Pigsflew.com

Mikah is a Jewish Atheist currently in the extremely Catholic Ireland. I wanted to give her a crash course today.

Here goes.

(11:32:48 AM) Adrian: Let me tell you a story they all know but are leaving you out on
(11:33:36 AM) Adrian: There’s a superhero
(11:33:43 AM) Adrian: we’ll call him SUPERCHRIST
(11:33:58 AM) Adrian: he’s walking down the road and a man stumbles in front of him
(11:34:03 AM) Mikah: and he can fly and the other guys can’t.
(11:34:35 AM) Adrian: “SuperChrist! Help me! I’m being posessed! AHHHHHHHHHHHHGGHHH!” and his head spins around as he spits up pea soup
(11:34:51 AM) Adrian: SuperChrist looks at him and says, “Demon, what are you called.”
(11:35:16 AM) Adrian: And the man shreiks and says in another voice, “I AM CALLED LEGION, FOR WE ARE MANY.”
(11:35:46 AM) Adrian: but J. Diddy isn’t fazed at all.
(11:36:07 AM) Adrian: He takes a look around him and sees a bunch of pigs and a lake.
(11:36:53 AM) Adrian: Big C changes to a Tiger stance and says, “Hey buddy!” (camera closeup) “Hope you like pork.”
(11:37:33 AM) Adrian: Suddenly he puts up a hand and uses his greatest super power, DIVINE INTERVENTION.
(11:37:33 AM) Mikah: (I don’t remember this one from the bible.)
(11:38:27 AM) Adrian: Light shoots out of his hand and into the man’s eyes, and suddenly spirits are leaking out of his face and hands, and running away from Hi-C Fruit Punch.
(11:38:39 AM) Mikah: mmm, spirits.
(11:39:27 AM) Adrian: And the Jibble Crizzle stays behind them so they’re forced to posess the pigs.
(11:41:36 AM) Adrian: Now he speaks again: “I’m going to give you one chance, punks. You stay here, and I’m going to rend you from this world and the next. Or, you can… ” (he uses his other super power, Zealous Conviction, to convince them), “drown yourselves in that lake and go back to hell.”
(11:41:45 AM) Adrian: The pigs squeal and run into the lake.
(11:41:59 AM) Adrian: “Oh my God, thank you SuperChrist!”
(11:42:03 AM) Adrian: says the man redundantly.
(11:42:25 AM) Adrian: “All in a day’s work, citizen. Up up and AWAY!”
(11:42:41 AM) Adrian: the lake turns to wine and he flys off to help the next hapless citizen from the forces of evil.
(11:43:01 AM) Adrian: That’s pretty much a direct translation from the original aramaic.

That was Mark chapter 5, starts around line 6 or so. Pretty badass chapter, if you ask me. And later…

(11:56:19 AM) Adrian: well i should mention that SuperChrist has super-hearing and can hear anything addressed to him, although he seems not to come very often, i think because it just sucks walking so far on sandals.
(11:56:27 AM) Mikah: hahaha
(11:56:38 AM) Mikah: He would have some sort of crazy metal-alloy sandals by now
(11:56:44 AM) Mikah: with rockets on the end
(11:56:53 AM) Adrian: with chips in the soles that interface with his ipod

Let’s start with one thing: I’m a linux user. That doesn’t mean I approve of the open source world all the time, in fact in a lot of ways this community can be petty, stupid, and sheeplike, just like any other set of end-users. I was, and I suppose, am still a Windows user, but again I don’t like everything about them. And while I adore the look of Mac OS X, I’ve tried (very hard, I might add) to like the way it works, but some things just require too many precise clicks (read: resizing and positioning windows), so I am not a mac user.

That said, lets talk about the application designs in these systems. In Windows, it seems that everything is about integration. We have a mail application–oh wait, no, it’s also a calendar, and a contact management system. In fact, if we’re Netscape, let’s go ahead and throw an html editor and a browser in there for good measure. They have a file browser that also understands HTML, CSS, Javascript, embedded applets, and of course the dreaded ActiveX, which allows a “trusted” web site (say, microsoftupdate.com) to modify your operating system.

This is not a bad thing, it’s a frame of mind called “Integration” that is fairly pervasive in both the Windows world, and the Open Source world. For a linux/OSS example, Ximian Evolution is in fact almost an exact one-to-one equivalent of Microsoft Outlook. They had the Mozilla Suite, which was effectively exactly what Netscape was. KDE’s Konqueror Browser is every bit as stupid as Microsoft for throwing an integral operating system piece — the file browser — at the unpredictable internet.

But OSX has something new, something everybody is quickly realizing is a good idea, and something other companies have been reproducing ad nauseum to varying effect: Widgets. The widget is a small program that does exactly one thing, but when doing that one thing it runs like the wind.

Why is this good? Let me explain the concept of Disintegration. If I want to browse the internet, I open firefox, not because it’s the greatest web browser ever, but because it’s just a web browser. It opens quickly, and if something on the internet breaks it, Oh no! I might have to reinstall it. Nothing else can be easily affected by its failure. The fact is, I don’t want to wait for my email server before I can quickly add a new homework assignment to my Gnome Calendar, because I’m forced to use Ximian Evolution to update it.

OSX doesn’t only do this in widgets, it separates everything. Mac Mail is a mail client, nothing more. iCal is a calendar, with no nonsense. Safari is a web browser that does one thing extremely well. Why can’t we learn from them? All of these programs are light, fast, and do exactly what you want without doing anything you don’t: I’ll tell my computer if I want my mail. Right now all I want is my calendar.

Integration is okay when it’s modularly integrated. An application that works with another application to use data from it is a good idea. An application that shares libraries in order to access common information from the Operating System is a good idea. But a single application that controls everything is not.

Let me finish with a cry for help: Ximian Evolution sucks. I want Gnome-calendar to let me update those extremely useful calendar views on the system clock without it. Pretty please?

My roommate has quite intentionally provided me with an Idea.

I was raised and baptized a Catholic, but was allowed—no, with my family’s background I was fundamentally encouraged—to learn about and try to understand other religions. To that end I have visited Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu temples, have participated in several pagan rituals, including a seance, and have even gone to Church on occasion. In addition to the Bible, I have read much of the Bhagavaad Gita and the Ramayana, the Tao Te Ching and bits of Confucius’ Analects, some of the Qu’ran, and at times I have attempted to get my facts straight so I could properly make fun of Scientologists.

I am also, however, a Computer Scientist. For the uninitiate, the Computer Science line of studies is almost equivalent to that of a Mathematician, albeit with additional concentration on electrical engineering and a focus on logic. What this means is that anywhere I see a problem, my most natural instinct is to take steps to correct the problem.

The reason these religions exist is because of the human need to belong to a larger group, and the (perhaps greater) need to exclude others from that group. The problem is that currently too many people have positioned themselves into exceedingly large groups that do not actually answer for all of their needs, only most. Let us compare this to an area with which I have even more expertise: Software.

Microsoft’s hold on the desktop market, for better or for worse, is nigh-absolute. If one shops for a computer, they will find themselves choosing between nine desktops running Microsoft Windows, and one running Apple’s OSX (in user population, the Islam of the operating system market). Other choices are available, usually flavors of UNIX, but many people are simply not exposed to them. Unaware, or indeed, afraid of alternatives, users will sometimes even more firmly clutch to their familiar operating system, which may not do everything they want, but become blindly zealous about the fact that theirs is (quite obviously!) the ‘best’.

For these users it is too late. Nothing can be done for these extremists, except perhaps to keep them well separated from extremists of another side. It is for those who search for their alternatives, for those Windows- or OSX-users who decided it “just wasn’t enough”, and found alternatives, even if they were also lacking, that I have created this religion. And it’s based on another idea from the desktop worlds: Licensing.

Intrinsically, old-world religions resist change. They contain certain agreed upon stories and rules, and no matter how much time passes, almost nothing else will ever be considered “cannon”. Efforts are made to change some of these religions, but the shifts are usually not universally accepted, and often end up with the fledgling offshoot religion being condemned unilaterally to hell or some other unpleasantness. But sometimes people require a change, simply because the belief structure they’ve hitherto subscribed to no longer makes sense to them. This can be in very small ways, but even a small rift in such a rigid structure can create a much larger fracture and shake the entire system to its very core.

This religion is different. To be more accurate, This would be a new religion structure: the Open Source Religion.

Let’s say I base this religion, let’s call it OpenTheism for now, loosely on a ground-up rewrite of Christianity. Let’s start with the Believer Agreement. We’ll say that in order to be an OpenTheist, you must believe in one God, and you must believe that God wants you to be good. Other than that, you are free to believe, evangelize, or modify anything within this religion, so long as any modifications you release are released such that others may freely believe, evangelize, and modify them. If you are evangelizing OpenTheism (or a derivative thereof), you must include either this Believer Agreement or a later version of this Believer Agreement. You may not sell any material documenting or teaching of OpenTheism for more than the material cost of producing said documentation. Salvation is and always will be free. The Assembly of OpenTheists reserves the right to re-evangelize OpenTheism with new or updated versions of the Believer Agreement, but OpenTheists are only required to follow any Believer Agreement version including or later than the one that was supplied to them when they became an OpenTheist.

Perhaps this is a shaky first draft, but with time and effort I’m sure that people could be convinced that the Open Source Philosophy as applied to Religion is not about what you can’t do, it’s about what you can do. People who have ever thought, “I believe in God, sure, but what if I want to be able to run a web server on my religion?” OpenTheism is designed for you.