Mr. Baccala has written an interesting essay. I disagree
very much with his reasoning, but I like his conclusions.
You may find it interesting to consider an alternate
perspective on the moral instructions given in the
Gospels.
For a moment, consider Jesus as a teacher, teaching a
technical subject like computer science. First he
reviews elementary discrete math. Then he teaches
basic programming in a beginner's language -- perhaps
Modula-2. Then he teach real-world programming in C++.
Then he covers software engineering.
During the software engineering class, he does not
refer to discrete math at all. None of the lessons are
meant as absolute truth -- all are dependent on the
condition of the students.
Later, some of the students compile a fragmentary
collection of lecture notes. Those are the Gospels.
All of them are certainly true teachings, but they
are so incomplete that one cannot get an accurate
sense of the teaching process. As a result, the
lecture notes allow for a certain, narrow approach
to computer science, but they are vastly inferior
to actual instruction by a competent teacher.
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