Well, thanks for your compliments and your upvote.
I don't say openly that I disagree with PhilGoetz, but I guess to the extent that my disagreement shines through anyway, it's because I think the particular law he's chosen is only very weak evidence against religion, whereas he claims it's very strong evidence.
Granted, an omnipotent, omniscient God could certainly have done far more useful things for the Bronze Age peoples of the Middle East than simply advising "Don't charge interest;" I like some of sci-fi author David Brin's remarks along those lines:
Why not open a small trade college and teach our ancestors to pour cement? Well thanks a lot, you alien gods you! Thanks for neglecting to mention flush toilets, printing presses, democracy, or the germ theory of disease! Or ecology, leaving us to ruin half the planet before finally catching on! Hell, if someone had just shown us how to make simple glass lenses, we could've done the rest. How much ignorance and misery we'd have escaped!
If a deity were to suggest a ban on commercial interest, though, such a suggestion would hardly be worthless, let alone incorrect, as PhilGoetz appears to claim. A minimally powerful god who could predict the future might have bothered to warn that commercial lending would be required in the future, or she might have figured that it was too much hassle to explain why and when it would be required to a tribe with little concept of scientific history or economics. There is no evidence in the text of the Old Testament that the law against commercial interest was meant to be perpetual; Jewish legislators could and did change it as the basis of the economy changed.
Fair enough!
And a great Brin quote (edit: found the link!), too - and on a similar subject, though I wouldn't normally recommend this book: one of the things I found interesting about Sheri S. Tepper's novel The Fresco was that it rather undermines several kinds of theodicy by having not-all-that-powerful aliens intervening in a number of quite huge terrestrial problems.
Exodus 22:25, Leviticus 25:36, and Deuteronomy 23:20-21 forbid Jews from charging interest on loans to "your brother" (other Jews). (This is to me the most convincing argument against Judaism and Christianity, because it's too simple to argue around. That proscription is just wrong, in exactly the way you would expect laws written by uneducated tribal people to be wrong.)
Roman Catholics believe they must follow the Old Testament laws, except for the ones they don't have to follow; but during much of the middle ages in Western Europe, this was one of the ones they had to follow. They interpreted "your brother" as meaning "brother Christians". So Jews could lend to Christians with interest (and, presumably, Christians could lend to Jews). This was convenient for everyone. The Jews were necessary to work around an irrational moral prohibition of the Christians.
Of course, the Jews had to take on the guilt of violating the moral code, even though it was for the benefit of the Christians. (This was also convenient; it meant that after some Jews had loaned you an especially large amount of money, you could kill or expel them instead of paying them back, as the Spanish monarchy did in 1492).
Later on, some orthodox Jews hired goyim to turn lightswitches and other electric devices on and off for them on the Sabbath. They're called Shabbos goy, the Sabbath goy (thanks, Alicorn!).
JCVI is considering moving from an on-site hardware grid, to cloud computing. There are lots of reasons to do this. One is so that Amazon can be our Shabbos goy.
We develop lots of bioinformatics software that we're supposed to, and would like to, give out to anyone who wants it. But if you don't have 800 computers at home, connected using the Sun Grid Engine with a VICS interface and using a Sybase database, with exactly the same versions of C++ and Perl and every C++ and Perl library that we do, you're going to have a hard time running the software.
We can't put up a web service and let anybody send their jobs to our computers, because then some professor is going to say to their freshman class of 200 students, "Today, class, your assignment is to assemble a genome using JCVI's free genome assembly web service."
If we could charge users just a little bit of money, just a fraction of the cost of running their programs, we could probably do this. Then people wouldn't be so cavalier about running a program repeatedly that takes 500 CPU hours each time you run it.
But we can't, because we're an academic institution. So that would be evil.
So we need a Shabbos goy. That's Amazon. We can release our software and tell users, "All you have to do to run this is to get an account on the Amazon cloud and run it there. Of course, they'll charge you for it. They're evil."
(The Amazon cloud is evil, BTW. They charged me for 21G of RAM and then only gave me 12, and charged me for 24 1GHz processors and gave me about 1/4 of that. I spent over $100 and was never able to run my program; and they told me to stuff it when I complained. But that's another story.)
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