I will leave you to your opinions. I don't type that fast, so 'chatting' would be like driving backwards through road construction. I 'assumed' this site had a 'Christian' worldview, I guess I was wrong. Ciao. — twolneyl18 mins ago
Yet another one. What can we do about this tendency of newcomers to assume we're a Christian site? I've written a lot about this on meta already; clearly that's not making any difference. Where do we need to put how prominent a clue on the main site???
BTW, this ^^^ is the poster whose two posts I marked for review here. It doesn't look like anybody else has voted. Do y'all think those answers are really ok, or are people just not around and reading these days?
It has been proposed that questions that can be answered using commonly-available references should be off-topic. In the spirit of this question, what good reference works on biblical studies are available online, and what kinds of questions are they good at answering?
@MonicaCellio To be fair, on the first question I didn't vote on any of the answers because the whole question seemed off-topic to me
The other question about the "tree of intelligence" struck me possibly the same. Seemed more like a theology question, so I didn't even read any of the answers.
@Soldarnal that makes sense. Now that the issue has been raised I'd like to encourage you to review both; do you think close votes or downvotes are called for? I've already cast my DVs and will review the questions again for possible VtC.
@MonicaCellio I've been in and out so much lately, I haven't been checking the review queues. That's my fault.
Hey, a review of a new conspiracy theory gospel book! Looks like the author does the same thing that Mattias' guy does: anything in the gospel against his theory was made up, everything that supports it is God's own truth.
@FrankLuke no worries -- people have the time they have, and summer tends to be vacation season. Despite what the metrics say it's been feeling to me like site activity has been down for a couple months -- as measured in response times, votes (a) at all and (b) promptly, and general visibility of the "regulars".
@FrankLuke oh hey, that's the book Ali was pushing recently (I forget in which room). I didn't look at it, considering the source, but I can't say I'm surprised by your find. :-)
@FrankLuke yeah, lots of one-post new accounts. So I guess we're doing better with Google and, as a result, surfers want to "add a comment to the forum they found", not understanding that that's not what we do here. Part of why I want us to deal with problem posts (both these and from established users user who should know better) is that they're broken windows, giving the impression that that's ok to other people who come across us.
@MonicaCellio Wife and I were discussing this last night. Why so many drive-bys? What makes it difficult to understand what H.SE is? She thinks the name is a big part of it. She likes bibilicalstudies.SE.
One other thing that is big to her is that we stop at application. If someone has a text and application question, they have to start here for the meaning and then go to C.SE or MY.SE for the application.
@FrankLuke well, one issue is that application only works if participants agree on the core axioms, which will never be true on a site without a doctrinal foundation. And I'll fight pretty hard to keep this site doctrine-neutral; we have other sites for that and at least on MY the text questions are also on-topic. If they're not on-topic on C.SE, that's a matter for them, not us, to resolve.
@FrankLuke I agree that the name is confusing. I also suspect that a lot of Googlers don't really even notice the name; they're looking for the answer to an application question (usually), they land here, and they don't stop to read before jumping in. That's probably true all over Stack Exchange, but lots of people have opinions about the bible compared to, say, those who have opinions about Java code. (Not that programmers aren't opinionated, but the bar to entry is higher on SO.)
The Workplace has this problem too, though severity varies (currently I think we have it worse than them, but that's not always true). Any subjective-seeming site is going to have this issue.
@FrankLuke and here's another one, hot off the pressses. I...don't even know what to say to that, beyond flagging as NAA. Really? Somebody thought that belonged here?
Later today I plan to either edit this down to an answer without the preaching (it'll be much smaller) or vote to delete it. Anyone have opinions on which is the better path?
@MonicaCellio Little editing done. Flagged as NAA. VtD.
@MonicaCellio It at least answers the question of when did Jonah die in the narrative with "he was alive throughout." When it goes into the part about Jesus was therefore alive, it goes off topic. X the first paragraph. Leave the second. X the paragraphs after it.
Over on the Judaism site, HodofHod implemented an integrated virtual keyboard for typing Hebrew:
The keyboard works on Biblical Hermeneutics and will work on Hebrew Language & Usage if and when that goes live.
This seems like an idea that could easily be extended to other languages/scripts: G...
@swasheck for the most part, those are the questions I think we should see more of. They are fun to answer/educate, and the question is all about the text itself
@swasheck the first time I took it we used Black's Grammar and the second time we used Machen - so this book is new to me
@swasheck I think we have discussed this before - perhaps I should just use that
@swasheck what I like about Wallace's abridgement is that there is a clear reference path. Want to learn more about this? Want to find out the few exceptions? Check out this chapter of the big book
@swasheck ok cool - don't expect it to be earth-shattering or anything. It's moreso for my own commentary purposes. You will notice they are heavily influenced by NET notes and other existing commentary - I never intend to publish it or anything like that
so like my answer ... sometimes the article is used as a pronoun and sometimes it's the article for another word. i'd be interested in figuring out a way to tag the NT with not only POS tagging but also grammatical tagging unless you already know of such a thing, @Dan.
unless you think you/we could create treebanks based off of nathan's POS-tagged SBLGNT