Religious Studies In Software Engineering

13th October 2026

I graduated from Lampeter University, Wales in 2006, with a 2:1 in Religious Studies. Whilst I’ve earnt all my money since then from the seemingly unrelated world of software, my degree has been invaluable. Programming isn’t just something we do to computers, it’s something we do to humans and society as well. Ideologies, politics and religions can be thought of as a set of steps that, if followed, lead to a desirable outcome.

Religion is a deep and diverse subject: I studied everything from agnostic faith, to hallucinogenics and Japanese traffic cone worship. Although there is no one accepted academic definition of religion, I think a useful one to bear in mind for this essay is, “the state of being ultimately concerned”¹. Ultimate concern can be seen in those great questions of life; what is existence, what happens when we die, what is our purpose, what does it mean to be good, why do we suffer? Although Religious Studies explicitly doesn’t offer any answers to these questions, it is a discipline that is ultimately concerned with taking those that ask these questions seriously.

Since 2015 I’ve been continuously travelling the world. Not having a fixed home has meant that I’ve slowly but surely reduced my possessions to a bare minimum. My entire worldly belongings fit in this 30 litre daypack:

Despite its small size, I still carry some items of sentimental value. One of which is this handout from our Buddhism module:

It contains a very much non-exhaustive selection of some 34 definitions of religion. Buddhism is an Eastern tradition and so has had a unique effect on the Western tradition of Religious Studies. Whilst Buddhism is clearly a fully-fledged religion, it is, in stark contrast to mainstream Western religions, godless. So however we define religion, it needs to take this and indeed many other diverse human beliefs and practices from around the world into account. This makes agreeing on one true definition hard if not impossible.

I think we can rightly be suspicious of a field that doesn’t precisely know what it’s actually studying. But for me this has always been one of the most interesting and useful aspects of my training. How do you sincerely and rigorously take something seriously without knowing what it is?

The Insider/Outsider Problem

One framing we were taught to approach this with was the Insider/Outsider problem. Those best suited to knowing what a given religion is, are those that practice it, namely insiders. But because of their commitment and investment they are also those most likely to be biased. Whilst outsiders on the other hand can be more objective, they’re also problematic as they’re not directly exposed to the subject of study. Therefore we should strive to consider both perspectives in order to arrive somewhere in the middle. We can do this both academically and individually.

Academically, we can consider both the outsider studies of say, anthropologists and the insider accounts of believers. Individually, as outsiders, we can be curious and think critically, but we can also, more interestingly, allow ourselves to be genuinely moved as sincere visiting insiders to specific responses to questions of ultimate concern. But given religion’s track record over the millennia, this seems dangerous. Why dignify some of the most damaging ideas in human history by letting them into our personal lives? For me this gets to the heart of what Religious Studies is and what I’ve found most valuable about it in my life and career over the last two decades.

Given the fact that religion is not easily defined, we must be prepared to entertain the fact that, whatever the dimensions of religions are, some of those dimensions may be present in worldviews that don’t immediately appear religious. Think of how capitalism puts money above all else to the detriment of social and ecological welfare. Profit may not be a god in the traditional sense, but the way in which it so fundamentally permeates modernity notably echoes the great world religions like Buddhism and Christianity. Whilst it’s perfectly possible for somebody to not profess an ism of any kind, I think Religious Studies shows us that we’re all, to some extent, inevitably inside one ism or another. That’s not to suggest that anybody can speak as if inside any other religion or ism. But rather that Religious Studies, in its sincere and holistic approach, neither demotes religiousness to a mere object of scientific dissection, nor promotes it to a source of unverifiable truth. I always have been and still am, deeply sceptical of religion. But I don’t get to smugly point at it from my high horse thinking I’m a “clean” outsider untainted by insider-ism.

One of the fathers of Religious Studies, Ninian Smart, had this to say about the Philosophy Of Religion, an adjacent discipline focussed on religious truth claims²:

The fabled Martian arriving on the planet and inspecting among other things our intellectual resources might also be struck by a strange thing. Journals he would note, devoted to the philosophy of religion. The more advanced essays therein might discuss the question of truth as between religions. But over Cambodia he would not look down to perceive Christians struggling spiritually with Buddhists: he would find Marxist rural anarchosyndicalism destroying temples and monks. In Tibet he would see the clash of ancient religion and Maoism. In Romania he would note subversive Baptists. In Sweden he would see Christianity softly overwhelmed by social democracy. In brief, he would think that as far as rivalry goes […] religions and ideologies were tugging against each other, and that really from a practical point of view it was odd that such a struggle was rarely depicted in the journals of the philosophers of religion. […]

He might be further puzzled at how blithely men could come to put religion in a sort of ghetto, considering so many professed not to be able to clearly define it.

To a Martian there is no significant difference between religion and ideology. What’s paramount and starkly obvious is that, whatever its name, and however it’s defined, it’s one of the defining aspects of the earthly life to which we all belong.

Earthly Life

My father died from alcoholism during my final year at university. I am forever grateful for how immensely supportive my tutors were during that time. Just a few weeks after his death our final exams started. For my Buddhism exam I chose to answer the question, “Why Do Buddhists Meditate?”. It was a topic close to my heart as I had myself been meditating daily for 5 years at that point. As I entered the exam hall I unexpectedly saw my ex-girlfriend. I kept my composure, but when I came to write the words, “…as opposed to a belief, meditation as a practice exists beyond statements on the true nature of things…”, I broke down in tears. I was overwhelmed by the convergence of so many things; academic achievement, personal fulfillment, loss and love. My tears softened the paper upon which I was writing such that any ink would run. I started writing again further down, leaving what must have appeared to be a curious empty paragraph.

I wasn’t just an outsider to my degree. It fundamentally shaped who I am. I literally, as in literally literally, submitted tears to my formal academic record.

In that same Buddhism module for which I still carry a handout, we also learnt that before the arrival of Alexander The Great in India during the 4^th century BCE, the Buddha wasn’t represented in human form. Rather he was depicted by absence, such as an empty chair or footprints.

Buddhapada (Footprints of the Buddha). Gandhara, South Asia, 2nd century. Schist. Yale University Art Gallery.

There are various interpretations for why this was. My favourite is because it represented the central Buddhist concept of emptiness. Emptiness is often misunderstood as the idea that there exists some fundamentally empty dimension to existence. In fact, it’s just the observation that you can’t point to any one aspect of a thing in order to locate that thing. Typically this is applied to a person: whilst I am made up of my body, thoughts and feelings, I can’t point to any one cell, utterance or emotion and say that that is what I most fundamentally am. This can be applied to anything, even, as we have just seen, the definition of religion itself.

My empty paragraph, like the Buddha’s footprints, showed me that I was really there, that I didn’t just peer at my university experience from the outside. I saw, and still see, the temptation to blithely put religion in a sort of ghetto, to keep it at a safe distance, to believe that I am somehow above and beyond all that fantasy and violence. But questions of ultimate concern don’t leave me unscathed.

Once I’d graduated, I had to find a way to make a living. I’d learnt about software since before I could remember, from my father, the alcoholic. So whilst I already had some fluency in that world, it wasn’t immediately appealing. I wanted a roof over my head, but I wanted fulfillment too. How could the world of computers offer me the same warmth and stimulation as my degree? This is still a question I come back to time and time again, and even though the answers don’t always feel within reach, the tools and perspectives I was taught have time and time again guided me.

The Technologising of the Word

Another of my favourite course modules was Religion And Media. My first thought was that this was going to be about mass media, like how religion is represented on TV and the internet. But “media” here was more in the sense of the plural of “medium” of communication. We explored the effects that the four great paradigm shifts in media technology had on religion and culture; orality, literacy, print and digitisation.

Orality

It’s funny thinking of speaking as a technology. Did we invent it? It feels more like it was given to us by evolution. But there are nuances to the medium of speech that make its influence more concrete. In Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word³ he considers the power of narrative, rhyme and song. These are clearly our innovations, those ancient and perennially celebrated traditions of poetry and music for example. For millennia these media have been the dominant technologies recording and transmitting human knowledge across time and space. Carefully created stories, with engaging characters, stimulating adventures and performed with pleasing rhymes and melodies, are more easily remembered and more readily heard. Think of those poetic epics like The Odyssey or Ramayana.

Seen from the enormity of today’s digital revolution it’s hard to imagine how linguistic tools as seemingly trivial as song and story precipitated changes in the fundamental structure of human culture. But we can reasonably form an argument that this is where religion’s DNA emerges. Oral technology leads to codification. By preserving a particular representation of the world and events, it inevitably also favours particular views, opinions and indeed beliefs. We can even begin to imagine how it might contribute to social hierarchies: memorisation takes time, time that can’t be used for say manual labour. If the keepers of the stories become sources of truth then they are afforded certain powers over others. This is of course not an inevitably but it does sketch out the potential ramifications of what at first seem like inconsequential technologies.

Literacy

It’s easier to see the relevance of writing on religion. Today we have what are considered to be 6 World Religions, religions that have spread across diverse geographies and cultures; Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism. These are all also religions for whom literature plays a central role. The written word is even more ossifying in its codifications and so even more pronounced in its effects on religion and culture.

Print

Print continues the trajectory, but here it’s interesting to consider how media technology can also promote the opposite of codification, like secularisation for example. Clay Shirky argues that it was the printing press that led to the creation of the nation-state in Europe during the 17^th century⁴. Until then the ultimate power in European states lay with the Church. A large part of that power was mediated via Latin-speaking priests who were the single source of truth for interpreting labouriously hand-written and thus conveniently rare Latin bibles. The printing press made it economically viable to give ordinary people access to canonical Christian texts in their local vernacular languages. This undermined the power of the Church, allowing other forms of political organisation to flourish.

Digitisation

Although digitisation, or let’s just say the internet for convenience’s sake, has obviously had a massive impact on humanity, I’d like to temper its commonly perceived impact. I suspect most of us, and especially myself as a software engineer, are problematically inside the convulsions of this paradigm shift. It’s hard to have an outsider’s perspective. I am after all writing this on, and you are likely reading it from, a digital device. As Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message”⁵,

This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – results from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.

Many of the richest companies in the world are digital; Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. Whilst the remaining non-digital companies are themselves fundamentally dependant on digital products and services. The amount of power underlying digital mediums of communication inevitably shapes the messages it carries.

A quintessential example of digital insiderism is belief in the technological singularity, as espoused by writers like Ray Kurzweil⁶. The idea goes that, if the rate of technological advancement is itself increasing, then it stands to mathematical reason that at some point in the near future the rate of change will tend to infinity. A concrete pathway for this could be imagined via self-improving AIs. If LLMs are increasingly capable of writing software, and indeed the very software that creates themselves, as long as they have the necessary computing power, then in theory their evolution should become exponential. Which leads to a super-intelligence beyond human comprehension.

I don’t think it takes a Religious Studies graduate to notice the religious themes here. The singularity rhymes with monotheism, the traditional staple of Abrahamic religions; Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The predictions of an imminent upheaval sound like prophecy, a useful tool of charismatic leaders to attract and maintain followers without having to actually provide concrete evidence. And of course super-intelligence is another way of talking about omniscience.

I of course don’t know what the future holds, but I am at least sceptical of this sort of religious rhetoric. I would instead like to offer another perspective that I came across during my studies: the idea that rhetoric surrounding questions of ultimate concern is cyclical.

The Sect-Church-Sect Cycle Theory

The roots of Sect-Church-Sect Cycle Theory can be traced back to well known sociologist Max Weber’s ideas about Church-Sect Theory in the 1900s. But I will outline the theory as it was later developed by the American sociologists Stark and Bainbridge in the 1980s⁷. Broadly speaking, a sect is an offshoot of a larger organisation like an established church for example. Classic examples in Christianity would be; Mormons, Baptists, Quakers, etc. The cyclic version of the church-sect split argues that most religions are in fact continuously moving back and forth along a church-sect spectrum. So for example, in many ways it can be said that Christianity itself started out as a sect within Judaism. And now Christianity has many sects, which themselves have become churches in their own rights. Consider how Protestantism broke off from Catholicism in the 16^th century, and Evangelical Christianity broke off from Protestantism in the 18^th century, which now has literal megachurches!

The proposed mechanism powering this cycle is the tension between the established religion and the surrounding society. Let’s see how this plays out by returning to the era leading up to the printing press in Europe. For centuries, Christianity, or more correctly, Catholicism, was an all-pervasive, monopolistic, institution inseparable from the very fabric of society⁸. It was the largest European landowner and levied a 10% tax from all members of society under its jurisdiction. The way to salvation was to receive The Seven Sacraments (Baptism, Confession, Eucharist, etc) which conveniently could only be performed by ordained priests. If priests, or indeed any members of the clergy broke the law, they weren’t tried in common courts, but ecclesiastical courts. This was the Church, with a capital C, and it essentially held ultimate power, even over royalty.

But it would be unfair to imply that Catholicism achieved its prominence purely by coercive and malicious means. It also promoted and financed what we’d now call social welfare: charity, supporting the poor and the afflicted, and creating hospitals. It literally invented the university, such as those in Bologna, Paris and Oxford during the 11^th century. For those under the Church’s sphere of influence, Catholicism was a politically stabilising force: it essentially replaced much of the civilising infrastructure of the fallen Roman Empire.

The tensions between the established religion and surrounding society are nuanced. It’s not a matter of simply replacing the church wholesale, but rather of reformulating. Ironically sects often claim they are more true to the original meaning of the church than the church itself. This is exactly how Martin Luther, the seminal figure of the Protestant Reformation, began his protest. He was a priest and professor of moral theology at the University of Wittenberg, Germany. In 1517, he published The Ninety-five Theses or Disputation on the Power and Effıcacy of Indulgences, which were inspired by a scandal where clergy were selling certificates that would supposedly reduce punishments received on the journey to Heaven. Unsurprisingly, he was excommunicated.

But thanks to inventors like Johannes Gutenberg, Luther’s ideas quickly spread across Europe in the pages of printed books. Small unornate churches started to be built that didn’t perform Latin Eucharists, but rather gave vernacular sermons. Christianity was given a new life that was direct, simple and accessible. And of course, soon enough, so successful were these albeit humble beginnings that protestantism came to grow its own powers and thus its own abuses of those powers. In England, King Henry VIII made the protestant sect, Anglicanism, the state religion, only for it a generation later to become another Church mandating compulsory attendance to its services. This then led to the formation of new sects like the Puritans and Pilgrims, which due to their subsequent persecution, fled to North America to be part of its earliest colonies. And so the Sect-Church-Sect Cycle continued.

Despite its church/sect naming, this cycle is considered to be a process that occurs in all religions and ideologies. Its extremes don’t need to be called church and sect, another vocabulary could be traditionalists and trendsetters, or conservatives and radicals. So let’s look at a non-Christian example. Buddhism itself began as an offshoot of early Hinduism, it spread to China, became a powerful institution much like Catholicism and, similar to the birth of Protestantism, inspired a radical reinvention now most commonly known as Zen. A traditional Zen founding verse says this⁹:

A special transmission outside the scriptures,
Not depending on words and letters;
Directly pointing to the mind
Seeing into one’s true nature and attaining Buddhahood.

Whereas Protestantism translated esoteric Latin into common parlance, Zen skips out language altogether. It’s as if “words and letters” are the primordial “church”. That any time we commit to codifying responses to questions of ultimate concern we essentially create a mini church that must at some point cede to a “sect” that, should we choose to accept it, updates our view of the world with fresh insight. Now of course it’s ironic that Zen has so many words and letters arguing against words and letters. But that’s why I think the Sect-Church-Sect Cycle Theory is so useful. Whilst there is no one religion nor statement that can eternally enshrine the nature of reality, we must nevertheless risk the treacherous currents of assertion and rebuttal in order to keep alive the responses to the most pressing questions of our time.

Programming As Sect Building

In Peter Naur’s 1985 software engineering paper, Programming As Theory Building¹⁰, he argues that the real location of a computer program is in the mind of the programmer.

On the Theory Building View of programming the theory built by the programmers has primacy over such other products as program texts, user documentation, and additional documentation such as specifications.

Naur is highlighting a distinct aspect of software: unlike say mathematical proofs or physical laws, computer programs are not static statements, they change as new requirements arise and bugs are found. The text of a program is merely one of many concrete, snapshot articulations of the conceptual understanding of the problem possessed by the programmer.

Program text, as a commitment to a single, static response to a problem, suffers many of the same issues as a church. Without modifications, it inevitably becomes less and less capable of effectively responding to the questions it was originally designed to answer. But new sect-like versions of a program aren’t guaranteed to be effective either. It’s only after feedback from encountering the real world that new theories can be either validated or repudiated. Therefore, healthy software, like sects and churches, is in constant tension between the two poles of a proven but increasingly irrelevant status quo and an unproven but possibly more relevant update.

Programs are of course rarely written by just a single person. They may be written by a whole team, sometimes involving hundreds or perhaps thousands of members. And even when a single person does work on their own, they’re almost always doing so with the help of existing dependencies. By “dependencies” I mean software whose primary goal is to serve as a specialised component within a larger project, like openssl for example, that handles encrypting and decrypting data for sending over the internet. In reality most software is not merely the instantiation of a single programmer’s theory, but a complex interplay of many. Programmer’s inevitably need to communicate and organise.

The computer scientist Melvin E. Conway, wrote in his 1967 paper, How Do Committees Invent?¹¹:

[O]rganizations which design systems […] are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

Within the field of Software Engineering this has come to be known as Conway’s Law. If true software resides in the minds of programmers, and those programmers must communicate amongst themselves in order to create coherent program text, then program text will inevitably reflect the structure of the communication. A classic online example of this is the common asymmetry between the ease of subscribing to a service and the difficulty of unsubscribing. Think of those bright and obvious sign up boxes, perhaps with a supposedly limited time offer. And then think of canceling that same subscription, which is so often a dreary chore of patiently peering through reams of obscure menu items. We don’t even need to posit malicious intent here: an organisation will naturally prioritise internal technical communications about increasing revenue, therefore the implementation of features contributing to that goal will be better developed than those that contribute to losing revenue.

But ultimately Conway’s Law has far greater repercussions: it is essentially a formulation of McLuhan’s, “The medium is the message”. Namely that the structures through which we communicate are more pertinent than any specific message, or in our current case, any specific program text. This doesn’t just have negative implications though. In Eric S. Raymond’s 1999 book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar¹², he contrasts two opposing approaches to creating and maintaining software. The first can be understood through the metaphor of a cathedral: there is a clear plan from an overseeing body that delegates specific tasks to managers and teams. I think this is how we most often imagine the endeavour of software engineering, that it is so esoteric and complex that it somehow becomes monumental. However, the metaphor of the bazaar articulates something quite distinct: an ad hoc, seemingly random arrangement of diverse buyers, sellers, locals and foreigners, exchanging whatever goods and consumables happen to be available on the day. It may be surprising that any software of note could ever be made like this, but in actual fact it is not only foundational to the modern software landscape, it is responsible for perhaps the most successful piece of software yet created: Linux.

Linux is a general purpose Operating System (OS) like Microsoft Windows or macOS. It began in 1991 as the personal project of the Finnish Computer Science student Linus Torvalds. He publicly released the program text, which is more commonly known as, the source code, and welcomed contributions to it from everybody. It was not his explicit intention to model development in the form of Raymond’s bazaar, but nevertheless Linux has since enjoyed an ever growing international community of passionate and voluntary contributors. It is used in many contexts, most notably on Android phones, of which there are nearly 4 billion. Due to its liberal public licensing it can be legally copied, or colloquially, “forked”. Here is a family tree of some popular Linux forks:

Credit to @codywohlers on reddit.com

Even though there is a “GNU/Linux” (GNU is the accompanying OS applications) at the base of the family tree, it doesn’t actually exist anymore. In the Buddhist sense Linux is “empty”, as in you can’t point to any one particular existing fork and say that that is the true Linux. It is free to travel along a “sect-church” spectrum at will and with little ceremony. It is as spontaneous and diverse as a bazaar.

The marvel of Linux isn’t so much about Linus Torvalds, although he does play a huge part. It’s more so about open-source software (OSS) in general. OSS isn’t an invention, it’s merely what happens when you choose, for whatever reason, to share your source code. In a sense it is a bedrock case of Conway’s Law: the communication structures employed by OSS are nothing short of all the communication structures employed by humans in general. It is estimated that 70-90% of all software is open-source. There is something poetic about OSS. Nobody invented poetry, there are just poets that have popularised it. We are all free to write poetry, whether it’s for our eyes only, a close circle of friends or an internationally best selling anthology. Poetry thrives where ever there are Naur-like minds that grapple with the challenge of finding words for the wordless. For as long as we are free to communicate with each other, there will be poetry and there will be software.

The Digital Church

As a software engineer it seems reasonable to ask: if OSS is so successful, shouldn’t all software follow the bazaar model? But as a graduate of Religious Studies I have a different question: in a world dominated by software, what role does a software engineer play? Dear reader, I am inside the church.

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story¹³.

Hear my gospel.
This prose my technology.
This narrative my craft.
OSS is the way, the truth and the light.
No one comes to success except through it.

Are you convinced? Or is the rhetoric too strong now?

I hope that, even as I confess to exaggerating for dramatic effect, your eyebrows are raised. To claim a relevant voice on digital matters in this day and age should not be taken lightly. It’s akin to claiming some priest-like exclusive access to the sacred Latin Bible of old. If I can harness, or even just appear to harness, a fraction of the power currently surging through the digital world, I could wield it for substantial personal gain. It doesn’t even matter what position I take, just to claim some relevancy is enough.

Up until 2018, Google’s official motto was “Don’t be evil”. Of course now that the motto has been removed doesn’t therefore make them evil, but it does highlight knowledge of a common narrative in Big Tech. To intend not to be evil implies that being evil is a common trait of those with great power. It should go without saying that Google is constantly under judgement from the highest courts of the world. It’s just par for the Big Tech course; not paying taxes, monopolisation, political polarisation, promotion of disinformation, exploiting addictive behaviours, copyright infringements, and so on¹⁴. But of course, as is common when such immense powers are involved, Big Tech’s legal repercussions look suspiciously like rulings of ecclesiastical courts giving special treatment to the faithful.

It is even argued by some, that Big Tech can be associated with its own unique “secular religion”, TESCREAL¹⁵. The name is an acronym coined by computer scientist Timnit Gebru and philosopher Émile P. Torres, that refers to the “interconnected and overlapping” ideologies of; Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. To quote Torres¹⁶:

At the heart of TESCREALism is a “techno-utopian” vision of the future. It anticipates a time when advanced technologies enable humanity to accomplish things like: producing radical abundance, reengineering ourselves, becoming immortal, colonizing the universe and creating a sprawling “post-human” civilization among the stars full of trillions and trillions of people. The most straightforward way to realize this utopia is by building superintelligent AGI [Artificial General Intelligence].

Adherents of such a worldview are commonly found in Big Tech, like: the father of Singularitarianism, Ray Kurzweil; CEO of Google, Larry Page; the richest man in the world, Elon Musk; and CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman.

Again, I don’t think it’s difficult to see the echoes of traditional religious belief here. Particularly, TESCREAL seems to have a conception of Heaven: a utopia not of this world, where we will not want for anything and where death has been banished. There’s even belief that you can buy your way there: companies are offering to freeze your brain or body, so that when the technology arrives, you can be resurrected. Sam Altman is known to have payed for such a service from Nectome¹⁷, which bears a curious resemblance to the certificates sold by Catholic priests that inspired Luther’s reformation.

What is a software engineer to think about all this? OSS may have its own anti-Big Tech ideologies, but they’re not immune from falling into the trap of churches. For example, the most famous OSS license, the GPL, was created by Richard Stallman in 1984 as protest against a corporation “hoarding” changes to his own publicly available source code¹⁸. Yet today there are plenty of OSS projects that have gone on to become multi-billion corporations in their own rights, like; RedHat, Docker and Hashicorp. It’s just the Sect-Church-Sect Cycle all over again.

What is important to understand is that a software engineer never just writes code: they are inextricably implicated in a Digital Church of global and historic influence. Whether consciously or not, every technical decision they make contributes to a confluence of power that effects nearly everybody on this planet.

A New Programmer Team

A program isn’t just for computers.

It can also be for politics: a set of rules and aspirations that direct the running of a country. Or for religion: a set of beliefs and practices for leading a fulfilling life. Even for software engineering itself: the theory and discipline of effectively using computers. Programs in and of themselves are not problematic per se. They only become an issue when, as Naur argues, we elevate the program text above the living theory held by the programmers. The presence of program text does not imply the presence of a functional program, quoting Naur again:

The death of a program happens when the programmer team possessing its theory is dissolved. A dead program may continue to be used for execution in a computer and to produce useful results. The actual state of death becomes visible when demands for modifications of the program cannot be intelligently answered. Revival of a program is the rebuilding of its theory by a new programmer team.

In politics, “demands for modifications”, could be, for example, the act of voting. In religion and ideology though, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the dramatic process of sect formation, it can simply be the way in which a worldview responds to unique circumstances. I find this often happens to me when I visit new countries. For example, as a European I’m used to waiting for traffic lights to signal when it’s safe to cross the road. But in South Asia I have to modify my habits by assertively yet carefully making a path across the road myself.

There is no one program text that fits all possible situations.

To drink the Kool-Aid is a term in common parlance we use to describe the blind acceptance of a possibly problematic belief. It originates from the tragic deaths of over 900 members of the People’s Temple movement in 1978. Cyanide laced Kool-Aid was drunk both voluntarily and by coercion as a form of “revolutionary suicide”¹⁹. Nowadays we don’t associate literal death with the term, but we do assume a worrying absence of critical thinking. We can lose friends, family and colleagues to metaphorical Kool-Aid, not mortally but emotionally and cognitively. Religion, Big Tech, money, OSS sectarianism: the bazaar of potential Kool-Aids is bustling.

Dissolving a programming team doesn’t just happen when a software company goes bankrupt, or the last member of a religion passes away. It also happens when the humans involved succumb to Kool-Aid, when they can no longer intelligently answer for their theories and beliefs. Demands for modifications will never end, they are part and parcel of engaging with the living world, whether you’re a software engineer, a voter, or a pedestrian. Every word we utter and every character we type, whether it’s prosaic or programmatic, is an opportunity to reflect, to build new theory:

A special transmission outside the program text,
Not depending on words and letters;
Directly pointing to the mind
Seeing into the problem’s true nature and releasing a new version.

🙇

Footnotes