I think this is a great question.

Having been raised Christian I've been exposed to countless attempts to do just that, and sometimes I think it's a good thing. Even if you do manage to read the entire Bible (and study sufficiently to really understand what's going on, taking into account social, cultural and historical context along with the transformations the text has gone through) it's much easier to apply a distilled version to everyday life - hence the "statement of faith" composed by so many groups. And of course, this has been done throughout history. Here are a few that come to mind:

• I think this accounts for the popularity of John 3:16 ("For God so loved the word...").
• Much liturgy is about this. I like the Apostles' Creed, myself - it's short, but packed with specifics, and there are a number of good musical settings.
• A church I recently attended summarized it like this: "God loves you. Jesus died for you. You can have hope in the resurrection." I like this, but wish it was more specific about *which* resurrection I have hope in.
• As a teen I was taught this condensed version (with pictures) for evangelism: "God made people to be with him. People messed up and separated themselves from God. Jesus' life, death, and resurrection allow us to return to God. It's still up to us to return to God." I still think this was a funny choice; it's a bit negative to be someone's first exposure to theology.

In every case there's a sense that something important has been left out. In my opinion, the best ones are a few statements that can each be studied and explored to great depth. Painting in broad strokes is necessary because then your creed applies in more situations, and it's less divisive because different interpretations will work. But if you have a problem with different interpretations you have to be more specific... it's quite the balancing act.

In what universe? I thought most porn was fantasy...

Oh yeah, Emacs, not Eclipse. *facepalm* My bad. I just remember it was an IDE that I couldn't get working at the time, and had to dig through docs for literally days to figure out how to compile from the command line.

At least in the subject line of my original comment, # is just an infix representation for a tuple. From the Oz Tutorial:

"A common infix tuple-operator used in Oz is #. So, 1#2 is a tuple of two elements, and observe that 1#2#3 is a single tuple of three elements: '#'(1 2 3) and not the pair 1#(2#3). With the # operator, you cannot directly write an empty or a single element tuple. Instead, you must fall back on the usual prefix record syntax: the empty tuple must be written '#'() or just '#', and a single element tuple '#'(X).

The syntax can be weird, (why the double square-bracket? why?) but I wouldn't call that Oz's biggest misstep in gaining wide acceptance. In my experience, the biggest problems while learning were

1. Almost zero documentation on getting the language to (partially) compile and/or run outside of Eclipse. I'm not sure how I ever figured this out, to be honest.
2. Lack of a decent file I/O library. When was the last time you had to write your own streamreader for a business application?

I am thrilled to see Oz getting more mainstream attention - the whole dataflow concept is very cool, and it's fun to write.