Delta1212

Perhaps if it was part of an experiment. I don't think it works with just any random event that we might come across because then it just requires finding an event that has a chance of one out of the total number of all events that happen around the world of happening. Like having everyone in the world flip a coin thirty times in a row. If you do, chances are pretty good that you will have at least one person who gets the same thing every single time. If you ran an experiment where you had a single person flip a coin thirty times and they all came up heads, that is unlikely enough that I would have trouble believing it was random chance. If you had every person on Earth flip a coin thirty times on reaching their tenth birthday, it would be weird if you didn't get someone who got the same thing every time at least once or twice in a given decade. When, instead of the coin flip, you have every event in the life of every person on the plan to mine for events that coincidentally line up in any way with any event in the life of any other person on the planet, you are going to wind up finding a ton of people who randomly have a lot more weird connections than the ones that have been listed for Lincoln and Kennedy.

There are some people who consider both to be bad. Also, all anarchists are anti-government by definition. Not all atheists are anti-religion.

I wasn't in the path of totality, but I got a couple of decent shots by turning the exposure on my phone's camera all the way down and shooting through some clouds. I hadn't thought of it ahead of time, but a few times while it was going on, there was just the right amount of cloud cover for the sun to be clearly visible while also not being blinding to look at, which was pretty cool.

No, I mean, what makes protecting the self a rational choice?

The ones that aren't resistant die because the antibiotics killed them. Any that are left are resistant because they already had some resistance and that's why they are the ones that are left. Repeat this for multiple generations of bacteria and eventually you'll have a nice population of resistant bacteria because you killed off all of the non-resistant bacteria that we're competing with them for food and space. What the bacteria "want" has nothing to do with anything. Non-resistant bacteria didn't develop a resistance in order to better survive: They just died. Resistant bacteria didn't develop a resistance in order to survive. They had that resistance whether they had ever been exposed to the antibiotic or not. They just exploited an opening to reproduce more caused by a bunch of other bacteria being killed off.

The way that word of mouth spreads about looking at the eclipse really does make it seem like looking at the eclipse is particularly bad for your eyes rather than just, you know, looking at the sun being really bad for your eyes whether there is an eclipse or not.

They've been doing a lot of things I like this season, but now that we're getting closer to the end, I think compressing it to seven episodes was a mistake. They could have fit the same content into ten episodes and given things a bit of time to breathe and had a little less teleporting all over the continent within a single episode often within a span of minutes that has made a lot of things feel very choppy and weirdly paced. I also agree with the criticism from Alan Sepinwall that they've been falling back on teasing a lot of character deaths without paying them off the last few episodes and many of the escapes feel rather contrived as a result. I don't think even that would be quite as bad as it is, though, if they weren't packing the action set pieces quite so closely together. It also felt weird that it always seemed like the only people in the ranging party were the names characters until it was time for some redshirt to die and then one would randomly spring up out of nowhere just to get killed. In past seasons they've at least taken the time to establish a neat character or two to act in that role so we're at least aware that they exist before they are killed off. This season is very cool to watch but just weirdly paced and I think it's largely a result of the episode count.

Huh, I broadly agree with something waitforufo posted in the Politics section. What do you know?

Sure, but those differences having been stated, I don't see any reason to expect the person in question to defend some other set of beliefs nor do I think that the label they are using becomes somehow less valid than if they fully subscribed to the initially assumed set of beliefs.

The New Testament encompasses a collection of accounts of his life and teachings. It does not include every account and includes a number of things that are by or about his followers rather than him directly. You could easily take a single book as gospel rather than the entire document or even subscribe to one of the various documents that didn't make it into the canon as it was decided upon at the Council of Nicea. There is no single, unimpeachable document that is known to accurately and completely describe the life and teachings of Jesus.

And I said that where a person differs from what is commonly assumed, they should make clear, where relevant, what those differences are. That does not necessarily mean that the label no longer properly applies.

Christians existed for centuries before the Bible was put together into the canon that we are familiar with today. I don't think that there is really any definitive text that one must subscribe to in order to consider oneself a Christian. I'd say that the bare minimum is probably that one consider oneself a follower of Jesus. But that encompasses a very broad range of possible beliefs that may or may not include any adherence at all to anything written in the Bible and may not even necessarily include a belief in a literal resurrection.

I go through the same enthusiasm boom and bust cycle with various things. The most basic answer I can give you is that you're going to need to do some not very fun work to develop the habits that will make it easier to do what you need to do. Make reading a habit. Pick a book, read it for half an hour for bed every night until you finish it. If you find yourself growing bored, force yourself to keep going. When you find yourself reading an article where things are going over your head, make a list of those things and go to Wikipedia to look them up. If you can't find the necessary information on Wikipedia, have some online forums or place you can go ask questions. If you're at a University, there are likely to be people there who can answer some questions on a diverse variety of topics. But ultimately it's just going to take some mental effort to force yourself to do things even when you don't feel like it. Once you get going and develop the habit, it will get much easier. In the meantime, the easiest way to do that is to develop a routine that includes some self-study time and force yourself to stick to that schedule. It's much easier to get yourself to do it if you can say "Ok, it's 1 o'clock, time for me to read for half an hour" than if you're just sitting around thinking "What do I feel like doing right now?" because the answer is almost never going to be doing something that feels like work.

I don't know if I agree with your premise about a la carte beliefs being in conflict with categories of belief like, for instance, not believing in the resurrection disqualifying one from being a Christian. All beliefs are to one degree or another a la carte. You will be hard pressed to find to people whose beliefs are exactly identical on a wide range of topics. That disagreement means that there is rarely a set of canonical beliefs that fall under a single label which are not disagreed on at any point by people who take that label for themselves. As such, applying labels to any set of beliefs is not a practice of objective classification but really one of taxonomy. It is grouping non-identical things into categories of likeness. And any such taxonomic classification is going to, to some degree, be arbitrary and subjective with some blurriness on the edges. To describe yourself as a religious person, do you need to share all of your religious beliefs with every other person who describes themselves as religious? Of course not. Similarly, I do not think that one must share all of their Christian beliefs with other Christians in order to qualify as a Christian. Just like you cannot reasonably expect a person to defend the existence of Krishna just because they describe themselves as religious, I do not think that you can hold everyone who describes themselves as Christian to defend every belief that is common among some groups of Christians. Nor must someone who is a scientist defend every belief that is common in the scientific community. Nor must a conservative defend the beliefs and actions of every other conservative, nor liberals those of liberals. Such labels are names of convenience, not accurate descriptions of all of a person's beliefs. If a person decides to take a label on as part of their identity, then it is incumbent upon them to stake out where they differ from popular perceptions of the beliefs commonly associated with that identity, but they do not necessarily have to subscribe to every single one of those beliefs in order to retain that label for themselves, and expecting them to put up a universal defense of those beliefs or else admit that they don't really qualify for the label is generally unreasonable. A simple statement of "I am an X who does not agree with Y belief" should be enough.

It's also the same as a dog. Are dogs that are taught to be vicious morally responsible for their viciousness, or is the person who taught them to be that way the responsible party.