Yes, but if you can sufficiently undermine him personally, it becomes a lot easier to undermine what he has to say. People happily shoot the messenger all the time.

like Socrates, he will be forced to drink the hemlock tea.

If slavery was going to end in the South, why were the Southern states so keen to make sure a large ratio of future states bring formed out of the Western expansion would b slave states?

The slave states didn't want just accommodation, they wanted to expand and further entrench slavery.

For a quick glance at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_of_Unknowing, if not a purchase, I'm leery about any doctrine not maximizing the individual in terms of body, mind & soul.
Because while pursuing Christ is the ultimate goal of any Christian, maximizing oneself in all three dimensions is certainly the bi-product.
Things like Calvinism or heavy navel-gazing seem like Satan's judo, where the devil can't corrupt people directly enough, so they are sidelined with mumbo-jumbo.
But I haven't read the book, so I can't really get too punky about what's said therein.

Well, if it's anything other than the Gospel as written, and let's not kid ourselves--there is a vast swath of people labeling themselves Christian whose doctrine is sheer hooey--then those purported Christians are going to be Crush-tians.

Don't forget about the landing fuel you have to tote with you along your whole trip. That is not trivial weight.

Well, capitalists are always going to want to draw a harder line between the source code and other client code.
Mostly to support some business model, but also for performance: note that even GNU Emacs, in all of its glory, compiles a significant amount of the grungy code down to native binary, for performance reasons.

You make these assertions about "terrible language" -- what is it about the design goals of SQL you don't like?
and
"just not designed for object persistence" -- do you mean all of the overhead of normalizing data and casting it to canonical data types, as opposed to just dumping it to some key/value store a-la MongoDB?
I mean, sure, there is no universal tool that scales from a boot image to a data center. Yes, fanbois are tedious. But, other than PHP, I can find a little something to love in just about anything.

Right, but the point about the Lisp interpreter is that wandering back and forth across the line between the source code and the live data (mostly impossible with other systems) is readily attainable with Lisp.

Can you name one? I suppose the recent bit about "enforcing my will through legislation" is about as close as you're going to come, for all one doesn't feel the need to excuse supporting "2 + 2 =4" as an expression, either.

You can't assert that without denying free will, at which point your cheep materialistic reduction eats itself: in what context can the question of morality even ARISE, if we're all merely bags o' meat?
No, I don't think my excuse-fu even holds a candle to yours, sir.

In Soviet Russia Bing searches you!

We can theorize much, but upon what basis?

Which is another way to state my point about the unity of (code . data)
But I think that point is substantially a theoretical one; I write VBA code that generates VBA code all the time. Sure, I may not be able to execute it cleanly in one fell swoop, but you'll notice that MSOffice has orders of magnitude more market penetration than Lisp.

This project will achieve the first 66% outright, then fanny about ad in-fanny-itum on government subsidies to ivory towers near you, workin' hard, strivin' to get the other 9% nailed down.
Beside the white collar welfare, of course, this will help keep those academics and the stunnedents whose minds they poison voting correctly.
Sweet, sweet descent into oblivion!

And so what cheap excuses have I offered to God for my sins?

Sweet, sweet Progress!