No, just being revisionist and - once again - misleading.

Your phrasing, use of exclamation points, and flippant "Yup, good book that" were all clear indicators of your tone.

Saying something does not make it so. The OP did not take the position you stated. Your post was clearly intended to be derogatory and sarcastic.

Congratulations, the moderators of slashdot agreed with you. You sunk to the level of hipster group think and won karma points. Well done.

You don't need to justify yourself, you "won". I should have never wasted my time trying to help you improve your critical thinking and writing.

Please ignore my points, and carry on as you were.

No, I disagree. It was clear that the purpose of your comment was to score points by sneering at the Bible. It was clear that the OP's post was a joke, and poking fun at creationists. The OP was taking a sarcastic tone to illustrate some of the poorly reasoned arguments that are made by new-earth creationists.

You post, however was not that. You post cherry picked individual lines from the Bible in order to specifically misrepresent them, take them out of context in a sort of elitist, intellectually superior tone by applying current moral standards to a culture of thousands of years ago. By doing that, you treated an important book with total disregard and disrespect.

That was inappropriate.

You post was inaccurate, misleading and childish. It lowered the quality of the discussion.

Well, it depends on what assumptions you are making about me.

I never said I agreed with the things that I mentioned, or suggested that Leviticus contains a list of rules to live by, or what religion, if any, I ascribe to.

What I disagree with is the casual disrespect and misrepresentation that the OP treated the Bible with.

Regardless of religious preference, such an important historical document should be treated with more respect. Also, regardless of religious preference, it is a fool who goes through life believing that there isn't a great deal of wisdom contained in the Bible. Or the Koran (Quran). Or the Bhagavad Gita. I would defend any of those texts with the same fervor.

I know that it is cool to make fun of religions, especially Christians, here. It's a guaranteed way to score yourself some easy Karma (ironic!). In this case, however, I took exception to the condescending, disrespectful tone and willful ignorance of the poster.

Those points were specifically cherry picked in order to make a distorted point and to trash the Bible: "Yup, good book that"

It was done by applying current moral standards, two thousand years later, to a people, civilization and culture that were *vastly* different.

The poster made no attempt at intellectual honesty, and strictly went for "cool points". This sort of thing lowers the quality of the discussion for everyone. Even if slashdot tends to be something of a hip, liberal echo-chamber - most of us here value reasoned, intelligent debate. The poster didn't do that, so I (quite appropriately) called him out on it.

Ok, I try to avoid getting involved in religious conversations like this, but you are coming across as a typical ignorant elitist here, sneering down at things you clearly don't understand. We all get that you aren't religious, but that doesn't give you the right to present skewed information taken out of context. So, I'm going to completely waste my time here and present some *actual* information on each one of your points in the vain hope that in the future you will temper your snark.

What you aren't saying, is that at the time selling children into slavery was a common practice throughout much of the "civilized" world. This 'law' was put in to place to *protect women*. The reason why is that normally when a child was sold into servitude, they would be freed after a period of time. Since (by far) the reason that women were taken as 'servants' or ('hand-maidens' depending on the interpretation) was as second wives or concubines, it was grossly unfair to the woman to then release her from service after she had been used as a sex object for years. No one would want to marry her, and she was essentially screwed. To protect against that, this law was put into place saying essentially, that if you're going to take this woman on, you have to care for her forever, you can't just have sex with her for a few years while she's pretty and then kick her out once she gets older.

Again, you're totally cherry picking here. Leviticus rules of cleanliness were generally *good* things. At the time, they simply didn't understand biology, and sanitary practices were spotty at best. This was the origin of laying down some rules for sanitary practices, which is a good thing, even if they seem strange to us now. And by the way, Leviticus' admonishments were by no means limited only to women:

Leviticus 1-5:
"Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them: 'When any man has a discharge from his body, his discharge is unclean. And this shall be his uncleanness in regard to his discharge; whether his body runs with his discharge, or his body is stopped up by his discharge, it is his uncleanness. Every bed is unclean on which he who has the discharge lies, and everything on which he sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches his bed shall wash his clothes and bathe in water, and be unclean until evening."

This was relating to abnormal discharge, no one really understood STD's, they were just doing their best at the time. But great job completely misrepresenting Leviticus as anti-female in order to push some sort of agenda.

Again, you're totally misrepresenting the law here. A the time, this was incredibly progressive. Slavery was rampant and commonly accepted, to limit the bounds of slavery and who could be enslaved was a great step in the right direction. Considering that even the U.S. still hadn't worked out slavery issues as of only 140 years ago, applying 21st century morals to a progressive law created to put bounds and limits on slavery thousands of years ago... well, that's just childish.

I don't even understand your point here. Are you saying this is still a problem? I mean, I agree - we need to stop the rampant slaughter of all the people who work on Sundays in America. Oh wait... you mean, this doesn't happen? At all? So, clearly it was a law intended for another time - a time that penalties were pretty damn harsh for just about any infraction. There's some question about how tightly this was interpreted and enforced even at that time. To casually insult and discard the bible in it's entirety because of some parts of it are written for a totally different time, culture and moral code is asinine. At the very least, it gives us a stunning historical insight into humanity.

Your other points are similarly cherry picked and disingenuous. You take an insulting an elitist attitude about things that you don't know the first thing about, and I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt by assuming you're just ignorant. If you're actually educated on these subjects, then you're willfully misrepresenting these things, which is much worse.

I get that you're just fishing for cool points with this whole post, but your snide, disrespectful attitude just makes you look childish and uneducated. Religious or not, the Bible in an incredible historical document that should be treated with respect and educated thoughtfulness, not snarky cherry picking and misrepresentation.

Foe'd. Though I agree, Ban us all, then the traffic can drop in earnest and we can start the brave new world where Slashdot is ghost town that makes no money.

Shut up Lysander Spooner.

Creating a site with a coherent and congruent purpose for the people using it at least establishes clear compatibility for users going forward. People who agree with the founding principles will want to become involved, and people who don't can GTFO.

And your hyperbolous mythical monsters of bigotry by a majority are extremely unlikely. How many mainstream sites do you know of that are openly racist or misogynist? And I don't mean the sort of soft bigotry of disagreement being pushed as equivalent in academia, I mean hardcore 'minorities are evil' bigotry, since that's what would be predicate to your fantasy scenarios of a white male only power structure.

Exactly, I've pointed the same things out in every survey, to the feedback mail, etc. etc. Almost everything has been ignored/broken for months. Unless we see a real timeline and real results and not just more of the same "we care, but we're not going to do anything" gloss and bullshit, it's going to be a brief period of gnashing followed by exodus.

Exactly this. I gave all sorts of detailed, constructive feedback during the early stages, and then nothing happened. I'm sure I'm not the only one, because for all its faults, the /. community is much more intelligent and helpful than the average gaggle of facebook rejects on blog posts using the ubiquitous Disqus. Indeed, I've met a lot of Slashdotters at the anniversary parties, and you can tell they're a different lot, inheritors of the spirit of the early internet from before Endless September.

I don't need an Engadget clone, especially since I almost never go there either anymore (coincidentally they became shitty after being bought be AOL, pattern much?). I've seen several people talk about starting spiritual /. successors, and some are taking action.

I suppose this was all inevitable. It's just sad to see one of the pillars of the internet finally start falling after more than fifteen years. I've been reading /. since it was featured in some brief minute long segment on ZDTV when I was in high school. If I'd registered back then I'd probably have a four or five digit UID, but I didn't like registering for anything I didn't have to and didn't bother until it was necessary for the 10 year anniversary parties. Oh well, now UIDs aren't going to mean shit, so I guess I won in the end? Yay? Ugh.

So you're saying it's about developers? Developers, developers, developers?