Which creator, and which morality? There are thousands of branches.

Well, since we're specifically discussing the context of the Torah, I'd say the Jewish God in this case.

Funny thing, I seem to arrive at entirely different conclusions.

Then it appears that you can safely discard the historical or literal accuracy of the text for yourself.

Oh great, an armchair psychologist! I must admit it's a fun game to play, but you fail rather badly at it.

I'm not stressed, I'm having fun. I enjoy having arguments with people. Sometimes I try to convince the audience, but often all I'm looking for is a discussion with a specific person, and for getting things started sometimes just a few sentences suffice. Depending on how things go I may write in more detail on my opinions later.

My time's limited, so unfortunately I can't type a full treatise on morality in every comment.

Alright, I won't challenge you on this. What you are displaying is emotional reaction to a fictional character that is causing you to interact negatively with real people. If that is not what you feel, then I suppose while you don't have time to write any treatise, you certainly seem to have time to be... selfish I suppose. Spreading negative emotion to other people because it amuses you when it is not an emotion you actually hold is quite... well, anti-social I suppose. Although this is Slashdot.

I have provided you with the "post hoc" explanation... although I'm not sure how you could call it post hoc... what you're doing is just as "post hoc" as what the other side does. Decide it doesn't make sense for now, so it must have never made sense.

If you suspend disbelief and take it to be fact that God caused plagues, why would you doubt the reason provided in the same text? That... confuses me. I don't see how any person that isn't the middle of psychosis could possibly decide it made sense to believe in the text of the plagues, but not in the reasoning for it only paragraphs away.

Actually, if there is a Creator in the sense that's being talked about, "morality" is like a definition to it. The kind of God that exists in the Abraham story is so far above this particular reality that things exist because he defines them to exist. That literally every single thing about reality is a matter of will. That includes things like morality. The Bible actually implies that free will doesn't exist because it "moral", but because God essentially wanted an honest answer... that the reason people exist is literally to provide confirmation of his existence.

But in a way, the whole point is that you do that by existing. By being honest and earnest about what you believe for yourself, and seeking out what is true, and then making decisions about what you believe after, you confirm the existence of existence. That is, that from the point of view of the Abrahamic God, our existence is to serve him, and what he created us for was, essentially, for us to decide our own meaning. That's why it's important that you don't express false belief, in Christianity. Because it's much better to express what you believe and learn about what you believe than to choose a belief simply because others have. That message, among many others, has been lost to most people. But it's there in many places... the text in context expresses several times that you don't have to be perfect, you just have to keep honestly seeking out what is better. From the POV of God in the Bible, if you do that, literally the only place to end up is following him.

But, meh. You have some kind of fierce negative emotional reaction to a character in a story you do not believe. And you express that opinion to others, not to change their mind because you do not express it in a persuasive manner, but to temper your own emotional reaction and vent the stress it causes you. Such a reaction to a character in a story is unhealthy, so if you honestly do not believe in God, and yet you honestly have this kind of emotional reaction to this particular discussion, I would seek out some psychological or therapeutic help to find out if you have some stresses in your life that are causing recurring suffering. Or if you know causes of recurring suffering withing your life, do what you can to end them.

The story, which is a story of such age that it was told for (it claims) hundreds, perhaps even a thousand years before it was committed to the oldest text we have ever uncovered. And the story is about a person who hasn't just seen wondrous things, but has been informed that morality IS what this "voice" has said and done. Or rather, that the decisions based entirely on how you emotionally react do not define what morals are.

The message of the Abraham story is not what specific test was asked for, or even the manner in which it played out. The message of Abraham and Isaac is about learning that sometimes what you feel is right emotionally is actually wrong, and sometimes what feels wrong emotionally is right. The story of Abraham is less about "following orders" than it is the simple principal: you are human, and that means sometimes you are wrong; you must be prepared, in order to become a better person, that you are willing to question even your most tightly held feelings if you are given a good reason to.

From the perspective of the Bible, God is a very good reason. But in the absence of God, the message is the same, because in the absence of God the judgment of "evil" upon a mere character within a story is academic. Getting wrapped up in the academic discussion, in the absence of God, prevents you from understanding the parts of the story that ARE relevant to you.

Quite simply, from a purely sociological point of view, the story of Abraham represents a mechanism that some of our earliest ancestors used to convince people that accepting outside judgments of the realities we each individually lived in from our perspective was necessary to grow into better people. The story of Abraham is almost like a historical testament of a stage our species went through when we were unconsciously organizing our society to become more self-aware in order for each of its members to become more self-aware. It represents a snapshot of the sparks that make us different from Chimpanzees.

And that's just if there is no God. If God were to exist, of all the above would still be true, and then the story would have even more meaning, in that it would represent a message that no matter how things may seem, God will never direct us to do something that will cause "evil" or social taint, and so when things appear that way to us, we are misinterpreting things. You'll notice that God, in the story, was not trying to convince Abraham that murder was okay; He was showing Abraham that being compelled to do evil things was a way to know that we were moving away from his direction... that our sense of evil was a barometer to help us understand when we were probably doing something we weren't supposed to. One of the main points of the story is that Abraham's conscience was right all along. God didn't make him go through with it, just as he felt was wrong.

So you see, you are wrong. You are drawing conclusions about a story based upon how a bunch of people 3000ish years later have decided to apply it specifically to their situation. That defies all logic and scientific thought. It defies all reason. It is akin to someone refusing to read a book because the people long after had decided that the letter "f" lets them do bad things. Just because the lemmings are jumping over the cliff doesn't mean you need to start blaming the ground.

Well the disparity exists because of limitations in our resources. As for why wealth is the determinant of that? We, as a society, have been trained to accept that wealth represents value. That those are the same thing. Even people who "hate the rich" generally are describing a system where they want to redistribute wealth because they see it as being the same thing as value.

Wealth is not value, of course. I'm, in fact, writing an economics theory based on an inverse monetary theory that takes the difference of wealth and value as a premise. But, as we exist right now, the social infrastructure to determine this based on anything except wealth simply does not exist.

To put it simply, wealth is allowed to be the determinant of this because we have decided to allow it to be. You may have been convinced of it, or trained to accept it, but you have, and I have, and we all have.

The way for humanity to escape this isn't through revolution or some drastic, romantic sounding event such as that. Quite simply, people must wake up. And in order for them to wake up, someone must create an infrastructure that allows us to accurately assess which things are true and which things are not, then make decisions based on that.

The problems that money and wealth being used as a measure of value causes in our society cannot be easily fixed. There are no magic words to make it all go away, and there is not political or economic ideology that can be implemented by force to fix everything. Unless we fix the people that make up the system, fixing the system won't last long.

The sad truth is that people right now don't want the better society you are talking about. Perhaps for emotional, or false reasons; perhaps their minds could be changed; but right now, people en mass want the dysfunction that is at the core of all our problems. They may not like the particular problems, but the core dysfunction is desired. Until the people that compose our society give up the desire for that core dysfunction, all the Mises and Keynes and Marxes of the world can't save people from themselves.

Well, it brings subsistence and basic medical care to the other 4 billion people who don't live in "1st world" nations.

Of course if by "health care for all" we really mean "health care for us", then no, we don't need to care about that at all.

I wasn't talking about "industrialized nations", I was talking about humans. Sure, I suppose the US could continue to make our standard of living even better by using up resources that would have greater impact on the less industrialized societies. But then we are living a lie. We're saying within the US that there are no haves and have-nots, and we're doing that by creating more have-nots in other parts of the world.

How can we be ethically consistent in our "fairness" of applying medical care equally when that requires us to use absurd amounts of resources that frankly don't belong to just the humans within America's borders?

Can you give me an example of a society where health services are provided at cost to the entire society?

This whole debate really uncovers a truth that we as humans don't particularly like acknowledging: we do not have the physical resources to provide everyone with our best medical care. So somehow we must have some people who do not receive our best care. And some who do.

At the very least, we need to be producing over 1 zetta-joules of energy per year to provide that standard of living to the entire planet, and that assumes availability of materials.

That seems a bit unreasonable. But we can reduce the materials and energy needed through advancing technology and knowledge.

This is actually quite true. The Internet already exists in a state where it could be dismantled even in pieces. Botnets, or even organized effort, directly against the root DNS servers would already cripple the Internet in every meaningful way. Or DoSing certain important routers/switches in the network.

The point being, in this particular situation, governments can more easily censor, but people wield the WMDs. Self-destruction isn't a particularly good method of fighting, but suppose things began to change, ever so slight, in steps. How long do you suppose it would take for organized parties to cripple a key government network (externally of course, nothing that compromises safety would get enough people behind it)?

There is no off switch, there is not going back. At least not in the United States. They can certainly errode things... have the NSA or FBI pick up server records, suspend domain names of sites that perform 'undesirable' functions... but in the end, a threat to the basic tenet of freedom of speech on the Internet would result in the largest riots we've ever had in human history, most of them digital riots.

I think the US might have figured that out already. They've opened Pandora's Box, there's no keeping society completely in the dark any more. But the rest of the world has almost certainly not, and if the rest of the world forces things to come to a head, it would likely be the most widespread series of counter-governmental actions we've ever experienced in recorded history. You think that all your little drones in Democratic Banana Republic are nice little docile things? Wait until you take away the Internet. It has, in very short order, become one of the things that the masses have unconsciously said "No, this you cannot take away or things get bad".

I don't think people would jump straight to conflict or revolution, but if you gave it time, and things persisted, we'd either have a huge number of governments deposed, or we'd have at least one large-scale war between people who hijack their county's political process to use force on other people who are doing things they don't like.

At this point, the Internet in its "free speech" form has become an unremoveable part of human infrastructure. Its absence would cause major chaos and destabilization of the status quo, and guess what all the people who call the shots want? The status quo.

In the end, so long as they understand even the most basic concepts of cause and effect, I don't believe we'll ever see the entire Internet lose its free speech on large scales. We'll have to fight little brush fires here and there, where such-and-such website gets into a legal battle with the government, but not wholesale authoritarianism. Simply taking away the "right" to the Internet from everyone would be the surest way to insure that the status quo doesn't last very long.

...is that DRM represents an in perpetuum algorithmic representation of law that supercedes all haebeus corpus, or the belief of reasonable doubt. In order for DRM to be treated this way, DRM has to be a computer algorithm that is more correct about how to assess law than the justice system itself. Or at least, that's the consequence of this law.

Perhaps, but because of that I can now finally look at converting an older box with some select newer hardware into a FreeNAS box that lets me auto-manage backups, disk replacements, and allows me to keep my data independent from my workstation. :) Something I've been wanting to do on my home network for the last eight years or so.

Why do tech-minded people always seem to need to create obtuse and obviously false exaggerations for the purpose of conveying their point? Use your words and say what you mean.

Posts like this don't make you look clever, they make you look like a caricature.

There are plenty of ways to administer the free version of MySQL to get very good performance and options. Just because you have not been able to do that does not mean it cannot be done.

I think the point that was being made, however, was that if you want to put in that much effort, why wouldn't you use a database like Postgres that actually was built for you to do that?

Chief Operating/Operations Officer

Essentially, this position usually is the lead logistics position.

Hmmm... you might be on to something...