are trained and experienced at evaluating information for quality and authority. Your knowledge may be increased by a Google search -- but I'd say it's about as likely that you'll be misinformed, misled, and misguided by the same Google search.
I find it interesting that several people have mentioned using Google Scholar and then reading the articles available through their college or university access to databases -- but in general it's the librarians at the university who selected those databases, and out of whose budget comes the funding to provide that access.
Don't count us librarians out. We're far from beaten yet.
Quite a few libraries, especially in larger/wealthier suburban communities that already have coffeehouses, are installing cappuccino bars or the equivalent in order to pull in clientele.
I work in a public library. I applaud some of your recommendations (computers, software, & DVD collections should be integral parts of a library's mission, for instance), and absolutely recreation is both a valid way to serve the public and a hook to get people in for more "serious" library use. (At one library where I used to work, in a community that had never had a library before, I bought TONS of videos to get the local population in the door -- so that they might think of the library when it came time to get tax forms, car repair information, books for school book reports, local history and genealogy info, and so on.)
However, our book circulation in my library is at record highs. Our reference staff is larger and busier than at any point in the library's history. I'm not in favor of eliminating, or even significantly reducing, our investment in books so long as those facts remain true.
It's hard for many/.-minded folks to grasp, perhaps, but there are many people -- not just the pre-computer-age elderly -- who actively prefer physical books. Computers have many advantages -- but they also have many disadvantages. I can't take a computer into the bathtub with me and read while I soak. Unless I shell out big bucks for a Kindle or a PDA, I can't keep a computer in my pocket to haul out and read a few paragraphs while waiting in line at the post office or supermarket. Even the best bookmarking functions with ebooks are clumsy and a hell of a lot more complicated than just sticking a gum wrapper or a paper clip or whatever you have handy in a paperback to mark something you want to come back to.
You have a valid point about the similarities between computer gaming and fantasy books. However, there are also some key differences. One problem libraries have with computer gaming is simply that hardware, licensing, and tech support for gaming computers is expensive. Many small town libraries can barely afford Internet-capable computers, much less game-ready boxes. Moreover, a busy library must impose time limits in order to give everyone a chance to use the computers. We already have patrons whose computers we have to manually shut down to get them to abide by the time limits when we have three or four people waiting. We don't need even more such problems, and I have a hunch that someone in the middle of a crucial moment in their quest would hardly be more cooperative.
Re: Porn DVDs -- unfortunately, most libraries are at the mercy of their local communities. Not many would risk the firestorm of public controversy if they started carrying porn, when they're already exhausted from fights over keeping things like Brokeback Mountain, Harry Potter, and Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen.
I work in a public library, and I am forever amazed at how even well-educated people have no grasp of such things. A typical interaction with one patron (an MD):
Patron: Do you have any books by Vijay Hamachandra?
Me: Let me check the catalog. -- No, I'm sorry, we don't have anything at all by that author.
Patron: Well, he wrote a book about polysaccharides. What if you look for polysaccharides?
Me: Well, I'll be happy to check to see if we have any books about polysaccharides, but there are no books at all by that author in the county.
Patron: What if you search for Hamachandra AND polysaccharides? Anything come up then?
And this is not an isolated incident. These conversations go on every single day, with people ranging from nine to ninety years old, with all sorts of educational levels.
If nothing else, the library is useful for providing people with someone who knows how to find information. Google is immensely useful, but only if you have a clue how to use it. More esoteric search tools tend to require even more user expertise. For the typical/.er, the use of these things seems to be self-explanatory, but trust me, for the majority of the population, it's not.
I'll agree with many of the points made by other responders. There's also the simple fact that buying books by authors I like helps support the authors and encourages them to write more. (And I'm saying this as someone who works in a library and who borrows quite a lot of books to read from work.)
But I'm not likely to drop & break a coal plant in my home around my children. And the thermometer I use is a digital one that is pretty hard to break.
Any home -- especially one with children in it -- will be at a greatly increased risk of mercury inhalation with CFLs. Accidents WILL happen, and this legislation -- like most misguided, feel-good legislation -- fails to ensure that the alternatives to incandescents are as safe in the short term as incandescents. When (not if) I drop an incandescent bulb, there's a risk of somebody stepping on a glass sliver. With CFLs, there's that PLUS the whole hazmat issue.
Unless CFLs can be made unbreakable (yeah, that'll happen!), I think the immediate health risks of the mercury vapors vastly outweigh the risks from additional energy usage.
And I see a LOT of comments here dismissing people's experiences with CFLs burning out rapidly, smoking, etc., by saying "check your wiring". Does anyone on/. realize what a large percentage of the population lives in ancient rental housing, with no viable recourse to get a landlord to fix problems like that? For people in that situation (many of whom are too uneducated, elderly, disabled, etc., for "find another landlord" to be a realistic option, either), this bill will raise their cost of living AND increase their health risks.
I think the minute the holiday chaos settles down around here I'm sitting down and writing letters to all my political reps to get this ill-considered law taken back off the books.
I could see myself buying it as a gag gift for, say, my father, who liked Norris' TV show immensely and is completely computerphobic. (I haven't, mind you, and don't really intend to, but I could see myself doing it, if I didn't have better options available for gifts for him.)
Slashdot Mirror
I can't see why not.
How do you know he's alive?
Offer her a hemlock and oleander salad with amanita mushrooms and a lovely mistletoe-berry vinaigrette.
What's wrong with spending an hour on your lonesome? Being the antisocial curmudgeon that I am, I'd look forward to it.
Why on earth was this modded as flamebait?
-- for Phunny.
Good point. I guess the fact that I never have my cell on me might explain why I didn't think of this ... or I could just be denser than I think I am. :-)
Slight quibble -- cell phones allow you to be more consistently connected. I never used to have the option of using a land line from, say, aisle 12 of the supermarket. Mind you, I'm not clear on how this makes it "more attractive to meet people in the flesh", but it is a significant difference between cell and land phones.
Another slight quibble: having a pen pal can be more appealing than adding another social engagement to an already overloaded schedule. I can keep in touch with pen pals in a few minutes a week, whereas face-to-face meetings pretty much take a minimum of an hour of your time, and usually more. For us overworked introverts, having someone to correspond with long-distance can satisfy some of our need for social interaction without taxing our rival need for solitude.
"not watching star trek" --- wait, I don't follow.
If you seriously believe that the harm you inflict on others can always be mended, then I feel for the other people in your life, whoever they may be. Wounds can often (although not always) be healed, but they always scar, even if the scar can't be seen.
Do you know anyone who does not continue to make mistakes over and over? I don't believe I've ever had the privilege of meeting such a person. It's rare, in my experience, even to meet someone who doesn't make the same mistakes over and over, when it comes to interpersonal relationships.
I agree, minimizing your mistakes is a laudable goal. But it doesn't go far enough.
Since you asked ...
I don't treat any part of the Bible literally. I treat it as a collection of stories, with a grain of truth at the core. The four Gospels don't even all agree on details -- but they agree in broad scope and in theme. But one thing that the fundamentalists (and most Protestants, and many Catholics) forget is that Christianity is NOT derived from scripture. Scripture is derived from Christianity. In my view, the Bible is the collection of stories that come closest to explaining -- and NOT in a literal way -- the core idea of the faith.
Yes, I suppose one could call it a "God of the gaps" argument. I'm okay with that. I don't think all the gaps will ever go away. Science will learn more and more, but I think that there will always be things that we don't know -- or even more strongly: that we can't know. Quantum mechanics, for instance, seems to point out that some evidence is inherently unattainable.
If you find unbelievable the notion that a God of the gaps should exist, then by all means, you are right in good conscience to (as you call it) de-convert. Myself, for various personal reasons, I find less believable the notion that no God exists. Maybe it's just wishful thinking. My brother calls me a "Christian agnostic", and I must admit there's some truth to that description. As Puddleglum puts it in The Silver Chair: "Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things--trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies playing a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."
Now, having said that -- let me add that you may not find the Aslan-less real world hollow, and if that's the case, then I see no reason why you should make the same choice as I.
Whoops, forgot I wasn't logged in when I posted my reply. The AC above is me.
Yes, those phenomena -- "causality, chaos, and random interactions" -- are often used as arguments against the existence of God; but they are insufficient to disprove it, and depending on how one looks at them, can be viewed equally easily as manifestations of God's will.
GP prefaced his statement with "I believe", not "I have proved". Faith is the decision to believe. GP has decided to believe that God directs such phenomena; you have (I'm guessing) not decided to believe so. But either decision is a judgment call. GP is not trying to convince you. Please accord him, and others like him (like myself), the same courtesy.
Your other point -- the argument from evil -- is one that is hotly debated, and decidedly troubling. But counter-arguments have been made by finer minds than mine, if you're really interested in the question.
Though not the GP, I'm a Christian who believes in evolution myself, I'll try to tackle this if you don't object. Please excuse the brevity of the summary below; there is so much left out, I fear I've made it sound rather less structured and nuanced than it really is.
The way I look at it, the "fall" was not a one-time event that blighted the rest of us. It was, and is, and will continue to be, an over-and-over event that blights each of us individually. "Adam" is not an historical figure, but an allegorical one, a representative of our human nature.
We are human, and fallible. Not one of us makes it through life (or probably even through the day) without making some serious error of judgment that wounds another person, whether deliberately or thoughtlessly. Those errors are the things we need to atone for: our deliberately hurtful deeds, our thoughtlessness. No one is immune from this; it is a necessary consequence of our free will.
And in most cases, I think we cannot really make up for the wrong we have done. The errors create wounds that are beyond our power to heal. Yet in a just universe, evil requires an expiation.
As I see it, Christ's death provided that expiation. The salvation of Jesus is offered freely, as a pure gift -- nothing expected of us in return, except to say, "I accept." Without that acceptance, the expiation for the evil I have done then falls on myself.
(DISCLAIMER: Please understand, it's not my intent to proselytize or start a debate. I only expressed my view because the parent asked for an answer. I'm not saying that this is THE answer. I'm saying that this is AN answer, and one that I can live with. If your life, logic, and understanding have led you to a different conclusion about the world -- a different relationship with God, a different God or set of Gods, or no God at all -- and so long as you are harming no others, I won't presume to say that your view should be the same as mine. Go in peace.)
Yes, but Roman Catholicism has no problem with evolution. The previous pope declared that there is no contradiction between the Bible and the theory of evolution. (The current pope, being significantly more conservative in most respects, may someday contravene that declaration, but at present, it still stands, AFAIK.)
In my side job, I answer reference questions in a chat environment. I'm amazed at the number of students who log on and ask a question (say, "What were three major achievements of Martin Luther King") that could easily have been answered in a Google search. But when I send them web pages with the answers spelled out clearly, "They quickly scan the site. They don't see clues that specific information is located on that site" -- and then tell me that site isn't helpful. I've come to the realization that many of them don't have the reasoning skills to recognize that the answer is there unless it's phrased exactly the same way as the question: "Three major achievements of Martin Luther King were X, Y, and Z."
This isn't making excuses for the system. This is a failure of the student, and, yes, the fault of the user for their impatience and their lack of understanding.
If the user took a moment to process the info, s/he could often have the answer faster with the first site than if s/he "leaves the site, goes back to google, and looks at the next promising linked site."
What's so cool about Library of Congress is once you figure out which Letter a subject has, you can go there and just start yanking tons of books off the shelves, and educate yourself on loads of stuff right there.
...
And how exactly is this different from Dewey? Go to 796.357 if you want to browse the baseball books. 398.2 for folklore. 423 for English dictionaries. 133.9 for ghosts. Et cetera
So many people are unaware of how to process information, evaluate it for quality and authority,
This is the key point being overlooked here. Google is a fantastic resource for finding information. It is an incredibly lousy resource for evaluating information.
And here is where libraries are crucial. More than anything else, librarians are trained and experienced at evaluating information for quality and authority. Your knowledge may be increased by a Google search -- but I'd say it's about as likely that you'll be misinformed, misled, and misguided by the same Google search.
I find it interesting that several people have mentioned using Google Scholar and then reading the articles available through their college or university access to databases -- but in general it's the librarians at the university who selected those databases, and out of whose budget comes the funding to provide that access.
Don't count us librarians out. We're far from beaten yet.
Quite a few libraries, especially in larger/wealthier suburban communities that already have coffeehouses, are installing cappuccino bars or the equivalent in order to pull in clientele.
Well, sort of.
Boss? Is that you?
/.-minded folks to grasp, perhaps, but there are many people -- not just the pre-computer-age elderly -- who actively prefer physical books. Computers have many advantages -- but they also have many disadvantages. I can't take a computer into the bathtub with me and read while I soak. Unless I shell out big bucks for a Kindle or a PDA, I can't keep a computer in my pocket to haul out and read a few paragraphs while waiting in line at the post office or supermarket. Even the best bookmarking functions with ebooks are clumsy and a hell of a lot more complicated than just sticking a gum wrapper or a paper clip or whatever you have handy in a paperback to mark something you want to come back to.
I work in a public library. I applaud some of your recommendations (computers, software, & DVD collections should be integral parts of a library's mission, for instance), and absolutely recreation is both a valid way to serve the public and a hook to get people in for more "serious" library use. (At one library where I used to work, in a community that had never had a library before, I bought TONS of videos to get the local population in the door -- so that they might think of the library when it came time to get tax forms, car repair information, books for school book reports, local history and genealogy info, and so on.)
However, our book circulation in my library is at record highs. Our reference staff is larger and busier than at any point in the library's history. I'm not in favor of eliminating, or even significantly reducing, our investment in books so long as those facts remain true.
It's hard for many
You have a valid point about the similarities between computer gaming and fantasy books. However, there are also some key differences. One problem libraries have with computer gaming is simply that hardware, licensing, and tech support for gaming computers is expensive. Many small town libraries can barely afford Internet-capable computers, much less game-ready boxes. Moreover, a busy library must impose time limits in order to give everyone a chance to use the computers. We already have patrons whose computers we have to manually shut down to get them to abide by the time limits when we have three or four people waiting. We don't need even more such problems, and I have a hunch that someone in the middle of a crucial moment in their quest would hardly be more cooperative.
Re: Porn DVDs -- unfortunately, most libraries are at the mercy of their local communities. Not many would risk the firestorm of public controversy if they started carrying porn, when they're already exhausted from fights over keeping things like Brokeback Mountain, Harry Potter, and Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen.
Hear, hear.
/.er, the use of these things seems to be self-explanatory, but trust me, for the majority of the population, it's not.
I work in a public library, and I am forever amazed at how even well-educated people have no grasp of such things. A typical interaction with one patron (an MD):
Patron: Do you have any books by Vijay Hamachandra?
Me: Let me check the catalog. -- No, I'm sorry, we don't have anything at all by that author.
Patron: Well, he wrote a book about polysaccharides. What if you look for polysaccharides?
Me: Well, I'll be happy to check to see if we have any books about polysaccharides, but there are no books at all by that author in the county.
Patron: What if you search for Hamachandra AND polysaccharides? Anything come up then?
And this is not an isolated incident. These conversations go on every single day, with people ranging from nine to ninety years old, with all sorts of educational levels.
If nothing else, the library is useful for providing people with someone who knows how to find information. Google is immensely useful, but only if you have a clue how to use it. More esoteric search tools tend to require even more user expertise. For the typical
I'll agree with many of the points made by other responders. There's also the simple fact that buying books by authors I like helps support the authors and encourages them to write more. (And I'm saying this as someone who works in a library and who borrows quite a lot of books to read from work.)
But I'm not likely to drop & break a coal plant in my home around my children. And the thermometer I use is a digital one that is pretty hard to break.
/. realize what a large percentage of the population lives in ancient rental housing, with no viable recourse to get a landlord to fix problems like that? For people in that situation (many of whom are too uneducated, elderly, disabled, etc., for "find another landlord" to be a realistic option, either), this bill will raise their cost of living AND increase their health risks.
Any home -- especially one with children in it -- will be at a greatly increased risk of mercury inhalation with CFLs. Accidents WILL happen, and this legislation -- like most misguided, feel-good legislation -- fails to ensure that the alternatives to incandescents are as safe in the short term as incandescents. When (not if) I drop an incandescent bulb, there's a risk of somebody stepping on a glass sliver. With CFLs, there's that PLUS the whole hazmat issue.
Unless CFLs can be made unbreakable (yeah, that'll happen!), I think the immediate health risks of the mercury vapors vastly outweigh the risks from additional energy usage.
And I see a LOT of comments here dismissing people's experiences with CFLs burning out rapidly, smoking, etc., by saying "check your wiring". Does anyone on
I think the minute the holiday chaos settles down around here I'm sitting down and writing letters to all my political reps to get this ill-considered law taken back off the books.
I could see myself buying it as a gag gift for, say, my father, who liked Norris' TV show immensely and is completely computerphobic. (I haven't, mind you, and don't really intend to, but I could see myself doing it, if I didn't have better options available for gifts for him.)