> Problem is, there

That's bullshit, and in a bullshit tone of voice.

Amy, ALL RELIGIOUS TEXTS ARE UNIMPROVABLE. There are no exceptions. The Bible at no point confesses fallibility, and you personally have cited many of its odious passages on this blog.

Yet you're unafraid. Why?

I'll tell you why: Christianity has been tamed. Doing so took generations of struggle, sacrifice and outright war: You have no excuse for being glib about it.

Listen... Anyone... Can someone please name a religion, just one, that's changed the wording of a fundamental text to accommodate modern insight?

Moonies? Scientology? (L Ron Hubbard hated teh gays, you know...) Confucianism?

Bonus points if the religion made that change because of suggestions from people who were NOT part of the faith.

Let me know.

> Jews interpret and argue

Some Jews do. Few by instinct, I suspect... Human nature isn't humble.

In any case, Judaism has obviously (nay, famously) been forged by opposition from surrounding culture around the world for millenia. Jews, like perhaps no other tribe, have learned that their arithmetic will be doublechecked no matter what.

Amy. AmyAmy. Amybug, The Big Aim, the Prehistoric Flying Ame-a-saures... Please understand this. All the virtues that you find in your life are not new. They're not the product of the people who express them, including yourself (and me). They're not, in most meaningful contexts, ours. We're at the end of a crazy-complicated mechanism of contingencies, a vast funnel of dumb luck and sacrifices by other people... Some of them brave, some of them cowards. Whether or not we feel gratitude in some poignant way, we need to recognize how we came to take their efforts for granted.

If the Torah were as flexible as you imagine, an editor in a century long past would have saved your mother's class the trouble of thinking about it so much.

Or are you glad no editor did? I personally am pleased the class is thinking about virtue in such explicit ways.

> Failsafes are built into Islam

You keep saying that. It's never any more meaningful.

Our sages tell us that Torah can be interpreted in four different general ways: peshat, remez, drush and sod.

Is that what they say? Since when? After how many centuries of violent opposition did they come to these conclusions?

Do you seriously, seriously contend that any religion came to a condition of humility by its own accord? Could I not take you to TODAY to a neighborhood where intrusive practice of Judaism would oppress and appall you?... Including, certainly, within the United States?

It's a favorite moment because I was there for it, so I've posted it time and time again... But remember, in all faiths, "the rats are still down there, incubating the bacilli."

There's nothing new under the sun.

(That's from the old book.)

Listen... Anyone... Can someone please name a religion, just one, that's changed the wording of a fundamental text to accommodate modern insight?

If you mean modern as in today, many christian variants use widely different 'translated' versions of the bible

If you mean modern as is 'at the time'
Well, then you have Catholocism, Lutheraninsm, Anglicanism, and Puritanism.
Unless you refuse to see excising entire books and passages as change

"Failsafes." You're concerned about failsafes.

Maybe you never heard about Papal infallibility. (Note that its taken a few centuries of paperwork to get this one under control.)



Hitchens had said that Rome vacated it's teachings on purgatory a few years ago; but reading the web this afternoon, we see that

"the Catholic Church still teaches it, and Catholics are bound to believe in it."

(emphasis: Cridmo)

You don't seem to be panicking, though.

Lookilpiddledik agrees with me. The splintering and diminishment of Christian power has been a lengthy and detailed process... So it will be with Islam.

OK then! Well, I'll do my part... And I won't pretend to be the first person in history to face the problem.

Islam has already splintered into a number of sects, and if they ever get the upper hand over the worlds peoples, members of these sects will simply run around killing members of the other sects. A "your Islam is not as Islamic as my Islam" sort of thing, if you will.

I cannot foresee it going down any other way. Pacified Christianity, on the other hand, typically does not have members of its sects running around killing members of its other sects. For Islam to live peaceably WITH ITSELF, let alone with other religions, there will have to be a massive reformation.

> members of these sects will simply run around
> killing members of the other sects

Oh, you mean like Christians used to do.

> Pacified Christianity, on the other hand,
> typically does not have members of its sects
> running around killing

Aii. Aiiyiiyiiyiiyi.

What will it take for people to recognize that this is my argument?

CHRISTIANITY HAS BEEN
✌ PACIFIED ✌

It's been going on for so long, and has worked so well, that you want to pretend it never happened. So do the Christians! They want to believe, and need YOU to believe, that they're this nice by nature!

Tranquilized into neighborliness, yet still ursine.

What will it take for people to recognize that this is my argument?

CHRISTIANITY HAS BEEN ✌ PACIFIED ✌

Hmmm. What was the mortality rate of the Christian European wars of Religion?

It is no act of bravery to be an unbeliever in the West.

Anymore.

It is no act of bravery to be an unbeliever in the West. Anymore.

Yes, with Chrisianity, being an unbeliever -- or being the wrong kind of believer -- could be a very dangerous proposition. But your "anymore" is the key word there. That's in the past. In this regard, Christianity has matured, or reformed.

Islam has yet to do so in the same way. And I'm not sure it ever will.

> In this regard, Christianity has matured,
> or reformed.

Why? Why?

Why do people believe this?

Why?  Why?  Why?  Why?  Why?  Why?  Why?

Why? There's some THRILL that people get in thinking that Christianity is what made Christians nice... Even when they themselves are not Christian.

I don't think so. Not for a fucking moment. It was kicked into this timid old age. Christianity didn't "reform," Christianity was reformed... In figurative as well as literal senses.





Does anyone remember when all the people who happened to meet Paul's grandfather in A Hard Day's Night would describe him, inexplicably, as "very clean"?

This is like that.

> And I'm not sure it ever will.

It will if it wants to survive. Humanity everywhere wants modernity. And you know what modernity demands that militant Islam can't deal with?

Women.

IIRC, there was this little thing called The Enlightenment.

Coming eventually, although not soon enough, to Islam.

Yes. We've already done a lot of the heavy lifting... The enlightenment is much more accessible than it used to be. American kids go through it in grade school without even knowing it's happened to them.

BLOG-COMMENT-TRIGGERING-DATASOURCE-INPUT_#1:

Awhile back I came across this article. The subtitle was so despicable that I left the link to the article on my desktop for two weeks, then grudgingly speed-scanned it.

What If We Never Run Out of Oil?
Charles C. Mann Apr 24 2013, 9:58 PM ET

New technology and a little-known energy source suggest that fossil fuels may not be finite. This would be a miracle—and a nightmare.

Well, an editor probably gave it the subtitle, but it's still annoying. There enough energy in the world to keep everyone clothed and fed: The fact that this blessing comes with hazards, including some we cannot foresee, doesn't make it a nightmare. At all.

BLOG-COMMENT-TRIGGERING-DATASOURCE-INPUT_#2:

Then, earlier tonight, I was reading this old exchange with Raddy, who thinks it would be really bad if everyone lived as well as you and I do:

You can't bring two billion Chinese, a billion Indians and a couple of billion others up yearning for automobiles and single-family homes as they are built today.

Here's the deal: The Enlightenment is available to everyone now, even to cultures who were to foolish or isolated to take part when it really happened. China the Middle East and Africa can skip the worst parts of the west development, and concentrate on improving things even more, both socially and technologically.

I happen to have a friend emailing tonight from Guangzhou, where he's parked overnight as transport navigator. I asked about the air quality (midday Tuesday), and the response just now was fascinating: Better than average, which is worse than LA on a bad day, although not as bad as LA in the early 60s.

Well, there are 12 million people in Guangzhou. It's on the West Coast. I don't know the weather patterns, but a continental nation's worth of air pollution is blowing by his hotel window on the way to the pacific. And in a relatively underdeveloped (filthy) industrial nation... But the air's better than Los Angeles used to be! That's fantastic.

Listen, people solve problems, and China has more than a billion people, so they're going to have several really, really, bright ones. And those people will be motivated! First, because they're probably poor and hungry for success. Second, because China has no choice but to solve these problems... They need to get every last penny of value from a barrel of oil, and to reduce pollution as much as possible. Nobody's going to give them "automobiles and single-family homes as they are built today"... But they'll have those things as they're built tomorrow, which will be better in ways we can't foresee.

Present metrics are not future norms... Not for sex, not for pollution, not for violence, not for hunger, not for energy. People solve problems, and having the experience and products of the United States (and Europe), both human and otherwise, will be a tremendous blessing to nations who need to get to the future in a hurry.

I wonder if you see what you did there, creeping around to agree with the physical limits I cited.

Even as a threadjack.

Hamilton is not widely known for objectivity.

Just sayin.

> creeping around to agree with the physical
> limits I cited

Negatory, Big Ben. I noted that your expression of concern—

> You can't bring two billion Chinese, a billion
> Indians and a couple of billion others up
> yearning for automobiles and single-family
> homes as they are built today.

—was completely inappropriate, and in almost exactly the same way as your prattle that "the quantity of oil on Earth is finite."

These wordings are either pathetically oblivious or despicably deceptive. After however-many years, I'm still not sure which way to go.

For the record, I very very badly want to "bring two billion Chinese, a billion Indians and a couple of billion others up yearning for automobiles and single-family homes as they are built today." I want this to happen more than anything else in the Universe. That's basically the humanity's challenge for the twenty-first century, as Barnett put it... To bring the Chindian middle classes online with minimal disruption. They want it, the deserve it, and they're going to goo for it whether it hurt Raddy's zero-summy feelings or not.

Some things will be difficult for them, just as things have been difficult for some in the United States. They will persevere and adapt, as we did, and their needs will be met... You can BANK on that.

Sorry Raddy! You don't get to pull the ladder up into your treehouse just because it looks like the flood's coming.

The quantity of oil on Earth is finite.

None of your wonderful prose can change that. Now, go buy a gallon for $4, not the least of which reason is that these other nations want gas, too.

You want it. You say so right here.

PS- you made up the part about "zero-summy feelings". That's an outstanding example of minimization by ridicule, but that's fallacious, as well as a silly attempt to deny my assertion: that the amount of chemical and fissile energy on Earth is fixed. Any good geology textbook would show you the obvious.