The story going around right now is that, in order to install iOS 8, the latest version of the operating system for iGadgets, you need to delete the Bible app.
This is not true. I upgraded my iPad OS earlier this week, and I still have the Bible on my tablet. What kind of atheist would I be, if I didn’t have the ability to reference Christian wickedness straight from their source book?
I suspect that the real problem is that the app is a poorly coded hog that eats up a heck of a lot of storage, so if you have to clear out some space, the thing you never read is the first to go. Wouldn’t want to lose the porn collection, you know, or the pages and pages of games!
What are those people thinking? The old Bible Bogey, who is omniscient after all, would surely ensure the app would still be there for all to read his guide for human behaviour. Oh, wait, it still advocates rape, slavery, infanticide, genocide. Maybe they think he might be in the process of updating it?
Do you think christians will pay attention to the facts when they have a perfectly good persecution story to whine about?
Given the choice between deleting the Bible and deleting Grindr, what’s a good Christian to do?
It takes a ridiculous amount of space to install iOS 8, but you get most of it back as soon as the installation is done.
Yeah, the iOS 8 upgrade needs 5GB free to install. Doesn’t need that much once done but it’ said killer if you have an 8GB device.
Bible app: For when having a physical copy of a holy book you never read isn’t sufficiently pious anymore.
Why would god need an app.
The iOS 8 install could automatically bugfix it by converting it to the Jefferson bible. Now that would be an upgrade.
Wouldn’t want to lose the porn collection? But I thought you just said the Bible was the first thing to go…
I see a poor assumption there…
Who needs an ap, anyway? Just go to Bible Gateway. Or, if you want to enjoy the commentary, Skeptics Annotated Bible. The best antidote to belief, in my opinion, is to actually read the thing. Which of course the faithful don’t actually do.
Apple made Him get an app so they could say that there’s an app for everything.
——————-
The tweeters and even the FluffPo seem to just be joking. Maybe you are too (PZ), so sorry if I didn’t get it. I don’t think anyone is saying that specifically the bible app has to be deleted, they’re just playing on the space requirements of iOS 8 that do seem to be much higher than iOS 7. It is about 1.3 GB more for something like my iPad mini retina. That’s a good chunk of my 32GB.
^ (Any similarity of my joke to the first tweet at the link is purely coincidental.)
blf @ #10, nahhhhhh, it wasn’t a poor assumption. The Christers do think. But their thinking is all screwed up.
It’s like Ken (Asses in Genesis) Ham & Prof Andy (Truth in Silence) McIntosh & others of their Young Earth Creationist ilk. They are quite logical. Except that they start from a false premise, i.e. that the bible is true. But from there on in they’re pretty darned logical. But they’re still fucking stupid, in not recognizing their initial error.
I like the title, “Another Christian Myth”.
Reminds me of about a decade back when some preachers discovered that a Unix command to change file permissions had an option of ‘666’, and concluded, in an act of Olympian stupidity , that it was Satan’s attempt to infiltrate the internet.
I’ve got the Blue Letter Bible app, it’s not a resource hog and lets you compare translations (including the Septuagint).
By the way, if you don’t have 5 gigs free you can still update from iTunes on a computer. I had probably 2 or 3 gigs free when I updated. You need more space doing it on the device since it has to download the update first.
I spent a few seconds trying to figure out what a “dead uncle app” is before I decided I was mentally substituting commas in the wrong locations.
Obviously this is the “Cult of Jobs” trying to opress the slightly smaller “Cult of Jesus”.
Knut: Satan lets everyone write over his files. Just not to actually run anything.
Well, I got the impression that a lot of the high ups in religion would be quite happy if not everyone could read and write.
Alverant @2
If Christians didn’t have something to feel persecuted about then they get to whine about not being persecuted enough. It’s a win-win situation.
Ariaflame: You’re right on. Knowledge was jealously guarded by the ecclesiastical authorities in the Dark and Middle Ages. The nobility served as the fighting arm, while the clergy were the propagandists. Quite the system.
Penn Jillette agrees: “If you’re considering becoming an atheist, read the Bible from cover to cover. No study guides, no spins, just read it. Sometime between when God tells Abraham to kill his son and when Jesus tells everyone to put him before their families, you’ll be an atheist.”
Maybe the next release of iOS could delete Christianity, and after that…
@7
What does God need with
a starshipan app?Done.
Many years ago when my eldest son was still at school and we had a MSDOS computer, he wrote a bible concordance program. He borrowed the KJV from the library – it fitted on a floppy disk – as did his program!
Do I detect bloat here?
“Well, I got the impression that a lot of the high ups in religion would be quite happy if not everyone could read and write.”
Precisely the reason Tyndale was burned at the stake for publishing a New Testament in English
Why would you have a Bible app? If you needed a copy handy on your iTem, wouldn’t a Bible ebook or a Bible PDF or something be the way to go? Principle of least privilege— the Bible does not need anything executable to be read.
Jake @ 30:
Apps can do things ebooks can’t. For instance, say you want to compare a particular verse between the King James bible and the good news version. An app can do that. (No idea if any Bible apps do that, but it’s an obvious enough feature that at least one must)
It’s their magic words! If you mess with their magic words, bad things happen.
Jake Harban wrote:
Because they need to be told what each verse in The Good Book means. Only fools and atheists try to read and understand the bible for themselves.
Jake, #30
Well, there was that one dude.
Oh, the persecution, the persecution! Truly, everybody is out to get them. This is reaching conspiracy theory levels.
Why has nobody yet said that this is Good News for Humankind?
And religious sites serve up more malware than porn sites. Obvious they can’t code well.
You shouldn’t need an upgrade to force you to delete the bible app, you should delete it just because the bible is crap.
I’ll stick with iOS6 for as long as I can…I’ve yet to have an ‘upgrade’ go smoothly, or feel like it was anything but a downgrade afterwards. Reminds me too much of Windows. I only hope my next phone doesn’t fall into the same problems (probably going Android).