Hard-Coded: The Beliefs You Didn't Choose
Identifying the personal 'facts' that are actually just settings you can change
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[ TAGS: #BELIEF_SYSTEMS #HARD_CODED #DOGMA ]Whenever I hear religious or tribal wars, what keeps ringing in my ears is the fact that any of the perpetrators could have been any other person had they been born into that environment.
Growing up, I was a bit radical with my Christian views. I read those “Prepare to meet your God” pamphlets. Discarded all my earrings. I didn’t wear trousers. I would pray fervently on my elder sisters’ behalf that they had erred and were living in sin cos they wore trousers. Would immediately bow head in prayer and seek forgiveness if I mistakenly grooved to any secular music.
It then leads me to question, “if I had born in an extremist religious household, wouldn’t I have participated in nefarious acts?”
Random thoughts that keep me awake at night…
In software engineering, something is “hard-coded” when a specific value or rule is embedded directly into the program’s core source code, rather than being a flexible setting or external configuration.
Think of it like a digital clock. If the time zone is a “setting,” you can change it when you travel. If the time zone is “hard-coded,” the clock will always show UTC time, no matter where you are in the world. To change a hard-coded value, you can’t just flip a switch; a developer has to open up the core programming and rewrite the base logic to be flexible. It is fixed, rigid, and resistant to new information.
We treat many of our beliefs, especially those instilled in childhood as hard-coded facts. We don’t see them as settings we can change based on new knowledge; we see them as the unchangeable source code of reality itself.
Of course, I now know better choices as I am an adult. But back then, it felt all too real to keep to those dogmas. We also experienced it in some denominations that banned Television back then calling it the Devil’s box.
What changed?
Knowledge. Permit me to go off with a quote from Hosea 4:6:
My People perish because of lack of knowledge.
We are scared of what we do not fully understand. And (un)fortunately, death is one behemoth that humans have not fully comprehended. Because of that, we hope, crave that there should at least be another life when we die. And in order to do that, we need to keep to the dogma of the religion we are affiliated with. We do crave that reward that had been promised in different religious texts.
Hence, the opposition and antagonism of anything that is not aligned with our beliefs. Because if we were to go strictly by the scriptures (for the Christian folks), then my claim that wearing trousers is a sin is not factual cos it’s supposedly “men’s clothing” does not tally with the outfit of the generation where the Bible was written. The men were wearing gowns. Meanwhile, we also cherry-picked the part of the scripture that denounced mixing fabric types.
There is a level of System Lock-in that comes with deep-rooted beliefs. We stay because the cost of leaving feels higher than the cost of staying. That’s the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Because we have invested so many years into this identity, this community, and this version of God that we refuse to 'exit' the program, even when we see the bugs. We would rather stay in a broken system than admit the investment was a mistake.
But the question I’d like to ask is, “what’s the worst that could happen?”
Updating your beliefs is expensive. It might cost you your comfort zone. But running a broken script for a lifetime is even more expensive.