Spark Bible is a free app I built for iOS & Android. The idea is that many millions of people read the Bible regularly and want it to impact their lives for good. However, the Bible is also quite difficult to understand.
There is a lot of foundational knowledge people only get through graduate education in theology or biblical studies (e.g., understanding the differences between ancient near eastern cultures vs today’s cultures). My goal is for Spark Bible to make that type of knowledge and learning more accessible to the average Bible reader.
I just gave this a quick try. I really like how easy the interface is to use and navigate. Parts like the bottom panel can be turned off if they get in the way.
One big thing that I noticed that would keep me from switching from my current Bible app, KJV Bible Lite, is that there's no offline mode. I can't load any chapters without a connection. I like that there are several translations available, but generally, the text isn't so big that it couldn't simply be stored locally.
Also, while I really like the idea of videos being available, there are tons of textual commentaries available for each book and chapter of the Bible. I have a few physical copies from various authors and publishers that I like to reference while studying. I'm not sure how viable it would be to include in an app like this due to various factors (eg: I'm not sure if a lot of the known commentaries in print are available online, especially for free from their publishers), but it would be an excellent addition. Especially too, I'm already reading the Bible. I think that switching to watching a video could take me out of the flow of reading once the video was over.
I'm going to keep using this and see if it can give me a better experience than KJV Bible Lite
Thanks for the great feedback! I do really like the idea of offline mode and integrating text-based commentary (there's definitely some great stuff out there). The main hurdle at this point is the licensing fees associated with both these items.
There are roughly 1,900 years of freely-usable commentaries, going by the rule of thumb that anything published in the US before 1923 is in the public domain. (The translations would have had to have been done before that year as well, I guess.) This could be an accessible way to get into e.g. St. Augustine's commentaries.
I think the way YouVersion got around it was having the public domain versions downloadable (so KJV and ASV I think). Maybe that would be enough for now?
Are there any Bible apps that you would recommend? When I was last looking, I was wading through loads of apps that were little more than the scripture text, but overloaded with ads
There is an android version as well. It's fast, easy to read, works offline, and makes it simple to leave notes or highlights. I'm not personally used to the NASB translation, but the app is quite nice.
I started writing out the features that I'd like to have in an ideal Bible app, such as multiple translations, commentaries, etc. But I remembered that I used sites like Bible Hub and Bible Gateway regularly. It didn't occur to me until now that they might have apps, and sure enough, they do! Bible Gateway offers an offline mode, but you have to create an account first in order to download specific versions of the text. Bible Hub is little more than a wrapper of the website, even advertising the app within the app.
Congrats on launching.
I'm not Christian, but this does remind me a bit of the Sefaria project, which aims to bring together a library of Jewish texts for scholarship, and has a great mobile app. This project also seems to have a deep scholarly focus, so it might be worth having a look at as well for some ideas.
My main question for this app is how they are going to deal with the many conflicting interpretations of the Bible. Who decides which interpretation is shown by default or the order?
For example, the pro-LGBT and anti-LGBT churches have drastically different views of many verses.
“I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.”
-1 Corinthians 1:10 (ESV)
“I appeal to you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught; avoid them.”
-Romans 16:17 (ESV)
“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.”
The letters to the churches are relevant today. They aren’t cannon to point out the church at Corinth has this particular issue and it doesn’t apply to anyone else.
You’re pointing out that scriptural context is important, and you’re right. These verses, in full context, are about divisions in the church.
That’s true, but the context of what was going on still matters. You’re better off referencing the entire book and what it’s saying and why, than covering a single verse out of context as instruction.
Yes, that’s true. But, it’s not out of context. It’s explicitly about being “divided.”
> Divisions in the Church
10 I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. 11 For it has been reported to me by Chloe's people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers. 12 What I mean is that each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” or “I follow Apollos,” or “I follow Cephas,” or “I follow Christ.” 13 Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? 14 I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, 15 so that no one may say that you were baptized in my name. 16 (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.) 17 For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.
Do you follow the LGBT church? Or the anti-LGBT church? Or do you follow X? Or do you follow Y?
> I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.
But how would you actually implement that in this app? People fundamentally disagree about the meanings of many verses.
Yeah is that poster saying the division between the different Christian stances is against the Bibles message and one side or both is not in accordance with the words of the Bible.
Or are they trying to suggesting the act of pointing out the very clear different and incompatible beliefs between two different Christian groups is actually the division the Bible is against.
Hard to tell which, but those two readings are basically the opposite of each other.
Your example is an interesting one. I wonder if majority of people make up a belief first and then follow a church that reaffirms their (already made up) belief or they follow a church first and let the church shape their beliefs?
Neither, most people are born into whatever church their parents went to ;)
But seriously, it really is a mix. A church can most certainly shape its members beliefs, but many people will also leave a church over issues like these.
That's an important question. I attend a church that I disagree with on some issues. What I love about it is that it's OK for me to tell our ministers that I disagree and we have a conversation. I mentioned that I didn't know how I felt about the topic of a recent sermon and I've been invited to work on a Bible study on the topic so the congregation can learn more.
Definitely an important question. In an ideal world, I believe people would want to explore and learn from viewpoints that differ from their own (after all, how else can you learn?). But, of course people tend to be very embattled on issues like these and shy away from anything that sounds different than what they already believe.
One idea I have is to use a ML recommendation model that would use theological preferences as inputs. The trick would be how to personalize that model for a given user before knowing what content they want or would be put off by. Perhaps that could be part of the onboarding process though.
This would be great. It’s about the way the Talmud is structured. Every piece has multiple interpretations and they’re written together and can be discussed an though about
Not every view. Some of them have an obvious, indisputable truth value – like “the start of Genesis 2 is just an out-of-order version of Genesis 1” (something I used to think until I looked at an untranslated version – it's obviously wrong, and only the specific word choice of a specific English translation suggests it could be right).
They will have no free will but to accept the recommendations given to them. But seriously, most churches belong to a denomination. And practically all denominations have a specific alignment on every theological issue you can imagine. In any case, you could simply go with reformed theology beliefs and that'll work for most users.
> And practically all denominations have a specific alignment on every theological issue you can imagine.
That's...not particularly true, especially for the denominations that are both large and institutionally old, or are newer but less centrally authoritarian. The Roman Catholic Church (for an example in the former category) for instance, has a small number of declared-as-infallible dogmas, a larger number of doctrines that arr understood to be certain or argued to have been infallibly declared, a wide space of broadly accepted doctrine about which there is still debate which is recognized as legitimate and not dissent, and plenty of open theological questions, more of which are added all the time, because changing circumstances raise new questions not previously considered, and change the factual context of previous considerations so that, even for doctrines that are solid, what piece of the prior articulation is the actual doctrine and what piece reflects the limitations of the context considered at the earlier time must be discerned, and is often actively debated.
"has a small number of declared-as-infallible dogmas"
There's rather more to it in general but the concept of dogma is one of the reasons that many Christian denominations exist - in protest of the notion of dogma.
For example: Papal Infallibility. The dogma of Papal Infallibility is that God created the post of Pope and inaugurated St Peter as the first one. God created the papacy for His purposes therefore holders of that role cannot be fallible. However, the Pope is a man (why can't Papa be Mum?) and I'm pretty sure that involves being a sinner. It takes some pretty fancy footwork to elevate a bloke who was a mere automatically sinning Cardinal into an Infallible Pope.
For me the whole crux (if you like) of Christianity is that the ultimate divine being became a person and suffered as such - if you like: They experienced Their creation first hand. I don't think you should go around elevating people into little or demi Gods - that's a form of polytheism. Funnily enough I'm declaring my own form of dogma: People are not infallible: Pope, Queen, nor gerdesj.
I do understand the Catholic concept of dogma and even why it still exists. It is not my point to belittle it either but there is quite a good reason why: "practically all denominations have a specific alignment." Those people find the concept of dogma and the like ... sometimes unsatisfactory.
That tells you about PC USA. Which is a historical mainline liberal presbytery in the US. It doesn't tell you in the last 5 years a good number of individual congregations have left because of this very issue and emigrated to the EPC or other slightly 'less' liberal denominations. Or that PCUSA has been hemmoraging numbers for a long time. Or the PCUSA has often been thought of as a big umbrella denoms that has in the past allowed individual prebyterys (regionally) to have differing rules.
Or that presbyteries are not like catholic churches or anglican ones! There are no priests or higher authorities! Each presby congregation is made up of members, who elect elders, who then visit their local presbytery (the regional org) to vote on matters.
Most importantly, it misses the fact, that Presbyterian is an anagram for Britney Spears
Church name doesn't tell you the denomination. Do you know how many presbyterian denominations there are in the US alone? Most of them are probably completely the opposite of the PC(USA) on those particular issues the HRC cares to discuss at all.
It's a spectrum. On one end you can just find someone to teach and validate all your existing beliefs. On the other, you can blindly follow religious leaders verbatim; all the way into a cult, Southern Baptist approval of slavery, or Catholic indulgences.
Does this app include teachings from Latter-day Saint theologians? While I'm interested in this, typically my faith is excluded from these sorts of projects, and often it doesn't take long when I dive into "mainstream" christian communities to come across hostility towards my faith or non trinitarian views.
I also have difficulties to find good iOS app for Catholic. Nah. It's very hard for me to find any downloadable version of Catholic publications.
Anyway, that's too bad that you received that hostility. I have 2 mormon friends in my high school. They are chill and fun to hang-out with. They often invited me to join their church, but I can reject without making it a big issue.
Hey, you might like to try get.catenabible.com - we have a large catholic, orthodox, and protestant user base interested in understanding Christianity from the early Christian interpretation. Hope you find it helpful, God bless!
More accurately, I might say it's a protestant Christian app, whereas Mormonism considers itself restoration Christianity and may not fit as well here.
Can we please stop suggesting that anti-LGBTQ "viewpoints" are worth exploring and that people are just to "embattled" on the issue of basic human decency?
Hey, good question ^^ we built Catena which only collates apostolic Christian commentary, which primarily comes from pre-denominational writers. Early Christian commentary is a deep source of original Christianity, definitely helps with accurate interpretation of Scripture, and you can filter which writers you would like to read from in the settings. Hope you find it helpful (get.catenabible.com)
I don't think you'd actually hear someone saying something like this today, despite the fact that the theological divide between protestant and Roman Catholic remains what it has been.
I'm a non-denominational protestant, but my family is good friends with a Roman Catholic family down the street... we do have so much in common with them, despite our disagreement as to whether justification and righteousness before God is conferred on the basis of faith alone in Jesus Christ alone.
> despite our disagreement as to whether justification and righteousness before God is conferred on the basis of faith alone in Jesus Christ alone.
There is a strong tendency for Catholics and Protestants, when we all chill out and sit down carefully making distinctions about Justification, to find we agreed all along but had different language to describe the same thing.[1] I suspect it extends to other doctrinal issues and areas of genuine disagreement become much more productive when said attitudes and practices are adopted.
I also strongly suspect that most areas of disagreement between Christians are persistent symptoms of European Renaissance politics with theological rationalization.
Speaking more seriously, most churches these days are very ecumenical since they have realized they have much more in common with each other than secular culture.
I've been thinking about this technical space a bit lately. I don't personally like mixing text with other media, but I do agree that many of the bigger bible websites are severely lacking in the UX department.
Best site I've found personally is yallversion.com . It replaces "you" in any translation with "y'all" (or other 2nd person plurals) based on the original koine greek. I've been studying koine, so the side-by-side view works and highlighting words between different versions is what makes it so useful to me, but the "y'all" stuff is honestly amazing in it's own right.
I do a little thing with languages where the data is something like "shake ${his} resolve" or "conspire against ${him}" where the feminine for both are the same word. But for his/hers, we use ${hers} because the masculine conflicts with his/her.
English is an interesting language. It doesn't get this confusing with most of the other languages I know.
That's a good question that I'm still exploring. I'm still debating the non-profit vs for-profit route. At the moment this is bootstrapped and self-funded, but if I can gain enough traction I may attempt a freemium business model where people can pay for more advanced study tools (e.g., original languages) and potentially for in-house produced video content.
Thanks for clarifying -- makes sense. Good luck with the project.
Maybe I'm weird about it but reading the Bible for me is personal enough that I don't want to use an app that collects my identifier and tracks usage data. I'd rather pay for something I can use offline or anonymously. Non-profits seem preferable for this sort of thing as well imo.
I don't mind the occasional online Bible app, but in general, I'd far rather read offline with something that doesn't track my reading/information/etc. I understand that the gamification can be useful, but it also is a wealth of "big data" that can be aggregated and I'm not sure that's healthy for anyone.
I'm going to be even more controversial and contend that neither historical context nor primary sources should ever be necessary to legitimately criticise an idea. Primary sources and historical context are certainly valuable for the study of history and culture—but any idea worth its salt should always be able to stand on its own. By way of example, one shouldn't need to have studied the Rigveda, or understand the historical context of ancient India, in order to have reasonable ground as a proponent or critic of modern yoga practice.
I certainly wasn't offering advice about how to be persuasive in marketing your ideas, or criticising ideas. That's an entirely different kettle of fish.
If being able to quote from the Rigveda is important to changing your mind about whether yoga has positive physical effects on the human body, then I suppose anyone motivated to convince you should probably do that.
Congrats on the launch! I installed it and messed around with it a little bit, it's quite polished. However, I honestly find tools like this in kind of a weird place. I don't think I'd use this as a Bible study tool (a pen/paper and physical Bible seem to be more productive), and when I'm on my phone reading the Bible or a devotional it's early in the morning or before bed -- not really in the mindspace for a deep exegetical dive.
This looks like a Protestant version of Catena, a similar app where the annotations are exclusively from Orthodox and/or Catholic sources over the millennia.
Hi! Catena developer here :) I am Coptic Orthodox, and our team has had Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant engineers. We do serve all Christians, with the service of apostolic Christian commentary. Happy to connect anytime and hear any thoughts! God bless!
Other pages load ok in it, and I tried some other links. But maybe it's just me?
(using safari on ipad)
(similarly, searching for "spark bible" brings up nothing)
Is it region-restricted? I'm not in the USA.
EDIT: ah by using the footer App Store link I get a page in the App Store with a dialog saying that the app isn't available in my region. I tried using both links again, and yeah for some reason the floating footer link shows the informative error, but not the upper one. Spooksies...
Most of the apps in this space that are doing really well (Youversion, Abide, etc.) are geared more towards making the Bible quick and easy. This is great, but I believe people also need an easy way to learn on a deeper level. Videos are the starting point, but I hope to add more ways to accomplish this. My vision is to help "bridge the gap" between academia and the everyday Bible reader.
The video content is reviewed (currently by me via an admin portal). All the videos are publicly available (Youtube and Vimeo).
A real business model is TBD. It's currently more of a "passion project" but if I can gain enough traction I think there's some interesting ideas for monetization and partnerships.
As a (fellow?) Christian I'm curious how you imagine curation of videos would scale, especially like you mentioned somewhere, different viewpoints can be highly controversial even amongst the Christian community.
Ideally, Spark Bible would help overcome the embattlement that divides Christians by providing education that's more academic and explores differing viewpoints. But, I know that is probably over-idealistic thinking.
One idea I have is to build an ML model that could be used to personalize what content is presented to a given user. It should be pretty trivial to build & train.
From what I've seen of scripture, people are perfectly happy to donate to the project. I'm in one open source group and we've had people request to donate even though there's nothing left to spend the money on. Often they choose pay for things like hosting, so I think a Patreon would be a good enough business model. Or just a premium app with advanced features.
Full disclosure, i haven't had a chance to look at your app yet, but I have a question. How does it compare to apps like Logos (Aka Verbum)? Specifically, can it compete with the logos PC and mobile integration and libraries?
Thanks, very interested to learn about your product.
While this could very well change as the app evolves, my current vision is that Spark Bible bridges the gap between a normal Bible app and more academic tools like Logos. I would like for people to experience the same ideas that a biblical scholar has via studying commentaries and Greek/Hebrew using Logos, but without having to go to seminary. Organizations like BibleProject and many seminaries are making some great educational content freely available online, which in large part gave birth to this idea.
A video being publicly available doesn't mean you have permission to reuse it for free. If you do not have permission to use those videos you are stealing from those creators.
> By connecting you with video from top Bible teachers, Spark Bible enables you to find answers and to become a smarter, more confident Bible reader.
> Solid Bible education is now just a tap away for every chapter of the Bible.
It seems like you're not vetting the content at all. I'm not sure this will really consistently lead to being "smarter" or "more educated". You can find a wealth of manipulative, toxic "religious leaders" on YouTube.
Edit:
I see this comment [0] from OP:
> Currently there's an admin back-end where videos are manually reviewed and given applicable Bible references before they show up within the app.
Cool! I made a Bible program myself (scrolltag.com) a while back. I have also made a series of explanatory videos on the entire Old Testament (~280 videos) I made for a Bible College. Maybe you can include them. theapprenticeship.org/otvideos.html
The tech stack is pretty straightforward (Rails back-end, using Expo/React Native for the mobile apps).
The biblical texts are actually rendered in a WebView and the native code communicates back/forth to the WebView with a basic javascript bridge. I wasn't sure this approach would work at first, but it's actually worked out quite nicely.
Handling theological bias has actually been one of the bigger challenges (not technical of course). People have such drastically different views and prejudices of the Bible that I'm always walking a careful line of what resources are approved vs not.
My approach will likely improve over time, but for now it is based on a few main factors.
1) Is the content primarily concerned with teaching the Bible?
2) Does the teaching fall within what is broadly considered orthodox?
3) Is it a good "fit" for the UX of the app?
By "fit" I mostly mean duration. If there is a good sermon, but it's 45 min long, then it may not be approved. Since people are actively reading the Bible, ideally a video will say something meaningful and specific about a Bible passage without taking too long (<5 mins).
We've had similar challenges with Catena, definitely a challenge in the fragmented denominational space, but I like your principle of indexing on broadly orthodox content. Excited you're thinking about this space :)
we actually do this on get.catenabible.com - we get permission from the speakers then tag the video in our database by verse+timestamp. Would love your feedback :) God bless!
Regulat you-version bible app user here: I really like your app as it is not bothering me everytime I accidentally select a verse (instead of scrolling) when using the you-version. The changes of the top and bottom bar could be less distracting in my opinion, though…
I however still miss a german Bible version (Elberfelder or Luther) - or it was not clear how to find the other languages versions.
Just one other idea: I regularly need to do live translations and like the history if a side by side view is optionally viewable that would be great. Thanks
This isn't specific to the Bible (although it's prevalent in that community), but I've never understood why it's seen as so important to understand what the original authors of literature meant or intended. They're fallible like everyone else, and therefore might be wrong. To me it seems like it would make far more sense to focus on seeking the best conclusions using the source material as inspiration, rather than treating the source material as an authority and seeking to understand exactly what they meant.
In terms of impacting people's lives for good, I definitely feel like religions are at their best when they are inspiratory, and at their worst when they try to impose authority.
Understanding the original context/culture in which the literature was produced can be very helpful (although I'm not saying it's 100% necessary).
One illustration is that of a traveler. If someone was traveling to another country with a drastically different culture than their own, they would be expected to make the effort to learn the customs and differences in that culture before they went. This would help them understand and experience things in a whole new way, gaining a broader perspective of the world than just their own ways of thinking. Essentially, taking the time to understand this other culture will be the difference between a "good" vs "bad" travel experience for them.
I believe it's similar with reading and trying to understand ancient texts. It's the difference between learning something new that can grow your perspective on the world, versus reading your own perspective into the text and simply reinforcing the ideas you already had.
> To me it seems like it would make far more sense to focus on seeking the best conclusions using the source material as inspiration, rather than treating the source material as an authority and seeking to understand exactly what they meant.
But then why would you need the source material at all? You can just come to conclusions about things without relying on any source text, if grounding interpretation in the source text is not critical.
In that case, literature (and criticism in general) become about the cleverness of the interpreter rather than anything about the art itself: the effect is to first devalue the art, then to devalue the study of art. To the extent that appreciating and studying art is useful to a society, ultimately this diminishes the culture. This is more or less what we've seen happen in the post-Deconstruction era.
Annotations add great value for works where the reader would otherwise miss cultural context (or can even reveal inside-jokes, as with The Annotated Alice). I wouldn't try to read James Joyce or Shakespeare without them. In the case of the Bible, there are books that rely heavily on well-known allegories, Aramaic puns, or just features of everyday daily life in the ancient middle-east that a modern reader wouldn't have internalized.
For many (not all) their holy books are not seen as inspiration but devine instructions. Not as fallible words authored by men but as devine revelation transcribed my men.
I totally understand that many would argue against that but if you are trying to understand the motivations for understanding the authors intent this explains why some do it.
> They're fallible like everyone else, and therefore might be wrong.
I think this is the misunderstanding. The Christian position is that God is infallible, therefore the Bible is infallible, since God is its ultimate author.
Since that's the case, we want to understand it as well as we can. Any position I hold that contradicts Scripture is by definition wrong, therefore I want my views to match what is taught in Scripture exactly. I'll never get there perfectly because I'm a fallible sinner, but the closer the better.
That is definitely true. For example there is widely held doubt that Paul wrote 1 and 2 Timothy despite that being the claim in its opening words. The content of the cannon,the books which make up the Bible were horse traded around 400 AD by fallible human beings. Before that there was no accepted Bible. I have a strong Christian faith in which the Bible plays it's part, but it needs to be read thoughtfully.
Serious question: why even call yourself a Christian if you don't believe that God is powerful enough to guarantee that his Word will stand, be known, and is final and authoritative? If we can't believe that minimal fact, how can we believe that Christ died for our sins, that we will be resurrected bodily in glory, that the Lord was conceived by a virgin, or that God parted the Red Sea, or made the world in six days?
"The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever" (Is. 40:8).
I don't wish to get into a 2000 year old debate about who is a true Christian. We do better to unite than to fight.
I was merely confirming that it is not necessary to consider the Bible to be infallible for it to be valuable. I do not need to call myself a Christian any more than I need to call myself a human. I am one, and luckily you cannot take that away from me.
Personally I don't see how this comment is at all relevant. I assume OP posted the project here to show it off as a technical project, it just happens to be about a religious topic.
when it comes to historically significant texts, I like having the ability to cross reference editions, esp. with translated works. translator annotations and marginal information are usually where I derive the most value. would love to see an "annotated king James" that contains information about potential linguistic issues migrating to English, as well as notes about translational ambiguities etc
I don't see how you can justify throwing away the original intent of the author with that reasoning without that also justifying throwing away the work entirely.
Surely the intent of the author when they were writing the piece, and the piece itself are both worth considering when analyzing the text?
I find this position understandable, but I can't imagine holding it myself.
I think reducing the consideration of the author's intention is tempting, but in fact it is a mistake to forget the human (or supernatural, for religious texts) element. This type of information is inherently relevant to understanding most any conclusions based on the work.
I need to pay more attention to a meeting, but your response is genuinely appreciated. I'll note that I agree with you on works of fiction, but what about religious texts (which claim to be pure/divine) or non-fiction (which usually claims to represent the truth).
Imagine Eeyore telling you, "You're a real friend." If you heard him say that, it'd be obvious from his intonation and mannerisms that he was being sarcastic. However, simply reading the quote, the meaning is unclear, or seems opposite of what was intended. How do you seek the "best conclusions" without understanding intention, or the illocutionary force, of the speech act?
The necessity of interpretation to understand written texts is what led to the Protestant Reformation. Later, Francis Bacon applied interpretation beyond religious texts to the "Book of Nature", which was the precursor to the Scientific Revolution. The cognitive effect of written language is fascinating and completely frames modern ways of thinking. If you find this interesting, check out The World on Paper by David Olson.
The biggest issue with the Bible compared to similar ethics oriented literature is that it doesn't do a good job of providing explanations for why things are immoral. This makes it very difficult to correct the mistakes that the authors made and update them to the modern era.
The best example of this is probably the kosher rules in the Old Testament that banned shellfish. Those rules might have made a lot of sense back when they were first written (back when seafood was very risky due to poor refrigeration), but are probably not very useful now. The issue is that because the Bible doesn't explain that reasoning, it's not possible to easily update those rules to adapt to modern food safety techniques.
I'm not going to do this concept justice because it takes a while to get into this mindset but I'll try to share what I can.
Something people get out of religion is that not everything can be understood. I believe this to be intellectually true - whether because creation cannot understand the more complex creator, or because we simply evolved to understand what we need to survive but there's no reason to think we can see objective truth (see Kant's Critique of Pure reason)
Religion embodies this humility (recognition that I can't understand it all) To use your example, we follow kosher laws not because they make sense to us but because they are commandments of a higher power which we are too humble to know better than. The fact that some of these commandments also "make practical sense" almost undermines that point. Ie - just because pork is now USDA-inspected doesn't empower is to decide "oh we know better than G-d"
I have grown from an atheist to someone who tried to embody the above, but it works even if you treat it as a pure metaphor for recognizing that some things are beyond us.
The idea that a higher power would care if we ate shellfish, but is ok with us beating our slaves (as long as they don't die straight away), is really hard to rationalise.
The humble position, when faced with something you don't know, is to say "I don't know." Too often the religious position seems to be "I can't know, therefore I will believe something someone else has told me" which seems entirely non-humble to me.
> I've never understood why it's seen as so important to understand what the original authors of literature meant or intended.
How could you even begin to understand the text without knowing what they meant? Surely not by free association! Recall those ancient epics you've likely read in school. What were they? Translations. Someone rendered the original text into your language for you. To do that, they had to first understand the original text. To do that requires understanding the language(s) of the original text. To understand the language(s) of the original text, you need an adequate familiarity of the culture at the time. This is extraordinarily difficult to accomplish competently because of the breadth and depth of background knowledge required. It is incidentally why there are multiple competing translations of ancient texts (it is said that translations aren't truly possible).
Now consider again the knowledge you need to interpret text in its historical context. If you've just unearthed some text from an ancient civilization no one knows much of anything about, this is going to be damn near impossible and full of speculation even when you manage to produce a plausible translation. There's also the question of the status of the text: what is it supposed to be? In the case of the Bible, you need the continuous Tradition through which to interpret it. You need to interpret it synoptically or run the risk of making ad hoc judgements unhedged by other parts. (This is why Sola Scriptura fails; not only is it self-refuting, as in, nowhere in the Bible is this principle declared, not that this would lend any credence to the claim, but you lack the interpretive apparatus to interpret the text in the first place, leading to all sorts of weird claims and inferences. Not only that, but the Bible itself was compiled in the fourth century in light of this Tradition. How else would you establish the canon if not by drawing on the Tradition?)
> They're fallible like everyone else, and therefore might be wrong.
Yeah? Check out the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. The Catholic Church states that Holy Scripture is free from error[0]. So your view is not universally shared.
> In terms of impacting people's lives for good, I definitely feel like religions are at their best when they are inspiratory
What is your view of religion, of Christianity? Its purpose? What is this "inspiration" and what is it for? What does it inspire? If your answer is "to become a better person" or something of that sort, then we must ask: how so? Either some truth is being communicated which makes you better by virtue of knowing it as well as the change it effects in you, or whatever is being said is fraudulent and useless and ought to be discarded (put aside partial truths for the moment). And because Christianity concerns the ultimate things, it means that all of your life is oriented by it, and it means that it must help you with respect to your ultimate end, something you can fail at attaining.
As I have written elsewhere, everyone has a religion, so the question is "is it any good?", which is to say "is it true?", and not "do you live by one?". Man cannot do without religion because he cannot live without an orientation or a direction in life, he cannot live without an Ultimate, so much so that he will fill that void with all sorts of garbage. He needs to know at least the necessary part of the big picture and a way of living in accordance with it. You may find bits of pieces of truth scattered among the religions, valuable insofar as they contain the truth especially about ultimate things, but Man does not subsist on religious dabbling. And here the Catholic Church asserts clearly its claim to the fullness of truth.
> and at their worst when they try to impose authority.
This seems to misunderstand the purpose of authority. The purpose of authority is to safeguard teachings from corruption and manipulation and make them available over the centuries so you don't end up with a proliferation of confusion and error. Don't let the centuries of caricatures of the Big Ol' Mean Church fool you!
Usually originalism is used to defend some desired status quo, justifying persecution of some "other". Whether it's the Bible or the Constitution is largely irrelevant; the interpreters are the real gods here, not some bearded zombie carpenter skydaddy.
Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar, regardless of which side you're flaming or defending. It leads to extremely poor quality internet discussion (not to mention some of the nastiest) and that's what we're trying to avoid here.
I didn't say avoid discussion, I said avoid flamewar. You could start by dropping snark, name-calling, and cheap shots.
The idea that "the topic made me do it", i.e. that the appearance of some topic compels internet commenters to sink straightaway into internet dreck, is unconvincing. On HN, we want thoughtful, substantive, respectful conversation. Other users are doing it, so it's clearly doable.
Does the actual app have an animated carousel of video thumbnails like the screenshot on the site? Moving graphics are very distracting when one wants to read text; after a lifetime of videogames, I'm almost unable to read because unknown fast objects entering the screen require an immediate reaction.
The value of thumbnails for videos that are all "talking heads", even if shown fixed in place (like e.g. in YouTube playlists) is also doubtful; text with duration, name of the speaker, title of the video and possibly date etc. would be more compact, more information-rich and more elegant.
That's a good point. I'm still trying out different ideas for the homepage. The actual app does have a side-scrolling carousel like that for people to access the videos (not auto-scrolling though, people have to scroll it manually).
Just took a cursory glance at the list of speakers but if I'm not mistaken this is exclusively Protestant commentary? Is the app particularly aimed at Protestants or is it just availability?
It is currently mostly resources from Protestant teachers (iirc Yale has some good videos on there that include back & forth discussion from both Protestant and Catholic scholars). This is driven mostly by my familiarity with Protestant resources, but I believe it's also true there's less video content available for Catholic or Orthodox teaching that focuses particularly on the Bible (correct me if I'm wrong). I think it would be great for people to have resources from a variety of faith traditions though.
hey, we build get.catenabible.com - we launched our video feature last year and annotate each video by verse so you can jump to where it's discussed in the video while reading (tap any verse, then swipe left once to see related videos). We add new videos and speakers every month, and trying to expand to all apostolic denominations. Hope you find it helpful, God bless!
Can always need a new one since the old life church one (that used to be good) has become focused on growth hacking that I cannot bookmark a verse without it trying to broadcast it to all my friends.
The Bible is deeply personal to me and just like I don't anyone knowing what I asked my doctor about or what I bought at the pharmacy I don't want to share everything I read in it.
Feature request: When i click on a verse, one option is to provide that verse as provided by the various bible translations ( similar to bible.cc ), with the word differences highlighted.
For lack of space, just a handful of translations can be picked ( by the user ahead of time via the settings )
Currently I've added ESV, NIV, NRSV, KJV, and a few other public domain translations. Getting access to translations has been a challenge due to licensing costs.
One thing to keep in mind if you're selling or distributing your app in the UK: the KJV is still under copyright there. While copyrights held by mere mortals expire in the UK the same as they do elsewhere, copyrights held by the monarchy ("Crown copyright") are perpetual.
Any possibility for an option to list/read/explore the deuterocanonical books, i.e. for translations that have them, e.g. the RSV[1]?
Also, there are freely accessible texts of the Knox translation[2] and Douay-Rheims (Challoner revision of 1752)[3] online, the latter from multiple sources:
The Douay-Rheims (Challoner) text is certainly in the public domain.
As for the Knox translation, I'm aware newadvent.org arranged permissions with the Westminster Diocese who hold the copyright; maybe they'd be open to giving similar permissions for your app?
Thanks for pointing those out! I'll add to the todo list.
Yes, I definitely plan to add deuterocanonical books at some point, although I think it's low priority for the average Bible reader. It does add a good bit of technical complexity since there's conditional logic involved if you expand outside the Protestant canon.
> It does add a good bit of technical complexity since there's conditional logic involved if you expand outside the Protestant canon
Indeed, and best wishes in figuring out a good approach if you go down that route! It's very understandable that tackling such complexity is not at the top of your todo list.
> I think it's low priority for the average Bible reader.
I'm not looking to debate the point, or anything like that, but wanted to suggest that "average Bible reader" might have a broader scope, depending on one's perspective.
At any given time there are millions of Catholics and Orthodox Christians around the world who are reading the Bible; consider also that there are readings (and other spoken/sung elements) in the liturgies of both East and West that originate from the deuterocanon, so it would be quite natural for someone to want to "read at home" and explore a text they heard read/sung aloud during Holy Mass or the Divine Liturgy.
In addition to the Catholic deuterocanonical books, some Orthodox denominations include many more books.
Also, another public domain translation is World English Bible.
And, if you do not have footnotes, perhaps to add it, since things can be lost in translation, or be due to the culture of the time and place, or units of measurement which are no longer common, political boundaries change, etc, you might want to know whatever notes there are of it.
Nice! Could you add Chinese Union version? It's public domain and still the most popular version in Chinese speaking area. FYI there are Traditional Chinese version and Simplified Chinese versions. Thanks! https://github.com/scrollmapper/bible_databases
This is so cool. I also had the idea of linking videos to specific passages in my Bible app that I did with Rails (it's old though).
I'm glad to see other people working in that niche. Because the Word of God is so rich and so many scholars have commented on it. Youversion is nice, but there are so many dimensions through which the Bible studying/consuming could be enhanced. And those dimensions of rich text study could even be inspirations for interacting with other sources of information, such as philosophical texts or reference materials.
hey! we actually launched this on get.catenabible.com just last year :) we're adding new speakers and videos every month, hope you find it helpful and would love to hear your feedback! God bless!
Sure. Essentially all the videos, topics, and any new type of resources added in the future have Bible reference(s) set (this happens via admin controls). This is another big reason content has to be manually reviewed before allowing it to show up in the app.
More than you think. But I think more would call themselves "spiritual" or "unaffiliated religious" than be members of organized religion. I have no peer-reviewed evidence for that though, it's just a personal observation.
There's a good number of religious users. I'm not Christian, but I think Bible commentary is fascinating. Things like linking a few words to a whole database of knowledge. It doesn't apply to things that aren't scripture.
Anecdotally (but just as valid as your comment) i've found the polar opposite. I know loads of people who have left religion later in life and plenty of old atheists who never did.
I'm pretty sure most people who identify as "atheist" and "agnostic" have pretty similar views about God and the possibility / improbability of its existence.
The main difference is simply a difference in opinion of what words mean.
People who use the term "agnostic" are usually going by the formal philosophical definitions of atheism (where atheism requires evidence against God).
People who use the term "atheist" are usually using the more informal definition of atheism (where atheism is simply a lack of belief).
Yeah I consider myself atheist but if Jesus came down from heaven and started performing (scientifically tested) miracles then I guess I'd change my mind.
That makes me, in the strictest sense, agnostic.
Seeing as no miracle has ever been proven I'd say the difference will remain academic.
Many/most Christians take the Bible as a partial historical record of God's action in past times, and I'd hope that big chunks come across as eyewitness accounts of what real people saw and experienced ... see e.g. Gospel of Mark or Book of Acts. There are more esoteric parts, but many portions are relatable.
With regard to miracles, the New Testament purports to record many that Jesus and his followers performed, with explicit intent to exhibit Christ's authority over all that plagues humanity. With His ascension they've ceased or become much more rare (I grew up in Pentecostalism, whose adherents believe they're frequent and routine, but I don't think this myself).
So ... right now in 2021 there are tons of disaffected American Evangelical Nationalists, Trump-mongering liars willing to take every QAnon and political conspiracy, meld it with their beliefs and their need to hold on to "The Big Lie" that Trump won the 2020 November election. Their "apostles and prophets" are in a huge echo chamber across the airwaves, YouTube, Facebook, their mega-churches, convincing themselves that Trump is still president, that he will return as President in 2021 July, or August, or by the end-of-the-year. And they have a huge following, and they have inroads to Trump himself and to the Republican political jello (which has no structure, no policy). They could make things uncomfortable in the next two to twenty years or longer. And they've convinced themselves they have the "spiritual technology" and can control God (though they won't put it quite that way) and can decree their political, economic, social will to control the mechanics of American government and society. They are dangerous. ... and per the New Testament apocalyptic literature, at some point will rise a population so given to their delusions they'll be allowed to operate as they want, i.e., to perform those miracles and perform those wonders. So, don't take miracles at face value if ever they happen in your lifetime.
For the worst of the worst right now w.r.t. the Trumpian clamor, check out the "Elijah Streams" YouTube channel where Steve Shulz and his menagerie of false prophets bray for all. For someone who dissects their messages and compares it with Christian scripture, check out Chris Rosebrough (quite conservative) and his "Fighting for the Faith" YouTube channel.
Religion is only really growing in poor countries where religion is often the only option for a lot of services.
It seems like when you give people education, wealth, and other opportunities, they don't go back to religion.
It's declining reasonably quickly in rich countries like Europe and the United States. Also, note that your article is outdated, the decline of religion in the US has accelerated quite a bit since 2015.
From your article:
> Europe is the only region where the total population is projected to decline. Europe’s Christian population is expected to shrink by about 100 million people in the coming decades, dropping from 553 million to 454 million. While Christians will remain the largest religious group in Europe, they are projected to drop from three-quarters of the population to less than two-thirds. By 2050, nearly a quarter of Europeans (23%) are expected to have no religious affiliation, and Muslims will make up about 10% of the region’s population, up from 5.9% in 2010. Over the same period, the number of Hindus in Europe is expected to roughly double, from a little under 1.4 million (0.2% of Europe’s population) to nearly 2.7 million (o.4%), mainly as a result of immigration. Buddhists appear headed for similarly rapid growth in Europe – a projected rise from 1.4 million to 2.5 million.
> Christians are projected to decline from 78% of the U.S. population in 2010 to 66% in 2050, while the unaffiliated are expected to rise from 16% to 26%.
Valid points. It makes sense though that "poor countries" are going more religious as generally life is difficult there and religion provides inner peace, useful in those times. Along with services and community support.
Also, note that those same countries are growing in population %age and are skyrocketing economically (and joining us online, on HN) while also being religious.
People tend to selfishly forget religion (and their loved ones) in good times, but good times don't stay forever :)
So, obviously not how natural selection works. You'd have to be more likely to die without having kids due to lack of religion for that to make sense.
Religion is not key.
Without it, people don't become alone/depressed/etc.
The offspring thing is that wealthy people/nations/communities tend to have less kids since its more expensive per kid and seen as more burdensome to their lives.
I live in a largely secular country, people are choosing to not have kids due to the environment and the general satisfaction in their lives without kids.
The same reasons (education and social security) which counter dogma also allow people to make educated choices for their lives.
Well here is my though process: Choosing not to have kids (for reasons you point out) == not having faith that things will work out, both for the child and yourself.
What if religion isn't the root cause... Lets play a game...
If a group:
- is becoming less religious
- is becoming more gay
- is becoming less white
- is becoming more literate
- is becoming less starved
- is becoming better at typing
- is becoming worse at blacksmithing
- is becoming better at curing diseases
- is becoming worse at writing with a quill
- is becoming more vaccinated
- is becoming less likely to drive an oldsmobile.
- is becoming more likely to drive a toyota.
- is becoming more urban
- is becoming less rural
- is becoming more divided in ideology
- is becoming more likely to believe in election fraud
OR
(my personal hunch)
- is bad at causation/correlation
> Then that group is essentially a dead-end and those practices will not expand to more groups. Them being rich isn't helping them.
>How is that not a form of natural selection?
--- --- ----
Why can't it be the vaccines and toyotas that are causing depression? Maybe darwin should have warned us that city birds don't mate.
Maybe its just bad causation/correlation when viewed through the lens of one facet of historical change.
You're obviously right. It's funny that folks who dislike or reject religion tend to claim to believe in evolution, but tend to fail to see that religion guides us along the most evolutionary path possible (be fruitful and multiply)
I have an admin back-end that allows for reviewing, editing metadata, and then approving resources. Once approved new videos get pulled into the app via an API without requiring an app update.
Small bit of feedback for the landing page Theo: On a MacBook Pro the image of the app looks a bit shoddy. The font doesn't look as crisp as it could. It would be better if you could serve a retina option. These days it's pretty easy with srcset. Good luck!
There is a basic web version if you visit https://sparkbible.com/read. I built it mainly for SEO purposes, but eventually I do see it having feature parity with the other apps.
I'm glad the mods unflagged this, as I do believe there is some interesting discussion here.
Do you see your app as being useful to people researching more philosophical aspects of the Bible? (For instance: I'm atheist to the core, but I'm curious about the impact Stoicism had on the Bible.)
I flagged this submission because I think it has a high potential for not-interesting and unproductive discussion. Others can vouch if I'm wrong, but I don't see a place for an app like this on HN. Product Hunt seems more appropriate.
This is a very loosely held opinion, though I'm not willing to go back and forth on it, and I doubt my flag will change anything one way or another.
Your flag would have contributed, along with others, to lowering the rank of the story and also to the [flagged] marker getting put on it. I don't think flagging was appropriate in this case—the app seems as on-topic as any other, and the fact that the material is religious shouldn't make a difference, although religion is of course a divisive topic and most religious-themed submissions tend to get this treatment from some users.
Religious tolerance has been a prime principle of intellectual culture for many centuries. If you zoom out to a historical perspective, it's clear that it's in all our interests to practice it, regardless of what our religious or irreligious views may be. We don't have to hold the same views to respect each other, and the art of interesting discourse with people who hold different views is something we should all cultivate, assuming that we have the intellectual curiosity that the HN guidelines speak of.
From a different angle: the problem with mobile apps as Show HNs is that they're not easy to try out (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) without going through the rigamarole of installing them. But that's a problem with the entire category, and as long as we haven't disallowed them (which we're not going to), this submission seems as valid as any other.
Was I wrong to rely on the system to prevent my view from having an outsized or misrepresented amount of control here? I figured my vote, along with many others, would decide the fate of the submission, ultimately moderated by you.
I can adjust my behavior if this wasn't the right way to think about it, but I just want to make sure I'm acting as intended with this point of view.
No, in the sense that other users had to do the same thing in order for flags to 'win' over upvotes. Yes, in the sense that your flag probably had more effect than you assumed it would.
I wouldn't say you were super wrong about how the system works or is intended to work! I'd say you and the other flaggers misapplied the site guidelines in this case. You're right that it's moderation's job to correct for such failure modes.
Did you read the HN guidelines? I can vouch that you're wrong. Someone spent time working on an app they care about and has proven by the conversation here to be interesting to the community. If someone wrote an app on a topic you'd be interested in, would you have flagged it?
Please consider that there are varying perspectives on HN beyond your own and that sharing an app which allows people to study the Bible isn't forcing a worldview on anyone.
You serious? The guy/girl is taking on the task of trying to help with understanding of one of the most complex, and well known, books we have as a species! And he/she is trying to do so using technology that most here are familiar with. How in hell (pardon the pun) is this not relevant?
Its a super interesting challenge
Even as someone dismayed by the outsized influence of ancient religion on modern society, I don't think it's fair to flag this. Like it or not, this impacts a lot of people, and developing an app for that audience comes with its own set of interesting UX, curation, funding, etc. considerations.
Even if I don't like the product, it's certainly worth a discussion at least.
The problem is, unless I'm misunderstanding something about HN, they can not vouch until the submission is already dead.
You're not out of bounds to suppose this will have some bad comments, but I do think it's presumptuous to bet there will be no interesting discussion. There in fact has already been both - a lot of interesting discussion, and a little bit of bad comments. I encourage you to flag bad comments while they are still the minority, and only resort to flagging the submission if they take over, since, again, nobody can vouch for the submission until it's dead, at which point there will be fewer people to vouch for it, as it will be hidden.
Edit: Actually, maybe vouch is only for comments, and not for submissions? I'm not sure exactly how it works, but I think my suggestion still makes sense.
I flagged it too. If we take it to the extreme... and I see tons of bible app discussions on Hacker News then I will quickly lose interest in HN. The bible isn't based on facts and contradicts itself many times over.
If everyone flagged every article they found uninteresting, particularly something that rarely comes up here, because they're afraid it will become common on HN, then we'd pretty quickly have a pretty narrow and boring "lowest common denominator of interesting" site.
On a side note, I'm curious the history of "lowest common denominator". Did it start out as a confusion of "least common multiple" and "greatest common divisor/denominator" from mathematics, or was it more purposeful?
Something akin to this actually exists in Saudi Arabia. Specifically there is an app that allows man to keep track of their wives, who must get approval from their husbands to do things.
Given the legal and practical social status of women in Saudi Arabia, that's kind of like looking at labor conditions in an antebellum Southern plantation and asking “why would anyone work there?” Perhaos not quite as extreme, but in the same direction.
Spark Bible is a free app I built for iOS & Android. The idea is that many millions of people read the Bible regularly and want it to impact their lives for good. However, the Bible is also quite difficult to understand.
There is a lot of foundational knowledge people only get through graduate education in theology or biblical studies (e.g., understanding the differences between ancient near eastern cultures vs today’s cultures). My goal is for Spark Bible to make that type of knowledge and learning more accessible to the average Bible reader.