Really I'm not just talking about operating systems. I was trying to make a point about how using Windows instead of an open source OS wouldn't violate this law.

The same could be said for any other software used by the Swiss government. They could be using Excel or other niche proprietary software. Hospitals in Switzerland could also be using obscure proprietary software for their patient databases, especially since that information would likely not be made available to the general public anyway.

According to my literal interpretation of the article, it would need to be made "by or for" the Swiss government. They could use any proprietary software they want based on this phrasing, as long as the software wasn't made by government workers and the government didn't hire any outsourcing company to make it.

Most software we have has been made irrelevantly to the Swiss government or any government in general. Even if they used Linux, Linux has nothing to do with the Swiss government. Unless Switzerland are gonna code their own extensive open source computer infrastructure, the law doesn't really apply to almost any software used in their offices at all.

It seems likely that the Swiss will hire people to write a few open source pieces of software, like maybe an open source hospital software for doctors to put notes into their computers and have it on the database, for the sake of argument. But that might all be a bit of an empty promise from the people signing in this law anyway.

If reading that headline made you think the Swiss government is gonna start using mostly open source software, that might be true, but I don't think the law enforces that as it's explained in the article.

To me this seems to be somewhat of a soft law that could lead on to more laws phasing out proprietary software in Swiss government offices and public sector workplaces. That at some point could include Windows, but swapping Microsoft Office for Libreoffice would be a far easier short-term goal, and that in itself might be a bit of a headache logistically.

If you're interested in what sort of software will be running on Swiss government-owned computers and how much of it will be open source, I think we can't say at this point. You'd have to see what laws they pass in the future and how that software changes.

Anyway, government offices ideally shouldn't use Windows on their computers, especially outside of the US. That is one of the most important things if they're doing this because they think it's more secure.

This would apply to lots of software other than Windows (or operating systems in general).

Well yeah, but the Christian belief is generally that the Bible is right, if you study it, you'll realise that, and "magic" will be proved when we reach the time of Revelations. If a god wanted to keep proving they were divine constantly without anyone having to think about it or "accept God into their heart", they'd have to keep appearing and doing random "magic" for no reason except to prove they were divine. That would be a very chaotic world and might not be God's real goal.

We might not have seen anything like that in our lifetimes, but most of the religions believe that there were miracles in the times of their prophets, so that was sort of happening in the old testament.

You could say that these prophets and divine figures were magicians, but they then likely would need technology far in advance of their time. Do you think Jesus had elaborate stage tricks? It would probably be more sensible to say at least some of them were lied about or supposed to be metaphorical.

Just because you've never seen something you don't think is understood by physics or other explainable things, doesn't mean there isn't any kind of god(s) that have divine powers.

If God is the ultimate ruler and creator of the universe, God can do whatever He wants. Any belief system will tell you this basically.

You seem to be an atheist, but if you did believe in God then it would be quite silly of you to deny that such a God could perform miracles. If this is all someone's dream, they could imagine whatever they wanted. If I wrote a computer program and was the "god" of that universe, I could make whatever I wanted happen in the program, at least if I was skilled enough in programming, but God would have to be anyway in that scenario.

You seem like you might actually have quite a detailed knowledge of evolution, especially very early evolution. I don't know a huge amount of detail about the early evolutionary time periods.

My understanding is that for a long time it had to just be the primordial soup. That would need to create a self-replicating molecule, which was a very unlikely random event that advanced life was essentially waiting for.

Some Christians and probably other people could believe life didn't originally come from this process. God could have created life and then let it evolve.

The mitochondria would have probably came in after this, and mitochondria being in cells does actually mean we can say that all eukaryotes had a common ancestor, because that was also a very rare event in the early stages. It could likely have happened to just one cell (at least the final stage of making cells with mitochondria), which is what I think you're describing, but I might be wrong.

If we're not interpreting the story of Adam and Eve literally, that could be the meaning. Adam and Eve were just a very early stage of evolution that created organisms of some kind that could easily spread.

Some more devout Christians might not like that interpretation though, since I think the story could be made at least a little more literal.

Anyway this was a big ramble. I hope someone somewhere enjoyed reading it. My point really is that some people who seem strongly against religion in general haven't thought much about the claims they make, which you should if you care about having logically informed beliefs. You seem to have thought about it at least a little bit, especially with your point about evolution, but I think that if you want to go around proclaiming your worldview, you should be able to somewhat counter other worldviews, especially one(s) you were taught a fair bit about growing up and are dissing.

There are also the more philosophical/logical arguments for or against there being a God in general. Those are a whole other kettle of fish and I think they're generally quite weak and inconclusive (if they weren't then every logical thinker who checked one would have quite consistent worldviews).

I'm an agnostic who's learned a fair bit about Christianity. I know how Buddhism is supposed to work as well essentially, and a little bit about other religions like Hinduism. I've had someone telling me about Christianity all the time basically, so I know quite a bit about how the Christian worldview is supposed to work, which is somewhat similar to Judaism and Islam.

Anyway, that's it.

TL;DR: God could obviously do any magic they wanted and evolution doesn't exactly disprove Adam and Eve. There are lots of predictions in the Bible and if you want to understand them and their significance you need to know where they came from and who was testing the predictions. Feel free to argue. I'm in bed ill and that's why I made such a long and somewhat confrontational forum post.

Also, obviously if the Christian God is real He can do whatever He wants. Any God can do whatever they want pretty much, unless it's a pantheon where gods fight or something. If you think this is all a dream then whoever's dreaming it can do whatever, at least if they're aware. If you've seen the Haruhi anime, Haruhi can perform whatever miracles she wants. All religions believe God can do whatever they want, and that's just sensible. They're God.

God could obviously spawn as much water as He wanted. He could make pocket dimensions or something in Noah's ark. It doesn't even really matter.

You do raise another good point though, which is essentially that you think Christianity contradicts evolution. Obviously if you're a creationist then that isn't a problem, but most Christians nowadays are not creationists.

What would really need to be proved through evidence of evolution in order to discredit Christianity is exactly what you said. "Mankind isn't descended from two people."

Evolutionists are often discovering "gaps" in their chain, and by that I mean filling them in. I don't think the gaps in the evolutionary lines disprove it. That's just totally stupid. There's a futurama clip where they explain how dumb creationists are to think that, and I totally agree with it.

The problem though is that essentially evolutionists just discover snapshots of evolution. Pretty sure I had evolution explained to me in my biology class as the evidence being like this: take a photo of your dad and one of yourself, then if you have any children tell them to do the same and collect them up in a big photo album. Over the massive timescales of evolution, you should start to see some change or development in these pictures. You should in theory be able to start with very simple microorganisms and create a family line going all the way down to a modern human, but they can't do that in practice.

The lineages worked out based on fossils by scientists aren't even as clear cut as that. If I discovered the bones of some neanderthal and named them "Alice" or whatever (I don't actually know all the lineages in detail, but schools will often teach a small segment leading up to Homo sapiens, and I used to have that memorised), then someone else found another set of bones and decided to name them "Bob", we could start talking about Alice and Bob.

Alice and Bob were essentially people. They weren't as evolved as modern people but they were both prototypes of a person at some stage in human evolution. Alice and Bob probably weren't close family members. It's exceedingly unlikely Alice was Bob's mother or sister. If they were found in the same region and dated to a similar time period then they should be quite similar, and that's generally what evolutionists find. You can also analyse other things, like most obviously the shape of their bones, which changed over time. There are more advanced things evolutionists check in modern times too, like they compare the genetic codes for cytochrome oxidase, since it's an enzyme found in pretty much all life. That may not have been preserved in some of these fossils though, idk really tbh.

Bare in mind of course that most people didn't end up as fossils, and most of those probably haven't even been found and analysed.

The actual point is that at no point could we say Alice and Bob were in any very easily understandable way related to one another, nor do we know exactly who their ancestors are. Evolutionists (scientists) sketch out big trees that show how creatures at different stages of evolution were related to each other based on various evidence. Their evidence will always be incomplete in that they can never ever trace an exact lineage from a million or so years ago.

There could be an older fossil, Charlie, who they put in as part of their tree because he seemed like an earlier stage and more similar to the stuff/people that came before him. Charlie could have died from some genetic disease and never had children though. He might have been an evolutionary failure. An actual evolutionary scientist would likely be quick to correct you if you said Charlie was "the ancestor/father" of Alice or Bob.

What I'm trying to say is, evolutionary scientists would have no way of knowing "mankind isn't descended from two people". They might say that's not generally how evolution works, but if you use a relatively small sample and evolve antibiotic resistance into bacteria, it would technically be possible. It might even have been happening exactly like that occasionally across the world when hospitals didn't realise there was such a problem with antibiotics and how they should be prescribed.

Essentially, there's a small chance/it is theoretically possible we evolved from two people, especially after a big extinction event.

Every Christian who isn't a creationist should be aware of the fact that the term translated to "day" in most English versions as in "God created the world in 6 days, then rested on the 7th" or whatever doesn't necessarily mean "day". It could just mean any arbitrary time period.

If we're gonna go extra far with how evolution could fit in with the Bible, we could say some of these "days" corresponded to different parts of our huge scientific time period.

Maybe God brought about Adam by perfecting the genetic code miraculously after a major extinction event long in the past, and humans evolved from there, though the lineages in the Bible would disagree with this. I think a more sensible view for a non-creationist Christian would be that Adam was a very late stage in human evolution (probably actually Homo sapiens). God could have created Homo sapiens by making some changes to the previous step, which would be somewhat consistent with being made in "His image". That would be a literal interpretation.

Of course, you could call into question the validity of different versions, or say there really should be only one version. If you're a Christian, should you read the KJV, the NIV or something else?

I believe there were a few different lines of scholars. For example, the Bible was copied in the Vatican, but also by other scholars across the world. If you're not gonna read the original (which is written in multiple ancient languages that scholars today don't seem to have a full understanding of), then there are loads of English translations, and a handful of popular ones.

I think scholars actually understand the Latin translation used by the Romans a lot more than the original text. That one was also copied. Of course, translating the Bible seems to be a very dangerous business if you're a Christian.

One of the very last verses in the Bible (Revelation 22:18) (and also 22:19) basically warns you're gonna be cursed and go to hell if you edit the text of the Bible.

Meaning can be lost or added in translation, so you could say that if Christians truly believe the Bible is a holy text that shouldn't be edited, they should all try to read the original.

This was a bit of tangent, but essentially what I'm saying is that cross-references in the Bible are valid evidence for the Bible. They're not necessarily proof but they are evidence. If you were interested in what I'm saying, you could consider looking into the Book of Isaiah. The Christian I know who's always telling me this stuff says it contains loads of predictions and some of them agree with other predictions made elsewhere. There are also some bibles (especially study bibles) that contain tables of these predictions and how they were fulfilled by Jesus (according to the books of the new testament).

The new testament isn't exactly a fanfic sequel though. It (and also the old testament) was written by multiple different people who claimed to witness (or prophesise) certain things and agree on a lot of them. You do make a good point though. If some or all of these people had studied the predictions in the old testament and lied or assumed certain details (all the writers of the new testament could have even conspired to lie to everyone), then some of the prophecies would hold very little weight, especially the 30 silver one.

If you consider the Bible to be a proper historical source that was compiled from books different people wrote about current events, then you probably should take at least some of the Bible seriously.

There are other predictions, like that Jesus would be descended from David, and supposedly the entire line of the family tree from Adam to Jesus has been kept track of. You probably don't believe that's accurate, but it's easier to believe people kept track of the lineage from David. The Jews wanted to keep track of this stuff to see if the prophecies worked out.

The easiest way to convince a reasonably logical person to be a Christian (which I definitely don't think would be reading random well-known Bible stories like the Book of Job), would be to show them undeniable evidence that Jesus died and rose from the dead. The Bible is quite short of doing that as far as I'm aware, but there are lots of other little predictions like that which could contribute evidence towards what the Bible says as a whole.

I think the vast majority of sensible historians looking into that time period agree that there was a person called Jesus that became (at least locally) quite famous for being a moral philosopher and claiming to be God or in touch with God in some way and his ideas spread across the world over time (some religions other than Christianity actually claim that Jesus was a prophet, but some of his teachings were corrupted and Christians shouldn't be worshipping him the same way they do Allah or whatever else).

Also, the stories in the Bible were not passed down by word of mouth. They were copied by scholars and translated into different languages for others to read. This would suggest the original text of the Bible has actually been preserved.

Coming at this from more of a common sense angle, I was always told oil doesn't go down the sink. For most people, it ends up in the normal rubbish.

Putting oil in the normal rubbish seems like it would have basically no issues at all. I think it would either be incinerated or end up in a landfill. If the energy from burning rubbish is being harvested (it might not be) then I would think the oil would help and that could be a useful way to recycle it.

If it ends up in a landfill, I don't see any problem with a bit of oil being buried with other junk. A lot of people seem to be saying they would bury it anyway.

The only real concern would be if you have a lot of oil and you're worried about your bin leaking or something. If you put most oil immediately into the bin then this shouldn't really be an issue.

Of course if you just have a few little drops of oil in with a bunch of water then you would probably pour that in the sink anyway and it would most likely be fine.

Collecting stuff in a bucket, making soap or using it for something else seems like a lot of hassle to mitigate quite minor concerns. Most people don't have a serious use for a bucket of used cooking oil.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong about any of this.

Did you attempt to analyse the Bible in a logical way though? I don't believe in it personally, but someone I know is very adamant about being a Christian and thinks that the Bible essentially proves itself to be true.

The Bible is generally quite boring to read from cover to cover. A big part of the reason for this is that large sections of the Bible just tell you long family trees. The old testament also includes a lot of prophecies about Jesus and essentially what is supposed to happen in the new testament (if Jesus was really the messiah). Sections of the Bible like this aren't necessarily supposed to excite you that much, but if you think of the Bible as one compiled historical document, you can check its internal consistencies and think about where information might be missing.

As an example, Jesus' betrayer (who it wasn't said in the old testament would specifically be Judas), was predicted to get 30 silver pieces for betraying him. This was a quite specific prediction, especially if you knew he would be dealing with Roman currency. It's a bit like if we made up a new religion now and said that our messiah would appear in America and the betrayer would get $500. If that actually happened, it would be some evidence for our religion (or Christianity).

Of course we could say that 30 pieces of actual silver would have similar values across most (silver-backed) currency, which is unlike basically every world currency today. That might have been a reasonable prediction for what you would get for sending a criminal to be executed anyway. Also, we don't really know if Judas actually got 30 silver pieces if we're not gonna totally trust the Bible.

If you haven't checked out any of the "cross-referencing" of the Bible and just think it's an airy fairy thing about there being a God who performed miracles, then you're denying the Bible from a lot less logical of a position than the Christian I know who is always banging on about this stuff to me to try and convert me.

As a side note, I believe there are a limited number of other historical sources relating to the time period of the Bible, although most of these would either be quite irrelevant or they would be deemed Satanic by Christians.

It doesn't seem like this law would mean that their government is necessarily using much (or even technically any) open source software.

Based on the article, the law seems to apply to software developed "by or for" the public sector. Windows wasn't made "by or for" the public sector. It was made by a company in the US. And yet lots of computers used by people employed by governments across the world are using Windows. I know that in the UK at least (and probably a lot of other countries), pretty much all the computers in hospitals run on Windows, and I don't think that would violate this law.

They might pass more laws to phase out Windows and other proprietary software on government computers, but as it stands it seems like that only actually applies if the Swiss government want to make software. Most software they would need for handling databases and things already exists.

They did also talk about how the law would make certain data have to be publicly accessible. I dunno whether you would have to specifically request that data from their government by filling out a form or something (ideally not I suppose), but if they want the data to be in a proper open file format instead of something like .xlsx, a lot of government offices might start using Libreoffice and similar, but that's somewhat unrelated from the first part of the law.