I liked the article, but this is like the cultural equivalent of Not Invented Here. Does it really matter that organized Christianity believes that a guy woke up from the dead? If you want a sense of community and the rituals that go along with it, then you could absolutely join a church of your choosing and just not believe in zombie messiahs.
The wife and I have been talking about this at great length as of late. We are not wired to believe in the supernatural, but I am having a hard time coming up with reasons why that would prevent us from finding a church to go to. It does limit which churches might be accepting of us, as I will not be handling snakes or washing anyone's feet. But as churches get more and more devoid of fundamentalism (a survival maneuver), they become more and more like the thing being talked about in the fine article. Maybe it'll all meet in the middle one day.
If you join a fundamentalist cult, then yes. Lots of modern churches are non-denominational and quite relaxed. In fact, they are surprisingly similar to the entity being described in the article.
I'm pretty sure a belief in the major parts of the bible are necessary, are they not? I mean, I thought the resurrection of christ was the whole point of anything describable as Christianity?
The whole point of Christ dying was to forgive sins.
In the old testament they would sacrifice animals and use the blood of the animals to wash away sin. People would sacrifice animals at the temple with a Priest and collect the blood to wash away their sins.
Christ was God's sacrifice to end that practice Christ's blood was shed to wash away our sins. Christ was dead for three days to build a bypass from hell into heaven. Before that it wasn't possible to reach heaven. Christ rose from the dead and promises on judgement day when he returned to raise the dead and judge them.
Islam differs on Jesus they see him as a Prophet didn't die on the cross, and converted to Islam, and there is no trinity in their religion. Jesus is not the son of God or Messiah but a Prophet instead named Isa.
Some churches are converting to Chrislam where they rewrite the Bible to be compatible with Islam. One that Christ doesn't die and isn't resurrected.
You'll find that there are many different versions of Christianity, even Atheist Christians who follow Christ's teachings but don't believe he is a God.
Many Christians became non-practicing because they got busy with their jobs or they just stopped believing. A lot of atheists used to be Christian at one point, and just didn't believe in God any more.
In modern times people worship science and technology and don't see a need for God anymore.
When you visit a church you see elderly people, and the sick and disabled, the sort of people who need God. You don't see very many of the young adults who are healthy, if there are any young people they come in with their parents.
> When you visit a (fundamental) church you see elderly people, and the sick and disabled, the sort of people who need God. You don't see very many of the young adults who are healthy, if there are any young people they come in with their parents.
An observation of the fundamental church at large reflects your statement. I would delimit that statement though to say that there are pockets of thriving 'resistance', so to speak. I happen to belong to a fundamental church that bucks the trend of an ageing population.
I really cannot visit every single church in the USA.
The ones I do visit they are trying to figure out how to get young people involved with them. The Catholic church for example has a shortage of priests and they need more young priests and young volunteers. They need more young people to attend church and donate money as well.
It may be different in where you live because your church has a connection with young people. But near me in the St. Louis MO area, young people are dropping out of church to become non-practicing or atheists.
Generally churches have a minimum set of beliefs to be accepted as an official member. However, most churches welcome people who don't believe to be part of the community. There are limitations--non-believers usually can't be part of leadership (one of the reasons being the reason you gave)--but it's part of the Church's mission to bring to goodness of God, community included, to non-believers.
> I thought the resurrection of christ was the whole point of anything describable as Christianity?
Yes: "But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith." 1 Corinthians 15:12-14
I don't think it's very useful to quote the bible as a source of what Christians believe. So far as I can tell, only a tiny sliver of Christians believe the work in its entirety.
I've always assumed the reason is because only a tiny sliver of Christians have actually read the whole bible - so they probably have no idea what it says. A quick google search seems to confirm my assumption [1].
I've always assumed it's because if you read it it's filled with some awesome love/acceptance/transcendence stuff and some really terrible bronze age horrors. It would be too terrible to actually take it at face value.
There are lots of good sibling comments to this one, but I want to get one more point in before we all move on.
Spending an hour yielding to something larger than yourself is probably good for the soul and definitely good for the ego. You can walk into almost any church, and there you will find a quiet space where you can meditate/pray. You can find a sort of comfort in its 2000 year history, and in the myths/rituals of our past and the people who believe in them. If you are made to feel uncomfortable, then try another one or stop going altogether, there are literally zero negative consequences to it.
The point of this is that you don't have to swear an oath to little baby jesus to get a benefit from a modernized church. You can make of it what you want, they won't mind in the least.
One popular meme you'll see is the pre-christian greco-romans didn't saw religion and belief as somewhat orthogonal. So you went to the ritual/party at the temple to hang out, show off your (purchased) social class within the temple, and do the ritual, show off to everyone else that you did the ritual, show off how well you memorized the allegorical tales, etc. Personal belief was not a terribly high priority. How much of this is "real" analysis vs Victorian era make believe is not entirely clear.
At my previous neighborhood mainstream church (Methodist) which I attended for a while, many attendees did not really believe in most of what was preached. For them it was mostly a social gathering, an opportunity to sing enthusiastically together (and how often do you get to do that today?), and a lot of social events (church picnics etc). As a social group it worked very well. People really would help each other out. The subject of religion rarely came up in any of these social events, and you could certainly get by without having any real belief or even much knowledge of traditional Christianity.
I've been trying to think why it worked while secular communities do not, since it was in a sense a secular community. All I can think of is that most members had been there all their lives, it was what they grew into, and it was welcoming to outsiders.
If you can handle the cognitive dissonance of listening to sermons every week that you do not really believe, I think it can be a plausible way of getting that kind of social engagement.
> The one big vertically scaled database at the hub of everything is definitely disappearing.
Maybe in Startupville, CA. But I think you're forgetting that it's a big world out there and there are lots of systems that are built on vertically scaled relational engines that practically print money. The vast majority of companies out there do not have Twitter-scale engineering problems to solve.
I work exclusively in Fortune 500 size enterprises.
And the big EDW that you use to find powering everything has been broken over the years into unintegrated silos e.g. ERP, Web, Salesforce, Payroll etc. The big trend now is to reintegrate all this data and do analytics on it. To do this requires you to do (a) major ETL work between completely different schemas then (b) your data science/analytics work. In semi real time.
This article is referring to this type of workload since this is Spark's bread/butter. You land the data in HDFS, use Spark SQL to run ETL/Analytics jobs and then output the results in a single enterprise view for reporting, marketing etc. And yes this is identical to what Twitter's analytics team would be doing.
With cloud tools from Azure, IBM, Amazon this sort of analytics is going to be becoming much more common place. All using SQL the language but not SQL the database.
The enterprise I work for won't touch cloud with a 10 foot pole, and I know this because we literally got told to quit asking about it. :)
So yes, even we are building out a pretty beefy internal Hadoop cluster, so I would never say that it will be all-relational-all-the-time. But my point was more that there will be copious amounts of SSAS cubes and Oracle warehouses for the foreseeable future. They work great for their use cases and they have well known problems with well known solutions. Doing what Twitter's team is doing when you aren't Twitter might not be the best idea for everyone, after all.
In our case, we use Teradata for our work and it's quite capable of handling very large workloads, and thus we currently have no plans to spin it down in favor of the new hotness. (Even though the new Hadoop cluster positively dwarfs our TD appliance.) I'd say we have a mixture of both on the horizon, if only because our DBAs are less than cooperative about Java UDFs, so Hadoop is the easiest way for us to do complex processing against our fairly large data set.
For EDW, yes. You might see smaller federated data marts or even separately managed relational dbs all over the place. But for OLTP systems for the vast majority of enterprises out there, the vertical single instance big hunk database is still big dawg.
> separately managed relational dbs all over the place
On the BI side, this is overwhelmingly the outcome for large companies. The business units get silo'ed, they build their fiefdoms, a consolidation project gets kicked off and fails, rinse, repeat. Even if the consolidation succeeds, it takes extremely strong leadership to keep it from devolving right back to silos. The tech is not the cause of this problem, so I don't foresee it being the solution to it either.
How real-time are the analytics with these implementations? When I think ETL I think daily chronjobs. Have there been advances in this space which would let me instantaneously see a lead created in Salesforce in these new reports?
We have a POC running where we stream web hit data onto HDFS in near real time (several seconds of latency perhaps). There's no reason to think you couldn't do it with other streams of data as well.
edit: Not sure about Salesforce specifically, sorry if this is too far off topic.
The company I work for is building a near real time (web real time not real realtime) setup (a second or delayed) using AWS SQS and redshift with a custom message consumer. If you keep the message consumer as stateless as possible it's super scalable and reliable.
Administrations often change their tunes to maintain a populist backing. They could have just said plainly, "Look, he did the crime and we are required by the rule of law to bring him to trial." and left it at that. But they didn't. They subtilely drilled home the "he's a traitor and a coward" ideas, and I am honestly not sure why. They have nothing substantial to gain by it, other than maybe to discourage future acts of subversion. Apparently, whatever the aim, they're willing to use the language of tyrants to achieve it.
They are not required by the rule of law to bring him to trial. The law grants the President the option to pardon, and that is precisely what was being explicitly asked for in this petition.
The story this tells is so stark, I don't know what else there is left to say on it.
They guy sealed his own fate when he made himself an enemy of the state, and I fear he will never get to set foot on his homeland again. One day, I hope he will be nationally recognized for his service to his people. In the meantime, the drastic divide between the aims of the government and the aims of the governed makes me grow ever more worried that we have dark days ahead of us.
He will be on the run for the rest of his life, until he's caught or assassinated.
If it's the former, we have a responsibility as citizens to have affected enough of a change in our government to see to it that he is given a truly fair trial.
If it's the latter, we'll probably never hear of it, or know the truth of it.
Serving isn't for everyone, and I don't expect you to understand it if you haven't. But either way your attitude is as discourteous as it is pretentious, and you have added zero value to the conversation by shooting your mouth off on the subject.
America's fighting forces will continue to carry out their mission, day in and day out, just like they always have. I have a feeling they'll do just fine without the backing of the German nerd contingent.
It changes over time, and ranges anywhere from the use of force to achieve an objective all the way to simply humanitarian. Sometimes a mix. (delivery of supplies + security) The world is not in a steady state, so as our needs change over time, so does the mission.
From TFA (although I realize he's not advocating for this):
“Two of my colleagues will be joining us in a few minutes but I think we can get started. I’d like you to whiteboard an answer to the following prompt: given a string, write a program in any language you want that reverses the string.”
I have not, and will never, do such a thing on an interview. It'd be the shortest interview in history if I were ever asked to.
We have hired plenty of great people just by talking through the relevant technology and asking open ended questions. My thing was usually to talk through HTTP in detail, and I would loosely time how long it would take to get through chunked encoding. Then I'd ask "how would you solve this problem" question, to see how they attack a problem and how they stand up to me poking (sometimes unreasonable) holes in their plan. You don't need panels, committees, quizzes or any of that bs--just ask questions you know the answer to until you're comfortable that they're competent and pleasant to be around.
(I may or may not have gotten Entity Framework tech support for free from an interviewee once in the past, but we don't speak of such things.)
> individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity
I find myself wondering if I am part of a remaining few who treasure that. I value self-sufficiency over dependency, moreso as I get older. I have come to realize that there can rarely be an imposed collective benefit that didn't come at the expense of at least one individual. The answer to "is it worth it?" will be dependent on which one you ask. Likely the same for "is it moral?" if I had my guess.
That said, I don't think individualism can last forever. The fast exchange of ideas gives incredible power to well coordinated groups. Will it descend into mob rule? Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell. We see regular examples of internet mobs taking down powerful people and companies. The recent Pao take-down comes to mind here. People have their opinions on whether or not it was justified, and mine is irrelevant here, but to me what is most striking was the sheer effectiveness of it. Eventually "we" will figure out how much power we wield and put it to use on targets of more consequence than the CEO of a cat picture website. Occupy could have really shaken things up with the right leadership in place. They were tactically effective, but lacked a leader to put them to effective use to achieve an end.
I think the time of the collective is fast approaching. As long as it's a volunteer collective, I have no issue. If it's forced at the threat of violence, I think my opinion would differ. I am not convinced that history inspires confidence on this one.
Internet mobs only take down powerful people and companies when those companies are built to facilitate those mobs.
Internet mobs have completely failed to take down any number of other bad CEOs, or influence the policy of any nation state in a significantly positive way.
The disconnect is leverage. You can rant all you like online, but corporations only care about sales and the bottom line. Unless Team Rant has a measurable effect there you have no real influence at all.
Internet mobs have been good at shaming middle- and low-status individuals who attract envy and/or who say the wrong thing in public. Careers and reputations have certainly been damaged or destroyed.
But don't confuse that kind of schoolyard game for political or economic influence - they're completely different things.
This is why I mentioned Occupy, they had the people in place to make a meaningful impact. They were able to come out in force so quickly because of the free flow of ideas and information. It may have been that quickness that kept them from forming a cohesive strategy for achieving their ends, but that could be a whole 'nother article in itself.
It can't be imposed. The term 'collectivism' is a poor choice due to its historical baggage of totalitarianism. 'Community' is slightly better.
I don't think this article is really talking about 20th century centralized socialism as we've understood it. I think we do have the potential to shed that cold war narrative and explore other more self-organizing possibilities.
Self sufficiency and dependency are not a 1-dimensional parameter. You can be self sufficient in some aspects, and dependent in others, and each of us can be like this in different ways.
Both aspects have their merits, and it is very easy to see that those merits are fundamental necessities. Governance is hard.
What I meant is that governance implies some dependencies. Ones that people may not want, which makes it hard to know what dependencies to apply through governance.
Agreed, I just meant I choose self-sufficiency over dependence when possible/practical. As I get older, it seems to impact my choices more and more--and I'm not (just) talking about basic necessities, it's also guiding my investment decisions and property purchases.
We had beer taps at my previous job, and nobody drank during business hours even though they could have. Any work past 5 or so might have been under the influence from time to time, but we really only drank in any quantity after quittin' time.
Pretty much the same at my current place, most people won't use the kegs until its an appropriate time. I've had a beer at lunch or late afternoon a few times though and its never made me feel less productive. Sipping on a beer while coding is a nice experience imo.
What? We can kick pretty much any country's ass six ways from Sunday. We admittedly have trouble with having the political fortitude to fully break our adversary's will to fight back, but I think that is a systemic issue with a faster flow of information (starting with Vietnam). It's not necessarily a US-specific problem, and it certainly doesn't mean the US is not "good at war".
While we can agree to disagree on the feasibility of a military solution, I can assure you that it's the threat of that possibility that drives diplomacy. Diplomacy without the threat of war to back it is more akin to begging than anything else.
It's the way things are. You have to subdue the opposing side completely, or the war never ends. Doing this means essentially beating them mercilessly until they have no choice to fully capitulate. It's not that we lack the capability, it's that soccer moms don't want to see that shit on CNN. War is an ugly business, and we seem to have lost our stomach for it. Time will tell if it is to our benefit or determent.
Well, ask the soviets how it worked out for them. I'm sorry, but your military is nowhere near as badass when it comes to subduction and ruthlessness. And the soviets failed spectacularly.
Oh really, so those Iraqi franc-tireurs and IEDs were just simulations then then? Maybe Baudrillard is still alive....winning a war involves having an endgame in line with victory objectives, and the US can't rule over countries that don't have a coherent political structure in place to dicker over costs and benefits upon exit.
The wife and I have been talking about this at great length as of late. We are not wired to believe in the supernatural, but I am having a hard time coming up with reasons why that would prevent us from finding a church to go to. It does limit which churches might be accepting of us, as I will not be handling snakes or washing anyone's feet. But as churches get more and more devoid of fundamentalism (a survival maneuver), they become more and more like the thing being talked about in the fine article. Maybe it'll all meet in the middle one day.