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20 Dec 09
Early Humans Finally Drunk Enough To Invent Dancing | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
New 'War' Enables Mankind To Resolve Disagreements | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
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war has solved hundreds of problems, from waterway access to border disputes to the entirety of Polish history.
07 Dec 09
The complicated history of simple scientific facts
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how science really comes to its conclusions, a process that involves a few hundred years of work.
10 Nov 09
Is Blind Faith in God and the Bible a Modern Invention? | | AlterNet
Interesting analysis of the evolution of the meaning of the words "faith" and "belief" from early Christianity to today. Faith in the past was superior to today's, dealing with "commitment" instead of "blind belief that something is true."
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The term used in most New Testament texts (the Greek word pistis) meant something closer to loyalty or commitment, than unreasoning belief. When Jesus chastised his followers for their lack of faith, or commended a non-Jew for having faith, he wasn't talking about some unspoken creed. He certainly wasn't praising them for seeing that he was divine. He was talking about follow-through, about living up to ideas of selflessness and humbleness. Even the word "belief" has changed from a Middle English sense of "prize" to our modern idea of "accept at face value." Imagine how different every Christian creed would sound today if we replace "believe in" with "value" and "have faith in" with "commit myself to."
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