Nature, Science, Bayes' Theorem, and the Whole of Reality

A fundamental problem in science is how to make logical inferences from scientific data. Mere data does not suffice since additional information is necessary to select a domain of models or hypotheses and thus determine the likelihood of each model or hypothesis. Thomas Bayes' Theorem relates the data and prior information to posterior probabilities associated with differing models or hypotheses and thus is useful in identifying the roles played by the known data and the assumed prior information when making inferences. Scientists, philosophers, and theologians accumulate knowledge when analyzing different aspects of reality and search for particular hypotheses or models to fit their respective subject matters. Of course, a main goal is then to integrate all kinds of knowledge into an all-encompassing worldview that would describe the whole of reality

Quakers and Scripture

This chapter explores how the Quakers’ use of the Bible has developed, recognizing changes both in the Friends movement and in its historical and cultural settings. Friends’ approaches to Scripture have varied widely as they have responded over time to the influences of the Enlightenment, revivalism, fundamentalism, Modernism, and other factors. The chapter describes how Quakers have viewed the authority and inspiration of the Bible and how they have held the importance of the Bible in tension with the inward teaching of Christ, whom they refer to as the ‘Word of God’. The chapter also contrasts various forms of Bible study with reading the Bible with empathy as a fruit of Quaker spirituality

The Odyssey of Archbishop Gavril’s Translation of the Bible

Translating the Bible is not an easy task in any language. Every translation of the Bible is a confirmation of the capacity of a language to convey the Bible’s manifold depths and meanings. The publication of the Macedonian Bible has been received as a historic event in Macedonia. Archbishop Gavril’s translation remains a unique pillar in the development of the Macedonian literary language. The entire process of the planning, translation, and printing of the complete Macedonian Bible encompassed a period of some 50 years. Drawing on these references, the article explores the impressive journey of Archbishop Gavril’s translation of the Bible into Macedonian as documented in his personal letters and correspondences

Introducing the Bible

Title: Introducing the Bible. Author: Drane, John Introducing the Bible 730 p. Publisher: Minneapolis : Fortress Pr, 2005

Using boundaries to find smooth norms

The aim of this paper is to present a tool used to show that certain Banach spaces can be endowed with $C^k$ smooth equivalent norms. The hypothesis uses particular countable decompositions of certain subsets of $B_{X^*}$, namely boundaries. Of interest is that the main result unifies two quite well known results. In the final section, some new corollaries are given.Comment: 14 page

Finding Answers from the Word of God: Domain Adaptation for Neural Networks in Biblical Question Answering

Question answering (QA) has significantly benefitted from deep learning techniques in recent years. However, domain-specific QA remains a challenge due to the significant amount of data required to train a neural network. This paper studies the answer sentence selection task in the Bible domain and answer questions by selecting relevant verses from the Bible. For this purpose, we create a new dataset BibleQA based on bible trivia questions and propose three neural network models for our task. We pre-train our models on a large-scale QA dataset, SQuAD, and investigate the effect of transferring weights on model accuracy. Furthermore, we also measure the model accuracies with different answer context lengths and different Bible translations. We affirm that transfer learning has a noticeable improvement in the model accuracy. We achieve relatively good results with shorter context lengths, whereas longer context lengths decreased model accuracy. We also find that using a more modern Bible translation in the dataset has a positive effect on the task.Comment: The paper has been accepted at IJCNN 201

Androgyny/Hermaphroditism: Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew Bible lacks a term for androgyny or hermaphroditism. The term tumtumim, which identifies persons of indeterminate or “hidden” sex, appears later in rabbinic texts. Nevertheless, sexual fluidity, ambiguity, intersexed persons, and persons with a combination of masculine and feminine characteristics appear in the Genesis creation stories and prophetic texts. While gender transgression is relevant to the general discussion, this entry from The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Gender Studies: Oxford Biblical Studies Online focuses primarily on ancient understandings, namely those presented in the Hebrew Bible, of those of “both sexes.

Winston Peters “Puts His Hand to the Plow”: The Bible in New Zealand Political Discourse

This article examines the charismatic New Zealand politician Winston Peters’ sparse use of the Bible as a case study in the propagation of the “Cultural” and “Liberal” Bibles across the relatively irreligious landscape of New Zealand’s political landscape. It considers why politicians continue to employ biblical rhetoric despite increasing indifference towards Christianity and the Bible, by situating such moves within the context of global capitalism. It also identifies some peculiarities of the political use of the Bible unique to the New Zealand situation and explores how these have aided the construction of distinctive political identities

“Where the spirit of the Lord is there is liberty”: The Bible as a Vessel for Remembrance, Guidance, and Self-Understanding during the Civil War

Courage, guidance, family, strength, self-understanding, and survival: These are just a few of the things that this Bible represented to the soldier who carried it. For Private Lewis Tway of the 147th New York Volunteers, this Bible provided a tangible link to all these things—a way to make sense of the at-times non-sensical chaos and carnage of war, a way to grow, learn, and adapt to the infinite physical and spiritual challenges of soldiering while still firmly rooting Tway in the foundational people and principles that gave his life meaning. Tway’s engagement with this Bible was never static; the evolution of that engagement, coupled with the multiple meanings that this Bible took on throughout the course of the Civil War were instrumental in shaping, and re-shaping, the man who carried it. [excerpt