Stone Tablets Are Not Software Updates

 

There is something faintly surreal about the way we handle ancient religious texts in the twenty-first century.

On the one hand, we have quantum computing, gene editing, interplanetary probes, and smartphones that can translate six languages before breakfast. On the other, we still have heated arguments about what a collection of Bronze Age shepherds thought about shellfish, fabrics, astronomy, or who is allowed to talk to whom on a Tuesday afternoon.

At some point, you have to pause and say, gently but firmly, “Perhaps we are misfiling these documents.”

Ancient religious texts are extraordinary artifacts. They are windows into the minds of civilizations that did not have microscopes, germ theory, or Google. They are poetic, symbolic, mythic attempts to understand a world that was vast, terrifying, and mysterious. Thunder meant something. Drought meant something. Disease meant something. The cosmos was personal, not mechanical.

That is all fascinating, but can never be a lifestyle manual for modern democracy.

And yet, somehow, we keep trying to use them that way.

Let us be honest about what these texts are. They are layered compilations of oral tradition, political power struggles, moral fables, cosmology, tribal law, and metaphor. They are full of beauty, yes. They are also full of tribal prejudice, gender hierarchy, supernatural assumptions, and instructions that make sense only if you think the sky is a dome and disease is divine displeasure.

To treat them as infallible roadmaps for modern life is like using a Roman battlefield strategy guide to manage your Wi-Fi router. It may contain insights about human nature. It does not explain bandwidth.

There is a category error at work.

When we read Homer, we do not assume Zeus is literally throwing lightning bolts from Olympus. We admire the poetry. We analyze the cultural values. We recognize it as mythology. When we read ancient Norse sagas, we do not attempt to legislate based on Odin’s preferences. We contextualize. We study. We enjoy.

Why is it so difficult to apply the same intellectual courtesy to ancient religious scripture?

The moment someone suggests that perhaps these texts should be regarded as historical and literary artifacts rather than prophecy engines, panic erupts. The assumption is that removing literal authority removes meaning. It does not. It changes the category.

We can respect something without obeying it.

In fact, that is how we treat most of human history. We admire Aristotle without consulting him on antibiotics. We appreciate ancient Chinese philosophy without assuming it predicted satellite navigation. We recognize that knowledge evolves.

Religion is not exempt from evolution simply because it is old.

One of the oddest features of modern discourse is the insistence that texts written in pre-scientific eras contain detailed predictions about twenty-first century geopolitics. It requires an astonishing elasticity of interpretation. Wars become metaphors. Earthquakes become coded signals. Political figures become shadowy fulfillments of obscure verses written for audiences who had never heard of a printing press.

It is not that ancient writers were foolish. They were doing the best they could with the limited intellectual tools available to them. They were trying to make sense of suffering, injustice, famine, and mortality. That effort deserves empathy.

What it does not deserve is to be treated as a surveillance camera pointed at the future.

Prophecy, as used in many traditions, functioned as moral warning. It was not a time machine. It was a rhetorical device. “If you continue down this path, catastrophe will follow.” That is less mystical prediction and more common sense dressed in dramatic wizardy clothing.

But in the modern era, prophecy has been turned into a kind of cosmic bingo card. Every global event becomes evidence. Every crisis becomes confirmation. It is exhausting.

There is also the matter of prejudice embedded in many of these texts. They were written in societies structured around patriarchy, tribal identity, and rigid social hierarchies. Of course they reflect those values. To pretend otherwise is to erase context.

If a text assumes women are property, or that outsiders are inherently suspect, or that certain groups deserve subjugation, that tells us something about the time in which it was written. It does not obligate us to preserve those assumptions as sacred.

We have abolished slavery in law. We have expanded suffrage. We have recognized human rights across boundaries that ancient societies did not even conceptualize. Why would we freeze moral development at the level of a nomadic pastoral culture?

The irony is that treating ancient texts as intellectual curiosities can actually deepen appreciation for them. When you remove the pressure to obey every line literally, you can explore metaphor, symbolism, and historical influence more freely. You can see how myths shaped civilizations. You can trace how moral ideas evolved.

It becomes scholarship instead of dogma.

And scholarship is far more interesting.

There is also something profoundly human about acknowledging that our ancestors were brilliant within their limits. They created epics, laws, cosmologies, and rituals without modern tools. They grappled with existential questions in candlelight. That deserves admiration.

What it does not justify is suspending critical thought.

When ancient texts contradict modern evidence, we do not need to perform interpretive gymnastics to preserve their literal accuracy. We can say, calmly, “This reflects an earlier understanding.” That is not disrespect. That is intellectual honesty.

Modern life is complicated enough without importing ancient cosmology into public policy. Medical decisions should not hinge on sacrificial symbolism. Climate science should not be filtered through apocalyptic poetry. Legal systems should not be anchored in codes designed for tribal confederations.

And yet, we see this tension repeatedly.

The problem is not that ancient texts exist. The problem is when they are elevated above evidence, empathy, and contemporary ethical reasoning. When mythology is treated as meteorology. When allegory is treated as architecture.

There is a reason we do not drive horse-drawn chariots on highways. Innovation replaced them. We did not burn the chariots in anger. We simply moved on.

Perhaps we need the same relationship with ancient religious texts. Study them. Analyze them. Teach them in literature departments and history seminars. Acknowledge their influence on art, language, and law. But stop expecting them to function as predictive algorithms for a digital world.

There is also a curious psychological comfort in believing that everything unfolding now was foretold long ago. It creates the illusion of order. Chaos becomes script. Suffering becomes a chapter heading. But comfort is not evidence.

If anything, clinging to prophecy can diminish responsibility. If events are inevitable because they were written, why bother improving them? Fatalism disguised as faith can become an excuse for inaction, even genocide sometimes.

Ancient texts deserve to be read with context, not fear.

And here is the part that often goes unsaid: reclassifying them as historical literature does not erase their emotional resonance. You can still find moral inspiration in a parable without believing it predicts currency fluctuations. You can admire poetic imagery without assuming it encodes satellite trajectories.

In fact, freeing these texts from literal expectation can restore their narrative power. They become stories again. And stories are powerful precisely because they illuminate human experience, not because they forecast stock market trends.

We live in an age of extraordinary knowledge. We have telescopes that peer into cosmic history and microscopes that reveal cellular choreography. To insist that ancient cosmology must override modern discovery is not piety. It is nostalgia for certainty.

Certainty is comforting but objective inquiry is braver.

So perhaps the way forward is neither mockery nor blind reverence, but reclassification. Let ancient religious texts sit on the shelf beside Homer, Gilgamesh, and the Norse Eddas. Let them be what they are: artifacts of imagination, fear, hope, and early moral reasoning.

Study them with curiosity. Argue about their symbolism. Appreciate their poetry. But please, for the love of rational adulthood, stop using them as GPS coordinates for the future.

They are maps of where we have been.

And that, honestly, is far more interesting than pretending they are instruction manuals for where we are going.

Keep Writing!

Rob Parnell