No, but you can more easily spend them.

The problem with the argument is that the rules - as written down in a society under the rule of law - have NOT changed. If the FCC needs or wants the authority, it can only properly be granted by Congress, not assumed by the agency as some sort of "natural authority."

Actually, I don't think that's been all that prolific a belief until the modern evangelical era. The "innate moral compass" idea more or less goes against the more Biblically sound "original sin."

"There is none righteous, not even one..." as the Bible says. I don't believe - and there are plenty of (particularly conservative) Christians who also believe that the Bible more supports the idea that man is NOT good WITHOUT the change that only God can bring. Calvinists call it "Total Depravity" - where we tend toward the more sinful side, and we are only held back by not wanting to be punished rather than a desire to do good and please God.

That's why the eternal punishment idea makes more sense.

If by "long term" you mean "centuries." Gold has rarely - if ever - held good value for real use in a lifetime. Only in VERY brief windows in the past century+ has gold been a good investment.

Until he gets hungry. How's all that gold going to be when you need some beans?

So...when the world ends, can you eat gold?

Sorry, but gold is not the end-all utopia the guys on the radio are hawking it to be. Guess who is making money off of gold right now...it's the guys selling it and dealing in the stocks. It ain't the guy with a couple of Eagles in his home safe.

We had the Great Depression on the gold standard, remember.

Whether you're for or against net neutrality, the above post is correct. The FCC doesn't have the authority to impose net neutrality by fiat and regulation.

I want to say they have several scraps of text that could conceivably have existed at the same time as the originals. We at least have some pieces that are less than a century from the original date they were written.

I'm talking more as in close in time-span. It takes a LOT longer than a few years for "myth" to take place.

And I take the similarity/non-similarity arguments with a grain of salt. Usually those arguments ignore scholarly conservative takes on the text.

Wow.

I don't mean to be mean, but I think that you're wrong on the logical end on several points.

Particularly about the "single competent apologetic."

First, if the Christian God is Who we believe He is, then we can't place our standards of good and evil upon what He does, because HE'S the one that gets to define it. That's the core problem that I see in most non-Christian critiques - it's the placement of human standards upon God and not the other way around.

Second, He WOULD be Holy and Perfect - and for Him to allow imperfection to exist without finding an answer for it would be creating a lie. The concept here is that evil cannot be "balanced" because it would still be there. It must be done away with.

It is not "evil" to judge someone for being even the slightest imperfect when you are completely and totally blameless and define perfection simply by BEING. Such an act would uphold the lie that imperfection is okay, when it isn't.

That is why eternal judgment is NOT evil - it is JUST because it is what is DESERVED.

Hence the need for the Cross and Atonement and "all that." The defeat of Evil requires a sacrifice that takes all that evil upon itself.

The above is more or less the central point of Christianity - that even the slightest bit of evil deserves punishment. Say what you will about the rest of the Bible and proofs of archaeology and the rest of the debate - but you are wrong here about the nature and character of God and Who we say He is.

I think that you may be misusing "myth" here. The recorded Gospel accounts are FAR too close to their actual events - and the oldest scraps we have may even date to almost the same age as the originals - that there wasn't much chance for a "mythology" to develop.

Say what you will about "Evidence that Demands a Verdict," but I always thought that this was the best point that was brought up in the book about both the OT and NT - that what we have on paper is closer in real time to the actual events than just about any other part of human history before the middle ages.

I think the other side of this issue is that for a majority of history - up until the early 1900s - most intellectuals, scientists, and the like were trained religiously and probably considered themselves Christians.

The Church did more than just about ANY other institution in training people for rational thought and scientific endeavors.

The problem inherent here is that there is an amount of government control exercised - which means that censorship could happen as easily on the internet (a la "fairness doctrine") as it could under corporate control. That's the paranoia about net neutrality on the right.

What we DO have is what wound up being very surprising - the Dead Sea Scrolls (the 1 AD stuff), which wound up being very similar.

You also need to take into account how Hebrew oral tradition was passed down. It wasn't the telephone game - there was some precise memorization that had to take place.

Probably in the next 3-5 years, we'll more or less be there, whether through another payment wall - where Netflix essentially becomes PPV; in 5-7 years they won't be mailing at all.