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lukeprog comments on Rationality Quotes: March 2011 - Less Wrong
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"Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy."
Joseph Campbell
...at least the rules are consistent and correspond to reality...
Not all of them. Which applies to Old Testament gods too, I guess: the Bible is pretty consistent with that "no killing" thing.
The bible doesn't say "don't kill". In KJV times, "kill" meant what we mean by "murder", and "slay" was the neutral form (what we now mean by "kill"). (This, by the way, actually corresponds to the Hebrew version)
This post brought to you by the vast inferential distance you have from the people who wrote KJV
Except for the countless times when killing is outright mandated on, well, pain of death.
And the times when killing is praised, and the times when killing is completely unremarked upon.
The Bible approaches consistency much more closely with "no murder." That said, if "murder" roughly boils down to unendorsed killing, that's not too surprising.
Even then it's more than a little odd. God's reaction to the first murder is rather mysterious. I've always felt the Cain and Abel story is the shortened version of something which really should have had a wider context.
Well, there's a lot of that in the Bible.
I've heard the Cain/Abel story explained as a metaphorical account of the conflict between hunter-gatherer and agricultural economies. (The initial conflict between the brothers stems from God's differential approval of their hunter and farmer lifestyles.) I have no idea whether there's real evidence for that or whether it's a just-so story, but if it's true it also provides a perspective on an equally puzzling account later on, where Jacob sells a mess of pottage to his hunter brother, Esov, in exchange for the primogeniture. (A contract he later enforces by outright deceiving their elderly father, which makes me suspect the later story came first and the earlier one backformed to justify what would otherwise be outright fraud, rather than mere coercion. But I digress.)