Two barking mad religions are expected to clash violently at the funeral of Apple messiah Steve Jobs.
The Westboro Baptist Church, which makes loads of friends the world over by picketing soldiers funerals with their gay bashing placards, is planning to turn up as legions of fanboys are expected to attend the burial of Steve Jobs.
According to a tweet by top member Margie J Phelps, members of the church will be outside the funeral claiming that the deaths are punishment from an angry God. Funeral goers will be treated to signs that say "God hates you," "America is doomed," and "You're going to hell."
Phelps tweeted that Jobs had a huge platform but failed to give God glory and caused millions to sin.
Jobs' Mob fanboys, who have been building shrines to their dead hero in Apple stores, are not likely to be patient. Even among religious nutcases, the Westboro Baptist Church members are seen as religious nutcases. The Supreme Court has upheld their right to protest at these events, saying that their free speech rights cannot be restricted simply because their speech is unpopular or even despicable.
Our bet is that a grief stricken mob of fanboys, some of whom expected Jobs to raise himself from the dead, will be looking for someone to take out their grief upon. Having seen what fanboys are capable of, we would think that the Westboro Baptist Church could have made one dumb protest too many and is heading for martyrdom.
Ironically it looks like Phelps is an Apple fan herself. Her tweet was sent via the iPhone. It looks like Steve provided the technology for the wrong brand of religious nutters. Still, he would have had the satisfaction of knowing that every time the Westboro Baptist Church carried out one of its daft protests, he was profiting. Besides, if Apple gear causes sin, and there is no mention in the Bible of this, then why is Phelps carrying one?
More ways to Lose On Planet Then There Are Molecules. Actually Steve Jobs Cheated Steve Wolsniack Out of Cash When Apple Started, So Techniclly, Steve Jobs Never Owned Apple after That. In Fact, Paul mccartny Owns Apple.
Hope steve Jobs has Open Casket. Gruesome. If Steve Jobs Wasn't Vegatarian, Be alive today. Dysentary that got Pancreas in End. Other ways to stimulate Mind that are Healthy & safe, like b balanced complex.
LSD=Loser. well, At least Nothing was Lost. Phones with 1 day battery life, barf,barf. cheap gizmos & poor designes. Never was apple software worth much, till Sir William got involved & used small market share as good testbed. Windows Thin Pc proves that software leads hardware & software can reach back & make hardware as good as any out today with Virtulization.
drashek jobologist.....
By Jeff Yang
Moments after his passing was announced, the world had already begun to mourn Steve Jobs — a man who changed the world as often as some people change their hairstyles.
He’s being celebrated as an innovator, a visionary and a revolutionary. Yet in his life, critics labeled him a self-involved egotist, a shameless huckster, a ruthless manipulator. His closest friends and allies, even Jobs himself, might agree that both sets of labels were accurate — the external manifestations of an idiosyncratic worldview that has defied interpretation by scores of would-be analysts, in part because at its heart was an Asian philosophy that embraces nuance, contradiction and paradox.
I’ve written before about how the study of Zen Buddhism shaped Jobs’s design sensibility and business philosophy. Jobs was a passionate advocate of what Buddhists call “the beginner’s mind” — an outlook free of the learned constraints that lead to preconceived solutions to problems. He preached and practiced the need for radical simplicity and rigorous focus, both of which are core Buddhist values. And he was a deep believer in the validity of Japanese traditional aesthetics, whose precepts are deeply intertwined with the ideas and practice of Zen.
Under Jobs, the expression of these aesthetic principles can be found in every one of Apple’s products — concepts like miyabi, which translates as “high refinement” or the polishing away of roughness and crudeness; shibui, or “unobtrusive beauty,” a loveliness that balances streamlined form with complex detail; iki, or “audacious style”; and yugen, or “enigmatic quality.”
Most of all, however, Jobs demanded from his people an appreciation of the critical importance of ma, which loosely translates as emptiness, space or void. Ma states that a thing is defined not just by what it is, but what it is not — that a sculpture is beautiful because of both the rock taken away and the rock left behind, and a ring is useful because of both the hollow at its center and the metal strip that surrounds it.
He frequently expressed that he was as proud of the things that Apple didn’t do as he was of the things it did. And though he’s being eulogized today for the things he created, during his career he was constantly under fire for the things he’d decreed had come to the end of their useful lives: The floppy drive, absent from Apple’s company-reviving iMac. The optical drive, eliminated from the laptop-redefining Macbook Air. The physical keyboard, conspicuously excluded from the game-changing, touch-only iPhone.
In every case, he was lambasted by critics and users alike, only to have his intuitive and seemingly arbitrary decisions proven entirely correct: Today, none of these things are missed by the millions who use and love Apple products, and their absence has opened the door to fresh technologies and new ways of using them.
That was the essence of Jobs’s unique genius — understanding that absence defines presence; that the only path to the great new things of the future was the merciless elimination of the good old things of the past.
There’s a famous koan, attributed to the Chinese master Linje, which goes: “If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him.” The koan wasn’t an exhortation to murder, but a metaphorical admonishment not to be bound up in dogma, in conventions, in standards. You cannot pursue the Buddha-becoming if you’re slavishly attached to the Buddha-that-is. You cannot grow if you’re unwilling to let go.
In Jobs’s most revelatory and intimate public statement, the commencement address he gave at Stanford in 2005, he restated Linje’s koan in inimitably Jobsian fashion: “Death,” he said, “is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.”
And that’s why Jobs would likely have preferred that those who admired his work not mourn his death, but instead celebrate the opportunity that his passing provides for others to step forward and change the world themselves.
“Why get caught up in the death of a single man?” Jobs might say. There are better ways to use your time and energy. Invent. Imagine. Heal. Explore. Create. Inspire. Push the human race forward.
What are you waiting for?
***
In the course of writing this, I took a moment to count the many Apple products I’ve owned — and loved — in my life, and I’m astonished by the tally. This is my lifetime Apple footprint: Apple IIe, Mac Plus, Mac SE, Macintosh II, Laserwriter Plus, Laserwriter II, Apple Newton eMate 300, Power Macintosh G3 and G4, original iMac G3 (Bondi Blue), iMac G3 (slot-loading; Graphite) iMac G4, original Powerbook 100, Powerbook Duo, Powerbook 540c, Powerbook Duo 2400, Powerbook G3 “Wall Street,” Powerbook G4 “TiBook”, original iBook, Macbook black (2006), Macbook Air, original unibody Macbook, Macbook Air 3,1 (2010), original clickwheel iPod (4GB), original iPod Touch (4GB), original iPod Nano black (2GB), iPod shuffle second generation (blue, 1GB), iPhone 3G (16GB), iPhone 3GS (16GB), iPhone 4 (32GB), Apple TV black, Airport Express, Airport Extreme, original iPad 3G (32GB), iPad 2 WiFi (32GB).
Thank you, Steve — and namaste.
“Tao Jones” is Jeff Yang’s weekly column for Speakeasy on Asian culture.
I never owned an Apple product ever ever and never used one either. Here is my non-Apple footprint 24/7 over the last 20 years:
Never used or owned an: Apple IIe, Mac Plus, Mac SE, Macintosh II, Laserwriter Plus, Laserwriter II, Apple Newton eMate 300, Power Macintosh G3 and G4, original iMac G3 (Bondi Blue), iMac G3 (slot-loading; Graphite) iMac G4, original Powerbook 100, Powerbook Duo, Powerbook 540c, Powerbook Duo 2400, Powerbook G3 “Wall Street,” Powerbook G4 “TiBook”, original iBook, Macbook black (2006), Macbook Air, original unibody Macbook, Macbook Air 3,1 (2010), original clickwheel iPod (4GB), original iPod Touch (4GB), original iPod Nano black (2GB), iPod shuffle second generation (blue, 1GB), iPhone 3G (16GB), iPhone 3GS (16GB), iPhone 4 (32GB), Apple TV black, Airport Express, Airport Extreme, original iPad 3G (32GB), or an iPad 2 WiFi (32GB).
very good and talented man, was the son of an American Caucasian mother
and an Arab Syrian father, and this might explain the high IQ and
ambition drive DNA that drove him all his life. I also did not know
this Arab connection until the i read the news last month, i always
thought he was, er, Jewish. or Greek. Nope.
But this is a good story for the Arab Spring
too, Steve Jobs was one of them, and look how far he rose, so long
live Arab DNA mixing with Caucasian DNA even if they never got
married. Is his dad still alive?
And three: the 24/7 CNN All News Channels legacy tributes to Steve is
getting annoying. I do not own or use ever every any of those devices,
I have never bought or used any Apple device, not an iPhoney, not an
Ipaddy, not an Ipoddy, i mean, what’s with this worship of the
gadgetheadery of the this God of the Gadgetheads? I mean, he was just
a mortal man who ran a cool business, but does he deserve 24/7 CNN
coverage like he was a god? Will CNN and the ALL News Channels give
the same coverage with Steven Speilberg dies? or Paul McCartney? Or
Margaret Atwood? What’s with this TV news deificiation of Jobs? He
lived, he died, a good life, a very talented man. But NOT A GOD, stop
this 24/7 coverage. He was a flawed man as well. Let’s look at that
stuff, too, and drop the god stuff.
As someone who has never owned an Apple product, I could care less
about Apple. But the man Steve Jobs, yes, I salute a life well lived
and his drive to succeed. Bravo. But a flawed man like everyone else.
Blogger says: ''It’s all a reminder: These Apple things with screens and buttons aren’t just tools we use and then set aside. They change us. They are part of our culture. ''
NOTE THEY ARE PART OF B.S. CONSUMER SLASH BURN CONSUME CUlture. Stop making Jobs into a god and Apple into Heaven. Neither. Just a business. A genius. but it did not change culture at all. USA and UK and the world is still as dumb as ever. Look around you bloggers~
I think you are confusing sexuality and religion (probably deliberately).
If you want to argue a set of points around one or the other, then go ahead, but that is not what you are doing here.
Okay somebody suggested Jobs had a 'beard' - yes you explained the slang well enough. So what.
Dragging in religion does nothing to aid your anger at what somebody else said.