I'm a gentile atheist and I find that Halachich debate and reasoning totally appeals to the detail-oriented fanboy in me. Ultimately, it was a barren intellectual exercise with respect to the real world, but a hugely challenging intellectual exercise -- a game -- nonetheless. Maybe one of the great games of history. Who can tell how many brilliant minds wasted their lives building this enormously refined system of law, based on the myths of one of many, many barbaric tribes? But with that said, in the modern day, many of the best jurists and legal scholars today are Jews who owe some debt to this cultural inheritance.