Do you think Apple should include a copy of the Bible ...

RacerX: Yep those reference materials were great. However, in these days, the web replaces many of those things. And for dictionary stuff: OmniDictionary is quite great.
 
I think a better idea would be for Apple to work with the authors of Mac Bible to install a more sophisticated help system on each Mac. If you were talking about religion here is my take:

There is not an advantage for Apple to put the Bible on the Mac or iPod because it does not correspond to any of their application's functions. I view Macintosh users coming from all different types of backgrounds and places so it is their choice whether they need religious texts. That is why we have third party developers whom make software with different kinds of religious texts.
 
Oh dear - just had a horrible idea - put the religious texts into the help browser.

Then, you could ask put in searches like "copy and paste" and get help for - the Finder, TextEdit, Mail, the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes...

This waste of time was brought to you by the letters 'C' and 'V' and the number 8
 
mi5moav said:
That's fine with me as long as they also include...

::ha:: You beat me to it!

I assume the poster would also want a large amount of scientific texts and links to ALL the material fundamentalists wish to ban and censor.

After all we do not want the users to maintain their beliefs solely based on ignorance.

::angel::
 
JetwingX said:
apple is a computer company, not a church.

You ARE kidding me NO?

I always thought of it as the Church of the Digital Deity, which is why I am still paying my tithes to the one true prophet, His Holiness The Steve.
 
I see absolutley no reason why anyone would think that an operating system should include anything of a religious nature unless it is something like "GodOS"
 
rubaiyat said:
::ha:: You beat me to it!
Yep, by over two months.
rubaiyat said:
I assume the poster would also want a large amount of scientific texts and links to ALL the material fundamentalists wish to ban and censor.

After all we do not want the users to maintain their beliefs solely based on ignorance.

::angel::
If you can tell me how life happened by accident, I might have respect for your opinion. Until then, keep your "holier than though" attitude to yourself.
 
Uh...that would be "holier than thou" not though....

Though that's pretty funny. :D

Hmm, if Apple did add in a Bible, it'd be the first thing I threw away. Don't think I'd get vocal about it, but I wouldn't keep it around, either.
 
If you can tell me how life happened by accident, I might have respect for your opinion.
No problem: the evironment of the prehistorical sea favoured the development of fatty molecules which because of their chemical makeup had a hydrophilous and a hydrophobous part. This quite naturally led to the formation of primitive cells. As these cells were more stable than their surroundings they were the idel place for the development of longer lasting chemical composites. Once simple self-replicating molecula came on stage, life was born.

Take the chmicals, shake and stir and you get life. Life is pretty common in all the enivronments that contain just a few basic chemicals, water and a certain amount of heat or other energy. For example it is quite probable that the Jovian moon Europa harbors life.

The famous experiments by Miller showed that it was quite easy to re-create the conditions of the ancient seas in laboratory and obtain the same results. Interestingly the composition and chamical properties (acidity, salinity, etc.) of your blood are quite close to the original marine environment.

This is a quite simplistic account as a proof of concept that such an account can be given. Life can be "created" simply by chance.
 
Just gotta get it out of the way: No, I don't think it should be included.

On the other hand, though, saying that if the Bible were included that other religious texts would also have to be included is like saying that if iTunes comes bundled with a new Macintosh that RealPlayer and Windows Media Player and all the other media players should come bundled as well.

Granted, software and religious texts are two very different things, but using said logic is backwards. The world doesn't work that way. McDonald's won't (and shouldn't) serve you a Whopper and BMW won't sell you a Mercedes. The choice lies with the company, and if they wanted to include the Bible and exclude all other religious texts, that's perfectly fine by me. If they wanted to serve me the book of Mormon and exclude the Bible, also fine by me. What goes on my computer is my choice ultimately, regardless of what comes pre-bundled.
 
Cat said:
No problem: the evironment of the prehistorical sea favoured the development of fatty molecules which because of their chemical makeup had a hydrophilous and a hydrophobous part. This quite naturally led to the formation of primitive cells. As these cells were more stable than their surroundings they were the idel place for the development of longer lasting chemical composites. Once simple self-replicating molecula came on stage, life was born.

Take the chmicals, shake and stir and you get life. Life is pretty common in all the enivronments that contain just a few basic chemicals, water and a certain amount of heat or other energy. For example it is quite probable that the Jovian moon Europa harbors life.

The famous experiments by Miller showed that it was quite easy to re-create the conditions of the ancient seas in laboratory and obtain the same results. Interestingly the composition and chamical properties (acidity, salinity, etc.) of your blood are quite close to the original marine environment.

This is a quite simplistic account as a proof of concept that such an account can be given. Life can be "created" simply by chance.

The experiment by miller has been shown to be a fraud. It is wrong on so many levels. For one, it requires the absolute absence of oxygen. Notice the compounds are hydrogen, ammonia, methane and water. The presence of oxygen in the original experiment would have pretty much ended Stanley Miller and Harold Urey's careers, and quite possibly their lives as well. The problem with the mixture is that it is practically impossible to have an oxygen free environment in REAL life. A single spark in an environment filled with Methane, hydrogen and a little little little bit of oxygen would result in a spectacular explosion, killing any so called 'cells' that could have been formed by the process.

Not to mention that all the Miller/Urey experiment did was to show that it was possible to synthesise certain amino acids. that's all. No cells, nothing living. You can shake and stir all you want, and 50 years later you'll still get no life.

If you're still not convinced, practically all scientists in the field know accept the fact that the composition of the chemicals in the Miller/Urey experiment aren't representative of the primitive earth atmosphere.

Publishers have been forced to recently correct factual errors in text books and papers that have been relentlessly propagated by those who have an agenda to further. Here's an article by the Discovery Institute concerning retractions made by various publishers with regards to 'experiments' that have been the staple of Darwinists for years. http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=1618&program=News-CSC

So no, this example of life happening by 'accident' is a no go. Next example please.
 
Cat said:
No problem: the evironment of the prehistorical sea favoured the development of fatty molecules which because of their chemical makeup had a hydrophilous and a hydrophobous part. This quite naturally led to the formation of primitive cells. As these cells were more stable than their surroundings they were the idel place for the development of longer lasting chemical composites. Once simple self-replicating molecula came on stage, life was born.

Take the chmicals, shake and stir and you get life. Life is pretty common in all the enivronments that contain just a few basic chemicals, water and a certain amount of heat or other energy. For example it is quite probable that the Jovian moon Europa harbors life.

The famous experiments by Miller showed that it was quite easy to re-create the conditions of the ancient seas in laboratory and obtain the same results. Interestingly the composition and chamical properties (acidity, salinity, etc.) of your blood are quite close to the original marine environment.

This is a quite simplistic account as a proof of concept that such an account can be given. Life can be "created" simply by chance.
I doubt it. :)

Here's how I look at it: as humans, we spend so much energy in life trying to keep things from falling apart. We have car mechanics for broken cars. We have doctors for degrading bodies.

If we look outside of humanity, we observe nature. If the wacko environmentalists are to be believed, humans are killing the earth anyway; however, we do observe nature renewing itself. With the seasons, we have cycling weather patterns and all of that. Long-term, we have burned down forests renewing their trees.

But if we keep looking outward, we notice that the sun is largely what sustains the earth. And the sun is burning up. All stars burn up. As far as we can tell, everything will burn up, cool down and die. The trend is obvious.

In my observation, evolution works against the trend. This is how my very complex brain works, and I would love to know if my logic is flawed.
 
Humans are pretty damn arrogant to think they could even scratch the planet Earth. This world will chew us up and spit us out before we even inflict so much as a flesh wound to this planet.

Sure, we may make it difficult for humans to live on Earth one day, but that doesn't mean we've hurt the earth -- it will continue it's cycle and be habitable for creatures that exist in conditions humans can't, and, eventually, evolve into something else. All our pollutants and X-rays and radiation and landfills and space debris will be renewed by natural processes and the earth will continue on just as it did before humans.

I can tell you one thing though: the farce about recycling being the key to saving the planet is crap. Recycling is contributing to the demise of much of Earth's natural resources, and I firmly believe we'd be better off without recycling in the state it's in at the moment. If you wanna "save the planet," stop recycling immediately.
 
MDLarson said:
But if we keep looking outward, we notice that the sun is largely what sustains the earth. And the sun is burning up. All stars burn up. As far as we can tell, everything will burn up, cool down and die. The trend is obvious.

In my observation, evolution works against the trend. This is how my very complex brain works, and I would love to know if my logic is flawed.

Not quite. Stars die, yes, but that dying vents out the gasses and whatnot that can form up a new star. So it doesn't just fade out and there's one less star. Cycle of birth and death. That's how it works on most scales. The death of something will lead to the birth of something else.
 
One of Einstein's laws... you can't kill energy, and there's a fixed amount of it in existance. Something releases energy, something else gains energy: it's the only perpetual motion machine that exists.

So when a star dies, that energy is available to some other process.
 
However, the universe is expanding, and we have only recently discovered that the expansion is accelerating.

There is no reason to expect it will ever stop.

So our finite amount of energy will eventually be spread infinitely thin. This is sometimes called 'heat death'.

On the smaller scale, you're right - energy released can become part of another process. In the long run though, the universe becomes ever colder and darker, approaching - though never quite achieving - zero energy.

On this cosmic scale, the question of life organizing by chance or design is almost moot; the universe's initial energy came from somewhere, and most scientists despair of ever explaining exactly where - you might as well say God gave it to us, it makes as much sense as anything.

But the accelerating expansion is a fact. If God created this universe, he made it in such a way that it will one day wind down and fade to black.
 
Viro said:
all the Miller/Urey experiment did was to show that it was possible to synthesise certain amino acids
Amino acids are organic compounds, essential to cellular life. I.a. the experiment produced adenine, one of the four bases of DNA/RNA and essential part of the Krebs cycle.

I said it was a simplistic argument, just to show the first bases of evidence that life can be created by chance. After Miller, many more experiments have been made, none of them as famous as the first one, but nevertheless all of them adding information and confirmation to the first hypothesis (Szostak for instance has found triphosphates). Miller's experiment was very crude and simple, but already gave spectacular results. Not life in the sense of full-blown monocellular organisms, but the essential bases of life.

Viro said:
For one, it requires the absolute absence of oxygen. Notice the compounds are hydrogen, ammonia, methane and water.
No, it does not require the absolute absence of oxygen. The atmosphere of the earth at the time did contain very little amounts of oxygen (remember, no life yet, no plants, hence no oxygen). Oxygen was present in compounds, but _under water_ (which is what we are talking about) O2 does not abund loosely. So that is not a flaw of the experiment.

Viro said:
You can shake and stir all you want, and 50 years later you'll still get no life.
Miller obtained his results after only five days, the earth has hade more like 5 million years. Criticizing the metaphor is not an argument.

Your critcism closely follows that of Jonathan Wells ... who has been discredited and contradicted time and again ...

MDLarson said:
In my observation, evolution works against the trend. This is how my very complex brain works, and I would love to know if my logic is flawed.
In your observation anything would go against the trend. From Big Bang to thermic death you would only have dissipation. Any chemical composites woul dgo against your observation. However, the funny thing is, nature does not consist of only entropy. After the Big Bang fundamental particles combined spontaneously to establish the elements we now know. These elements are intrinsically reactive, i.e. they combine to form compounds. Only pure gasses are weakly reactive, all the other elements are quite reactive and occur in the vast majority only in compounds (note: also O2 is a compound of two equal elements). This has nothing to do with life. Everything will ultimately decay, the leaves in autumn just like the sun and you and me. This does not imply either logically nor in practice that in the meanwhile temporarily stable compounds cannot be formed.

Life itself, either created or evolved, is against you view, as it is intrinsically homeostatic and moreover self-replicating.
 
Cat said:
Amino acids are organic compounds, essential to cellular life. I.a. the experiment produced adenine, one of the four bases of DNA/RNA and essential part of the Krebs cycle.

I said it was a simplistic argument, just to show the first bases of evidence that life can be created by chance. After Miller, many more experiments have been made, none of them as famous as the first one, but nevertheless all of them adding information and confirmation to the first hypothesis (Szostak for instance has found triphosphates). Miller's experiment was very crude and simple, but already gave spectacular results. Not life in the sense of full-blown monocellular organisms, but the essential bases of life.

Near my aunt's house in Malaysia lies a marble quarry. It's a noisy busy place where workers a busy mining marble for use in building houses. If you strolled around the place, you'd see lots of blocks/slates of marble waiting to be shipped to construction sites to be used.

However, just because the marble exists, doesn't mean that the Taj Mahal would soon follow. Sure, you find the marble in the ground but it's a very long way from being the Taj Mahal.

Likewise, having the basic amino acids is a very very long stretch from having celullar life. Most researchers see the Miller Urey experiments as a dead end and are now focusing their efforts elsewhere.

No, it does not require the absolute absence of oxygen. The atmosphere of the earth at the time did contain very little amounts of oxygen (remember, no life yet, no plants, hence no oxygen). Oxygen was present in compounds, but _under water_ (which is what we are talking about) O2 does not abund loosely. So that is not a flaw of the experiment.

It is a flaw in the experiment because (IIRC, been a long while since I did chemistry) H2O breaks down in the presence of UV light. Granted, it's very very small percentage of it, but it still breaks down regardless.

This is where the experiment is unrealistic. Normally, I'd suggest that you'd try to run the experiment with the conditions I've stipulated to see for yourself the effects of oxygen in the mixture, but knowing the results, I highly advise you NOT to do so.

Miller obtained his results after only five days, the earth has hade more like 5 million years. Criticizing the metaphor is not an argument.

Yet, after 50 years of research by really bright minds has brought people no where nearer to the solution. If that is the case, perhaps a different angle needs to be sought?


Your critcism closely follows that of Jonathan Wells ... who has been discredited and contradicted time and again ...

Having never heard of Jonathan Wells, a quick Google search brought me to this page. Is he the guy you're talking about? Browsing his site, he seems to supports my views so I'm guessing its him you're referring to.

As for his arguments being discredited, look at his responses and you'll see that there isn't really anything flawed about his reasoning. NOTE: I haven't read through his entire site, or his book so I don't pretend to know ALL his arguments. Some could well be very tenuous.

What one generation of scientists knows, the next generation will question and disprove. Perhaps the criticisms that this Johnathan Wells attracts is similar to he criticism that Darwin attracted in the 19th century when he first put forth his THEORY of evolution?

As a staunch atheist before I became a Christian, I used to believe strongly in evolution. Imagine my surprise when I found out later that the 'experiments' that my biology textbooks listed as demonstrating evolution had serious flaws in them. Thankfully, this isn't going to be much of a problem since publishers have been asked to retract a lot of the factual errors (see the link in my last post).
 
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