BibViz Project

A project to visualize negative aspects of the Bible in a way that is not only visually appealing but that makes exploring those aspects of the book quick and intuitive. The main focus of the project is Bible contradictions, but it also highlights biblical scientific and historical inaccuracies, cruelty & violence in the Bible, misogyny in the Bible, and homophobia in the Bible.

Data for the website is generated from various sources, including the Skeptic's Annotated Bible, Infidels.org, EvilBible.com, etc. See the scripts directory for how each piece was generated. Note that some information is managed by hand as not everything can be generated from the source pages.

The web directory contains everything required for the website, which is generated by a static site generator called Wintersmith. Several modifications/plugins are used, which can be found in the web/plugins directory.

This project makes use of Node.js, Javascript, Coffeescript, Cheerio (a jQuery-like library), Needle, Async.js, D3.js, Wintersmith, HTML, Stylus, and Nunjucks templates.

Contribution Ideas

The following is a non-exhaustive list of possible contribution ideas. Many require little or even zero programming experience. Feel free to fork and choose one:

• Translations
• New data sources for web/contents/data/contra.json
• Additional visualizations using D3.js
• Blog entries
• Meta-analysis of all data sets
• Tagging contradictions by severity
• Tagging contradictions by Christian sect beliefs
• Support for newer Bible versions (e.g. NIV, ESV)
  • Part of this work would be tagging contradictions by version
• Tagging contradictions with Christian responses
• Style, script, page, and search optimizations

Running Locally

First make sure you have Node.js installed, then run some setup commands:

cd web
npm install
npm install -g wintersmith
cp ../cache/kjv-full.json.gz contents/data/
gunzip contents/data/kjv-full.json.gz

For a live preview at http://localhost:8080:

wintersmith preview

To build the site into the build directory:

wintersmith build --clean

Wintersmith Modifications

The following extra features are implemented as plugins to Wintersmith:

• Blog support with Atom.xml feed generation
• Pass-through JSON data files in the contents/data directory
• Exposing JSON data files to the page renderer
• i18n support via a preprocessor template tag {% trans %}some string{% endtrans %}
• Generation of translated HTML files based on available languages and translate: true metadata
• Nunjucks templates with Markdown content that can contain Nunjucks tags
• A generator to create individual contradiction pages
• Various utilities (book links, getting Bible verses, etc)

Data Format

Various data files are used to generate the BibViz website. The files fall into three broad categories: Bible information, contradiction information, and specific issue information (used to generate issue bar charts). All of the files use JSON as their format.

Bible Information

The format of the Bible information data files (kjv.json and kjv-full.json) is something like the following:

{
    "version": "kjv",
    "wordCount": 123,
    "charCount": 123,
    "sections": [
        {
            "name": "Old Testament",
            "wordCount": 123,
            "charCount": 123,
            "relativeLength": 0.7,
            "books": [
                {
                    "name": "The first book of Moses, called Genesis",
                    "shortName": "Genesis",
                    "wordCount": 123,
                    "charCount": 123,
                    "relativeLength": 0.1,
                    "chapters": [
                        {
                            "name": "Chapter 1",
                            "wordCount": 123,
                            "charCount": 123,
                            "relativeLength": 0.3,
                            "verseCount": 123
                        }
                    ]
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

The kjv-full.json additionally adds each verse to the file in a verses array alongside verseCount, and is used to generate individual contradiction pages where the verses are displayed on the page. The full version is not loaded dynamically when visitors view a page due to its large size.

Contradiction Information

The format of the contradiction information data file (contra.json) is something like the following:

{
    "sab": {
        "name": "sab",
        "desc": "Skeptic's Annotated Bible",
        "url": "http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/",
        "contradictions": [
            {
                "desc": "How many men did the chief of David's captains kill?",
                "refs": {
                    "300": [
                        "1 Chronicles 11:11"
                    ],
                    "800": [
                        "2 Samuel 23:8"
                    ]
                },
                "url": "300or800.html",
                ... other metadata ...
            },
            ... more contradictions ...
        ]
    },
    ... other sources ...
}

Issue Information

The format of the issue bar chart information data files (science.json, violence.json, misogyny.json, and homosexual.json) is really just a list of books which each contain a list of references:

[
    {
        "name": "Genesis",
        "refs": [
            "1:1",
            "1:3-5",
            "2:3",
            ... more refs ...
        ]
    },
    ... more books ...
]

License

This creative work is licensed under a Creative Commons Share-Alike Attribution Unported 3.0 license, and relevant source code in the scripts and web directories are licensed under an MIT-style license. All contributions will be licensed in a similar fashion.