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Comment Re:Can someone explain to me .. (Score 1) 473

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that "almost everything Jesus said was a general rule". Let's take a closer look at this particular conversation.

A rich guy comes to Jesus and asks what he has to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus walks him through the Ten Commandments. More specifically, the Ten Commandments has two parts: commandments 1-4, which deal with our relationship with God, and commandments 5-10, which deal with our relationships with people. Jesus dealt exclusively with the second section, but omitted commandment 10 (thou shalt not covet).

The rich guy said that he had done all that.

Then Jesus hit the guy with where his problem really was - his money. (This is tightly related to the covetousness that Jesus didn't mention in his first pass.) Jesus is saying, "This is your problem, you can't hold on to your money and still follow God." But that's because the money is what this guy is holding on to. If Jesus were talking to somebody else, he would go after what they were holding on to - maybe sex or pride of position.

See, you're either holding on to God, or to something else. If you're holding on to something else, that's what Jesus would go after - whatever it is for you. So it's not that having money is a problem, it's that holding on to the money (as the thing you put ahead of God) is a problem. Now, I will grant you that that problem is somewhat highly correlated with having lots of money, but not entirely so. (Poor people dream about the money they don't have instead of holding on to the money that they do have.)

Then, after the rich guy leaves, Jesus said that it's essentially impossible for the rich to get into heaven. Now, what made this such a bombshell is that the culture said that being rich was a sign of God's favor - so being rich meant that you were much more likely to get into heaven, right? But Jesus' point isn't that the rich have to give up their money to get into heaven, it's that you can't get into heaven any way but through him. So it's hard for EVERYBODY, not just for the rich. And, true, it may be especially hard for the rich, because it's really easy for them to grab onto something other than Jesus (money), and that means that they miss the only way.

But saying "Jesus clearly says in that passage that the only way for rich people to enter heaven is to drop their earthly possessions into the hands of the poor. All of it. For all of them. The passage can not be understood differently" is a bit much. No, Jesus didn't say that.

I refer you to Acts 5, where there were people selling their property and giving to those in need. And Ananias and Sapphira tried to fake it. Peter says, "When it was yours, did it not remain your own? And after you sold it, wasn't the money under your control?" The issue wasn't that they weren't giving it all, the issue was that they were trying to pretend that they had done more than they had. That means that Peter didn't understand Jesus the way you did. No offense, but my money's on Peter to be right.

Comment Re:Can someone explain to me .. (Score 1) 473

But Jesus never said that the community owns everything, or anything close to that. He said, "YOU [the rich guy he was talking to at the moment] go and sell everything you have and give to the poor".

He didn't say "bring down the capitalist system", or "confiscate everything from those who own it, because property is theft, or because the community owns everything". He said, "You who owns this stuff, you voluntarily give it away, not because I'm changing the social order, but because I'm changing YOU".

That last paraphrase gets to the heart of the matter. Jesus was about changing people's hearts, not about changing the social order. The change in their hearts was supposed to change their behavior, including their behavior toward money. And that change was supposed to influence society. But the influence on society is a third-order effect. Jesus talks about money (the second-order effect) to expose the heart issue, which is what he's really after.

So, no, Jesus is NOT a socialist. I'll give you this, though - he's not a capitalist either.

Comment Re:Can someone explain to me .. (Score 1) 473

"Jesus was a socialist"? Um, no.

Theoretically, Jesus was a theocrat - God rules. But practically, he told those living under occupation by a foreign empire (Rome) to pay their taxes, and that there was no disloyalty to God in doing so.

People say that Jesus was a socialist because he said things like "give to those who ask of you". But this is not at all what people call socialism. He didn't say "set up a government structure to take taxes from people and give to those who have need". Instead, he said "you who follow me, you give to the needs of others. Do this, not because the government makes you, but because of what God has done for you."

Submission + - Finally, the jury rules against SCO (groklaw.net)

rewt66 writes: SCO got the day in court that they've always claimed they wanted. And the jury ruled that the Unix copyrights did not transfer from Novell to SCO, so even if some SVRX code did get put in Linux (which I doubt), SCO doesn't own the copyrights to it.
Space

A Hyper-Velocity Impact In the Asteroid Belt? 114

astroengine writes "Astronomers have spotted something rather odd in the asteroid belt. It looks like a comet, but it's got a circular orbit, similar to an asteroid. Whether it's an asteroid or a comet, it has a long, comet-like tail, suggesting something is being vented into space. Some experts think it could be a very rare comet/asteroid hybrid being heated by the sun, but there's an even more exciting possibility: It could be the first ever observation of two asteroids colliding in the asteroid belt."
Image

Tower Switch-Off Embarrasses Electrosensitives 292

Sockatume writes "Residents in Craigavon, South Africa complained of '[h]eadaches, nausea, tinnitus, dry burning itchy skins, gastric imbalances and totally disrupted sleep patterns' after an iBurst communications tower was put up in a local park. Symptoms subsided when the residents left the area, often to stay with family and thus evade their suffering. At a public meeting with the afflicted locals, the tower's owners pledged to switch off the mast immediately to assess whether it was responsible for their ailments. One problem: the mast had already been switched off for six weeks. Lawyers representing the locals say their case against iBurst will continue on other grounds."
Math

Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes 538

artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"
Earth

Minnesota Introduces World's First Carbon Tariff 303

hollywoodb writes "The first carbon tax to reduce the greenhouse gases from imports comes not between two nations, but between two states. Minnesota has passed a measure to stop carbon at its border with North Dakota. To encourage the switch to clean, renewable energy, Minnesota plans to add a carbon fee of between $4 and $34 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions to the cost of coal-fired electricity, to begin in 2012 ... Minnesota has been generally pushing for cleaner power within its borders, but the utility companies that operate in MN have, over the past decades, sited a lot of coal power plants on the relatively cheap and open land of North Dakota, which is preparing a legal battle against Minnesota over the tariff."
Space

Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88

Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."

Comment Not so fast (Score 1) 575

Relativity is wrong at some level... or quantum is. Or both.

As far as I know, there is currently no basis for assuming that it is relativity that is wrong (or that is the only one wrong).

My personal theory is in line with Have Brain Will Rent (just below), that relativity and quantum mean completely different things by "time". But that's just a guess.

Comment Death of one old bag of baloney? (Score 2, Interesting) 364

If I recall correctly, MS at one point tried to say that, if something like this happened, you'd have to release all your source code. Now we find that MS knows that you only have to release the source code of the program in question. Big difference. (Of course, if this was in Windows itself, the difference would not matter much to MS...)

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