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Comment by r00fus | Hacker News Reader

It all sounds so childish to me as a current atheist. Like, who's sports team are you a fan? If not mine, then you're against me.

In fact, an API that allows access to a religious text should be useful for everyone - even those detractors of said religion.

Next up, we need a legal code API and versioning.

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It's childish to have issues with someone making their religious texts available via API just because they take that religion to be false, yes. But you're sort of erecting a strawman. I don't see anyone claiming "I hate this API because I disagree with Islam.".

Also maybe this is it? Haven't checked. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/content/help/webservice.html

a law API makes sense to me because laws are updated all the time, especially when you take into consideration all the various jurisdictions. A Quran or biblical text API makes less sense to me because it is essentially unchanging static text until the religious doctrine is amended.

Three things: 1. It may not be as unchanging as you think. The different translations of the Bible (NIV, ESV, NKJV, NASB, etc.) are a pretty important facet to many, with newer translations coming to prominence in English speaking communities every ten years or so (for better or for worse, but that's another topic). I can't speak to other religious texts, but keeping new translation available could be enough of a reason alone to make an API. 2. Having an API can facilitate internationalization if you wanted to ship a project in other languages. 3. Having an easy way for a computer to look up a particular passage is a non-trivial problem to solve, and something like this could give a huge jump start for hobby/personal projects.

Yeah you could just download the Quran and reference it locally or someone could (relatively) easily roll their own version of this, but I think something like this is nice and I can appreciate it's value, even if Islam isn't my cup of tea.

[edited for clarity]

many subgroups of atheism, and many of those fight and have fought each other..

agree 100% on legal code versioning - legislation should be a version control diff with 'git blame' like things for contributors ..

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