"Software" updates to the most important religious and political games
Religion, politics, math, and how they all nest together
I took my daughter to a Christmas play and it dawned on me that I was witnessing a game here. It wasn’t the performance that was a game, but the entire operation that made it happen was. I accidentally participated in a game where the performers put in time and energy, and the audience puts in time, money, and applause.
For lots of people Christmas itself is about presents and Santa Claus. Again, it’s another game. It’s a game of lying to kids about an imaginary being and seeing at what point the kids piece together enough about the world to discover that the tradition is based on a fiction.
Religious and political games
Christmas is about Christ. And Christianity, has a set of rules. It’s not just a game of winning or losing, it’s arguable a game of loving your enemy, and turning the other cheek, and being nice to the outgroup. Do all the good stuff, and go to heaven. More importantly, love the right things, and go to heaven.
What’s under appreciated about it is it’s a self-updating game. The texts are not in stone. We don’t have good information about how exactly the game came about, but theologians study the book and try to reconcile anything that appears contradictory. Sometimes the software update gets bloody. Sometimes it’s internal bleeding, and other times it’s external bleed from conquest.
Martin Luther had a couple big realizations (from the game perspective). First, it was the sobering realization that the game described in the text was no longer the game that was being played. The game turned into yet another money game. Indulgences were sold, and salvation was bestowed. This situation enabled a legal “flip some tables” move. The second realization was that the rule book itself had some texts of dubious origin, which Luther placed into a section called the apocrypha.
Political revolutions can erupt when the elite are above the law. It may not be enough to put the elite to justice. The rules are always ultimately interpreted and executed by human beings. You want to put in a system that prevents the human corruption from sneaking in again, and to do that you need to put new systems (rules) in place.
The update mechanism for politics is revolution. Either that or you’re conquered and you adopt the rules of the conquerers. People don’t often think of religion as being subject to revisions. And many Americans don’t believe in serious updates to the Constitution, either. Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s main founding fathers, also created his own Bible.
As with any game, the people at the top tend to like the game as it is, and the outsiders and outcasts tend to not. The have their own ideas which threaten to disrupt the hierarchy and momentum of the existing game. We sometimes forget that the outcasts aren’t just looking to be included. And they’re not looking to win the existing game either. They want to update the game.
No game needs to be perfect, and searching for the perfect game is ultimately a fools errand. We make progress on approximate solutions. The outsiders will always be with us.
Revisions to the math game
Even mathematics has weird edge cases that cause us to rethink and redefine how we do it. We take the number zero for granted, but it was a controversial mathematical object in ancient Greece. We have the imaginary number i, and it’s a useful concept, but it certainly doesn’t feel like a real part of math, hence the name.
What do we get when we divide by zero?
From the left, 1/x approaches negative infinity. From the right, it approaches positive infinity. What is 1/0? Zero makes some sense. ±∞ makes sense. You might say it’s an error, or not a number (NaN) since it isn’t one specific number.
In the most popular programming languages, √-1 and 1/0 both return NaN. This is a redefinition of the math game! However, it’s fine because we’re merely re-evaluating how we’re handling edge cases. I could tentatively compare this to Luther moving books to the apocrypha. Sure, you can still work with complex numbers using computers, but like the apocrypha, they’re not considered essential.
The game onion 🧅
Games are wrapped inside other games. And we play games at every level. When we were kids, we played tag. And the difference between adulthood isn’t that we’ve stopped playing games. No, we just play adult games, where the stakes are higher. When you get on the road, you play the “get to the destination” game. You can play two games at once. For example, you can stress about your work game while you’re in the “get to the destination” game. You can lose one game by losing at another. For example, if you crash, you don’t just lose in the driving game, you might even lose at other games.
As you go up the ladder of games, you eventually reach games of life and death. In these games, your reproductive success is at risk, or your health might be.
We don’t play the game of life and death directly. Instead, we create treaties, governments etc. With reproductive success, we create dating norms, rituals, laws, etc.
If you don’t like any of the human games, you might like games like physics and math. In these games, you can make discoveries, and reality itself will be your opponent. Some games stop being fun after a while. Many dead religions fell away because newer, better religions came along.
We like games; we want to break out of the bad ones, but we’re always playing some game.
Isn't the whole point of the bible the fact that it is a holy word of god and therefore set in stone? Who has the authority to update that?