While we're at it, perhaps you could provide one example of a case where Christians have "lynched" a gay person? There have been a few, limited physical altercations, but at the end of the day I'm not aware of any lynchings -- of gay people, or scientists, or anybody else.
 

The problem is that "scientists" (I use the term advisedly) don't confine themselves to telling people what science says, nor do they confine themselves to condemning individual Christians that attack them. Instead, they attack Christianity itself. This has been going on for about 200 years.

I could say much the same about gay rights' advocates. I am sick unto death of hearing them trot out the same old tired dozen or so examples (all drawn from the Old Testament, with no appreciation for the different kinds of revelation that Christians believe in) of how the Bible says X, Y, & Z. What really frustrates me? It's quite evident that in almost every case, they've never read it.

Highly recommend you take a gander at "Surprised by Hope" by N.T. Wright. Your notion of the doctrines of the afterlife is ... ahem ... not exactly Biblical. Not that there aren't a lot of people who believe this in the church, but, in a word, they're wrong.

And leave the theology to the theologians?

The notion of Young Earth Creationism wasn't popular in the early church, and in fact the Six Ages of the World theory is just another wacky idea from the supreme Wackadoodle of Western Christianity, Augustine. In contrast, listen to what Origen (3rd century) said:

We answered to the best of our ability this objection to God's "commanding this first, second, and third thing to be created," when we quoted the words, "He said, and it was done; He commanded, and all things stood fast;" remarking that the immediate Creator, and, as it were, very Maker of the world was the Word, the Son of God; while the Father of the Word, by commanding His own Son--the Word--to create the world, is primarily Creator. And with regard to the creation of the light upon the first day, and of the firmament upon the second, and of the gathering together of the waters that are under the heaven into their several reservoirs on the third (the earth thus causing to sprout forth those (fruits) which are under the control of nature alone, and of the (great) lights and stars upon the fourth, and of aquatic animals upon the fifth, and of land animals and man upon the sixth, we have treated to the best of our ability in our notes upon Genesis, as well as in the foregoing pages, when we found fault with those who, taking the words in their apparent signification, said that the time of six days was occupied in the creation of the world, and quoted the words: "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens."

I'm minded of a legendary, possibly apocryphal quote from Karl Barth (pronounced "bart") when he was confronted by a woman who couldn't believe in a talking snake in Genesis 3. "It is not so very important whether the snake spoke. It is much more important what the snake said." Most serious theologians think that the purpose of Genesis 1-11 was not to give literal history, but to setup the basic propositions that:

• God created the world and it was "very good."
• Man screwed it up.
• The son of man, through the church, will restore it to its original goodness.

You don't have to agree with this; but I wish that those opposed to Christianity (neo-atheists, gay rights activists, and the like) would stop telling the church that we are not permitted to interpret our own sacred texts in ways that we have used for thousands of years.

(Note: I have a Ph.D. in "Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity: Textual and Historical Studies" from the University of Virginia -- basically, New Testament as I focused it -- so feel qualified to speak with some authority on this subject.)

There is no "maybe" about it.

Theorem: IF a person engages in violence while claiming to support a given cause, they are by definition an enemy of that cause who is actively working against it.

Proof: It is an empirical fact that the use of violence in the name of a cause has one overwhelming, inevitable and 99.9% predictable effect, which is to harden public sentiment against the cause. This fact is used routinely by agents provocateur to manipulate public sentiment. Now, since this is known by everyone, is well-documented and is as ordinary and uncontroversial a fact as "the sky is blue", it follows that the only reason anyone would ever use violence in the name of a cause is if they wished to discredit the cause. Since there is no other significant effect, there can be no other significant motivation.

Why people think that "people who genuinely believe in the cause" can be distinguished from "people who are manipulating public opinion" is not clear. They take exactly the same actions which have--unsurprisingly--exactly the same effect. Their purported motivations simply don't come into the equation anywhere. They are ALL agents provocateur, and are ALL opposed to the cause. Period. There is simply no other rational interpretation of any use of violence that is nominally done in the name of a cause.

That's extremely sad. Like anyone who understands the nature and cause of war, I view soldiers as what they are: the first victims of a hormonally driven, completely irrational and pointlessly destructive behavioural legacy of human evolution.

You and your friends and family have my deepest pity, and I sincerely hope we will one day live in a world where being a deadweight loss to the economy is not considered a matter of pride but sadness, and we all recognize that all soldiers are victims of our human failings.

Personally, I think that Apple, Google, et. al. should be required to maintain some sort of interoperability between their media platforms, or at least open them enough that others can compete. If I buy a movie on iTunes, I should be able to play it on an Android machine (there's no real technical obstacle.) Same for books, music, etc.

This is clear monopolistic behavior, and should be crushed like a bug.

are we in the middle of a Perl renaissance?

I hope not. I have to maintain a large body of Perl code at work, and it's a nightmare.

I was shopping for a car last night, and while reading stickers was struck that the Honda Pilot actually has more domestic parts than the Dodge Durango, and not by a little bit. I knew that this was at least potentially true, but was really struck when I saw it on the label.

I don't really care who owns the company, because they're just fat cats (and can starve for all I care.) I care who actually gets the middle class jobs involved in auto manufacturing.