BTW, note that the thing you rail against Christians about, stubborn hubris, is exactly what you're exhibiting. You've become that which you hate. Better to take a more deferential stance, and understand that you don't have all the answers, and be less judmental (in your case about God and religion) as you'd wish His followers would be (about the kinds of things they're so negative and high-and-mighty about). We shouldn't be at war about things that are mistakes. (If I'm going to go to war with you, it'll be over Leftism, that man-made, Satan-stoked false religion that is actually the world's #1 religion.)

I apologize again for the pain that my side has wrongly inflicted upon you. I wish you wouldn't blame God for that.

I thought you insisted that you're actually a woman, just born with a male body. Then even if some others mistake your wearing women's clothes as a sin, God knows the truth about you.

God made you the way you are, it's not a mistake, and whether I understand it or not, I'm commanded to love you. Christians need to obey God more, and know their place (while God gave me a brain to reason with, and communicated to me certain prohibitions, when things get complicated, we should leave the judging to the Judge).

He could've sanitized everything, but without temptation to disobey, how could there ever be a choice presented to us to ever not follow Him. Free Will would be meaningless then, because there'd be no possible way to ever exercise it, if the only things there are, are all things that are allowed.

Your skewed thinking on this subject is in your focusing on the one (1) thing that was disallowed. We lived in paradise with everything taken care of and not a worry in the world, and there was all of one whole prohibition in the whole place. So it's of course highly imbalanced thinking to paint the situation then as some kind of raw deal.

So the Garden shows us two things: 1) God loves us and wants us to be in paradise, and 2) what bigger fools are there than human beings. The takeaway is that God can provide paradise for us, and we certainly can't.

And that's fully how I expect Hell to be populated. Frankly, I'd have a hard time loving a god who sent people to Hell, no matter how justified. But I'm convinced He'll actually not need to send anyone, that the lost will voluntarily choose it on their own.

The rest of this is too galling for me, complaining about a totalitarian system when that's exactly what the Left is actually setting up. Satan has you guys tricked into building hell here on earth. And you're convinced the Left is about teh freedom. This is why I cut off my visibility of DR's and Fusta's comments on Slashdot, because I got tired of hearing about some irrevelent opposite-world.

Look, you've obviously got a lot of rage and hate built up over God, accumulated over probably a long time, and that couldn't be undone over one weekend. I'll just say that I wish you peace.

It appears that the nature of your error in the math is that you artificially constrain it to the unsupportable notion that if there is a God, He must be able to fit Himself completely in what He created.

On Romans 9, in general I don't subscribe to Calvinist intepretation. If I thought God chose some for damnation, I wouldn't be worshipping Him, as He would be undeserving of my love. I'm pretty sure that the Calvinist strain is a minority angle in Christianity (although may be over-represented in conservative sects, and hence appear central to Christianity, if that's all you know).

I gather that the historic context of this book of the Bible is that most of the Jews were unbelievers (in the Messiah) at the time, and yet God had promised Israel the kingdom of heaven. Paul was speaking to the Jews primarily, basically saying salvation is not a birthright, it comes through faith in Jesus. (9:6 - "For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel.") To them, the Gentiles around you have faith, so they are saved. And if you're angry about that, well, really, who are you question your Creator anyways. God makes the rules, and those are the rules.

But it does not say that it was God who fitted certain vessels for destruction. My Bible cross references 9:22 with Proverbs 16:4: "The Lord works out everything for his own ends -- even the wicked for a day of disaster." God took a haughty, stubborn unbeliever, Pharoah, and used him to show His power, that He is worthy of our respect, and His mercy to the Israelite slaves, despite being imperfect sinners, and therefore that He is worthy of our love. Because we're all sinners, and therefore vessels deserving of destruction. He does things to show the magnitude of His power, and the magnitude of His mercy.

It also does not say that I was fitted for glory. I believe my name was written in the Book of Life before the beginning of (this universe's) time, not because God chose me to be saved, but because He could foresee that I would accept His offer and be saved, and therefore prepared a place for me in Heaven. The off-putting view that God made some of us winners and some losers in the game of eternity is inconsistent with what seems to be our purpose to God. He's looking for us to love Him. Would He pick as winners in eternal life some who do not love Him? Have people in Heaven who are like, meh, about God? Of course not. So only those who love Him will get to Heaven. But then if He hand-picked those who were going to Heaven, He'd have to make sure all the hand-picked loved Him. It seems like the only ways He could do that are, 1) make us automatons and program those He picked for Heaven to have no choice but to love Him, or 2) foresee who would end up loving Him. But if He opted for 1), that's hardly true love.

As for the rest, it's really verse 51 and beyond that you're citing in Luke 12, not 21, but I know your eyesight isn't perfect! But Jesus' (first) coming meant that now there would be the saved and the lost. In the Gospels it says that people will hate believers because of Him. Even within a family there could be strife between the saved and the lost wrt this touchy subject. As for the "black and white thinking", if you don't follow Jesus, then you follow something else; there is no middle ground. God wants us to live His way, and if we choose to live our own way instead, that's in opposition to what God wants.

Finally:

Those like you?

I for one (and maybe the only one on Slashdot!) never hated js, always liked it, I just don't feel it belongs outside where it was invented, because it has compromises due to what is was created for, where outside that environment there are much more suitable choices. Neither would I like seeing SQL turned into a language across other layers of an application.

And I understand your point that less cost in development opens up more things for it to be economically sensible to automate. I just don't want my occupation to turn into writing shitty code for every little thing.

Then you're an atheist because you did the math wrong. (Which, essentially, is how all atheists come to settle on atheism. For example, the reason my dad believes there is no god? "The vastness of space." In his mind, somehow, the billions and billions of planets out there means, in some way, that the likelihood that there is a god is infitesimally small.)

Where on earth did you get the idea that an infinite being must not be able to interact with the finite?!? If you create something, you're not bound by it, yet you can interact with it. And I don't know if you can say that about the universe; I would say it as our perception of our (His?) universe is bounded both in time and size. But we're dimensional beings of dimension n, whatever number you might want to give to n. A higher dimensional being could work with our n like we can work with all of our (n-1), (n-2), etc.

And finally, wisdom and propriety and respect for human sovereignty and dignity points to boundaries on how much you help, independent of how much is being asked.

Well, whatever emerges, will be about enabling the less-skilled (in software engineering), and hence lower paid, to take up programming.

But I shuddered when Google I think it was was making some kind of Java to JavaScript translator. I thought people who only knew and only cared to know Java would end up having much of the software industry catered to them, to where development ceased in the languages of other environments.

Now I'm wondering if it'll be js instead. I wouldn't be suprised if next there'll be a js way to query and manage relational databases, so that "JavaScript Engineers" don't have to learn SQL DDL and DML.

You're delusional on a couple of things. That the views you're against are religious and the ones you're for are not. And that getting obsessed with the affairs of others is just you being a little too good of a person, rather than bad. (Like the proverbial road and gate to Heaven is narrow vice the path to destruction, helping is a fine line and there's tons of room instead for meddling. (Maybe also like charity vice socialism.))

It's just a happy world to you. People who think like you are tolerant little cuddle bears, and not at all religious extremists.

I get my view of how the lower class is treated by the cops, from watching the TV show "Cops". Like I am right now. If you're lower class, don't show it, and certainly don't act it, to the cops. Drive a well-maintained car, and be very respectful.

I'm shocked at how things go down on that show. If I was treated like that in a traffic stop, I'd be livid. But somehow cops can sniff out who the troublemakers are. These people have illegal drugs and unregistered weapons in their car, and prior records.

Generally the poor are poor because they make bad choices. Generally. Fix the wealth gap "problem" and it changes nothing, because lower class is the person, not whatever their current economic conditions are.

People who have bills to pay and have to go to work in the morning don't have time to be out causing trouble. Cops get a read on what kind of person you are.

So we are a classless society, in that you're not stuck in one socioeconomic class no matter how hard you work. But you can never have a classless society in the sense that there'll never be equality in other ways, because people are different.

People are stupid and mean. I hate my species with a passion. It's a good thing I have a religion, that puts stipulations on me and things in a context. As an atheist I'd be a bad mofo, and not in a cool way. So working with tons of people, esp. the public in general, is definitely out for me. I can't afford anymore fuel on the fire.

I didn't work in any sweatshops during the dot com era nor know anyone who did. Rich people weren't trying to squeeze every last bit of productivity out of us at the time, they wanted us to rapidly build up things that would make them insanely rich. Accomplished software engineers who also had a good idea of what this new (to them) Internet thing was were their E tickets to building them wealth, they thought.

I really miss the optimism, however misguided it was, of that time. The positiveness. They didn't look at you when you came in for an interview like you were some nitwit fraud, they at least acted impressed. And they threw money at me, to the tune of 20% and 30% raises over prior positions. And they were happy to have me, I was happy to be there in that kind of positive and energetic environment, and to be well-compensated, and I worked hard. (Granted you may have had different experiences.)

I have to agree of course that one difference definitely between IT and other fields is the easy transferability of the work. That's a factor that sets us up for being treated less well that other occupations don't have. But I've heard that nurses are treated like shit, same for pharmacists. Even doctors are going to have worse treatment in this country, as we move on to a single-payer system and it's all about the race to the bottom in cutting costs and services to a minimum. In my area I believe dentists, once a path to a good life, are even struggling, for various reasons this is getting too long to go into.

TL;DR: I guess you're basically right about this, IT probably is worse than other fields. I just don't want to believe it, because it was so good before.

I think in the U.S. we're more polarized than ever. The rhetoric seems to get nastier and nastier, and the tactics sleazier and sleazier. Piling on more and more rules doesn't seem to be helping us to get along at all. To me you already contradicted the claim that it's about us all getting along, with the whole, there's nothing universal, so we have nothing in common, so either we agree, or the stronger forces it on the other. I guess without (a Being giving us) a moral standard in the universe, that indeed would be how "morality" gets set. To me you've partly described Hell.

You know nothing of my family or where I came from.

So here it is in a nutshell:

I worked my ass off working shitty fast food jobs to pay my own way through college, got a degree, and a good job. Had nothing to do with my "family connections" or "white privilege" or any other lame ass excuse used by people that don't have any success.

YOU are to blame for your failures in life. Not your family upbringing, not your race, or any other secondary attribute.

Considering I'm originally from Toledo, Ohio -- not far from Milan, Ohio, and seeing as how Thomas Edison was able to put his gifts to good use despite being born into a poor family and having health issues, I'll take those odds.

I have earned everything I have. I would have no problem doing that in any era.

Roll it back to 1911. Not just because an iconic firearm was born, but roll it back to before the first Fascist American President, Woodrow Wilson, took office.