This topic is about observations you have made around how people think about the Bible and software.
This sounds a lot like something David has said about Relight. The concept of asking questions of the Bible and other resources is definitely a mental model people seem to have.
I think the main difference between Relight’s goal is the idea that the software isn’t directly answering your questions. When you Google something like “how many cups are in a gallon” or “when did Toy Story 2 come out” Google actually answers your question as if it were a person, of course usually providing a link to where it got its answer. This seems dangerous to me for theology, where soul murder is a potential outcome to a wrong answer. I like the idea of Relight getting good at recognizing questions and providing relevant results—but that’s where I think I’d want it to end. So it would be great if someone typed “What does the Bible teach?” and got taken directly to WSC 3, but I don’t want it to try to just provide the answer like Google does.
I like this idea. A lot of resources have sought to to this sort of thing, like the pocket dictionary of theological terms. If there were a reformed version of such a thing and it were well done, I could totally see adding it to Relight. A Bible dictionary would also be helpful. The site could have a “Lookup” feature when you select a word (like Kindle does), and I could also rig the Omnibar to catch queries like “what is x” and send them to the dictionary entry for that word if such an entry exists.
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Yes, the Kindle look up feature would be perfect. The idea of having a specialized dictionary powering the definitions behind the scenes is perfect. That’s exactly what I’m thinking. So the next time I forget what “concupiscence” means or why “economy” doesn’t mean world politics in this instance, I’d be able to tap the word and figure it out without leaving the page.
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