If you saw the movie, Beowulf, you probably would remember one or two passing comments on Jesus expelling dragons and all other monsters from the earth — literally or rhetorically, from storylines. It is a small surprise to know that regarding the poem, Beowulf, scholars discuss on its similarity with the Bible and the character with Jesus.

Probably it was true, that Christianity had destroyed all myths and dirty tricks of rulers. Probably that’s what religion is all about. Or, even that’s what civilization is all about. In the novel, Snowcrash, all hackers’ must-read novel, Neal Stephenson identifies software with religious rules, like Sumerian me and rules in Deuteronomy.

In the Snow Crash interpretation of Sumerian mythology, the masses were controlled by means of verbal rules called me. The characters of Hiro and Lagos compare me to small pieces of software that could be interpreted by humans. The me contained information for specific tasks such as baking bread; they were stored in a temple and their distribution was handled by a high priest, referred to as the en. Within this context, Enki was an en who had the ability to write new me, and is described as the primordial hacker. Also, the deuteronomists are supposed to have had an en of their own, and that kabbalistic sorcerers known as the Baalei Shem (masters of the name) could control the primordial tongue. (Wikipedia on Snow Crash)

For your information, I think that even Christian zealots hate reading Deuteronomy. And, Numbers. Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, authors of A perfect mess, say that Leviticus and Numbers and much of the Old Testament are, “in fact, taken up with the sort of listy, prescriptive and proscriptive material that might have found its way into an ancient version of Organization for Dummies.“ (p. 58)

Chapter 3 of the book, The history of mess, is probably the most interesting part of the book. It details how various human efforts — including religion, science and management to name but a few — can be viewed as an incarnation of tireless efforts of humanity for neat, organized state.

The book says earlier that if we do the cost-benefit analysis carefully, the cost of maintainig order probably exceeds its benefit. That should be true, in a world governed by the rule of entropy. And, they stop short of saying that human brain is wired to prefer tidiness, that it is biased toward organization, probably for biological and evolutionary reasons. Is it another version of the lizard brain that some of our habits persist despite that they ceased to be effective anymore?