current us events
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I think in most Western cultures the way society is run (by everyone, not just the government) in far too complex and intertwined for any revolution to really make a difference. Big business and governments go hand-in-hand in so many ways that to break it down to any extent would be impossible I think. It'd take some kind of economic or human catastrophe (nuclear war, world banks collapsing) before people are shocked out of their complacency. It'd be nice if it wasn't that way, but people are raised and taught to accept the way things are because 'that's the way they have to be'. The only way that could be overcome is by some sort of Stalinist brainwashing regime, which obviously is equally sinister.
I think in most Western cultures the way society is run (by everyone, not just the government) in far too complex and intertwined for any revolution to really make a difference. Big business and governments go hand-in-hand in so many ways that to break it down to any extent would be impossible I think. It'd take some kind of economic or human catastrophe (nuclear war, world banks collapsing) before people are shocked out of their complacency. It'd be nice if it wasn't that way, but people are raised and taught to accept the way things are because 'that's the way they have to be'. The only way that could be overcome is by some sort of Stalinist brainwashing regime, which obviously is equally sinister.
wow thanks for sharing some good points that i was aware of, but slipped my mind.
However, I personally disagree about the "1000 years" theory. That phrase is mentioned in the Bible, but it can be taken out of context. It is refering to the return of Christ to the earth. It is saying basically that we don't know how long it will be till that time comes. Time is basically only a concept known to man on earth. To God, time isn't really an issue. But since (as I believe) the Bible was physically writen by men, yet inspired by God, when Genesis says such and such was created on this day, I believe that is a literal day. I don't think "day" would be included if it wasn't literal.
This is actually a fairly hot topic in Christianity right now.
Sorry if I got a little philosphical or whatever, but just wanted to point out my belief.
An economic depression is something you should be prepared for at any time if you live int he USA. The USA business model imports more than it exports. That is why US business is suffering more and more the past several years. Even though we're out of the short recession we were in, the NASDAQ is only at roughly 1500 while if you go back four years, it was at aroung 8900.
On top of that, no new tarrifs at all have been imposed to help combat this problem. If the government simply added new taxes to imported goods, people would be forced to buy goods made in their own country. After several years of this practice the price ont he locally purchased goods would decrease as production skill increases. It's a rather simple principal you learn on day 1 of economics 101.
Japan at least has half a brain. They're smart enough to not import almost any US made cars and instead sell gads of their cars here. It's absolutely destroying America's automotive industry and putting theirs ahead of everyone else. Some of the cleanest, most efficent engines out there are coming out of Japan these days. the USA has that silly obsession with gasoline and beating up OPEC for more all the time. If European car standards were applied here i think a lot of good could come of it (especially int he pollution area).
For anyone who didn't hear one of Bush's latest ideas, he wanted to drill for oil in the great lakes reigon. That's a genius idea if I ever hear dof it. Lets drill for oil in 1/5 of the world's total freshwater supply. What a winner. All it would take is one screw-up to contaminate all 5 damn lakes.
On top of that, no new tarrifs at all have been imposed to help combat this problem. If the government simply added new taxes to imported goods, people would be forced to buy goods made in their own country. After several years of this practice the price ont he locally purchased goods would decrease as production skill increases. It's a rather simple principal you learn on day 1 of economics 101.
Japan at least has half a brain. They're smart enough to not import almost any US made cars and instead sell gads of their cars here. It's absolutely destroying America's automotive industry and putting theirs ahead of everyone else. Some of the cleanest, most efficent engines out there are coming out of Japan these days. the USA has that silly obsession with gasoline and beating up OPEC for more all the time. If European car standards were applied here i think a lot of good could come of it (especially int he pollution area).
For anyone who didn't hear one of Bush's latest ideas, he wanted to drill for oil in the great lakes reigon. That's a genius idea if I ever hear dof it. Lets drill for oil in 1/5 of the world's total freshwater supply. What a winner. All it would take is one screw-up to contaminate all 5 damn lakes.
yeah nobody's perfect -- esp. politicians.
At least I like him better than Clinton.
Too bad Bush got plopped down in the middle of all this mess.
At least its not all his fault or anything.
Isn't funny how these discussions can change around.
Went from pledge to religion and science to politics.
Gotta love message boards
That phrase also gives us an insite into how God thinks. We humans do this as well. How often have you heard an older person say "In my day.....". They were not talking about only 1 24 hour day, but an undetermined period of time. And this was simply my point here. We have no idea how long the creative days were.
As for taking scripture out of context...
In my opinion, that is an old argument used by those who don't like being shown something that might be oposite of what they are confortable believing. After all, Christ quoted the ancient hebrew scriptures quiet often. It was the only part of the bible that was available in his day. How often do his words state with, "It is written...". The apostles did the same. How is it wrong now as long as what you quote is not twisted into contradicting the bible itself? Note I said the bible and not someones personal viewpoint.
Go to the nearest food store and pick up an apple, or maybe some grain. Both products, and almost all food we eat is the result of evolution. Grain is probably the first product of artificial selection. Those seeds were planted that tended to give the best crop. This brought us grain that is very tolerable to different climates, different in taste and shape. Those differences has been achieved in miniscule amounts of time compared to the span of time between today and the time dinosours walked the Earth.
Drug resistant bacteria and viruses is another example. These bacteria and viruses are significantly different from those that existed even decades ago.
Archeological evidence shows that most of the animals we know of today are not present in old layers of rock. Instead, fossils of many different animals that we do not see today have been found. Dating of fossils is very precise; it is based on half lifes of radioactive elements and simple math.
That phrase also gives us an insite into how God thinks. We humans do this as well. How often have you heard an older person say "In my day.....". They were not talking about only 1 24 hour day, but an undetermined period of time. And this was simply my point here. We have no idea how long the creative days were.
As for taking scripture out of context...
In my opinion, that is an old argument used by those who don't like being shown something that might be oposite of what they are confortable believing. After all, Christ quoted the ancient hebrew scriptures quiet often. It was the only part of the bible that was available in his day. How often do his words state with, "It is written...". The apostles did the same. How is it wrong now as long as what you quote is not twisted into contradicting the bible itself? Note I said the bible and not someones personal viewpoint.[/b][/quote]
Well I think a lot of people try to read too much into some scripture. Why would God try to communicate with us by writing something we have to interpet. It makes sense to me that if the Bible said "on the first day" that means a literal day.
Also, I believe that God is all-poweful which means He is fully capable of creating the world in 1 day if He wanted to. (I'm not sure if you disagree with that or not).
I'm also not saying that I have all the answers either. I'm not as much as a Bible scholar as I would like. But I've heard many messages on this subject and have researched some for myself.
Originally posted by DBOY@June 26 2002,15:53
racketboy: It's a simple Perl script I wrote that write wout binary GIF89a data from a randomly selected file when called. Since most boards can't accept anything but .gif or .jpg extensions, I just symlinked the script to a .gif name. It's pretty nifty
sweet! Perl is such an awesome language.
Makes me want to dig back into it.
But unfortuanatly I'm stuck hacking COBOL all day
Today we have alot more solid evidence on the existance of evolution than we had int he past. The bulk of anti-evolution literature was written int he first half of the last century and is rather dated compared to more recent findings.
People pretty near universally accepted evolution existed even before Darwin presented his theory. What created such a stir was the suggestion that humans too are a product of evolution as opposed to the divinely created masters of the universe. It stroked quite a few people's ego's the wrong way.
All Darwin ever did was present natural selection as the mechanism behind evolution. In fact a lot of christian protestants were the first to accept his theories citing that natural selection must be god's divine providence at work on earth. And yes this really shocked and pissed off Darwin as he was a deeply religous good little Christian boy. He couldn't believe people were applying his theories to such unethical bullshit.
There's a long tradition of great thinker's theories being misapplied by stupid people around the world. For exqample, they morphed Einstein's theory of relativity into a theory of relativism: that all things in the universe are relative to perspective so good and evil don't actually exist. How you get that from e=mc^2 is beyond me but as I said, stupid people will do stupid things with smart people's ideas.
If you're interested in these misappropriations of such theories, check out the book Modern Times by Paul Joseph. He has an excellent book spanning the entire 1900's. It's about 1500 pages as I recall and will set you back $14 for the paperback edition.
I also reccomend Science, Politics, and Gnosticism by Eric Voegelin (it's out of print so you'd need to buy it used) and if you want to see a parody of 1900-1950, read CS Lewis' "That Hideous Strength". They're all really good
People pretty near universally accepted evolution existed even before Darwin presented his theory. What created such a stir was the suggestion that humans too are a product of evolution as opposed to the divinely created masters of the universe. It stroked quite a few people's ego's the wrong way.
All Darwin ever did was present natural selection as the mechanism behind evolution. In fact a lot of christian protestants were the first to accept his theories citing that natural selection must be god's divine providence at work on earth. And yes this really shocked and pissed off Darwin as he was a deeply religous good little Christian boy. He couldn't believe people were applying his theories to such unethical bullshit.
There's a long tradition of great thinker's theories being misapplied by stupid people around the world. For exqample, they morphed Einstein's theory of relativity into a theory of relativism: that all things in the universe are relative to perspective so good and evil don't actually exist. How you get that from e=mc^2 is beyond me but as I said, stupid people will do stupid things with smart people's ideas.
If you're interested in these misappropriations of such theories, check out the book Modern Times by Paul Joseph. He has an excellent book spanning the entire 1900's. It's about 1500 pages as I recall and will set you back $14 for the paperback edition.
I also reccomend Science, Politics, and Gnosticism by Eric Voegelin (it's out of print so you'd need to buy it used) and if you want to see a parody of 1900-1950, read CS Lewis' "That Hideous Strength". They're all really good
Simple, if the animals of today did not exist a million years ago, but other animals did, it means that the animals were not created at any single time. The fact that plants and animals can change over a period of time, the fact that DNA can change over a period of time, that DNA changes are hereditary and that changes in DNA controls the development of plants and animals prove the theory of evolution completely. All of the preceding facts have actually been proven in laboratories, something Creationists have been asking for a long time.
Originally posted by racketboy@June 26 2002,16:03
sweet! Perl is such an awesome language.
Makes me want to dig back into it.
But unfortuanatly I'm stuck hacking COBOL all day
My main language of choice is really PHP. It's excellent for any kind of programming that doesn't need to exist as a stand-alone application. Incredibly easy to pick up if you know JAVA, C, or Perl and fast as hell to develop in.
I just wrote that one in Perl cuz I had the gifcat.pl library laying around and din't want to bother finding it's PHP equivalent. Though now that I think about it I could probably just fread() the file in, print the GIF type content header then the binary data and have it work fine.
Hmm, I'll need to try it later, may be able to cut down it's size even more
in case anyone is even interested in my beliefs, try
http://www.icr.org/
It's the Institute for Creation Research.
I'm not sure if their website is any good, but I have enjoyed some of their stuff in the past
I encourage everyone to actually research all sides of the topic and come to their own conclusion. But please don't just hastly make a decision.
I'd love to debate more, but I'm calling it a day for now.
Maybe more fun tommorow, eh?
http://www.icr.org/
It's the Institute for Creation Research.
I'm not sure if their website is any good, but I have enjoyed some of their stuff in the past
I encourage everyone to actually research all sides of the topic and come to their own conclusion. But please don't just hastly make a decision.
I'd love to debate more, but I'm calling it a day for now.
Maybe more fun tommorow, eh?
