Jim Taylor's Soft Edges - Problems with patches

Jim Taylor has more than 40 years experience writing and editing, in broadcasting, magazines, newspapers, and books. He was for 13 years the managing editor of a 330,000 circulation magazine; he co-founded a publishing house; he has written 13 books and has lost count of the number of magazine articles. Although theoretically retired, he continues to edit two or three books a year, dispenses advice liberally, and teaches his Eight-Step Editing workshops across Canada.

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Problems with patches

Wednesday June 11, 2003

I use Microsoft software programs. Mostly because my clients and customers use them. And we all complain about Microsoft's quirks.
        A program suddenly announces that it has “performed an illegal operation” and shuts down. Conversely, I close a program; it tells me it has “encountered a fault” and asks if it should send an “error report” to Microsoft. Windows unaccountably open up in new sizes that I have never used.
        I'm told all this happens because computer programs have grown so complex that no one ever writes a new program. They just add new commands, new lines of instructions, to what went before. Then they test it – not long enough, most people would say – to see if the new instructions conflict with any of the old ones. If they don't, the software company releases the new program on an unsuspecting public.
        When an internal conflict does show up later, they issue a “patch.” Like a patch on clothing, it adds a new layer that covers up the hole without actually repairing the original error.
        So the oldest levels of programming sail on through the years, sometimes amended, but rarely re-thought. They become something like holy writ.

Layers of patches
        The pattern is not limited to computers. Dr. Bob Hatfield once described how the operating manual of procedures had developed at Foothills Hospital in Calgary. Some incident occurred; someone wrote a policy to cover it. Another incident; another policy. Only rarely, Dr. Bob suggested, did anyone look at that accumulation of policies to see if they still fitted the hospital's long term goals for medical care.
        It's also how most of our religious doctrines have grown. They were developed for a particular context, a particular time and place. When new situations and circumstances make those doctrines questionable, instead of re-thinking them, the institutions add a “patch” to justify their continued existence.
        The near-universal cynicism about Microsoft suggests to me that religions also ought to re-think some of their inherited doctrines.

A couple of worn spots
        Fifteen centuries ago, long before we understood anything about the science of genetics, Augustine of Hippo theorized that sin was handed down genetically. All sin could be traced back to the “original sin” of Adam and Eve.
        We now know about DNA. And we know that creation has evolved over millennia. Humans were not delivered, fully formed, in a garden of Eden.
        But our churches continue to patch the old doctrines.
        Similarly, ancient alchemists believed that one element could be physically transformed into another. Lead into gold, for example.
        We now know that alchemy doesn't work. But many churches still insist that bread and wine literally become the flesh and blood of Jesus as they are consumed.
        I believe that the church needs to do better than Microsoft. Periodically, it needs to re-think the “programs” it has inherited from past programmers, and perhaps reconstruct some of them from the ground up.
        It's not good enough just to apply patches that try to cover up holes in worn-out fabric.

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