Hacker News Reader

Comment by dternyak | Hacker News Reader

With this logic, most of the world is exhibiting deeply ingrained magical thinking by honoring 3000+ year old commandments like "You shall not murder".

Just because an ideology is honored and held in high esteem by its adherents (and to steelman your argument - even in higher esteem than it may deserve) does not mean we have better alternatives to the ideology.

View on HN

That commandment is not the thing stopping people for murdering others, it's the legal system. I would go as far to say that the ten commandments are mostly absent in the decision-making process of most people, and hence quite obsolete.

Perhaps we could go even further and say that people are inherently not inclined to kill one another and the legal system only steps in when such exceptional events do occur.

(Here, I'm only talking about murder and not what is a "tribe" attacking another, which happens even now. For instance, a nation invading and bombing another nation, drone-bombing wedding parties or religious extremists trying to take over a nation etc.)

The only way to test that assumption would be to legalize murder and see how many people killed others. It's a morbid scenario, but I wonder how many would take the opportunity to murder for revenge or personal gain.

There was a post awhile ago about people who only avoid crimes because of fear of punishment.

I think it was around 3% of the population. That’s a lot of people willing to hurt others

The parent post argued about attributing special importance to the exact verbiage and intent as expressed in that 250 year old document. While we do still have laws prohbiting murder, we don't rely on Old Testament for guidance on what killing is permissible and what killing is murder, which details matter, and what shall the punishments be; we do consider the nuances expressed in that old document as obsolete and if people would try to make arguments about treating murder based on the nuances of how exactly Old Testament prescribes to handle murder (e.g. whether all murderers must get the death penalty as per Leviticus 24:19) then we would consider that as magical thinking and not really a valid argument.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com