Cody Russell

Bible

Iain:

Okay, but how can the Old Testament still be partly correct and partly incorrect, unless God has changed attitudes in time? It seems that one of three things must be true:
• The Old Testament is not completely true
• The New Testament is not completely true
• Neither Testament is completely true

Surely, both cannot be completely true. And if you say that Deuteronomy Chapter 13 (which is actually the chapter I was looking for earlier, not Chapter 7.. I apologize for that) is not the true word of your God, then how can you believe that other parts of the Old Testament are true? If one piece is not true, then it seems you have very just cause to question the entire Testament’s accuracy.

How can you treat the Old Testament as a piece of history if you cannot have complete faith in its accuracy? Much of the text was in the form of “God said…”. So, what I wonder is, did God actually say it, or did he change his mind later on, or was he just wrong the first time, or what? God said that thou shalt not kill, yet he also clearly said to kill people (Deuteronomy 13:9 says but thou shalt surely kill him; thy hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people.)

I don’t understand how you can view Old Testament as a history if you do not have complete faith in its accuracy, and I do not understand how you can have complete faith in its accuracy when it contradicts itself and when the New Testament contradicts it.

The verdict is in

I got a response from the admins at Johns Hopkins web servers today. It seems that their primary reason for removing the passwd command was simply that they thought their users were too stupid to use it, so they created a webpage to do it instead. That’s brilliant. They create a cryptic username for me for some reason, while they don’t for everyone. I thought, okay.. maybe they have another user name crussell. But, no, they do not. grepping /etc/passwd shows that there are two other users with “russel” in their usernames, and neither of them are crussell. One of them also has a digit in his or her username, while the other does not.

They also restrict access control, such as chmod, so you can’t share your files with other users. Their reasoning for this is that this server is purely a mail server. However, it is not purely a mail server because we also have personal web space, and I can conceive of a time when I may want to make a file in my public web directory writable for another user.

Do any other Advogato users have suggestions on how to deal with senseless sysadmins? Or if you think the sysadmin is correct in crippling the server, please tell me why they would do this because so far the sysadmin has been incapable of telling me this.

Bible

Iain:

I’m sorry if my understanding of Christianity is very limited, so please forgive my comments if they’re not correct. However, I’d like to understand why they’re not correct so I don’t make the same mistakes in the future. One thing I don’t understand is how if Christians don’t believe in the Old Testament, why do they believe certain parts of it like the Ten Commandments, the story of Adam and Eve, etc? And if Christians do believe in the Old Testament as you said, I don’t understand how God could have suddenly made such a major change in role from the “I’m going to smoke your ass if you don’t keep me very happy” attitude to the “let’s be good friends and love one another” attitude. If this was how Jesus taught that God is, how can you still believe in the Old Testament at any level when it so clearly says the opposite? The religion would make more sense if they just ditched the Old Testament from the beginning and said, “No, this is how it really is.” My understanding of Islam is even less, but I think that is basically what they did.

I have gotten this sort of response before, that Christians don’t use the Old Testament. But nobody can ever tell me why. Is there ever a place in the New Testament that says, “Do not use the Old Testament.”? Or is this just something that is generally agreed upon by Christians for some reason? This is why I say that things are so open to interpretation. If it never says don’t use the Old Testament, can you say that a thousand years from now people who call themselves Christians will not “forget” the unwritten rule that they should not use the Old Testament? Christianity has changed a lot in a relatively short period of time, and it can continue to change.

Regarding your comment about the “fork”, perhaps I am taking this out of the context of time, but I was trying to point out that the Bible shows people killing over religion. I always hear people preaching about doing what the Bible says, but of course they never mean it in this way. My point was originally on religious conflict and tension, which is obviously illustrated in the Bible (Old Testament, though, as you pointed out, whose actual purpose I am still unclear on). I just told you that I was speaking about religion in general, not Christianity specifically. You’re the one who won’t address my original statement and have brought us out on this tangent of purely Christian discussion. That was not my intent at all. The Middle Eastern conflict is mostly involving Judaism and Islam, although the US involvement stems loosely from Christianity.

Bible

Iain:

Your Bible never speaks of killing people of other religions? What crack are you smoking dude? I gave you the book, just not the chapter. But I have it now: Chapter 7.

“When the LORD your God brings you into the land where you are entering to possess it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and stronger than you, and when the LORD your God delivers them before you and you defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to them. Furthermore, you shall not intermarry with them; you shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters for your sons. For they will turn your sons away from following Me to serve other gods; then the anger of the LORD will be kindled against you and He will quickly destroy you. But thus you shall do to them: you shall tear down their altars, and smash their sacred pillars, and hew down their Asherim, and burn their graven images with fire. For you are a holy people to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for His own possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.”

Read some earlier chapters (and probably some later chapters, too, I haven’t gone much farther yet) and you’ll see more war and destruction. I’m constantly amazed by how little Christians are truly aware of their own Bible. Most just read the pretty and happy parts, and they ignore all the sex, war, and other such dreaded topics and they pretend it’s not in there. It’s in there, dude, whether you want to believe it or not.

However, I don’t doubt in the slightest that another book will say to love and evangelise these people. That would not be the only contradiction in there. And it also makes for a religion that’s easy to “interpret” into whatever culture you like. A thousand years from now, will Christianity still be the peaceful loving religion that it is supposed to be today? Or will people remember what a jealous and destructive God that they also have?

Christianity was not my original topic. I didn’t originally intend to speak about it alone. I was talking about the idea of conflict between religion and how this always seems to spark death and suffering. Are you still denying that this is true?

Religion

Iain:

I didn’t say religion was the cause of all death and suffering in the world, but it seems to be the dominant thing historically. No other single force has contributed more to pain, death, and suffering that I can think of. The Middle East has been plagued by religious troubles forever. The Nazi extermination was mostly religious in nature. The Crusades were a massive toll in lives. Did you ever stop and wonder why online flamewars get promoted to the term “holy war” when they get totally out of control and have nothing but stupid, senseless arguing back and forth with no end in sight?

Look, dude, it’s fucking codified into these religions that they are the one true religion and that all others are evil and should be exterminated. Read the Bible, dude, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Read Deuteronomy and all the war and killing in it. There’s a section in there that says something to the effect that if your neighbor or your brother worships another god, you should kill him. I tried to find this in some online Bible, but they have 34 chapters of Deuteronomy, and considering how drastically different Bibles seem to be (which I’ve never been able to understand), I could be just wasting my time finding the link. If you don’t have a totally watered-down-for-children Bible, it should be in there. The same sorts of things exist in the Qur’an.

Buddhism is different. It’s much more focused on achieving enlightenment and valuing human life and such. The human mind is held in great regard, while some Other Religions are quite the opposite and have historically (up to and including today) actively sought to subdue the human mind and lower the general awareness and thinking potential of people. This was a big function of the Church in Europe for a long time. It’s still in use today to some extent, as we Americans have witnessed with the Kansas Board of Public Education.

Iain, the things you mentioned are obviously very small-scale and short-term compared to religious conflicts, which have plagued human society for thousands of years. How can you even compare the fucking IRA to something like this? Sure, there are human conflicts that are not religious and there always will be. But the difference is that they have solutions. Whether people act on those solutions in a timely manner is another problem entirely. When you have multiple major world religions that all claim to be the only true religion, all claim to have the same location as their Holy Place, and all say “Kill people who aren’t of your faith”, then you’ve got a problem.

Please, dude, enlighten me and tell me how this is really not as big of a problem as it appears to be.

I’m not intending this as a personal attack on you or anyone else. I was really upset this morning and may have spoken a little rashly. However, I won’t withdraw my opinion that religion has been a pretty Bad Thing historically.

And just because you may disagree, I assure you that my opinion of you will not take a 110 story leap. =) Rather than instantly condemning someone of another opinion, I think discussing the differences in opinion and trying to understand the other person’s opinion is more productive.

JHU servers

On a completely different note, Johns Hopkins servers are still pissing me off. However, rather than condemning the sysadmins completely, I have asked them why they have crippled the servers to the point that they are almost unusable. I hope to achieve Enlightenment on this topic in the near future. Unfortunately, due to the terrorism, Johns Hopkins University is shutdown right now so it may be many days before my email is read and responded to.

11 Sep 2001

chrisime: It only has the potential to be a third world war in the sense that once the attackers’ organization is discovered, they will be in deep fucking shit because it will be the entire fucking world against them. No Axis and Allies this time, it’s practically the whole fucking planet against their dumb asses.

11 Sep 2001

Fuck off you pansy bastards!

To all you people who say “let’s just have peace, don’t retaliate”: fuck off! You sit on your asses and don’t do shit, but I expect my country to determine who did this and then I expect them to be exterminated like the filthy pests they are.

While it is still unknown at this time who planned and implemented this assault, I suspect Middle Eastern religious idiots. It doesn’t really matter who it is, as long as they fucking die.

If it is the Middle Eastern militants, this just goes to prove that the world will never be safe while religion remains a dominant force. Period. Religion causes more pain, death, and suffering than anything in history. It’s obviously the worst disease to have ever afflicted the human race.

10 Sep 2001

yakk: I hope you feel better soon, dude!

Stupid JHMI server

The Johns Hopkins Medical Institute Internet servers are the most braindead boxes I’ve ever seen. The JHMI server (pronounced “Jimmy”) is totally stripped of all useful functionality, except for pine. They’ve actually gone so far as to remove such useful, and usually essential, commands such as chmod! passwd gives “Permission denied”, and I’m required to use a web-based method to change my password. finger is removed and replaced by an awk script and a grep of the /etc/passwd file so that it can say the user’s full name, and “There is no other information available about this user”. Highly useless. It is missing tar and gzip, but for some reason it does have compress.

I sent a mail to the support staff at jhmi.edu informing them that I thought the system setup was stupid, that I wasn’t fooled by the finger script, and that people at school now call this new computer setup “Timmy”, after the parapalegic kid on South Park who is almost as capable as their net servers.

Expect more on this topic very soon..