As I was banging my head against the desk, trying to debug my code, I was interrupted by a CNN alert regarding the attack in Dhaka. I don’t recall the exact numbers, but it stated x dead, y injured.

As time went on , both figures x and y kept on increasing. I eventually threw my hands up, and gave up on trying to debug my logic. I genuinely felt bad about hearing about the incident, but in comparison to the prior unfortunate events, I actually stopped to think and attempt to understand why this was happening.

There were some things which were factual , that I could derive opinions from:

The repeating element in these attacks is the fact that the perpetrators are of a certain faith

They justify their actions by quoting the scriptures of that faith

I always doubted the scriptures promoted violence because, I have religious friends, who are the kindest, and most morally upright people I know. This was the confusing part.

What sucks is that if I try to learn about the faith, there will be 10 different answers regarding one specific question. For example — “ Is the punishment for apostasy , a death sentence in your faith ?” A rather simple question, however there will be a variety of answers ranging from “ Yes, but ____” , “no, it is written in this verse of the [insert religious scripture] that there is no compulsion in [insert name of religion]” , to “Absolutely” .

It is hard to learn about what billions of people consider the one truth if there are n number of interpretations. I wanted to get back to debugging my code, and something came across my mind → what would happen if you could code, compile and run a religion ? Could there be bugs if you were to run gcc religion.c ?

Do what? You heard me, what if each commandment, or verse was a method in a class called religion? What if we compiled that code, and fed it a unique test case ? Let’s be more specific :

public interface Religion {

void obligations();

void restrictions();

}

public class [Insert Religion Name here ] implements Religion {

public void commandments(){

though shall not kill;

}

}

What would happen if we fed in the test case (believer_type,action_type,receiver_type) to the program? If we fed the test-case args = (Muslim, kill, human) would the implementation of Islam throw an Exception — killing of any human is prohibited, in any circumstance, or is this a valid test case which the code is designed to pass for ? i.e : Would there be logic-flow which checks ?

if (receiver_type.religion != ‘Islam’ && Muslim.state == ‘ holy war’)

{

return ‘action_valid’

}

else

{

return 'action invalid’

}

I would like to believe that the above test case will fail. However because of the ambiguity present in the scriptures and the amount of room left for interpretation , I really wish there was logic implemented to avoid ambiguity. If something is an obligation , under what exact circumstances ?

Thou shall not kill . Under what circumstances ? I need to kill plants, if not animals to survive. Why are the boundaries not clearly written ? If something is a restriction — under what exact circumstances ? It is hard to judge the perimeter of free will given to us when there is free will to interpret the books however we like to.

I wish before any act carried out which have such heavy consequences such as Dhaka, there would be a TurboTax like software that would ask for the “users” circumstances, analyze the supporting scripture ( which is probably a lot less shorted than the IRS tax code) and outputs the verdict of the faith.

Please note, I did not once suggest that any religion is corrupted at its core. I am also not a raging atheist who suggests that there is a problem which the notion of religion . I am against the amount of variability from one religious scholar to another when it comes to find out answers about the faith. I want one source of truth. I wish religion was written in a compiled language. If there is indeed a bug in the code, we should acknowledge it.

At least , then we have the option to run gdb religion.c