New bible reading activity

[Michael Veith]

Hi folks,

Am 15.03.2008 um 21:13 schrieb John Gilmore:

>> In other words, I think that in terms of third party content and
>> activities, we want to be "culturally neutral" by supporting all
>> types, cultures, religions, and ideals, rather than by ignoring all  
>> of
>> them.
>
> +1.
>
> It did seem odd to me that a whole application would be dedicated to
> reading (various translations of) exactly one book.
That's exactly what I would agree on; even if it was The Cathedral and  
the Bazaar we'd be talking about ;-)

> Perhaps this
> (GPL) application can be improved by volunteers to work with two  
> books.
> Or more!  (As every computer science student knows, the interesting
> numbers are 0, 1, and more than 1.  Once your code handles 2,  
> getting to 3
> or 3000 is usually really easy.)
Yes, right. I'd prefer a lot more books than only two. And let me  
state some kind of -let's call it- insight. I see some parallels  
between the manner one reads religious texts like the Bible or the  
Koran and the reading of code (at least in object-oriented languages,  
especially like in Smalltlalk/Squeak but also in Java if possible).  
Earlier in this disussion, GnomeSword was mentioned and its ability to  
allow parallel reading in different parts of the book. When I browse  
through Squeak code I do quite a similar thing. When I do research in  
scientific texts I sometimes do the same (though not as often as in  
code work).
Do you have similar experiences? Me as a linguist, I find this  
phenomenon quite interesting. What about an activity that may enable  
users this kind of text work? We'd need a common standard, maybe like  
the format coming with bible read (and maybe in some sort of  
application like the System Browser in Squeak provides).
>
>
> We've also seen people working on making it easy to read the Koran on
> the OLPC.  Perhaps the two efforts can be merged ;-\
Yeah, see above. I guess according to what was mentioned before in  
this list discussion we could guarantee to be culturally neutral  
without ignoring to enable a specific meta-cultural skill, namely  
parallel reading which can be seen as an important learning phenomenon  
when dealing with complex texts like religious texts, scientific work  
or code scripts.
>
>
> 	John (an atheist myself)
May someone/thing be with you, always,
±Micha (having nothing to say bout myself, just trying to be neutral)

P.S.: Please share your reading manners with the list, I guess we  
really could miss something when "kicking" (socially not technically  
nor physically) a good activity out due to pseudo-neutral resentments  
against differing motivations of writing code ;-)
>
>
> PS: Some countries have an official religion; their educational
> department is probably going to put religious education in every XO
> they use, as it already is in their schoolbooks.  Get used to it.
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