A Former Atheist

[Jericho]

Error 404: MORALS NOT FOUND

[robvalue]

Your religion has been infected with a virus and now contains elements of other previous random religions. Also the data has been corrupted so the narrative is no longer consistent or coherent. The damage is permanent. Please reformat your religion and start again.

[Jericho]

It is suggested that you delete your religion. However, should you choose to keep it in the system, please scan it for hypocisy and fallacies.

[The Grand Nudger]

If you take away all historical inaccuracies and supernatural events from the Bible, you're basically left with a bunch of nonsensical, and many times, hateful teachings and laws.

Yes, a mirror of the time and the society they were created for. It's mildly interesting from a historical point of view, it's utterly appaling that a lot of people still try to follow that kind of desert dwelling Iron Age legislation to the letter.

Negatron.....it was regressive even when it was conceived...the main gripe of the authors being that the time and the society -did not- mirror their holy texts. They had become decadent.  

-which is pretty much what it's remained ever since......

[Jericho]

And here we are with an outdated book with less logic and truth in it than Animal Farm.

[Alex K]

...use riemannian geometry even  if it's just SR. Otherwise I wouldn't know how one would correctly take the new coordinates into account.

I dare not clog the forum. Callaghan considers a special case. The non-rotating frame is presumed inertial. The two observers coincide in space and have no linear motion relative to one another. The rotation is uniform about the x-axis. The only world line tracked belongs to a point that remains stationary in the rotating frame. In this case, Callaghan just applied the classical rotation matrix to change the two space coordinates and a separate equation, T(t) = t * sqrt(1 - w^2*r^2/c^2) to find the proper time T on the world line, which is a helix in the non-rotating frame. It was simple because the point's radial distance r, common to both observers, and the  rotating frame's angular rate w are constant. I can see this won't work if the point begins moving about. But I admit I'm in pretty heavy seas with this kind of stuff.  

Nonetheless, though the point is stationary in the rotating frame, it's clock is slower relative to both observers the greater r is. Callagan also noted that the rotating frame has a boundary: it only covers events inside the cylinder of radius c/w centered on the x-axis. I agree it's a non-interesting situation: all this to describe a stationary dot as seen by two people, one of whom is dizzy!

So I've worked out the metric for a rotating frame, and it's interesting. There's no point where it stops being valid, but - as one would maybe expect - beyond the point you say, where w r > c, objects *have* to move clockwise with respect to the coordinates, and if you go further, they have to move fast than a certain speed with respect to the coordinates. This simply reflects the fact that when the observer rotates, objects far enough away all seem to rotate.

[Hatshepsut]

...it's utterly appaling that a lot of people still try to follow that kind of desert dwelling Iron Age legislation to the letter.

Who said anything about a desert? Ahh...the lush green hills of Canaan. And malleable, low-melting bronze did fine until General Pompey blew in from Italy about 63 BCE.

So why do you still follow it?

...Please reformat your religion and start again.

Christianity can't seem to shake off the "literalists" and "legalists" who cling to its body like fleas. The issue is probably supposed to be more one of preserving a precious text tradition that has been handed down to us, not following everything to the letter. But unfortunately, the literalists encoded all the rules on one of those shiny CD ROMs to foil reformatting! Of course we don't want to alter the text itself, but we should read it with some brains regarding its provenance and its meaning in a modern world where understandings have progressed over the last 2000 years.

[robvalue]

I want to alter it

[Jericho]

Of course we don't want to alter the text itself, but we should read it with some brains regarding its provenance and its meaning in a modern world where understandings have progressed over the last 2000 years.

Well you may not want to alter the text, but did you know that you're already doing it? The Bible itself has been edited and revised quite a lot over the last couple of thousand years. The simple fact is that the Bible is actually still being edited (you can verify that yourself). Sometimes these edits have made quite significant deviations from the “original” text. Further, some of these edits have been made for what appear to be contemporary political purposes. Hell, the latest revision to the Bible was made around the 1970's, in order to cofront the growing issue that is abortion. Just saying.

[Hatshepsut]

Further, some of these edits have been made for what appear to be contemporary political purposes.  Hell, the latest revision to the Bible was made around the 1970's, ...

The newest New International Version is dated 2011. But the English translations aren't the original language texts, which have remained pretty stable for more than 1900 years (Old Testament) or 1750 years (New). Of course there were lengthy periods of redaction and flux for each text in the original languages as well, yet by a certain date each text reached its canonical form and hasn't been further changed since then.

It does pay to read translations carefully not only for bias, but because many concepts and language constructions in the originals do not translate directly to modern English. Ancients had different (and generally less) knowledge about the world than we do, and they organized that knowledge differently. For instance, in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 there's some doubt about sexual categories we translate as "homosexuals" but had specific connections with sexual servitude in the temple establishments of Graeco-Roman days. And this passage, used by fundamentalists to condemn homosexuality (itself a modern concept of sexual orientation that the ancients didn't have), is actually concerned mainly with Paul's believers suing each other over small disputes! While I doubt Paul approved of the "gay" thing, his comment on it was incidental and brief.