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Comment by eucryphia | Hacker News Reader

I find it curious that anyone can be so reductionist.

It reminds me of highschool, where, while waiting for a teacher to arrive, another student declared to me that they "knew the chemical formula for a human" and then just listed six or seven elements without any regard for (1) that's not what a chemical formula is, nor (2) a human isn't a single chemical, nor (3) all the other elements in a human body.

What you're listing (clearly inspired by the ten commandments) wasn't sufficient for Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, even though at least two of those rose to dominance within preexisting civilisations that had a whole bunch of extra rules.

Those other rules included things like "pork goes off really fast in a desert so just don't even risk it" and "when we said don't kill other people we weren't talking about those specific foreign soldiers currently waving their spears around" and "crop rotation is good".

More recent things that the linked story is talking about includes "how to help women give birth without dying".

>another student declared to me that they "knew the chemical formula for a human"

Maybe he was just joking around?

She appeared quite serious, but this was the late 90s so it is entirely possible I've misremembered.

And it is also entirely possible that my teenage self simply didn't spot any attempted jokes on her part; as memories aren't like video recordings I can't play the event back with the awareness I have now.

"What you're listing (clearly inspired by the ten commandments) wasn't sufficient for Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, even though at least two of those rose to dominance within preexisting civilisations that had a whole bunch of extra rules."

Because they didn't follow them...

Which claim are you attaching the “because” (and, I think equivalently, “they”) to?

I ask because I can’t see how that response fits on to any part of that quote.

If the shoe fits... "Judaism, Christianity, or Islam" ...all of the above didn't follow the ten commandments. The problem isn't in the list of rules. The ten commandments are very well formed and cover the greatest injustices that plague you, I and our interactions with fellow people. The problem is in the fallible people trying to keep the ten commandments.

So when we fail to keep a commandment of God do we pretend to be like God and change the rule or do we repentantly seek God's forgiveness for breaking the rule? Ultimately, the answer proves an individual's rescue or downfall.

If your rules only work for spherical frictionless humans in a vacuum, they don't work.

The ten commandments are not, and never were, sufficient for any organisation of people complex enough to deserve the title "civilisation" — at most "commune", "village" or "tribe", but not a whole civilisation.

That is where you are wrong. They are not my rules. They are commands of God to be obeyed. They are meant to be followed and to show one thing: That we cannot obey them perfectly. If we could, and history proves we can't, then we wouldn't need God. But we do need God and that is why he sent his son to redeem us from the eternal consequences, not the temporal consequences, of our failure to obey God's commandments. So by His grace the commandments are sufficient.

Civilization (the topic at hand) is temporal, but even if it was whatever it is you think the afterlife looks like, then both “and history proves we can't” and independently “by His grace” would be sufficient to show that particular set rules are not, in fact, sufficient.

(That grace thing though, it’s not even vaguely coherent as an argument for you. It is a “get out of jail free card”: anything which could do what you’re trying to argue divine Grace could do would obviate any need for Jesus, or the thing with Moses on the mountain, or the flood, or departure from the garden of Eden, and the existence of asexuals is a demonstration that the whole spiel from Jesus about “looking at a woman with lust is adultery” could just have been avoided by design).

Also, neither Jews nor Muslims regard Jesus as the son of God — the former regard Jesus as, IIRC, “that heretic”; and the latter, IIRC, as the second of the three prophets.

As a side note: I was slightly amused to realise that according to the Bible, “Then he [Jesus] ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.” But hey, reading the NT is why I stopped being Christian.

> They are not my rules.

That’s nit picking, my use of that sentence is entirely valid regardless of who came up with the things.

Which version of the ten do you follow? The first commandment as given in Exodus (as compared to the slightly different phrasing later, but Exodus says this version is literally the word of God) is vague enough to allow polytheism just so long as “I who rescued you from slavery in Egypt” is put at the head of the table.

Of course, you don’t have to take the book literally — most Christians don’t (but then, parable of the sower), and some even consider literal interpretations to be blasphemous.

Wash your hands? Separate pooping water from drinking water.

Respect for sanitation and medicine?

The GP is paraphrasing the 10 Commandments as a "Manual for Civilization," I can't imagine respect for medicine/science is high on their list.

You do realize that many of the greatest scientific minds and advancements are from people that have a Christian religious background. Some that immediately come to mind are Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, Leonhard Euler, Michael Faraday, Charles Barkla, George Washington Carver, Charles Babbage, and Samuel Morse. And many in that list believed they were better scientists because they followed Christ.

Giordano Bruno, philosopher and scientist, burnt at the stake 400 years ago

Also: Einstein, Feynman, Aristotle, all famously not Christian, and that's just off the top of my head and limited to Western culture.

A westerner not knowing Hasan Ibn al-Hatham, Zhang Heng, and Aryabhata is less surprising (I learned their names in the last 15 minutes), but I think one ought to at least look for counterexamples before asserting any particular culture to be "better" at a thing.

Not even that good at religion, given what additional stuff there is in the three[0] holy books containing those commandments.

[0] Arguably more holy books, but I don't feel like arguing if Mormonism is more different from the rest of Christianity than Islam, let alone the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism.

Not as important if you are trying to bootstrap society. Hygiene is more important in dense populations already operating at several levels above scavenger.

Similar rules existed long before that. Humans aren't that dumb.

It seems we are that dumb if we had to make these sorts of rules and iterate on them but we still break them thousands of years later.

Not only do we break them, but the best and brightest among us break them.

But this is the ruleset that western civilization choose to have its young children memorize as a first set of rules to learn

Idk about your country, but we don't teach children "fear god or burn in hell" or "what would Jesus do", we tend to teach young children not to be dicks to each other and not to do dumb stuff. Most of our children books aren't based on some religious stuff either. They're quite neutral. Yes, there is "religious education" in school, but that's not the major focus of our educational system.

When i was in kindergarten, it was e.g. "Struwwelpeter"[1]. Nowadays, that's probably not considered child-friendly anymore...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter

Only a relatively small percentage these days, secular education is more and more the norm these days.

Clearly humans are that dumb.

> We've already got one:

ARTHUR: What?

GALAHAD: He says they've already got one!

ARTHUR: Are you sure he's got one?

FRENCH GUARD: Oh, yes. It's very nice-a. (I told him we already got one.)

FRENCH GUARDS: [chuckling]

ARTHUR: Well, u-- um, can we come up and have a look?

FRENCH GUARD: Of course not! You are English types-a!

ARTHUR: Well, what are you, then?

FRENCH GUARD: I'm French! Why do think I have this outrageous accent, you silly king-a?!

GALAHAD: What are you doing in England?

FRENCH GUARD: Mind your own business!

except that the "experts" can't agree on things either.

it turns out that whole "don't covet" thing is going to be our downfall

Presumably it caused some kind of problem back then too, so that's why they put it in.

Also, it's bad for the guy who owns all the land in that sweet dank river valley near you[1] if the people who do the work on that land start to covet his things in particular.

[1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs

The sudden super-clean vocal hits in this video are absolutely killing me, I don't know why it seems like the funniest damn thing all week, but it really does.

(I'm still watching to get to the part where your comment makes sense)

It is really to bad eucryphia's post was flagged. It is always nicer when we can have a free, and honest discussion without the nannies swatting at each of us when we don't fall into line. Perhaps the nannies "covet" the free thinkers of this world.

I think that one is mostly a fight over #1 and #2 (which eucryphia didn't include in their list)

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