Show HN: I made a new kind of Bible app

But there are Bible apps that include a number of public domain commentaries.

I'm definitely not a fan of the idea of the distraction of video within a Bible app, so I think I'll pass on checking out the app, personally.

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.

-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.”

-Galatians 1:6-10 (ESV)

English is an interesting language. It doesn't get this confusing with most of the other languages I know.

In other words there is an underserved market of people who want St Gregory Palamas and St Porphyrios in their Bible app.

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.

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.

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.

We should be discussing that part of it, IMO.

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.

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).

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.

https://residentcontrarian.substack.com/p/if-christians-read...

Written by Resident Contrarian (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=residentcontrarian.su...)

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.

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.

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!

[0] https://www.catholicherald.com/faith/what_is_biblical_inerra...

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.

Surely the intent of the author when they were writing the piece, and the piece itself are both worth considering when analyzing the text?

Would much prefer to see this as a new UI for Crosswire than an independent effort. I know tons of people using Crosswire

Male/Female/Trans/Nonbinary/Other, race, religion, age, industry, occupation, etc.

I know it's kinda hokey/a little reddit esque, but a "HN Demographic Survey" would be cool.

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.