Why is religion so complicated

Justin wonders what the base class of a church is (he's being geeky here), and wondering if its too hard to abstract the common elements. The answer is, it is and it isn't.

While looking at scripture, we find the base class of God's law.

CLASS godslaw {
   ABSTRACT COMMAND honor_god() ;
   ABSTRACT COMMAND honor_each_other() ;
} ;

But that was too abstract for the israelites and for the new testament Christians. So we ended up with specializations:

CLASS tencommandments : PUBLIC godslaw {
   COMMAND no_othergods() ;
   COMMAND no_idols() ;
   COMMAND no_misusing_thelordsname() ;
   COMMAND honor_sabath() ;
   COMMAND honor_fatherandmother() ;
   COMMAND no_murder() ;
   COMMAND no_adultery() ;
   COMMAND no_stealing() ;
   COMMAND no_falsetestimony() ;
   COMMAND no_coveting() ;
} ;

Even that turned out not to be enough for the nation of Israel so there were hundreds of other rules and regulations that got to be a big todo. Living your life right turned out to be a lot of work, and infact, some Jewish people believe that the reason for all those rules, was to make it impossible to be blameless or perfect (there was always something to work on).

It is interesting to read some of the other things that happened back in the early days. God wanted the nation to be self-rules, with priests to help guide each person spirtually. But the people said, nope--not going to happen. They pointed out that they were not with-it enough to pull that off and that they'd better have a king or everything would be lost. So God had to give them a king, which turned out to be a disaster, but they muddled their way through for quite some time.

There seems to be something frightening to most people about taking complete responsibility for one's life. If we could do it, we'd just need those first two laws and that would be enough to guide us. But we can't.

Things had changed somewhat in the time of Jesus. It wasn't necessary anymore to avoid eating animals with split hooves (good thing, cause ham is delicious, we even eat it on Easter). It seems like about half of the ten commandments have been tossed out as well, I certainly don't see very many people honoring the sabath any more, and leaving elderly parents to the whims of social security and medicare is probably not fulfilling the spirit of "honor thy father and mother". Even so, Jesus spent months and years spelling out hundreds of ways we could trip up in our hearts, even if we didn't actually take action.

Matthew 5:21-22: "You're familiar with the command to the ancients, 'Do not murder.' I'm telling you that anyone who is so much as angry with a brother or sister is guilty of murder. Carelessly call a brother 'idiot!' and you just might find yourself hauled into court. Thoughtlessly yell 'stupid!' at a sister and you are on the brink of hellfire. The simple moral fact is that words kill."

So we have two troubling trends spelled out here: one is that we (as flawed human beings) need more than just the abstract laws (which are immutable and unchanging), the second trend is that the specific examples of sub-classed laws have changed over time. Some laws have gone away, and others have popped up to cover new ground.

So if there's at least two examples of conflicting rule-sets that implement the base class god'slaw, what's the chance that we're going to be able to create a common ground between all the modern churches with anything more specific than the abstract base class?