10:07 – Colin and I finished series five of Heartland and started again with series one. It’s interesting to watch Amber Marshall reset from a 23-year-old woman playing 20 to an 18-year-old girl playing 15. The rest of the cast doesn’t look all that different jumping back from 2012 to 2007, including, oddly enough, Jessica Amlee, who was 13 when the series premiered and 18 as of the final episode of series 5.
The news from the EU remains as bad as ever and getting worse. I don’t think the politicians realize that the lull they’ve had over the last couple of months was merely the EU crisis passing through the eye of a hurricane. The winds are already picking up again. After the premature announcement a couple days ago about the release of the months-overdue tranche of the Greek bailout being released, it’s now clear that it has not been and that Greece has been given until Sunday to agree to the Troika terms. As of now, it looks unlikely to happen. If not, what happens Monday is anyone’s guess.
I’m still working on building science kits, designing new kits, and writing documentation for them. I also need to spend some time cleaning up downstairs, particularly my lab.
11:54 – Since I moved to Dreamhost from the shared server that Brian and Greg ran for a decade or more, I’ve really missed the spam filtering options that I had on their server. So I finally got around to emailing Dreamhost tech support to request some changes.
I have two requests that I would like you to consider enabling:
1. Currently, blacklisting is allowed only by <domain>.TLD. I would like to be able to blacklist by TLD. For example, it would be very useful to allow blacklist of all .CN and .BR domains, along with those from most of the rest of the non-English speaking world outside of western Europe. Ideally, this would be implemented with a page of checkboxes that allowed one to blacklist all TLDs with one click and then un-blacklist the ones you wanted to allow through by clearing the checkboxes for those domains.
2. My former service provider provided a squirrelmail spam filtering option called “discard silently” that permanently deleted the spam emails rather than moving them to a quarantine area. I would very much like to have this option.
Thank you for considering this request.
Y’know, it’s people like you who are causing this crisis. If everyone would just avert their eyes and say “La-la-la, I don’t see anything wrong,” then the world’s wise and benevolent leaders would be able to avoid all problems.
The Emperor’s clothes looks so light and airy!
Yes, it’s true. I’ve been saying that the euro was doomed since the day it was introduced, and I’ve been writing frequently about the coming collapse for the last couple of years.
And indeed the euro and the eurozone should have been allowed to collapse by 2011 and certainly 2012, and would have done so had not the politicians been willing to allow the collapse to result in an order of magnitude longer and greater human suffering in order to put the collapse off for a short time. The magnitude of the problem has now grown from hundreds of billions to tens of trillions, and much of Europe is now condemned to suffer a third-world standard of living for at least a decade and probably more.
Remember the scene from Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I?
King Louis: “They are my people! I am their sovereign! I LOVE Them. Pull! (shoots peasant flung into air) Drifting to the left…”
Reminds me a lot of the eurocrats and EU politicians.
Hey Bob, have you thought about moving your MX domain record to google apps? You can get up to 10 email addresses for free.
http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/pricing.html
I moved our MX domain record to google apps about three years ago. I am still using the old 100 email limit for free as they let me grandfather in. But, I would pay and pay dearly for the service just for the spam detection alone. You get the wonderful gmail interface for free, other google apps and 10 GB of storage per email address.
Did I mention that their spam detection is simply amazing? I get about one false positive per week and two or three false negatives per week. And the coolest thing is that it is all automated. I don’t have to do anything for any of our 13 email addresses on a routine basis. Some of my people are using POP (me) and a couple are using IMAP. If you pay the $50/email_address/year then you get all kinds of configuration options but I could really care less. The basic configuration options are good enough for me.
The cool thing is that you do get to use your domain for sending and receiving email. I send and receive email as lmc@winsim.com without any problems at all but I am fetching my email from pop.gmail.com and sending to smtp.gmail.com. I cannot imagine the howling maelstrom that these two server groups live in but it must be horrible. And the downtime is very little, maybe an hour or two per year. Frankly, I have no idea how they keep the entire system going. I have read that gmail.com is 150,000 servers but that was years ago.
I suspect that they will make us pay some day, maybe soon as google is becoming more bottom line aware. I will pay.
I thought about it when I moved from Greg & Brian’s Excellent Hosting Service to Dreamhost, but I decided that I really didn’t want all of my mail being read by Google.
I’m glad you liked our spam blocking.
One of the things we did was use several public relay blocklists as well as a few private lists of our own design to kick out stuff from the most common spam sources before it even made it to SpamAssassin.
We were blocking ~98% of attempted deliveries using this method, which accounted for over 90,000 messages DAILY. Most (more than 70%) of our spam delivery attempts came from US ISPs, and over half from dynamic IPs, presumably running rooted Windows zombies.
I don’t think that Dreamhost can get away with blocking this much pre-filter though, as they get too much mail to babysit things like we did.
I would not put anything in an email that I would not mind seeing on the front page of the Houston Chronicle or the New York Times the next day. I am fairly sure that the NSA can read your email if they want to. I’m sure that a few other entities can do it also. So, Google reading my email is just a price that we pay for such a great service.
Plus, email is discoverable in any lawsuit, private or corporate. I have already had my email seized by the FTC back in 2005 for a competitor anti-trust lawsuit.
I am also very interested in Cloud Apps as we intend to port our software to the cloud “some day”. Experiencing google apps, especially gmail, is a good thing as I believe them to be “best of class”. Unless someone knows of better cloud apps out there?
Yup, our online privacy is dead as a doornail and our physical privacy is shaky, too, between city camera systems, drones, Lord knows what else. We can make it harder for them, but that’s about it. And to really truly disappear from the world into a new ID or whatever CAN be done, but it is really difficult, tricky and not foolproof. If someone really wants to find you, they can, eventually.
I just don’t see how the humans who run all this can possibly keep up with hundreds of billions of emails, wireless transmissions, other radio bandwidth out there, etc. From what I have seen of key-word triggers it’s a joke. I’m probably kinda rusty on this stuff by now; my gig at work is mainly the regular patching, IDS, some firewall stuff, and just keeping track of the endless shit out there.
As for gmail, I’ve used it pretty much since it came out, along with their search engine, and have nearly zero complaints. Were I running a small biz operation, I would definitely consider Google Apps, etc. for the whole enchilada. Running on open-sauce systems, of course. The bulk of my IT budget would be on the hardware and nice fat bonuses for my genius IT drones.
Some critical stuff on Google today, in Deutschland.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/anti-trust-suits-threaten-google-from-both-sides-of-the-atlantic-a-863213.html
And the forthcoming storm is being hyped like crazy here in the Northeast, I dunno about points south, like the Carolinas and Virginia….
This is typical:
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/26/forecasters_warn_east_coast_about_frankenstorm/?source=newsletter
So naturally this weekend through Monday night the store shelves will get emptied and people will be wetting themselves. Bunch of damn lemmings; a little common sense and having all your stuff ready well before anything like this would be the thing to do. But no; this country is just lost, lost, lost.
Ooh, ooh, Greg. Pictures just for you!
http://life.time.com/history/hillary-clinton-photos-1969/
Hillary Rodham from a spread in Life magazine the year she graduated from Wellesley.
Is it just me, or did the words “Hillary” and “spread” in close proximity to “69” make anyone else’s hoo-hoo shrivel up and die?
Lordy, she was a weird-looking skank even then. But Larry was able to get over on plenty of other bitches before, during and after the nuptials. Got over like a big dog, too.
Yeah, thanks a lot, Chuck; I can’t find my hoo-hoo now.
An antidote was called for: Diana Rigg around the same age as the Heroine of Tripoli when the latter’s college pic was taken:
http://thinsop.blogspot.com/2011/05/diana-rigg.html
Found the hoo-hoo and now I can pee and go to sleep.
Don’t cha just love history?
Warning about “Frankenstorm” and other disasters at the drop of a hat? Scream “FIRE!” every time you see a spark? Hey, gotta do it, otherwise they’re gonna throw you in jail like the Italian earthquake scientists. Better a million false positives than one false negative, don’t ya know.
By the way, the pics of Hillary on Life – what a site (not “sight”, but “site”). Like to broke my browser. I have Ghostery installed, which is an add-on to block tracker sites and other idiocies. It also tells you which ones it detects and which ones it could block. The Life site set a new record – I’ve never seen a place that had twenty-two different tracking services: “Audience Science”, “Brightcove” (sounds like a defense contractor), ChartBeat, DoubleClick, etc, etc… Site don’t work none too well either, after they’ve all been nuked.
Chuck wrote:
“Ooh, ooh, Greg. Pictures just for you!”
I prefer her as a Goldwater Girl, but I’m sure you, OFD, SteveF, Bill or our host would have bedded her in a flash if she’d asked.
Another antidote: the lovely Sigourney Weaver:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sigourney_Weaver_by_David_Shankbone.jpg
Although I was a bit amused by the photographer’s name…
Another antidote, the lovely Sharon O’Neill:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfkemsBYsFU
I use NoScript and, yah, the Time site had an enormous number of ad and tracking scripts loaded. I never did see the Hillary pictures because I got bored of temporarily allowing various sites to load their crap, before finding the one which would load the pictures.
Warning about “Frankenstorm” and other disasters at the drop of a hat?
I think is all about the government wanting people to be afraid. Y2K (a non event), Swine Flu (a non event), Bird Flu (a non event), Food contamination (wimps), Hurricanes (only stupid people die), all manor of disaster predictions. A scared population is an obedient population. The more a government can keep people scared the more the government can come to their rescue and become the hero.
I think our society is too sterile. Too many mothers drop their kids pacifier and then immediately boil it for 30 minutes, rinse with alcohol and then run it through a sterilizer machine. Kids don’t get exposed to enough pathogens in life to build up immunity. A clean food supply is good, a sterile food supply not so much.
As for flu, yes people die from it. But they have weak systems or other issues. A healthy person should just be miserable for a few days.
“A healthy person should just be miserable for a few days.”
Check.
Whatever I caught many weeks ago attacked my head first, which I halted in its tracks with massive doses of Vitamin C, gallons of fluids and eating like a pig, while getting plenty of fresh air. Then it migrated immediately down into my chest where it remains. Fine while I’m sitting or standing upright but lying down to sleep not so much. Nothing has made a dent in it, and I’ve noticed that as we get older it takes forever to get rid of crap like this.
Emails buzzing around at work, apparently; my PHB mangler down in upstate NY is telling us our first priority for this upcoming mega-storm is to take care of our homes and families, so if we gotta stay home we should do so. He is, and will be working from home all next week as his house “does not do well in big rain storms.” In the last big storms the company’s big sites down there lost power and the repercussions lasted a while for the systems we help to support. We did OK up here but I guess we shall see. It will be interesting to watch the Lake, which is about a hundred feet away from where I sit.
Fortunately, some moms are still reasonable about these things. I’ll never forget having some friends over when Duncan was a puppy. Their son was only a few months old, and he and Duncan were playing on the floor in the den while the four of us sat there talking. At some point, someone looked down and noticed that the pacifier that had formerly been in Andrew’s mouth was now in Duncan’s mouth. We all laughed about that. Then Suzy took the pacifier out of Duncan’s mouth and put it back in Andrew’s mouth.
And then there was the time many years ago when a woman I knew had just had a baby, which she was breast feeding. Her best friend had also had a baby that was within a couple weeks of the same age as hers, and was also breast feeding. I asked her if she and her friend took turns nursing each other’s babies. From her expression, she must have been thinking I was some kind of pervert. I explained to her that women nursing each other’s babies gave both babies antibodies from both mothers, particularly if they did so within hours or days of birth, but it was helpful even weeks or months after the babies were born. I think she thought I was kidding.
From what I’ve seen (and this is purely anecdotal and observational; no science involved), many women nurse because it’s faddish rather than for the biological benefits. Anything you say about it which they did not already hear from approved sources (ie, their friends) is wrong.
“…many women nurse because it’s faddish rather than for the biological benefits. Anything you say about it which they did not already hear from approved sources (ie, their friends) is wrong.”
Yet another variation on that lovely game that was written up by Eric Berne in his tomes on “transactional analysis” back in the Glorious Sixties, all hail their wonderfulness. It was called NIGYSOB; “now I’ve got you, you son of a bitch.” Women who do as SteveF describes, usually do it in public or in other than private gatherings, simply to rub it in peoples’ faces and dare them to make an issue of it or to say anything at all, at which point the nursing woman can then exhibit her superiority. Also an attention-getting caper.
In grad school humanities classes a variation was for some student or prof to make some kind of outrageous claim about a text and its alleged intent and then if anyone raised an objection, they could do the North Korean POW routine of accusing them of racism, sexism, etc., and there would ensue public humiliation. I had this done to me once, and in another class during a discussion about a religious devotional poem by John Donne an arrogant crackpot student said it was clearly about fellatio between Donne and Christ. The prof was taken aback for a microsecond, but only that, and responded, ‘well, yes, she could see that…’ This was all too typical. Let me hasten to assure the audience here that the poem was mos def NOT about that. Donne was most likely a recusant, as was the man known as ‘Shakespeare,’ and even with the wild metaphysical stuff these guys came up with, they also did straightforward religious devotionals like Donne’s, who was an Anglican minister.
The ‘calm before the storm’ up here today; sort of sunny, temp in high 50s, no sign of anything amiss yet. Mrs. OFD in the air right now enroute from Atlanta and home for two weeks, before she leaves again for the southernmost tip of Texas. Then nothing again until January. So we will enjoy our marital harmony and joy for an uninterrupted six or seven weeks; I almost typed “martial” instead of “marital.” Freudian slip? Calling Dr. Berne….
I’ve never understood why people object to “nursing” (properly called “breast feeding, as nursing is an occupation undertaken by nurses) in public. I mean, what the hell is wrong with (1) breast exposure in public and (2) feeding a child in public? I guess some objectors think it’s like excretion, or as one purveyor of mumbo jumbo has it, the baby is cannibalising the mother. Most women are fairly discreet about it, and if it offends you just look the other way.
I was amused in the late Eighties when a childless Australian young woman said she was nursing another woman’s baby. A visiting American who was involved in the conversation was horrified, but the young woman was just holding/comforting the baby, not trying to breast feed it, which wouldn’t have achieved much anyway.
There is nothing particularly wrong about it, Greg; what SteveF and I are describing are those mothers who choose deliberately to make some kind of statement or issue about it as a sort of aggressive challenge to any possible responses. And like SteveF sez, whatever anyone says will be wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s a set-up. An ambush, if you will. As you say, most women are discreet about it and it certainly doesn’t offend me or most other folks.
Well, my kids were breast fed, and it was no fad.
They never touched a pacifier. Worst thing you can do to your kid without actually beating them, IMHO. It reinforces oral fixation and can alter the way the teeth come in. The thumb is ideal for the same use, and you can rarely lose your kid’s thumb, without losing the kid. Duncan had realized how bad it was for the child, and had removed it from the kid’s mouth in order to destroy it before the human intervened.
There’s something deeply wrong with a society that considers women nursing babies in public as even worthy of notice, let alone critical comments. Women have been nursing babies in public for something like two million years. It’s what mothers and babies do.
This unhealthy preoccupation with natural body functions and “indecent exposure” is just that, unhealthy. I remember one time in college my girlfriend at the time and I were hiking with a mixed group. At one point, she announced, “I gotta pee”. She dropped her jeans, squatted, and urinated. What I thought was interesting was that the three or four guys in the group (including me, who was sleeping with her) turned our backs to give her some privacy, while the other girls just watched her pee. No one made any comment at the time, and I never heard any of the guys say a word about it, but later on I overheard a couple of the girls talking about her “exposing herself”. The implication was that she was a shameless hussy. Geez.
As has been mentioned here, another Hoosier has offended the world with comments about rape being “God’s will” in statements during his political campaign. Slate took up the topic and has a test with quotes. The object is to determine whether an Islamic or Christian fundamentalist made the statement. I got 7 out of 9. There IS a slight difference in word usage between the two insanities.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/10/richard_mourdock_rape_scandal_spot_the_difference_between_the_christian.html
7 out of 9 here, too. I was fooled by the Fuqua and Peterson quotes.
There is no real difference between fundamentalists of Christianity, Judaism or Islam, and the differences are mostly dress. Otherwise, they’re all preaching from the same basic book of laws, of which many no longer apply in a modern world.
“…they’re all preaching from the same basic book of laws, of which many no longer apply in a modern world.”
The fundies of all three religions may be preaching from the same “book of laws” but they very selectively pick and choose which words, phrases, sentences and parts of that book they interpret to their own satisfaction and with which to beat other people over the head with it. Thus one group takes from Leviticus “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” and finds witches to torture, hang and burn. Another group finds such-and-such to be an abonimation and hasten to stamp it out, whatever the human costs. A third, sort of comical band of lunatics, although they are dead fucking serious, are the people who see they are told to take up serpents, etc., and there is some interesting footage of that if one is interested. And of course too many Christian fundies rip out the Book of Revelation from the entire Biblical library of books, discarding the rest, and focus obsessively on it to the exclusion of everything else.
From what guys here say, and what Mrs. OFD sees in her travels around the country, the regions in the Midwest and South are heavy with this kind of activity and it’s in your face apparently all the time. Not so up here, as I’ve mentioned before; we may see the Mormons or the Witnesses once in a blue moon and that’s it. The mainstream Prods are fading away into the Western sunset pretty steadily now and the muslims keep a very low profile. Jews in the cities and ‘burbs stay busy, but not so much this fah noth. And most Roman Catholics hide their light under a bushel, it seems; we are not real big evangelists here (as we are called to be) and you will not have us pounding on your doors with leaflets and brochures and exhortations.
As it is, most of my fellow American Catholics are Democrats and will happily and stupidly pull the levers once again for Barack Hussein, who would gladly see them all cast into the Lake of Fire, or more accurately, be totally indifferent to it. Most of them are “buffet” Catholics, like “buffet” Episcopalians of my past experience, who pick and choose which doctrines, dogmas and practices they will accept. Since Vatican II and the modern liturgy that came of it, they’re content with it, and the relentless dumbing down of the music, pablumized folk-style crap from the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Let a parish bring back the Latin mass and the peasants are stunned and bewildered and find it too difficult.
But I ramble…62 here now…we cannot call this an Indian summer, of course; that only applies to a few consecutive days or a week of warm weather like this but AFTER weeks of hard frost, which we have not had yet. This, to me, is just a sort of extension of late summuh….
Urk. I only got 6 of 9.
Oh, well, as Gertrude Stein said, “Nutcase is a nutcase is a nutcase is a nutcase”.
How could they have services in Latin? What, maybe 0.001% of the population understands spoken Latin? And what the church claims to be spoken Latin ain’t Latin; it’s some bastardized derivative form that in many respects more resembles spoken Italian (surprise, surprise) than Latin.
Oh, yeah. How many priests nowadays have any Latin at all? I doubt that many can even read it, let alone speak it.
Dunno. My close Catholic former alter-boy friends can recite whole liturgies in Latin, learned in their childhood, but none have a clue what it means beyond a word or two.
That is about the same as my German English students, who listen to pop songs in English (almost all songs on the charts in Germany are English), but have not got a clue what the lyrics mean.
Well, I guess turnabout is fair play. I remember Nena’s 99 Luftballons, which was notable for me because it was the only song sung in German that I understood every word of. Ordinarily, with sung German I’d get just a few words or a phrase here and there, but Nena enunciates very clearly.
And I always wondered why the English version was renamed 99 Red Balloons. I understand that they needed the extra syllable for it to scan, but 99 Toy Balloons would have worked just as well and also was an accurate translation. Of course, they butchered the rest of the lyrics in the English version, so why not the title.
Our local parish priest and his deacons and altar servers have the whole Latin Rite down pat and clearly know what it all means from the way they pronounce it and the emphases they stress. It it a lyrical, low-key form of Latin, known as Ecclesiastical Latin, and Bob hit the nail on the head for recognizing the Italianate character of it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_Latin
Older clergy remember bits and pieces of it but were among the first to jettison it after Vatican II; more younger priests are picking it up. How many know the classical Latin of Cicero, Horace and great Caesar himself? Not very many anymore.
Our parish does the Latin Rite the third Sunday of each month and most Saturday mornings. We have nice little red booklets that give the whole deal in Latin with facing page English. I love it, but at home stick to my 1611 KJV, and the 1559 BCP. Yes, I am a crazed old fossil from some bygone age that never was…maybe.
I doubt that very few priests could/can speak Latin at all. Most reputedly just memorized it and probably butchered the Latin Mass. I attended one at a wedding a couple of years ago and did not have a clue what the Priest was saying. He repeated some parts in English and in Spanish. Made the Wedding almost 2 hours long.
Went to a wedding last Saturday for a young lady the wife and I have known for 20 years (our daughters best friend). Nice Catholic wedding with several responsive readings (in AmEnglish) and a reading from the Book of Tobit. The book of Tobit was a first for as it is the Apocrypha which few protestants acknowledge or read.
Yeah, people still look at me funny when I mention Kee-ker-oh or Yul-ee-us Kye-sar. Mrs. Shreffler’s 8th-grade Latin class still has a lot to answer for…
I remember her hammering that stuff into us. “The Latin C is *always* spoken like our K; *never* like our S! It’s not ‘Seez-ur’, it’s ‘Kye-sar'”. Geez, IIRC, we started the first day of class with Caesar’s Commentaries on Gaul. And to this day, Julius Caesar ranks high on my list of historical people I’d love to meet.
And I suspect that Brian Bilbrey’s wife doesn’t appreciate it when I pronounce her name as Mark-ee-uh.
Bob, did you get to see the “Rome” series, put out a few years ago by HBO, I think? Guy playing him did a good job, I thought. I could easily play Vercingatorix but they’d have to pay me many denarii in good solid silver to kneel and kiss that eagle halberd. And of course, once the other young actresses and cougars got a good look, that would be a bonus.
Yeah, we watched Rome. As you know, they took a lot of liberties with real history. In particular, they did a real hatchet job on “Atia of the Julii”, who was apparently supposed to be Atia Balba Caesonia, but whose behavior was more like Clodia, if not Messalina. From what little is known of the real Atia, she was an exemplary Roman matron. I also thought it was a bit much to have Octavia engaging in incest with Octavian.
RBT wrote:
“At one point, she announced, “I gotta pee”. She dropped her jeans, squatted, and urinated.”
I’d always “go behind a tree” to do that, and expect any male or female I was with to do the same. What’s okay in the men’s room, or a mixed bathroom for that matter, is a bit different out in the open. Why? It just is.
There was a case in Western Australia when some greenies were having a protest against tree harvesting in a rural area, and the cops were there. One of the greenie women needed to let go, so she went off a little way from the rest and did her business. Problem was a cop followed her, and arrested her for indecent exposure. That was nuts, and the case was dismissed.
My sister is a bit strange about breast feeding. When her first child was a month or so old I was with her and it became obvious that she was going to start breast feeding him. I started to get up to leave the room, she said it was okay for me to stay, and started feeding him. That was the first time I’d seen her topless from the front. But she says she really hates seeing other women breast feeding their kids, even in private areas set aside for the purpose. I’m not bothered in the least by that, but I detest seeing people spitting in public. If I really have to do that I look around to see if anyone is nearby and looking my way, and then spit somewhere it’s unlikely that anyone will step.
RBT wrote:
“And I suspect that Brian Bilbrey’s wife doesn’t appreciate it when I pronounce her name as Mark-ee-uh.”
And I’m sure people who pronounce Cicero as Sis-ee-row get the grand old man spinning in his grave.
RBT wrote:
“And to this day, Julius Caesar ranks high on my list of historical people I’d love to meet.”
You know, of course, that Caesar is the incarnation of evil? Among the many things he did was to sacrifice 1000 puppies, because a cat priestess told him in a dream to do so.
Cicer0 and Cincinnatus are the real good guys of ancient Rome.
Well, I learned from Gladiator that Lucius Aurelius Commodus Antoninus doinked Annia Aurelia Galeria Lucilla, his sister, and if you can’t trust a Hollywood movie (from Ridley Scott, yet!) for history lessons, then the entire world is collapsing anyway.
OFD wrote:
“I love it, but at home stick to my 1611 KJV, and the 1559 BCP. Yes, I am a crazed old fossil from some bygone age that never was…maybe.”
You kept all that heretical Anglo stuff and the Micks haven’t burnt you at the stake yet? They must be slipping… 🙂
Yeah, I love the KJV too. I also have the NIV and several other modern versions but don’t enjoy reading them as much.
I prefer the NIV myself. Too many thee and thous and betweenst in the KJV.
The thing I like about the KJV is that when they translated it from Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew into English they italicised the supplied words (that are put there to make it flow properly), so you know what is in the original and what isn’t. The NIV doesn’t do that, it’s all on normal type. Plus the NIV just grates on me.
In 1993 I did a year of NT Greek with an elderly Anglican clergyperson. I was his only student so we met at his home for classes, along with his BC and another dog. I went overseas for seven weeks mid year and when I got back he was in hospital with cancer. Died in November that year. He said I’d need to do another year to be able to read the NT fluently – we concentrated on John’s Gospel. I was his last student.
I grew up with the KJV and BCP and just cannot get into the modern translations that the Church uses in its missals; I’m stuck with them at the church but not at home, and no micks or dagos or spics have interfered thus fah. And thankfully, our parish has a known medieval music scholar as its organist and “music director,” so we get the traditional English, French and German hymns, most before 1800.
I am given to understand that if someone now wants to learn New Testament Greek or Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic in a “Christian” context, the sources and texts and instruction are likely to come from the fundamentalist American Protestants. I was interested at one time but not THAT interested, and there are ways to learn it on one’s own, too. I’ll stick with improving my classical and medieval Latin, Old English and Old Norse. Maybe Acadian French. Keeps the few remaining brain cells active….
My Greek/English NT is a copy of a book first published 100 years ago. There’s a lot of non-fundie stuff out there.
Exactly; the non-fundie stuff is over a hundred years old. And still good, too.
NIV is the fundie Bible of choice around here. I prefer the new Oxford translation myself. However, I do not spend much time on that scribe-authored fiction. Determining what it really said is of little personal consequence when it comes to deciphering make-believe. Kind of like all those high school hours forced by our teachers trying to decode what Melville REALLY meant in Moby-Richard.
Ooh, that brings up some of the few happy memories of high school. Around tenth grade I got fed up with the bullshit of interpretation and “deep reading” and started crafting well reasoned, textually supported utter bullshit. Drove the teachers (and by “teachers” I mean “barely qualified babysitters”) up a wall, especially when I refused to back down and produce an “acceptable” paper.
After I bagged high school and went to college instead, I took only two English courses. Did fairly well so far as teachers went: one was your typical sponge-headed dope but one was hard-headed and graded on the craftsmanship of the writing rather than on the conclusions that were drawn. However, the class with the hard-headed teacher was filled with sponge-headed students — eg, in discussing Harrison Bergeron most of them thought it was perfectly reasonable to hold the more capable down to the level of the less capable.
Much of the Bible is fah from fiction and more new discoveries are made almost daily by archaeologists and others to illustrate that. And Melville certainly knew his KJV, as did Whitman, Lincoln, Hawthorne and the Belle of Amherst, et. al. in those halcyon days of yesteryear. I did a graduate paper on the “try works” chapter of “Moby Dick,” the center of the book. Melville also knew his Milton, a child prodigy and polymath and master of thirteen languages, including Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic and classical Greek, etc. He dictated “Paradise Lost” to his daughters after he went blind and was employed by an earlier Koba the Dread, Lord Protector Cromwell. Melville told his pal Hawthorne that he’d written “a wicked, wicked book.”
I respect and salute the late Kurt Vonnegut, both for his terrifying military service during the Allied firebombing of Dresden, and his defense of free speech. But much of his writing is outgrown my many of us past high school, and there is nothing wrong with that.
“by” not “my.” May Vonnegut, Hawthorne, the Belle of Amherst and all the other tortured souls requiescat in pace.
SteveF wrote:
“Ooh, that brings up some of the few happy memories of high school. Around tenth grade I got fed up with the bullshit of interpretation and “deep reading” and started crafting well reasoned, textually supported utter bullshit. Drove the teachers (and by “teachers” I mean “barely qualified babysitters”) up a wall, especially when I refused to back down and produce an “acceptable” paper.”
English was compulsory for everyone in Year 11 in my high school. I didn’t exactly hate it – some of the books we studied, such as Darkness at Noon and Orwell’s 1984 were really good. I was fortunate to do English before PC really set in, but I still found it boring. I fell asleep in my last English class, much to my teacher’s dismay. It was the only subject I failed in Year 11 or 12. Mercifully, it wasn’t compulsory in Year 12.
As to deconstructionism, I was greatly amused by the Sokal hoax (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair) and another hoax by a mathematician than any 1st year maths student would have spotted as a hoax (Can’t find the link at the moment.)
There is nothing in archaeology that has confirmed there is a god, much less an itinerant philosopher named Jesus. As Phyllis Diller articulately said, ‘No god created us; we created a god—in our image.’ Recording events 200 years after the fact, and revising them another hundred years later to fit the contemporary challenges of selling various competing religions is an insane way to document history, and isn’t it just grand that so many in society are willing to accept that kind of verification as true—damn requiring actual proof. What archaeology IS almost daily verifying, is the truth of evolution.
I realize everyone wants desperately—no, make that incredibly and unbelievably super-desperately—to accept as true the belief that life does not end completely with death. But clinging instead to fiction which cannot in any way be demonstrated or proved, except for the writings of ancient fiction authors is insanity, IMO. And killing for that supposition—well, it would be a sin if sin existed; but that is in the eye of the beholder, as life on Earth proves daily.
People rightly reject the religious charlatans of today, but are more than willing to believe the charlatans who supposedly lived thousands of years ago—whose words were not even contemporaneously recorded. At least we have video that is documenting things today.
200 years after? Chuck, just what sort of mushrooms are you eating?
The NT was complete before 100 AD.
Which NIV version ? The 2011 version of the NIV Bible is supposedly highly revised with up to date American English. My church prefers the New American Standard version.
Chuck is correct about the age of the manuscripts of the New Testament. All we have are copies of copies of copies of the books of the New Testament. Here is a nice looking paper that I have not verified that talks about the ages of the various pieces of the books:
http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/scriptorium/papyrus/texts/manuscripts.html
There is a piece of the book of John that they think may be from AD 125. Who really knows?
The books of the New Testament were first agreed to at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 sponsored by the Roman Emperor Constantine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea
Lynn, Chuck was saying that the words were recorded 200 years later, which is incorrect. They were recorded as early as 45 AD (I Thessalonians, IIRC), and perhaps as late as 90 AD in the case of the Apocalypse of St John. We have many manuscripts from 200-300 AD and, as the Duke article says, a “science called textual criticism deals systematically with these mistakes to eliminate as many of them as possible. The most important tools for textual critics are the manuscripts themselves.”
As you would know, there were many books that pretended to be by eyewitness, and various church councils were faced with weeding them out. That doesn’t mean that the genuine, eyewitness accounts were fakes too. I’m not even sure myself whether the Apocrypha should be included in the canon. The Micks say yes, most others say no.
I’m happy to look at a new version of the NIV, but I prefer the NASB and ASV (after the KJV, of course.)
The Presbyterian church I attended until recently used the RSV, reading it seemed to me to be like drinking flat soft drink, compared with the KJV. I used to read Good News for Modern Man, when it was just a NT/Psalms paperback back in the early Seventies, then went on to the Living Bible, but gave that up when I saw how fast and loose the translators had played with the original manuscript.
All this reminiscing has got me thinking that I need to brush up on my NT Greek, so I can read the original. Tried Hebrew in 1989, but didn’t put in enough effort so I didn’t learn much.
Gotcha. Yes, everything in the New Testament was written before AD 100. Mostly before AD 50. And everything was copied, copied, copied and passed around. It is my impression (weak) even that some of Paul’s books were written while he was under house arrest in Rome and had to be smuggled out.
It is my preacher’s thought that the Book of Revelation was written over 10 years before sacking of Jerusalem in AD 70? and that most of it foretold those horrific times coming for both the Jews and Christians living in Jerusalem. I do not have a clue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jerusalem_%2870%29
Well, I think a lot of what is said in Revelation, Daniel, and elsewhere can’t be made to fit with what your minister is saying. My interpretation is similar to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism_%28Christianity%29
(I’m pre-milennial and moderate dispensational.)
“I realize everyone wants desperately—no, make that incredibly and unbelievably super-desperately—to accept as true the belief that life does not end completely with death.”
Fear of death is a part of it, but I think it’s the smaller part.
The more important part is a need for a purpose, a feeling of importance, some reason to exist. If our actions have the same importance as the wriggling of a flatworm, well, that’s a bid depressing. People need to feel important, to feel that their existence has some purpose. Religion provides a ready-made answer. I mean, it doesn’t get much better than having the creator of the universe take a personal interest in you.
People are willing to overlook a lot of logical inconsistency in return for the satisfaction of feeling of importance and purpose.
brad nailed it. Most people just can’t deal with their own insignificance. This leads not only to religions but to irrational movements of all kinds. It also results in institutional paranoia for many, expressing itself as a persecution complex.
Yep. That’s also the reason why so many people flat-out refuse to believe that evolution is true. They simply can’t deal with the fact that H. sapiens sapiens is just one species among many, or that we along with the apes descended from a pretty recent common ancestor. Nor that the concept of free will, so essential to their religious beliefs, is illusory because everything we are is programmed in our DNA.
Speaking of which, I enjoyed reading the comment that included Grace Slick’s take on why men go for younger women. Grace is apparently one of the very few women who actually understands men and why we do what we do.
If everything is programmed in our DNA then how come identical twins exhibit such differences? For example, there was an article in Scientific American discussing female identical twins, one of whom was straight, the other gay. If they’re twins shouldn’t they both be gay or both straight if it’s all down to DNA? Environment plays a role too.
Well, of course environment plays a role, but the more we learn the more we realize that the role of nurture is much smaller than the role of nature.
As to twins, it’s not uncommon to have mirror-image aspects, such as one being left-handed and the other right. So I’m not surprised to see identical twins with one gay and one straight. Not to mention the fact that most women tend strongly toward bisexuality. I remember having this discussion in college with a girl. I maintained that on a ten-scale with 1 being completely heterosexual and 10 being completely homosexual, the vast majority of men were either 1 or 10, while women’s distribution looked more like a bell curve, with most clustered at 5 or 6 and very, very few pure 1’s or 10’s. So, I suspect one of your twins is a 5 and the other a 6.
Actually, I’m inclined to say “all women”. If it weren’t for the pressures of society and religion, I suspect all women would happily swing either way. I mean, think about their role in sex versus the male role.
But… but… but men and women are exactly the same! And Head Start can lift all children to the top 10 percent! And… and… Burn, you heretic!
No, you don’t get it. There are a few places where women and men are different, and in those cases, women are better.
I don’t know that I’d use the word “better” to describe women or men. Both have strengths and weaknesses, most or all of which are evolutionary. For example, men were the hunters and so developed the ability to focus intensely on the task at hand. Women, conversely, were the gatherers, and so developed the ability to take in and process a huge amount of information about their surroundings. So, to this day, men can focus on a task better than women can, and women’s situational awareness and ability to deal with complexity and sensory overload greatly exceeds that of men.
In other words, plenty of men were probably killed while focusing on a mammoth because they didn’t notice the sabre-tooth tiger stalking them. Women would have noticed the tiger, but probably wouldn’t have brought home the mammoth.
So, men tend to be linear thinkers, and linear thinking is extraordinarily powerful for some tasks. Women, conversely, tend to be matrix thinkers, which again is extraordinarily powerful for some tasks. But they’re not the same tasks.
Ahem. RBT, you are only digging yourself deeper into the non-PC hole. DaveB quite correctly corrected my incorrect thinking that women are not better than men in all ways that matter. Get with the program, man!
I was being more PC than SteveF. Yes, women and men are different. Denying this basic truth is pointless. One is certainly not better than the other. Viva la difference!
My mom spent considerable time researching Bible origins to keep the Jesuits that ran the school where she was the librarian up-to-date. She continued the research for herself, up to her end, which was 6 years ago. Now it is possible that things have ensued since then, but based on a quick survey of the field, it does not look like it to me.
Speculation about early documents abounds, and extrapolations have been made by church-biased entities claiming that things like writing style and vocabulary used can date original documents with authenticity. I do not find that any physical document exists that has been scientifically dated, which positively establishes authorship before 100AD. But even if there were, it is irrelevant for several reasons.
One is that life expectancy of males in the Roman Empire of the time was between 25 and 29 years of age. So even a document written as early as 50AD would be on the cusp of the third generation after Jesus’ birth. The first recorded mention of New Testament writings was in 150AD. If they existed before that time, why no earlier mention?
Moreover, it is readily admitted that the gospels, comprising the most important writings of the New Testament, were not written by the people they are supposed to be about; they were written by third parties who allegedly described the experiences of those people—thus the heading “The Gospel according to St. [X]”, not “by” or “of” St. X. It is highly unlikely that any of the disciples—if there ever really were any—lived to 50AD. So it is a stretch to say that an author of a text, even as early as 50AD, actually knew the person written about, if those disciples were contemporaries of Jesus.
The fact is that there WERE people writing accounts of the times when Jesus supposedly lived; quite a few of them actually, recording volumes on the very events of that age. Not one of them mentions a Jesus or a Christ, nor any of the supposed miracles or conflicts that allegedly occurred during Jesus’ so-called ministry. So, to me, it really makes little difference if texts are found and dated earlier than about 150AD, they are not first-hand contemporaneous accounts of the life of a guy named Jesus.
But, as we all know, religious courts rely over and over on hearsay as proof to convict, whereas enlightened civil courts reject it utterly.
Chuck,
Sure life expectancy was low, but there were many exceptions. Some people, like St John the Divine, lived to a ripe old age.
Since Jesus’ earthly ministry didn’t begin until about AD 27 there isn’t much of a time lag between his crucifixion and the time stuff began to be written down in around AD 45. It’s been hypothesised that various documents were written at the time and used by the NT authors as source materials to jog their memory. And a late 1st Century date is plausible for Revelation because John lived in exile to a ripe old age and didn’t suffer the same fate as many of the other apostles.
You could look at the following. (FF Bruce was a famous and meticulous Christian author, the others are less well known.)
F. F. Bruce, “The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?”
Richard Bauckham, “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony”
Craig Blomberg, “The Historical Reliability of the Gospels”
You might also be interested in Frank Morrison’s “Who Moved the Stone?” From the Amazon review:
“The strangeness of the Resurrection story had captured his attention, and, influenced by skeptic thinkers at the turn of the century, he set out to prove that the story of Christ’s Resurrection was only a myth. His probings, however, led him to discover the validity of the biblical record in a moving, personal way.”
You are quoting pro-Christian sources who obviously want to cover tracks. And I simply will not accept this guessing of dates based on language usage in the texts as establishing that some NT writing must have existed earlier than 100AD. No scientifically dated document; no proof. Certainly there is nothing anywhere so close as 45AD except Christian-biased scholars’ declarations that it must be so.
You are a guy who usually demands proof for everything, but you sure let Christianity slide. Even some serious Christian believing scholars have concluded that Mark was likely the first gospel written, and that Matthew and Luke were just more elaborately written, almost verbatim copies, of Mark. Kind of like one fiction author saying, “I can do it better than that,” and setting out a book with better grammar and wording. And John actually contradicts events claimed in the other three. Great memories these guys have; they should write a book. Oh yeah, it’s not memory; it’s fiction by entirely unknown authors.
Christianity is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on humanity, with huge institutions and governments having derived their authority, power, and despotism from this biggest of all fictions. Then there is that great Christian reformer Martin Luther’s quote about ‘for the sake of the Christian church, telling a good strong lie.’ And what a whopper that Jesus story is.
Chuck, you quote biased sources for the points you want to make, so why criticize me for doing the same? Sure, the guys I quote are believers, does that make anything they write false by definition? I’ll accept a lot of what Dawkins, Coyne and their henchmen write about science, and not reject their ideas just because they’re atheists. I don’t even reject everything they write about politics and philosophy. After all, Daniel Dennett is a Compatibililist.
Yes, a number of the synoptic gospels probably had much of their origin in a single document written at the time or soon after. So? Each of the synoptic gospels has a lot of unique material and each reflects a different view of Jesus’ role, such as Christ the servant, the Christ the king, and so on. I really don’t see how your claims help your case. Since the synoptics are describing the same person and his ministry it’s obvious that there should be some overlap.
A few weeks ago you were quoting from the Gospel According to the Libertarian Party. Since that text isn’t as well known of course I was skeptical, while you showed evidence of being a devout and uncritical believer. Why is it wrong when the situation is reversed, especially since the Christian gospels are far better attested and believed than the writings of a tiny US political party?
Hi Chuck, I am fairly sure that I cannot scientifically prove that Jesus existed, much less was the living son of God on this Earth. Jesus was born to what we would call nowadays trailer trash. His parents were not married, only betrothed when his 14 ??? year old mother became pregnant. His 14 ? 15 ? year father was probably thrown out of his father’s house for his fiance getting pregnant. Good Jewish boys back then lived with their wives and children with their parents until they turned 30. Their family may have helped out some but probably little. My point is that no one really cared about these people since after all, they got themselves pregnant before they were officially married.
Jesus grew up with several brothers and sisters. Nothing special and nothing to write about. He became a carpenter like his father. In fact, they were probably blacksmiths. We think that his father died early since he is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible when Jesus started his preaching. Again nothing special and nothing to write about.
Jesus started his preaching when he was 30 and was publicly executed 3 years later for sedition. It is kind of funny that he was executed because he was actually a big disappointment to the Jews as their Messiah. There were many men claiming to be the Jewish Messiah in the 400+ years surrounding Jesus’s time, all of them warriors advocating active rebellion from the Romans. Jesus was the only Messiah claimant that I know of that respected Caesar. Jesus’s message was not about a kingdom here on Earth but the kingdom of Heaven. The message was so tough for the Jews to take that even his disciples did not get it until after his death. His disciples actually thought that he was going to be like the other Messiahs and start a kingdom on this Earth.
Again, not really worth noting by anyone since he was just another Messiah dude. In fact, worse than the rest because he said pay your taxes to Caesar and live with Caesar’s laws. And something really gross, sick people were following him all around the place since he could reputedly heal them. Good Jewish people ignored sick people since, they had transgressed against God and were being punished for it. In fact, in order to hear Jesus talk, you might have to stand next to a leper. Gross!
And Jesus talked and ate with Gentiles (loosely translated as “not Jews”). Good Jewish people did not associate with Gentiles. In fact, God in the Old Testament instructed the Jews to kill the Gentiles for their land. Again, not very noteworthy when one could be writing about the High Priest, a truly important person.
In fact, 40 to 60 years after Jesus’s death, the Romans showed up at Jerusalem and destroyed the city. They killed most of the inhabitants (over a million) and scattered the rest to the four winds. The Romans tore down the boulders that the Jewish Temple and inner city were made of and heated them in fires in order to get the gold out. The Temple was filled with gold inside it and it melted during the final burning of Jerusalem. Now this was noteworthy and chronicled in detail by Josephus, a Jewish and Roman general and historian. Josephus actually did mention Jesus but only a couple of paragraphs at most.
I think that at some point a believer has to take a leap of faith that Jesus is who he said he was. It is not a tough leap of faith, actually quite small. I believe that Christianity is a journey through life and that one must take many leaps of faith. For me, the biggest leap of faith is God’s grace. I was raised to believe that I had to earn my way to Heaven and God’s grace is fairly recent knowledge and belief for me. I doubt all the time and must continually renew my faith by leaning on my family and my church.
I am not criticizing anybody here for their beliefs; some of my best friends are Christian. And so was I once. But I do try to make sure that what I believe is correct, so I am correctly motivated in my actions.
With zero contemporaneous mention of anyone resembling Jesus, with zero records in the Roman Empire as to the existence of Jesus, with zero recorded mention by Pontius Pilate to Rome in the many records he sent there, all completely lacking any reference to a Jesus or the execution of anyone like Jesus (all executions were supposed to be recorded for Rome; others executed by Pilate were reported),—it is beyond a leap of faith to accept the completely unreproducible and unprovable claims of Christianity. Even if the whole world population accepts it as true—except for me,—that does not make it true, nor substitute for proof that it is true. No matter how many people once believed the world was flat, the numbers believing that did not make it so.
And with Christians overwhelmingly accepting that the NT was not written by the people who were actually describing Jesus, then that means they were describing a person who was describing yet a third person. Wow, I sure cannot accept any story coming from that as reliably authentic. But those fabrications were understandably created, because so many charlatans want power, and having religious followers is one way to influence others and execute power over them. As the movement grows, it claims that unbelievers refusing to join the cause should be put to death for one or another righteous reason—like witches, harlots, fornicators, homosexuals, and scientists. If Ryan and Romney get elected, we likely will be executing people who get or favor abortions—all in the name of Christian dictates.
As to Libertarian Gospel, I have never referred to anything like a “Libertarian Gospel”—and I have even pointed out there is no such thing. IIRC, Greg questioned my contention that Libertarians do not consider that anything should be adjudicated but property issues; promises to perform are not about property, and should not be considered enforceable contracts. I pointed to places where one could read current published writings about Libertarian philosophy to confirm that, but I state again that Libertarians vary in what they consider important, and while that point is considered one of the cornerstones of a Libertarian platform, there is no “Gospel” as several of you seem to want there to be—just as there is no Republican or Democrat “Gospel”, different candidates believe and advocate different things.
Finally, this analogy that my referring to Libertarian sources is the same as insisting that I accept Christian-biased sources is not at all the same. Your question involved a lack of knowledge of Libertarian philosophy. Is that corrected by consulting other than Libertarians who are responsible for creating their own creed? My issue involved a point-blank rejection of Jesus as ever having existed, not a query about what Christian doctrine is. Of course I reject anything that a Christian apologist or polemic would say on the subject. My search is for independent non-Christian-biased scientific verification that an actual person existed who did the things claimed in the NT for a guy named Jesus. That evidence simply does not exist. And putting forward all kinds of ‘maybe’ excuses why nobody noticed him, or trying to date hearsay writings of an unknown author who is explaining another person’s description of yet a third party, as having been written close to the date Jesus existed, would be dismissed by any civil or criminal court examining and testing under the rules of evidence.
Moreover, that lack of contemporaneous evidence of Jesus is all the more weird, in view of the NT’s own claim: (Mark 1:28) “And immediately his fame spread abroad throughout all the region round about Galilee.” Clearly it didn’t; apparently, the author of Mark’s remarks just made that up.
The biggest gotcha of all, however, is the Christian explanation that we will not really know the truth until we die. Boy those ancient guys messing with fiction sure were good. Even the Matrix is not better.
Chuck, the execution of Jesus was completely illegal under Jewish and Roman law. There were so many illegalities in his “trial” before the Sanhedrin, and Pilate himself said “I find no fault in this man”. You think he’s going to send a report to Rome saying “Oh, by the way, I just sentenced a man to death although he’d done nothing illegal.” Yeah, right.
As to the Libertarian Gospel, I was obviously, blindingly obviously, pulling your leg. You quote libertarians as though the rest of us would just accept what they say. I lean libertarian, but I reserve the right to ask for a bit of proof sometimes. It’s not enough for you to say that some libertarian author has said A, B, C and that settles it.
“If Ryan and Romney get elected, we likely will be executing people who get or favor abortions—all in the name of Christian dictates.”
I was reading along and seeing your points fairly well, not that I hadn’t seen them before, here and elsewhere, but this is over the top. I can’t stand those buggers, either, but I seriously doubt they will oversee the executions of abortionists and their enablers and supporters. More likely they’ll step up the executions, i.e., judicial murders, of pot growers and sellers or something. You know, the War on Some Drugs. Which both candidates support and push.
The majority of Americans evidently have no problem with the legally sanctioned murder of 54 million of their fellow citizens and human beings since Roe v. Wade, just as the majority of Germans had no problem with the Final Solution or the majority of Americans back in the day had no problem with slavery.
My former Anglican/Episcopal rector/pastor studied with the late Bishop Robinson, who authored a study of the dating of the New Testament:
http://www.preteristarchive.com/Books/1976_robinson_redating-testament.html
Then you did not watch the Vice-Presidential debates. Biden asked Ryan point-blank if he would right then and there declare and promise that he (Ryan) and Romney would not initiate legislation making abortion a killing, criminal offense. Ryan said nothing. Biden pressed him twice more, but Ryan still said nothing in response. “See?” Biden said, turning to the audience.
I, myself, do not favor abortion, nor does Biden. But I do not perceive that I have the right to tell a woman—or anybody else—what they can and cannot do to, or with, their body. And certainly no legislation should originate from religious precepts of any group to be forced on all others. It is clear from studies done repeatedly over the decades, dating back to when I first started working in newsrooms, that the majority of Americans do not want to outlaw abortion, but want to make them hard to get, while not encouraging ‘coat hangar’ abortions and unsafe back-alley clinics.
Ohio has a clause in their state constitution which allows a person the freedom to do what they want, even if it is dangerous and could threaten their safety or well-being. That clause is how they got rid of the law they once had mandating motorcycle helmets. That is the approach I support.
The question is, if Romney/Ryan promise to execute abortionists, or Obama/Biden promise a chicken in every pot and an orgasm every time, will they be able to deliver?
If anyone thinks the Republicans would be able to execute those people then I have a bridge I’d like to sell them. The Supremes would stop them, lower courts would stop them, mass demonstrations would stop them. The quality of political discourse in the US had gone way way way down since I started following it closely 40 years ago.
As to abortion, I don’t like it. I also don’t like apple pie and critics of Barry Manilow. But I’m, in a sense, pro choice in that I wouldn’t stand outside a clinic and harass people going in, or try to turn back the clock. I’m not greatly concerned about abortion at three months, or using embryonic stem sells. I a concerned at abortions at eight months, although I’m not convinced an eight month old fetus is human, I’m also not convinced it isn’t. If we get used to abortions at that late stage then we’re on a very slippery slope.
Forty years ago I ad a pen pal in California, a teenage female pro choice liberal Democrat who said she hated Republicans because they were anti choice and pro war. I mentioned a case I’d heard of where a woman had had an abortion so she could wear a nice frock to her sister’s wedding. My pro choice pen pal was outraged and said that that woman should be “sewn shut”. I don’t think having an abortion for such a reason, or because the fetus is the “wrong” sex is admirable, but if it’s done early enough I wouldn’t get worked up about it.
BTW, I think the loony right Republicans who’ve been saying crazy stuff about rape and abortion should be permanently unelectable. Along with he crazy loony left Democrats.
Chuck wrote:
“Ohio has a clause in their state constitution which allows a person the freedom to do what they want, even if it is dangerous and could threaten their safety or well-being. That clause is how they got rid of the law they once had mandating motorcycle helmets. That is the approach I support.”
I agree with that, so long as such a person, having had an accident, doesn’t try to sue the government or someone else on the basis that they shouldn’t have been allowed to ride without a helmet.
I agree 100% with you on both the abortion rules and helmets. Actually, I have a helmet here, but no motorcycle.
I know of a preemie born at 6 months who is a healthy normal teenager, so I might have a problem with late term abortions. If a woman cannot decide for 6 or 8 months whether they want an abortion, I think that is a problem.
I wouldn’t think of riding a motor bike without a helmet, nor a bicycle without a bike helmet. But people should be free to choose.
None of us can saw how we’d think or act if we were the opposite sex to what we were born. As a woman friend of mine said “men and women think differently”. But I wouldn’t hesitate to have an abortion at three months if tests showed that the fetus had a serious abnormality. OTOH, I wouldn’t consider having one at any stage if the fetus was the “wrong” sex – i.e. female when I already had three girls, or so that I could wear a nice frock to a wedding.
I’ve read a number of accounts of women who haven’t known they were pregnant until they went into labour at nine months. Incredible.
I don’t think I am or anyone else is entitled to have an opinion. If a woman is pregnant–and, by definition, if she’s pregnant, she’s a woman–it’s entirely up to her what to do about it, if anything. Not her parents, not her husband or boyfriend, not her doctor, and most certainly not politicians or random strangers.
Yeah, any woman who’d have an abortion solely to be able to fit into a bridesmaid dress is a contemptible excuse for a human being, but so what? It’s still her decision. And, with that as a mother, I suspect that fetus was better off never having been born.
I’m willing to give the mother 100% authority over the fetus only if she has 100% responsibility for the fetus and child. If the father has no say in the matter, then he’s off the hook. No child support. And no tax dollars, either.
This would likely be a good thing for out of wedlock childbirth rates and stability of family and so on.
Well, my position has always been that, unless he agrees to support the child if the mother agrees to have it, that the father’s maximum responsibility should be half the cost of an abortion.
“… I do not perceive that I have the right to tell a woman—or anybody else—what they can and cannot do to, or with, their body.”
A slippery slope right there. And once she’s pregnant, there is another living body inside her.
“If we get used to abortions at that late stage then we’re on a very slippery slope.”
We’ve been on a very slippery slope for decades now, in regard to this, and also euthanasia.
But I’m not gonna convince anyone here, clearly, and recognize I’m in a large minority in this sick culture.
Chuck wrote:
“Slate took up the topic and has a test with quotes. The object is to determine whether an Islamic or Christian fundamentalist made the statement. I got 7 out of 9. There IS a slight difference in word usage between the two insanities.”
7/9. I was convinced I’d get 9/9. “Pride comes before a fall”.
RBT wrote:
“Yeah, any woman who’d have an abortion solely to be able to fit into a bridesmaid dress is a contemptible excuse for a human being…”
Why? If, as you say, a fetus before birth is nothing, then no one should think badly of her.
Comming from a slightly different perspective, I don’t think this woman is admirable, but why would you have an attitude beyond complete indifference?
If I was a woman I’d want to minimise the number of abortions I’d have because I’d want to minimise the number of pregnancies. Being pregnant is somewhat dangerous, having abortions can be a bit dangerous, so I’d want to minimise the number of pregnancies, which would mean n0t having unnecessary abortions.
I never said that a fetus is nothing. What I said was that it is not a person. And the value I place on a fetus is my own opinion. I simply don’t claim the right to enforce my opinion on her or any other woman. I freely confess that I do claim the right to enforce my opinion on others in some circumstances. For example, I wouldn’t hesitate to enforce my opinion fatally on some bastard who was raping a child. Or a grown woman, for that matter.
Colin is not a person, either, but I value him more than I value some people. Anyone who tried to harm him would have me to deal with, and I would not be happy.
I agree with former President Bill Clinton: “Abortions should be safe, legal and rare”.
I do think that any abortions past the mid point should not be allowed though except for the life of the mother. That gives a woman 4.5 months to decide about it.
I know several women who have had abortions. None are proud of the fact and in fact can get very upset about it 30-40 years later.
Women are different from men. Did I mention that?
What I find ironic is that the people who are most strongly opposed to abortion are also almost always strongly opposed to birth control (particularly for teens), Plan B, real sex education, and so on. Not to mention welfare programs to support all these children that they want to force women to bear. It’s hard to conclude anything other than that these people consider women to be breeding stock.
That recent comment about rape/abortion by that Republican moron really illustrates that they think they can have it both ways. According to him, his god must have wanted that child to be born. But, also according to him, his god didn’t want that woman to be raped. Huh? It has to be both or neither. Either his god is deciding these things, or he isn’t. Which?
It is called pre-destination and an amazing amount of Christians believe in it. I do not. We are born with free will.
Hi OFD, I visited that website about the timing of the writing of the New Testament books (actually they were letters to the faithful). I agree with your pastor. If the New Testament had been written after the sacking of Jerusalem, the letters would have been full of the sad tidings.
It is generally considered a fact that half of the Jews converted to Christianity within 10 years after Jesus’s death. Probably half of the 1.2 million people killed in the sack of Jerusalem were Christians defending their homes.
Which goes along with my Preacher’s theory that the Book of Revelation was written before the sack of Jerusalem in AD 70. I guess that this makes me post-millenialistic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmillennialism
Most of the fundie Protestants believe in some derivative or other of Calvinism and predestination and the Elect and the Damned. They are modern versions of my Pilgrim and Puritan Maffachufetts ancestors.
As a Catholic, of course, I believe also that we are born with free will and make of it what we will. This leads to some really hard questions, though, which people still have trouble with, depending on the circumstances.
Ah, the “once saved, always saved” crowd. I think not. God wants us to be striving toward the target all of our lives.
Yes, God is All Knowing and predestination and free will make my head spin. I have decided to pass and go with free will. My pay is not high enough for such questions.
“I have decided to pass and go with free will.”
Seems to me that’s about the only way one can go, philosophically. I mean, if every little thing is foreordained (be it by a higher power, or by absolute physical rules), how depressing is that? What is the point of playing the game?
The Calvinist’s and their reaction to predestination was really weird: action stick-up-their-ass-super-perfect as a way of proving that they were foreordained as god’s chosen.
We feel like we can make decisions, so let’s go with the assumption that we are making decisions. It’s a working assumption likely to lead to better results than the alternative.
“My pay is not high enough for such questions.”
Ditto. Every once in a while I look at them, but by a certain point my own head spins; last stuff I looked at involved theology married to quantum physics, etc., and I had to put it down finally. Hell, the medieval guys were easier to handle twenty years ago in grad school; Christian, Muslim and Jewish. Here’s one tidbit I recall:
Q: If God is all-knowing then He can know our futures so how does that affect our free will?
A: (one answer from one of them guys, I think it was one of the Arabs): He CAN know but chooses NOT to.
There is also some interesting stuff done with game theory, i.e.; if there are superior beings, how would we know?
But most days, after wrestling with Linux clusters and domestic issues it is just easier to open the 1559 BCP, pray, and drift off to sleep. (Order of Evening Prayer, which, when done in the old days in Ye Old Episcopal Church, was a beautiful service, sometimes done as Evensong, and a vestige from the Old Religion that didn’t get stamped out by mad-dog Calvinist iconclasts)
“iconoclasts”
You send me email. If I reply, then I exist.
OFD wrote:
“Q: If God is all-knowing then He can know our futures so how does that affect our free will?
A: (one answer from one of them guys, I think it was one of the Arabs): He CAN know but chooses NOT to. ”
Thinking about this stuff makes my head spin. One possible solution is molinism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molinism, named after the Sixteenth Century Jesuit Luis de Molina. Ironically, it’s also advocated by some modern Protestant theologians like William Lane Craig. See Dave, not all Jesuits are pure evil.
One of the problems with unconditional predestination is that it can’t avoid making God the author of sin, although, of course, the Calvinists deny that.
Lynn wrote:
“Ah, the “once saved, always saved” crowd. I think not. God wants us to be striving toward the target all of our lives.”
I happen to believe this. It’s the fifth point of the Calvinist system, “Perseverance of the Saints”, and although I’m not a Calvinist I think they’re right on this particular issue.
RBT wrote:
“What I find ironic is that the people who are most strongly opposed to abortion are also almost always strongly opposed to birth control (particularly for teens), Plan B, real sex education, and so on.”
Yeah, that’s weird. 20 years ago there was a wonderful television series on in Australia called “Brides of Christ”, mainly about the nuns and students at a fictitious Catholic girls high school in Sydney. One of the students is asked by her boyfriend to have sex in the back seat of his car, and says “I’ve got this”, showing her a condom so they can do the deed with lower risk of getting a STD or the girl becoming pregnant. The girl says “That’s a sin”, so they have unprotected sex in the back of his car, also a sin, and she becomes pregnant. Her outraged ultra strict Catholic father asks her “Who did this to you?” Rosemary answers with the truth “I don’t know.” (She’d had sex with several guys recently.)
Spoiler: The most likely father was the boy with the condom. A second or third year med school student at one of the local universities, he tells Rosemary “Trust me, I’m a doctor.” This guy was introduced to Rosemary by her parents, who didn’t approve of the guy she really liked.
Lynn wrote:
“Women are different from men. Did I mention that?”
Yeah, I said that a few days ago. I’d been told 20 years ago by a good woman friend, who’d also noticed it. Even RBT believes that men and women are different.
In my eyes any woman, no matter how ugly, looks better than any man, no matter how handsome.
Hi Miles, hopefully I did not offend you. Sounds like we are striving to the same goal with slightly different belief systems. Which is OK by me.
Not at all, I’m not easy to offend, and a lot of this stuff is peripheral in a way. I get more annoyed with people who believe in and practice so called “infant baptism” – an oxymoron if ever there was one – than predestinarians, a/post-millenarians, etc.
It is absolutely baffling how anybody—especially here—would take somebody’s second-hand word—actually, third-hand or worse in most cases—about existence of a super-power creator, who does not communicate directly with individuals of his creation, but speaks only through second- and third-hand parties who record things at least a generation after the guy is supposedly dead—yet this creator has rules that everyone must follow, else those who do not are sentenced to eternal fire and damnation after death, while those who do are blessed with eternal pleasure. Then further spend time speculating on what could or could not be true under this fabricated system. Hmm. All the while, there is nothing on this planet that proves any of those premises to be true. NOTHING.
The conversation here has revolved almost exclusively on justifying that a guy named Jesus existed, by desperately trying to date writings about his existence back as close as possible to his supposed life. And talk about a stretch—trying to use textual analysis of writings to date their authorship is not proof, and even if hard, scientifically dated means verified the early writings, the matter of whether that writing is fiction or fact is still open. And since nothing contemporaneous confirms this guy Jesus existed, we then hear the argument that if it is not proved that he did not exist, then he did exist because the Bible says so, therefore it must be true and nearly all the people of the Western world cannot be wrong. Pontius Pilate screwed up and didn’t report executing Jesus, because he would have gotten himself into trouble, so therefore Jesus existed and was executed. How hard is that to understand, Chuck?
Take a step back from cherished beliefs and apply a little logic here like you do to everything else in life. I will never be able to say, “I told you so,” when life here is ended, because life will permanently end for me the same as it does for the ants and bugs I accidentally run over in my car or step on.
If somebody came along today and said, ‘I have spoken with the creator, and he told me to tell you to be sure and do this…’ nobody would believe him (and those people do exist and nobody—relatively speaking—believes them). But wait: have some power-hungry lunatic write a book about a guy who never existed, pass it around, get people to actually WORSHIP this non-existent individual (and by the way, paint pictures of him as a blonde Anglo, when he clearly would not have been), bow down and revere the people who perpetuate this fantasy, believe without proof anything they tell you about this fabricated guy, and send lots and lots of money to them to extend even further the deception.
Wow.
I just wish I could have gotten in on the scam, but that bastard Hubbard “discovered” Scientology before I was even born. Bastard. Now, if I were to do the same kinda thing and scam a bunch of
dedicated believersgullible fools, it would be derivative. Oh, Muse of Originality, how I must suffer for my art!Er…
Scamming as an art form. I wonder if I can get an NEA grant for that.
Chuck wrote:
“Pontius Pilate screwed up and didn’t report executing Jesus, because he would have gotten himself into trouble, so therefore Jesus existed and was executed.”
The lack of a report by Pilate saying that he executed a man he believed to be innocent proves nothing. It may have existed and been lost, or have never existed. Unfortunately many manuscripts from that time, including secular ones, have been lost.
As has been said, Josephus wrote (briefly, unfortunately) of Christ, and some of the NT books were written as early as 45 AD, only 15 years after the crucifixion.
I guess what any of us believe, about anything, is up to us. I’d also like to remind you about the skeptic who set out to disprove the resurrection of Christ, but ended up writing Who Moved the Stone?
Don’t worry—there is no chance I will ever be writing any book pushing a totally fictitious theory of existence. Even if there were money in it.
On second thought—maybe there is a religion in “Plan 9 from Outer Space”. Like Mark, Ed Wood did not really develop that well, did he? Maybe I can do better. Pass it around after I’m gone, okay?
I have never understood infant baptism. The NT says very clearly that we are all individually responsible for ourselves yet certain people think that babies are collectively responsible for the human race sins.
I have another couple of skeptics turned believers books for you if interested:
_Mere Christianity_ by C. S. Lewis
http://www.amazon.com/Mere-Christianity-C-S-Lewis/dp/0060652926/
A series of essays written by C. S. Lewis in 1941 that he read on BBC radio during the bombings. I have yet to read this but the wife has.
_The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus_ by Lee Strobel
http://www.amazon.com/Case-Christ-Journalists-Personal-Investigation/dp/0310209307/
A journalist tries to track down a scientific basis for Jesus Christ. The wife has read this and has strongly urged me to read it.
Wow, counting Josephus as “evidence” is pretty thin. In fact, it’s no evidence at all. Disregarding the fact that Josephus was writing 60 years after the so-called event, the only significant reference, in the so-called “Testimonium Flavianum”, was almost certainly written by and inserted about 300 years after the so-called event by a Christian scribe.
Actually, you will probably find it hard to believe, but I have read most all of CS Lewis’ writings. He was my mom’s favorite author, and she passed everything she owned by him to me to read, way back when I was in my early 20’s.
I may be crazy, but I am rational and can no longer believe the irrational—especially when it cannot be proved and relies only on some third party’s word about somebody else they did not even know. I’m too old to accept the unprovable suggestion that if I do things not according to somebody else’s instructions, I will be sorry and am going to suffer for eternity after I die. Right. And step on a crack, break your mother’s back. As for getting 7 virgins (wrong religion, I know), I don’t want virgins; I want somebody with some practice.
Proof, by the way, is not just verifying that somebody wrote about this guy Jesus contemporaneously, but that they verified he was not an Oral Roberts, who had a bevy of actors pretending to be ill or lame, and were suddenly healed by his staged incantations. That kind of proof is never going to be forthcoming.
I’ve heard that before from that fount of wisdom, Walter:
“Jeff Dunham: [Walter is complaining about suicide bombers] You know, Walter, those guys actually believe that if they martyred themselves like that, there’ll be 72 virgins waiting for ’em in paradise”
“Walter: Well, April Fool, dumb-ass! If there are virgins waiting for you, there’ll be 72 guys just like you! “Oh, no, this is not what Osama said it would be!” Seventy-two virgins? Why not 72 slutty broads who know what the hell they’re doing? “
Hi Chuck, Cool ! You are ahead of me as I would like to read C. S. Lewis’s books: _Mere Christianity_, _The Screwtape Letters_ and maybe even _The Great Divorce_. I have not made it a priority as I constantly have a couple of hundred books in my SBR (strategic book reserve). At the moment over 300 as I am reading 2 or so a week and adding 3. I really, really like SF. Good SF is even better.
Like I said, I believe in free will. ‘Nuff said.
I, too, have much more in the queue than I can read. Possibly if I were to stop working and abandon my family. Sometimes it’s tempting…
Anyway, the only way I can make any progress on the stuff I feel I oughta read is to limit myself to one SciFi novel for every classic and two nonfiction books I read. Currently I’m in the middle of Sophocles’s The Trachiniae, a book on plotting novels*, and a biography and critique of Ayn Rand and her works. Once I’ve gotten through those, I think John Ringo’s The Last Centurion will percolate to the top of the entertainment queue.
* I write well-received short stories, but it looks like novels would be more profitable per unit of effort. It takes a different skill set, or at least different application of skills.
If memory serves, it was Lewis who said we ought to read two or three old books for each new one. I’ve probably been doing that, one way or another, for a long time, but am still way behind on it all, no way in hell to ever catch up, short of, as someone suggested, quitting work and abandoning the family. Which would be frowned upon somewhat.
Right now I’m reading the late Paul Fussell’s edited book of “Modern War,” and working my way, per usual, through the Church seasons of the KJV and BCP late at night. I still have to unpack a couple of dozen boxes of books here in my “office/library,” and before I can do that I have to assemble bookshelves and organize stuff a lot better here.
44 here now, and overcast, with raw drizzle, scheduled to continue through the rest of the week, the weather liars claim. And meanwhile I catch dribs and drabs of which imbecile clown prince is ahead in this latest election charade about which I couldn’t possibly care less.
Lynn wrote:
“Like I said, I believe in free will. ‘Nuff said.”
A weekend or two ago two Horsemen (Dawkins and Dennett) and a Pony Boy (Jerry Coyne) drove to a conference in western Mass about some bunch of scientific/philosophical issues. Dennet (a compatibilist) was to debate Coyne (a non-compatibilist) on that issue. I haven’t ploughed through the debate material yet, but I will. I also have one or two of Dennet’s books advocating some sort of free will on order, should be interesting.
I’d think it was pretty sad if it turns out we’re all just robots.
Chuck the uberskeptic wrote:
“Proof, by the way, is not just verifying that somebody wrote about this guy Jesus contemporaneously…”
Chuck, I don’t think that anything at all would satisfy you.
We ain’t all just robots or blobs of matter floating around on this blue orb all by its lonesome in the Milky Way, and it is quite possible that Chuck and others here may one day be Surprised By Joy.
Or maybe get another, less pleasant surprise… 🙁
Fortunately, there is no chance of either of those outrageously foundationless dreams ever coming true. Funny that you call me the skeptic. I’m a realist. You’re the skeptics, believing something that lacks proof utterly, is as supernatural as vampires, Buffy, and witchcraft, and has no reproducible actions that could possibly verify its truth. Ah, but do this and that until you die, and avoid doing those other things, and believe this and bow down and worship that, drink this wine because it is magically the blood of Christ (right!),—not because there is any proof that it will do anything at all, but because—somebody said it might be true, and there are all these people who believe that, too.
Heck, the Islamics have more authority for believing what they do, because at least their revered leader actually did exist.
I am quite happy to shuffle off all that baggage of imaginary responsibilities. And it is not a lonely thing at all, because there are many around me, who are realists about life, the same as me. You be the skeptics, and I’ll be the realist, because I am old enough now that I have given up believing that unsupportable fiction is true.
Eh? Skeptics are by definition people who require proof for extraordinary assertions.
And are you saying that Buffy did not exist? I’ll have to disagree with you there. I know people whose word I trust who say they have met her in person. They recognized her from the TV series, and she was even holding Mr. Pointy at the time. I’d say there’s much, much more evidence that Buffy existed than for that supposed Jesus guy.
Oh, wait. The part you’re arguing is whether Buffy had supernatural powers. I have to admit that there’s zero evidence that she did. In that respect, she’s no better off than that supposed Jesus guy.
Wow, you are right: skeptic and skeptical do not have parallel meanings. But it is offensive to be classified among a set of words, one of whose meanings is to question an assertion made without sufficient proof, and the other is to question a whole particular religion of fantasy bullshit, advanced entirely without proof. Talk about being politically correct; those Christians got in to change the language before PC was ever defined.
As an adolescent, I was called a heathen by a so-called Christian preacher, who did not like the church my family attended, so I suppose being called a skeptic is no worse.
Hmm. Two of the exact same post, bearing the same time-stamp. Cannot edit the first, but I can this one. Site is still very slow, perhaps that has something to do with it. I have a window of about 15 “Daily” tabs, and reload them all throughout the day. The ttgnet tabs take over a minute to even begin loading and sometimes as much as 2 minutes to complete, while the others are finished loading in 5 to 10 seconds.
Firefox 16.0.2 has been crashing and otherwise misbehaving a lot here lately. Yesterday I had to kill four FF instances in Task Manager because they were hung solid. Very very solid. And I’d just restarted FF after a reboot a day or two earlier.
Sometimes the tabs at either end become inaccessible, and the only solution is to restart FF.
I”m running FF 16.0.2 on my Linux laptop. No problems. I’ve had this instance running for days; not sure just how long, but unlike some here, I do not have a huge number of windows or of tabs. Normally one or two windows with one to maybe a dozen tabs each, usually closer to one than to a dozen.
This laptop has only 3GB RAM, but the OS seems to recognize only 1.9GB of it. I’ll have to figure out what’s going on there. Regardless, in normal operations the box doesn’t come close to using all the available memory. That’s probably why I don’t have problems but others do.
I am having no discernible problems with Firefox 16.0.2. RAM usage is the killer for me. Open just a few tabs running Flash, and my RAM is maxed out and into the swap file big time. Even the extra RAM the 64-bit version of Windows Ray so generously set me up with, which accesses another Gb of RAM has not helped. I do blame Adobe, as I can open as many text-only sites as I want, and RAM hardly rises. But everyone today is using Flash. My local TV station news source and the Indy newspaper are somehow using Flash just to present text. I cannot see text when I visit them, and the message is that I need to update to the latest Flash player, because I use NoScript, which blocks Flash by default. As soon as I authorize Flash, voilà—print.
I rarely get a Firefox lock-up though. Do you wait a minute to see if it clears up before ending the task? That happens to me occasionally, as does the message “script not responding–end now?” I hit Cancel instead, and everything seems to work normally, so I think the non-responsive script dialog is incorrect.
Meanwhile, I have a new laptop with 10gb RAM due to be delivered in a few days, so we will see how that works out.
Windows 7 x64 needs 8 GB of ram to be comfortable. It will page with 4 GB of ram if you get anything serious going on in a couple of Windows.
Firefox does have a ram reduction project going on but they are working on memory leaks, not reduction for active tabs.