Great television--Bad research

 

 

 

 

 
How adorable. A couple of things though:
 
1) Bartlett claims that the Old Testament requires the burning of his mother, since she wears garments made from different threads, and the public stoning of his brother for planting different crops side-by-side. Neither of these horrific penalties are associated with the passages he alludes to in his anti-Bible rant. While the Torah indeed forbids the mixing of the fibers or seeds, there is no specific penalty stated for the failure to do so. It was a part completely fabricated to make the biblical laws seem more harsh than they actually are.
 
2) This clip makes no attempt *whatsoever* to differentiate between the biblical laws that are still applicable today and those which aren't. For one thing, the Mosaic Law was never applicable to the Gentiles. It applied *only* to the Hebrew people who Moses led out of Egypt to settle in the Promised Land. For another, a large number of the laws were ceremonial and cultic regulations for the Ark of the Covenant or the Temple (both of which no longer exist) or practical regulations related to life in a nomadic desert setting. Bartlett groups them all together in an intellectually clumsy, but emotionally effective, manner, the intention of which I cannot see to be anything but an attempt at smearing both Christianity and Judaism.
 
3) As for homosexuality, Leviticus 18:22 hardly represents the only passage in Scripture which points to God's standards for marriage and sex. It is laid out by Jehovah in Genesis 1-2 and affirmed by Jesus in his teachings on marriage in the New Testament. There's also Paul's teachings on sexuality to confront. None of this is to sanction hatred or bigotry towards LGBT people, but it does prove that the perception of a Christian person opposing the "redefinition of marriage" basing their opinion solely on Leviticus is flawed and inaccurate.
 
What this clip does is it shows the importance of doing your homework. People should know what they believe and why–and they should be prepared when their conviction comes under attack. And while it is not always the case, Christians (and indeed all human beings) should always show love, kindness, courtesy, and respect–even to those with whom they disagree. But I haven't seen any pigs fly today, so I won't hold my breath.

 

 

 

 

 

Coding adventures

Here’s a curiosity about Java–in a random sequence, all sequences are equally likely, even not so random ones. Random random = new Random(441287210); for (int i=0;i<10;i++)     System.out.print(random.nextInt(10)+" "); } prints 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 and Random random = new  […]

Continue reading

American politics

Oh boy. Here we go, I guess. (You can nail me to the cross after reading it.)  As someone who was born in 1980s Yugoslavia I have been, in one way or another on a receiving end of a lot of american politics. Even hilariously by people who insisted we should suffer the same shit as they did,  […]

Continue reading

Life

  It gets harder and harder to disappear from your life. When you were a teenager, it was easy to check out from reality, but today is different. Today your life is formed; it has been built. When you decide to go, you are leaving behind a series of questions. You are leaving a mess that you will  […]

Continue reading

Blargh

 Between 4chan and tumblr, who has the dumber userbase ?    Honestly ? Tumblr.    A lot of the people on 4chan will act like unapologetic assholes, but at least they're not self-righteous about it. And, if shown legitimate proof of something, (based on what I've seen)  […]

Continue reading

Without you, there is no us

"This feeling was akin to heartbreak, and it took me a while to make sense of it--until one evening after dinner, looking at the students dotted across the schoolyard with their buckets, on garden duty, which seemed to happen more frequently as we neared Victory Day, July 27, it occurred to me that  […]

Continue reading

'Tis a season to be jolly

I’m glad that the phrase “Happy December” that we use here nicely covers the entire month, so one doesn’t need to search for reasons for resetting oneself so often with various substances because it’s December and it’s supposed to be a happy December, and we help it to be happy with substances, and  […]

Continue reading

Late night musings

Have you ever thought about how many people think about you? It’s so bizarre. Imagine someone, out of the blue, thinking of your face. Something happens; they remember you. Your favorite song, how you dress, the way you talk, the look in your eyes when you are happy.    They remember that  […]

Continue reading

The programmers at Arris don't know what they're doing

I've suffered with the worst pile of electronics having the audacity to call itself a cable modem Arris TM602 and its absolutely ridiculous security. You want to change settings ? The things requires a daily password. How to get it ? They want you to call support, who will tell you end  […]

Continue reading

The journey of a lifetime

Welcome, weary traveller. You’ve come a long, long way. You and the world around you are a temporary arrangement of matter and energy that took many billions of years to assemble. Imagine if you could deconstruct it and trace each part’s journey. Many of the trillions of atoms in your body were  […]

Continue reading

On censorship, snowflakes, and offensive material

Like every kid, I was forced to read Fahrenheit 451 in high school. If you’d asked me what it was about before last week, I would have told you: “Firemen who burn books.” And if you’d asked me why on earth they did that, I would have answered just as confidently: “Because a tyrannical government  […]

Continue reading

Morning ramblings

I'll never understand where this new trend of people listening to their music on portable speakers came from. As if carrying around music on their cellphones, usually in terrible quality, wasn't enough. Sure, a portable speaker makes sense if you're out somewhere, having a party or a barbecue or  […]

Continue reading

Randomness

Y'know the people who want to help you, but their help gives you more work than their absence would ? Yeah, I kind of hate that. Yet, again and again, I find myself surrounded with such people. Must be my karma or something. - I've known it for a while now, but I still sometimes get derailed by the  […]

Continue reading

Duh grada

Iako se mnogi trude objasniti da Sarajevo nije ono prijašnje (predratno) ipak povremeno se pojavi iskra onog nama svima poznatog i dragog duha Sarajeva. Prolazeći Grbavicom nismo mogli ne uočiti dvije mlade i lijepe Sarajke koje su se iz mnoštva lijepih sugrađanki izdvajale ekstremno oskudnim  […]

Continue reading

14,000 BC

Cold it was, and dark, when the vision came to her, for in the far north daylight was a gray dim time in the middle of the day that came, and went, and came again: an interlude between darknesses. They were not a large tribe as these things were counted then: nomads of the Northern Plains. They had  […]

Continue reading

Plah part XYZ

I'm starting to develop an aversion to computers. I'm pretty successfully ignoring bits and pieces of internet as it is. Comments, e-mails. I have to congratulate myself. People think they have the right to everything, that the world owes something to them. I'm beginning to understand the point of  […]

Continue reading

On Islam

From the Iranian revolution to the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks, and continued acts of global terrorism by militants in the name of Islam, questions have been raised and charges made regarding the relationship of Islam to religious extremism, violence, suicide bombing and terrorism. A common question often  […]

Continue reading

The winter is coming

There are people out there to whom it's impossible to explain my lack of presence in time and space. I shouldn't be so surprised, then, that I'm easy to miss, right ? I admit to being borderline present at best, but I still expect some common courtesy. Hopelessly, usually. Talking about what hurt  […]

Continue reading

Samota

Samota se mota vame; osamljen ostanek spomina.   V temnem kotu bela lisa, v sončnem oknu spet pogled. Skozi okno gre v kot svetloba, da bela lisa izgubi svoj lesk.   Sivina je na bregu mojega pogleda, še solze ne polzijo več v vrč. V vrču roža osušena, na oknu ni več mojih solz.

Takrat, ko bo korak zastal

Takrat, ko bo korak zastal in bo le noč naprej ostala, ko bom že dolga leta spal, morda nekoč ta list boš brala...   Ta list bo tak kot zdaj ostal, le bel papir bo pomečkan, le bel papir, ker sem oddal tam nek večer vse solze nanj;   vse solze nanj, ker sem želel, ko je bilo najbolj težko,  […]

Continue reading

Page top