Being dismissive of the Bible is not as cool as you think it is: those who do not study the Bible are doomed to repeat it.
I understand the instinct to treat Bronze‑Age literature like fanciful fiction: engineers are wired to put "myth" in one bucket and "hard data" in another. But for better or worse, the Bible isn't just an ancient novel. It's the source code for a huge fraction of the world's legal systems, ethics, holidays, and political claims, including the one we are discussing. Dismissing it as "Harry Potter" misses the point:
If we're serious about reducing violence, we need to debug the real code people are running in their heads, not the straw‑man version.
Software engineers are notorious for bikeshedding and pointlessly subjective "holy wars." Any belief in higher capacity for reason than their fellow man is sheer hubris.
I understand the instinct to treat Bronze‑Age literature like fanciful fiction: engineers are wired to put "myth" in one bucket and "hard data" in another. But for better or worse, the Bible isn't just an ancient novel. It's the source code for a huge fraction of the world's legal systems, ethics, holidays, and political claims, including the one we are discussing. Dismissing it as "Harry Potter" misses the point:
If we're serious about reducing violence, we need to debug the real code people are running in their heads, not the straw‑man version.