Dear Log,
A friend of mine is a brilliant religious studies scholar, and all around man-about-town. So I told him I'd been reading the Koran lately, and that I basically
didn't like it;
I thought it was histrionic tedium, mit'n smiting un dem wrath un dem Thou Shalt Not; and, more concretely, I couldn't see how it ever managed to start a tradition that ended up producing something like Sufism.
He replied that the worth of a religious text like the Koran is clearly partly from what it actually says -- but most people assume that that's all its worth is. But another great part of its worth comes from the personal effect of chanting the text, no matter what it says.
That'd never occurred to me. Call me literalist.
So I mulled that over, and thought maybe if some time I write really bad code (which is conceivable!), I can just say "Yes, the code is awful if you just read it. But if you memorize it and chant it, it will TOUCH YOUR SOUL."
