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Comment by laserbeam | Hacker News Reader

The bible - am not a religious person, don't want to become one, and I mean no shade to religious people. However, as I now read it, I'm surprised by how much western culture references it. People use examples, names and scenes from the bible much more often than I realised and it helps to recognize that.

American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Oppenheimer was an ok movie, the book it's based on is better paced.

A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit. This is the first book I encountered on disaster sociology. That field of study sounds amazing! It's about how people become altruistic and how communities form right after a natural disaster.

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I read the first few pages of Genesis many years ago and I was surprised that pretty much all the non-Jesusy bits I'd heard of were in the first few pages. It moves at a remarkably quick pace. Entire civilisations come and go in paragraphs. I had the impression all of this stuff was spread throughout like a novel. I was left wondering what the other 1000 pages are about (not enough to want to read them, though).

This, in my opinion, illustrates the value in studying classics: a lot of modern society is based on the stories we have been telling each other for thousands of years. Not just the Bible, though: also the Ancient Greek and Roman texts, and (if you're being adventurous) the Talmud, and the Quran + Hadith to see how the West's sister cultures developed. The modern atheist would do well to study religion.

I'm currently reading Plato's Republic right now - deservedly famous, and is the source of lots of generally known parables. It is much more than a utopian political text, as the title and its reputation might imply. In fact, it is religious in it's own way, but in an interestingly different way than the Bible.

Little related - this is also why I started watching movies and TV shows that are popular. I didn't use to watch a lot of them earlier. Now I understand how much our culture is affected by them and how it affects our communication.

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