The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Suggestion for a search function

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#1

I tried the ‘search’ function with the aim of pulling up all references to particular verses - thinking that, if a new person or a lurker had a question on, say, Matthew 7:21, they could do a search and find all the places on the Forum where that verse has come up; that way one would be ‘up to speed’ on the past and current thinking amongst this group.

Alas, I did not find a consistent way to do this, which leads to a suggestion: It would be a very useful thing for the Forum to have a list of scriptural references. That would be a difficult task, I reckon, as we don’t yet have a consistent way of verse citation - we might use, for instance, “John 3:16” or “GosJohn 3:16” or “Jno 3.16” - or many other ways. But, if the scriptural search was numerical only , i.e., 3.16 or 3:16, there would not be as much ambiguity.

Moderators - is it even possible to amass a list of scripture references from the archives? I can really see a use for it among the many ‘lurkers’ that are out there, troubled by a verse or a few, that don’t want to post their concerns but don’t have a way of directly pulling up the thinking on that particular verse/s.

#2

Although it isn’t given as a first search option (and if I knew how to modify the general page layout I’d do it), there is a Google search option provided after the first search results. This can be a little better at scripture searching than BBCode’s search engine, and incidentally a lot better at searching for other things than BBCode’s. :stuck_out_tongue:

I wouldn’t want to be the person responsible for trying to suss out every scriptural reference on site, some of which are contained in blocks like Romans 5 (where someone might want to reference different parts of Romans 5 and whoever wrote “Romans 5” might have had something more particular in mind than the whole chapter), and some are allusions expected to be well-known enough not to need chapter and verse citations.

A distant stab at that, as feasibly as possible, was made when I started the ExCom project, since while I’m certainly approaching the topic from various subsets of Christian Universalism, I am trying to synopsize things I’ve read on the forum I thought made sense regardless if I agreed with the source on other matters, and I’m trying to point out where alternate ideas could read the various scriptures coherently, too (at least in my opinion), and I make an explicit point of inviting anyone who wants to further comment or who recalls where they’ve made threads to discuss such verses, to copy-paste links to those other threads as followup – also when new threads talking about something (the sheep and the goats for example) come up, then links to those discussions can be posted on the appropriate ExCom thread as followup.

So it wasn’t (and isn’t – I’m still slowwwly posting up things :wink: ) just a project for me: I meant it to be a community-sourced resource. So if someone wants to argue that the sheep and the goats and the fire reserved for the devil and his angels is totally preteristic and doesn’t refer in the slightest to anything beyond the fall of Jerusalem (or whatever), and they’ve argued that in a thread, they can add a comment to that ExCom entry linking to that thread.

It was the only way I could think of to even have a chance at beginning the kind of index project you’re thinking of. :slight_smile:

#3

You mean …there’s NO app for that?? :laughing: Geez, we can put a man on the moon (or DID we? Hmmm,) …

Thanks for responding Jason; I’d volunteer to do the sussing but I don’t reckon I have enough years left of this mortal coil to get 'er done. :smiley: