Saul Luizaga wrote:
> You have said probably many truths here, but my point of view about the 
> Bible I think is still valid and the same as I wrote in my previous 
> post. A guide gets outdated and sometimes have some erroneous facts but 
> have to cope with that and take the good and the truth and apply it to 
> our life for constructive benefice which is basically what religions, 
> governments and society in general strives for, right? unless you deal 
> in absolutes, which I think this is a serious character flaw, and just 
> take the flaws of the Bible or any other text as a pretext to deny them 
> entirely; and AFAIK trying to follow a "perfect" path in life is just 
> utopia, I think at the contrary we have to make constant but gradual 
> changes in our life doing our very best.
> 
So.. If a guide has errors, you print a new guide, without the errors in 
it. You don't do the equivalent, which is what religion does, of taking 
a map that showed Antarctica as an island in the middle of the ocean, 
between Africa and South America, complete with rivers and lakes, which 
someone made up, then reprint the *same* map, complete with location, 
size, and shape, errors, while just removing the lakes, and some of the 
rivers, sticking the word "ice" in the middle, then making some 
notations along the edge, "not to scale". You print a new frakking map. 
You don't, to use an actual guide (sort of) as an example, take a book 
published by people who get nearly *all* of it wrong, then keep 
reprinting new copies, with things like, "Oh, actually Hillery Clinton 
wasn't the anti-Christ, it was Michael Jackson, or wait, no, it was Bozo 
the Clown, or no, sorry, oops! It was Obama."

If a guide is *drastically* wrong, you sit all the bits that are 
irrelevant on a shelf under "mythology", and laugh at people that used 
to believe it, while printing your "guide" with *only* the stuff that 
actually is relevant to what people are being guided to.

Religion does the opposite. It cherishes the mythology so much that they 
just keep reprinting the same guide, over and over, sometimes changing a 
word, or two, and maybe tacking on a whole mess of foot notes to 
"explain" why the literal meaning of the words are not true, but they 
really mean something else, **sometimes** the exact bloody opposite.

Lets be clear here. If someone sold you a "guide" to the wonders of the 
world, and it said the pyramids of Egypt where in South America, the 
Eiffel Tower was in New York, and that Micheal Jordan's shoes where one 
of the great worders, and then someone came along and "fixed it", by 
adding footnotes that said, "Actually, the first one is in Egypt, but is 
actually toothbrushes, the second one is in England, and we made a 
mistake on the later one, we meant Jordan Williams.", you would throw 
the damn thing in the trash. The closest you get to "fixing" the Bible 
is the Jeffersonian one, which deleted most of the OT, and anything 
supernatural, and even then, you would still have to revise it to fix 
all the stuff that archeology says is wrong place, wrong time, etc.

As a guide, its not the sort of guide anyone would look for, when trying 
to find *accurate* information about *any* other subject. Rather, it 
would be sitting on the shelf, next to the TAPS, FATE and Phact 
magazines, and people would be looking in "referece" for the real guides.

> And I don't re member well but I think that the Bible/Jesus don't say we 
> have to hate everyone including ourselves, but to deny ourselves meaning 
> detach from intellectual, personal or any other kind of pride that will 
> disable our capability of being ourselves: be in touch with our feeling, 
> flaws, virtues, etc and won't allow us to be humble to learn, improve, 
> find the better part of ourselves and greater good than what we think 
> we're capable of. In short is a meditation not a literal advice.
> 
> Cheers.
This is modern day interpretation, and *not* what the words of the book 
actually *say*. And that is the problem really. You don't get to have it 
both ways, not and then turn around and even *attempt* to say someone 
got it wrong, since all they have to do is say, "Yes, but the literal 
wording says the exact opposite." If you are right, you need to fix the 
wording, but then you would just have one more "incorrect" translation, 
which doesn't reflect the original wording, and people could, 
reasonably, argue doesn't reflect the intent of the author. If you are 
wrong, well, then its a damn stupid thing to look to for "guidance", 
since it doesn't say what you insist it does in the first place. Either 
way, you can't shrug off 2,000 years of idiocy, if right about it, or 
keep it, while insisting that everyone else is a bloody fool for 
continuing to read it *as written*. In neither case does it rise to the 
level of being a useful guide to creating anything other than an 
infinite amount of bloody confusion.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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