i've always been curious about religions. just to understand what's actually written in them. AI made this kind of research 100x easier.

so i ran an experiment: list EVERY prohibition written black on white in the 3 sacred texts of the major monotheistic religions, the quran, the bible and the torah. no interpretations from scholars, no traditions, no commentaries. only what the texts actually say.
then for each prohibition i got the AI check whether the majority of practitioners actually follow it today.
results across 177 prohibitions:
> islam (quran): 55 prohibitions → 62% followed
> judaism (torah): 67 prohibitions → 42% followed
> christianity (bible): 55 prohibitions → 25% followed
what surprised me the most is that the prohibitions are basically the same across all 3 religions. pork, alcohol, usury, tattoos, head covering, not swearing oaths... it's almost copy-pasted.
so the real difference isn't in the texts, it's in the application. muslims follow 62% of their prohibitions, jews 42%, and christians 25%.
the thing that personally shocked me the most: pork and alcohol are also forbidden in the bible. i always thought that was specific to islam and judaism. turns out it's written word for word in leviticus and even in acts of the apostles (new testament).
here's how i did it step by step if you want to reproduce:
1. downloaded the full texts from public APIs:
• quran: 114 surahs, sahih international translation via quran(dot)com
• bible: 66 books, world english bible (public domain) via bible-api(dot)com
• torah: 5 books of moses, JPS translation via sefaria(dot)org
• everything saved as plain text files with verse numbering [chapter:verse]
2. fed the entire texts as context to claude opus 4.6 and asked it to extract every explicit prohibition from each text, with the exact verse reference. strict rule: if it's not written in the text, it doesn't count.
3. for each prohibition, assessed whether the majority of practitioners actually follow it today, based on available data (pew research, demographic studies, observable social norms).
4. compiled everything into a spreadsheet: one tab per religion, each prohibition with its reference and a yes/no/mixed status.
lmk in comment if you want that spreadsheet, i may found a way to share it.
i'm just sharing a small experiment i did for my own personal culture. i'd be really interested to know what you guys think about this. and especially to get the perspective of religious people on this, is this accurate or just a bad analysis/interpretation from the AI? which is totally possible.