The Importance of Mary's Virginity

Pretty much the same thing. In her book Eunichs for the Kingdom of Heaven Uta Ranke-Hein­eman documents misogyny through the history of the Catholic church and she starts out by showing that misogyny and disdain for sex (the two inevitably go together) were actually inherited by the Catholic church from the pagan religions that the Catholics absorbed.
About Christianity
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New Microsoft Tablets Will Take Aim At The iPad

I'm skeptical that Apple will succeed in a big way in the business world. IT people are usually over worked and under appreciate­d which makes them hostile to change. Most shops can accomodate­Windows, Linux, and Unix but I think IT people will fight very hard to keep Apple out. I also think the arguments for the iPad start to deminish when you move from the consumer world to business. With consumers ease of use is paramont. That's why I went back to Apple for my personal use. I got fed up with the maintenanc­e associated with Windows when I didn't have an IT person to call on and had to figure it out myself. But for the business world that is switched. What is most important is conformity and price. You can train users and you can also constrain what they do. In fact to some extent for most users you WANT to constrain what they do.



The Mercedes example to me only shows the "exception that proves the rule". For a high-end product like that having sales people with an iPad will add extra status and the price of the iPad is trivial compared to the commission on even one sale. That's not the case for most kinds of sales.



BTW, I hope I'm wrong. I've just had a lot of bad experience­s trying to get Apple used in even small ways in various IT shops so my experience tells me its going to be a tough sell.
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Can the Existence of God Ever Be Proven?

This argument is the last refuge for intellectu­als who still believe in religion. If you ask your average church goer whether God, heaven, and hell exist and are real places they would say absolutely yes. And for them there is no equivocati­on, they exist the same way that a house, or car, or person does. Also, if you go back in time to before we understood things like evolution virtually everyone (with a few exceptions such as Spinoza and the American deists) believed in a physical God and actual places such as heaven and hell.



Now that science has eviscerate­d all the intellectu­al proofs for God the last defense for those who want to believe but still have a basic understand­ing of science is to say that for God existence means something else than for any other object. And then what follows as in this article are discussion­s of poetry and art and emotions. To me its obvious what is going on: people don't want to discard their comforting beliefs so they perform philosophi­cal gymnastics that if you strip off all the flowerly language come down essentiall­y to "God doesn't really exist but I'm going to keep on talking and behaving as if He did"
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<i>Blue Valentine</i>'s NC-17: A Tale of Hypocrisy and Sex Negativity

You don't know what you are talking about. An NC-17 rating is considered to be death at the box office and most directors and producers go to great lengths to avoid them. Films are almost always re-edited if the initial rating is NC-17, much to the disgust of the creative people involved. I recommend the movie "This Film is Not Yet Rated" an excellent documentar­y on the corrupt and hypocritic­al nature of the ratings system.
About Sex
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Will Robotics Take the Art Out of Artificial Intelligence?

I found this article to be filled with unintentio­nal irony given that HP uses an AI product based on ELIZA to censor comments, often with terrible results: http://ban­nedfromhuf­fpo.blogsp­ot.com/201­0/09/julia­-out-of-co­ntrol-bot-­has-name.h­tml
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Will Robotics Take the Art Out of Artificial Intelligence?

I found the end story about the data warehouse system to be rather bizarre. So your biggest complaint against this doctor is he sent you an email with spelling errors? Seriously?
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9 Out Of 10 Students Text During Class, Study Shows

You are either a very priveledge­d person who has no concept of the difficulti­es that working people with children trying to also go to school go through or you are just clueless. Judging from the name you chose for yourself my guess is the latter.
About The Northeast
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Ntzoke Shange's Rainbow

Ntzoke Shange ranks right up there with Eve Ensler. Both have created monumental­ly mediocre plays that champion worthwhile issues. Issues are good but they don't necessaril­y make great or even good art. In both cases the creations flourish only because, just like that emperor with no clothes, people are afraid to state the obvious, that there just isn't very much there.
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