Ugh. I forgot to return to the title. So that $150-160k/year they offered you, when you work it out for 18 hours a day 7 days a week, comes to $22-24/hour.

That's like making $50k/year at a regular 9-5 job.

Offers to work in combat zones initially look great. They'll back a dump truck full of money up to your house and all you have to do is go have an adventure overseas for 12-18 months. Woo!

The reality is that you'll be working 7 days a week, 18 hours a day. It's expected of you, everyone is doing it, and if you did try to work 8 hour days you would quickly go nuts from boredom because there is nothing to do. There are only so many magazines and videos and games around. Your office will be hot like an oven from all the desktop machines. If you're lucky the server closets will be a little cooler. You will be working harder, in those 18 hours a day, then you've ever had to work before.

If you want that kind of life, get an IT job on an oil rig. Or take a break from IT and go work on an Alaskan fishing boat. The hours, money, boredom, and stress levels are basically the same.

The Church used the OT canon from the time of Christ. After that time, the Jews removed certain books from their canon (-- some say in an attempt to stem the tide of conversions to Christianity). Luther pitched this as grounds that the Church must have wrongly "added" those books, and so brought his OT back in line with the Jewish canon of his day, and then went even further. If you go into a Christian book store and buy an Apocrypha, it is the books that Luther removed and perhaps a few more writings that no one believes are canonical, depending on the edition.

I'm not sure which bit(s) you think are wrong. There is one Church, founded by Christ on Peter. Some believers have split away from it, but it remains the original from which all others branched and is not, itself, a branch. I'm not saying that there were no branches before the sixteenth century, just that the Protestant denominations, sects, and ecumenical bodies that I took the person to whom I was replying to be referring to did not.

I was speaking of the heresies of Marcionism, Gnosticism, Montanism, Monarchianism, and the Cathars. Not the Eastern Church. There will always be disagreement within the Church, but it is *within* the Church. In your example, Paul and James deferred to Peter's authority. It doesn't matter that they agree, but that they are One: one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.

Those heresies were quickly pruned; not every shoot from the trunk is a branch. You can't go straight from roots to branches, after all; there has to be a trunk. Jesus founded a Church on Peter. In that moment, it was one, branch-less. That it hadn't yet hammered out a clear statement of beliefs is immaterial.

And yet it remains true that Protestants accept the authority of the Catholic Church by using the Bible that it assembled (minus a few bits that Luther removed, plus a few words he inserted), and that the Catholic Church existed for 1500 years before Protestantism arrived.

Since when? The Catholic Church views the Orthodox Church as being in full communion with it. The Orthodox Church disagrees with it on the issue of Peter's primacy among bishops, but that's the only major stumbling block to reunification.

It wasn't the Catholic Church that termed those books "the Apocrypha", it was the Protestants after Luther removed them from the Bible. Catholics have "the Bible", Protestants have a smaller, neutered Bible and "the Apocrypha".

Secular humanistic scientific atheism isn't scandalous. It at least pretends to be logically consistent. What does the fact that historians come in all shapes and sizes have to do with anything? I don't think any historians disagree with my point that Christianity pre-dates the Bible, or that Protestantism didn't show up for a good 1.5k years.

An excellent point! I was unclear; I include all four of Christendom's Apostolic Sees when I say "the Church", not just Latin Rite Catholicism. The church in Alexandria brought the world Clement, Didymus, Origen, monasticism, lead the Council of Nicaea, and was basically instrumental in the early Church. I do not want to seem to diminish or dismiss it! I am just bugged when Protestants, or those influenced by the scandal of Protestantism, relegate the Apostolic Sees to being "just branches" on par with the divisions following the Protestant Reformation.

It's not "one branch", it's the trunk. Those "branches" didn't exist for the first millennium and a half of its existence; its existence and authority pre-date the Bible, the component parts of which it authored, preserved, evaluated, and the canon of which it certified. Trying to claim that the Church is a political institution that tries to influence a culture, and not the guiding force throughout time in exploring, refining, and teaching the religion itself is laughable.

Yeah. It's lame and a total cheap shot.

Yeah, this one is really offensive.