So are you claiming that the accounts are fabricated? Or that someone carefully re-enacted certain of the predictions? Or some mix of the two?

You should read up on some of the prophecies Jesus is claimed to have fulfilled. Some of them involve the year and location of his birth (and indirectly, the length of his life), for instance. Obviously he didn't plan the circumstances of his birth himself (unless he's omnipotent in nature), so if you think he was a real person being talked about by essentially credible accounts, then his parents were in on the scheme also (at minimum). That seems unlikely.

If you do even a rudimentary search on "which prophecies did jesus fulfill" I think it'd be pretty difficult to intentionally fulfill all of them. The list of conspirators would be pretty long.

So in my mind, you would need to go back to assuming that the bible is largely fabricated post-facto.

Sadly, you missed my point. I'm not arguing that democracy results in truth.

First off, the early Christians were a persecuted minority. They did not "go along" with the majority, many of them were jailed or put to death because of their stubborn convictions.

Contrastingly, nobody _at all_ actually thinks FSM is a real entity. Nobody had died on behalf of their convictions that FSM is real.

I did not state that some people beleiving a thing is sufficient for its truth. However, I do imply a different question: is _anybody_ beleiving a thing _necessary_ for its truth? [a tangent we don't need to consider here]

If 100% of the people, upon considering the question of the existance of FSM, including the person who conjectured the existance of FSM -- if 100% of the populace concludes that FSM isn't real --- we don't strictly know if FSM is real or not.

However, irrespective of the truthful or delusional aspects of both entities -- FSM and the Christian God -- one of them has convinced precisely zero followers and the other has convinced billions.

Truthful or delusional, billions of people find the story of the Christian God compelling and true; nobody finds the FSM compelling or true.

They are clearly not comparable propositions.

People who use the same line of reasoning to reject God that they use to reject FSM are engaging in the ultimate strawman argument.

I'd like you to go back to my original 3 buckets in my original mail. Do you think that taxonomy is sufficient, or are there other possibilities I should include?

While it is technically true that there is as much acceptable-to-atheists "proof" of FSM's existance as there is of God's existance, there is one key difference.

Christ claimed, in all seriousness, to be the Son of God. And there are many eye witness accounts of him doing things that other people could not do. Most notably, there are multiple eye-witness acounts of him walking around and talking to people a few days _after he was murdererd_. Some of these accounts come from people who had much to lose from sounding like crazy people and nothing to gain from sharing their testimony.

Many people who were "taken in" by the claims of Christ and became his followers suffered tremendously.

What was the incentive for them to perpetuate a falsehood?

When reading the Bible and considering its truth claims, in my estimation, you must come away with one of these three broad conclusions:

1) the Bible is sufficiently fabricated to mean that most depictions of events are untrustworthy. Little in the book is relevant, from a truth perspective

2) Christ existed, and some of the depictions about what he did were accurate, but he was a magician and a tremendously good one, and was willing to commit his own life and the life of his friends to keeping his magician status secret.

3) Christ was actually exactly who he said he was: The Son of God. People begrudgingly beleive him because, despite mathematically improbable odds, he fulfilled the labyritnth of prophecies that greatly predate him, he performed many earthly miracles over the span of a few short years, and because he ultimately appeared physically to many people after he was publicly executed.

Forget for a moment whatever objections you have regarding the veracity of the claims about the claims. My point is that FSM has no such claims at all.

FSM may very well exist, but he/she/it/them/us hasn't convinced (fooled?) a bunch of people that he/she/it/them/us does.

Yes.

Everything entirely voluntary.

Anything non-voluntary is coercion. Coercion is always immoral.

In fact, democracy is always socialist, since both are the supression of the individual at the whim of some larger group.

The very idea of "majority rules" is socialist.

The US was notably _not_ a democracy. It is interesting that certain of our politicians have claimed otherwise at every possible opportunity.

What is their motive for this obfuscation?

...that can only be cured by the heavenly touch of Natalie Portman's hand upon my forehead.

Without this treatment, I fade in and out of conciousness, slowly losing body weight, muscle mass, and organ function. I have only 6 months to live if I do not get the treatment I need.

I've asked Mrs. Portman many times if there is a way she could lay her hand upon my forehead for the prescribed 8hr sessions 3 times a week. I've offered her all of my money. I've sold my home and my surviving family members have taken up disreputable work.

Alas, she refuses to lower her price, she has told me that she will not help me even if I pay her 1 million dollars per week!

I emplore you, caring people of the modern world. Please won't you save me?

I desperately need Natalie Portman's healing hand to save my life. But I cannot afford the outrageous prices she is demanding.

Can't someone do something?

The # of remaining active service warheads is surprisingly small. The entire ground-based ICBM fleet is 3 different detachments of 50 missiles each of the Minuteman. They are in MT, WY, and ND.

Each minuteman is fitted with 3 warheads in the 300-500KT range.

So, the entire active-force US ICBM fleet is 450 warheads.

Of course, this does not cover sea-based ICBMs. The numbers here are actually more substantial: there are 14 Ohio class boats in service, each with 24 Trident missiles. A trident can be equipped with between 4 and 12 warheads, depending on warhead type and treaty compliance. So we have at minium, around 1340 individual warheads in our Ohio-class Trident fleet, but if we broke treaty, and also fitted lower yield warheads, it could be in excess of 10,000 warheads.

Finally, there are warheads that are delivered by non-ICBM means. These of course cover the nuclear bombs of the USAF and Navy, the nuclear payloads for the ALCM, Tomahawk, and other intelligent guided munitions, and of course we have very low yield nuclear munitions for howitzers and other "large gun" type systems with ballistic profile for in-theater use.

The point of this is to say that the large spectre of our nuclear deterrant force that most midwestern kids grew up with -- the silo complex in the middle of a field -- has been almost entirely reduced to nothing. 450 warheads, 150 tubes, for the entire US mainland.

I beleive that treaties were harsh on fixed-installatino ICBM deployments and more lenient on sub-based forces, and I think this favored the US tremendously. It also makes good operational focus, since I am sure all of the relevant people in the former USSR know precisely where all of our land based tubes are, and all of them that haven't already launched will be done within the first 30 minutes.

Contrastingly, the Sub fleet's mission is to "Get lost". Nobody knows where they are, but enough of them are in position to fire on moments notice. It doesn't matter how many of the ground tubes are disabled, either before or after the first strike, the sub fleet has enough capacity to end humanity by itself.

I'm currently a software tester at Microsoft, and recently was promoted into the senior band. I'll comment on some of your points, to offer my contrasting experience.

1. this has never happened to me in my career. The spectrum of responses I get from developers are "why are you bothering me with this" to genuine appreciation. I am not discounting your experience, but know that you were probably in a defective org. They exist, but they are not the rule.

2. Nobody questions my competence after working with me. Also, if what you do doesn't impact the product, you definitely shouldn't be getting promoted. One of the factors mentioned in my reviews is the impact I continue to have on features and design decisions.

3. This is somewhat true. The SDET role was unique to Microsoft for a long time, and originally it was basically a ramp-up period to landing a dev job. The idea that a tester would want to continue to test (instead of moving into product development) after showing the competency and value required for several promotions just wasn't something Microsoft ever planned for.

The result is that Microsoft is struggling to define what makes someone clearly a Senior or Principal level contributor in a test role. This is doubly (or quadruply?) true if you are not currently or aiming to be a manager.

4. If it's any consolation, managers lie to other managers, managers lie to developers, and managers lie to PMs also. Management and lying are just part of how it works :)

5. Not true at all in my org. I've had developers buy me lunch before because I was able to help them find bugs we all knew were in there but they couldn't successfully track down.

6. This can certainly happen. Your job (and what makes you stand out from the other testers) are figuring out what to do about it. Do you refactor your tests to better insulate them from that kind of thing in the future? Do you attend or get feedback from dev meetings and offer estimates of test impact to proposed changes? Do you help make the schedule accomodate test constraints? Do you make the case that you need more help, perhaps some vendors to get through things? Do you show how you can deliver the same risk containment with fewer active tests?

The difference between career band N and career band N+1 is expanding the number of hardships you can turn into opportunities to demonstrate personal excellence and deliver team results.

7. So don't do manual testing. __Exploratory__ testing is where the majority of bugs are found, especially in actively developed areas of the product, and for many problem types is the most efficient activity in terms of hours spent vs. defects found. Exploratory testing is also one of the best ways to become domain experts on the product, and makes the automation you write considerably more effective. Read up on "exploratory testing" if you haven't -- it's what people _should_ be doing when someone says "manual" testing. At this point I relegate the definition of "manual testing" to following a script that has been prepared in advance and will not be deviated from. This sort of manual test is something that has enough value to be done more than once but not enough value to be automated (right now).

8. This is probably true. I've interviewed with other companies and they don't quite know what to do with me. Most people don't realize that SDETs were typically developers in their previous careers. I was a UNIX C++ developer prior to working at Microsoft. Seeing "Microsoft" on a resume can help get you noticed but seeing "10 years doing testing" is a hinderance. Like most jobs, you really need a referral or an inside-advocate to get your foot in the door. Once you have an opportunity to talk about what you've actually done with someone who understands software, it's less of a problem.

Personally, it's something I enjoy doing and am good at. There are aspects of the job (and the company) that upset me, but the developers on my team get upset by a lot of the same things.

The world is starting to learn that professional software testing is its own animal, with a different set of competencies.

And don't forget..

BRUTAL LEGEND.

Brutal Legend is one of those games that was always fun, always interesting, always funny. I never wanted it to be over. The setting and the attention and love for the world of music that I grew up with made me so willing to forgive anything about the game that was not awesome. Which is an untestable hypothesis, since everything in the game was extremely awesome.

I would play in the world of Brutal Legend for many more hours (and dollars) if I could.

Like anyone, I'm selective about the events I attend. If there will be people there I would like to see, I'll go. If the interaction becomes uninteresting, tiring, or otherwise unenjoyable, I leave.

An example comes to mind: I was recently helping a new friend celebrate his birthday. I was an outsider and knew only the host; I had only met a handful of the other guests before and only knew "of" them. We were having a good time for several hours. Eventually, some other guests who had already been out drinking showed up. One woman in particular was especially loud, boisterous, and uninteresting. She singlehandledly stopped the interactions that had been happening by yelling over people with inane bullshit, and started having a pity-party and was attempting to land a guilt-trip on the host by complaining about how she hadn't been invited.

I am not sure if this was the natural inclination of this woman, or if this was amplified greatly via the alcohol, or if she felt that the expectation of someone at a party is to simply be loud and boisterous. I concede that there are certainly gatherings and times when that is appropriate, and I've played that role at times, but it seems tacky to me if you play that card and the crowd isn't enjoying it and yet you persist.

There's no reason to change the mood of a group of people who are already visibly enjoying themselves.

So, with interesting conversation having effectively been squelched, I left shortly thereafter.

There were many occasions in college when the point in the evening came when people were ready to stop "generally" socializing and get down to the serious business of smoking pot. That was always my cue to leave, as I had no interest in that sort of activity.

Like I said: my time is too valuable to me to spend it in situations I am not enjoying and don't have other reasons to be enduring.