And your comment clearly shows that you are unable to engage rationally with viewpoints which differ from your own. Unfortunately, you've missed the point of my post, and simply repeated the same logical fallacies as the GP which I was attempting to point out.

Simple. There's people who ascribe the term "evil" to each of those concepts (yes, even potty-training). They have, in some cases, equally emotionally-charged opinions about secular humanism or potty training as Nadaka seems to have about religion. They would claim that those things cause "severe mental, emotional and ethical harm". They could even back it up with some anecdotal evidence ("I grew up in a secular-humanist household", or "I grew up in a household that potty-trained"), or some statistics (there's an awful lot of criminally-minded individuals out there who commit a lot of evil who have been potty-trained).

Hopefully, most of us would see right through their arguments. But, for some reason, when people start talking about the "evils of religion", we don't see the same holes in those arguments that we would see in a similarly-constructed argument about the "evils of potty-training", the "evils of vaccination", the "evils of wi-fi radiation", etc. Nadaka's argument is high on the same sort of hyperbole ("it imposes a severe mental, emotional, and ethical harm", "inflicting the communicable memetic disease", "the child never recovers") that often comes from the "anti-everything" crowd, but pretty short on data to support some pretty over-the-top claims.

Now, none of this is to say that Nadaka's "fundamentalist christian" upbringing DIDN'T have any hallmarks of mental, emotional, or ethical harm, or even child abuse. Perhaps it did. It does happen. But to paint all of "religion", or even all of "fundamentalist christian" with the same brush is rather poor reasoning.

One could just as easily substitute "secular humanism", "agnosticism", or for that matter "potty training" for the word "religion", and be on equally shaky philosophical footing with your comment.

I'm a biology teacher at a Christian school. I do teach evolution - with far more rigour than I ever taught it in public school - because I think that it's important for anyone who wants to hold a dissenting view on something considered to be this foundational to be really, really well informed about what they're disagreeing with. That said, I also work with students who have actually been abused by their parents - real abuse... emotional, physical, sexual, etc. Dogmatically stating "never teaching a child about evolution is abuse" just seems silly and insulting to anyone who has actually encountered abuse. Let's not throw the term "abuse" around so lightly.

Uh oh. The entire Christmas shopping thing is predicated on the assumption that you WILL feel left out on EXACTLY that basis. Better get my retirement savings out of retail stocks.

If they did, wouldn't "post card" be a missing option?

That's funny... On my work laptop, I use Linux specifically for Xournal, because I prefer it (in it's Linux binary form) so heavily to OneNote... Then, for all the other stuff I have to run at work, I boot back into Windows. But, Xournal doesn't have handwriting recognition, search, notebook organization, etc... just really, really awesome for producing miniscule pdfs of my handwritten notes.

That's a great graph. Took me a minute to realize that it was very strange to me to have time on the y axis, since it so rarely appears there - but once I got used to tilting my head at 90 degrees, it worked.. :)

Am I reading correctly that even the engine (a turbofan) was built entirely from 3d-printed parts? Now THAT's cool.

Yeah, pretty uneasy about this one. They got the home address wrong... The guy would definitely seem to be a creep ("I was just friends with her.." Really? 30-something guy and 15 year old girl?), but if he's innocent there's gonna be some serious trouble in store for him getting clear of this.

Well, he does have a point - if someone enjoys something, but it shortens their life span, is it "bad for them"? I suppose one does need to consider the "benefits" side of the cost-benefit analysis. That being said, it would be much easier to argue that someone smoking is certainly bad for ME - I get no particular benefit, and yet there are potential health hazards for me, there's the nuisance of the bad smells wafting into my home from the neighbours, and my health insurance premiums (or, in my case, my taxes) go up to cover the costs of their habit. But that can be a pretty slippery slope... I suppose my love of poutine (fries with cheese curds and gravy, for you non-Canadians) would also be considered "bad for you" due to the health problems it may well cause me one day...

Well, that's a rather poor example. The people who "don't believe in abortion", by which I assume you mean "don't believe that abortion should ever occur", predominately believe that because they equate it to murdering a helpless child. Whether that's right or wrong, surely you wouldn't say the same thing about murder - "don't try to keep me from murdering if I want to, just because you've got a hang-up about it". Again, not arguing the case one way or the other here, but when you think about it from from their point of view (abortion == murder), at least their strong stance is understandable.

This is true, but unfortunately, as a heuristic, "textbook + torrent == infringement" is probably going to be a pretty good one. I'd guess the vast majority of textbook torrents are "piratical". At this point, Mr. Jackson represents an edge-case - a very welcome one, but an edge case nonetheless. Still, it would sure be nice if there was a quicker way to get past the algorithm to an actual human who could take a look at particular cases like this one. Then perhaps we'd start overcoming that BitTorrent stigma.

You still sign a slip of paper when you use your credit card? How quaint!

How about this: The author of VIM, Bram Moolenar, spent a year in Kibaale between 1994-1995, and still actively solicits donations to the Kibaale Children's Centre which provides needy children in the district with education, food, and medical care. Check it out with a: :help kibaale from within VIM. Does that cover it? :)