Where Everybody's Crazy

Nevertheless, by avoiding the tyranny of doctrines, he falls from the Scylla of abstract theocentric theology into the Charybdis of anthropocentrism.

Ten points if you can guess who I'm talking about.

The Jargon File, bless it, says:

Also, many hackers are influenced to varying degrees by Zen Buddhism or (less commonly) Taoism, and blend them easily with their `native' religions.

There's certainly a lot of Zen, and other Buddhist, influence in the computer programming world. (AI koans, "has the X nature"^*, and so on.) I want to try to work out why, where it came from, who the vectors were and still are, how much of the appeal of Buddhism is playful and how much serious, and so on.

If you have any tips, please mail me, or, if you must, leave stuff in the comments. Any ideas would be appreciated, and even more so if you would (a) be prepared to take part in a survey, and/or (b) have some quotable references for me.

Well, it's been an interesting week. I've not had many lectures so far, which is nice - a bit of Greek on Monday, one lesson on Tuesday, Christology (which I must stop confusing with crystallography; not the same thing) and nothing today.

I've been moping around and messing with the college network; we're planning on installing Netreg here, so I've been getting it set up. I've been reading weird books, as yesterday's entries demonstrate.

Other fun things have happened, though; two nearby churches have donated their collections from the harvest festival to the college, so we've been helping ourselves to vegetables and tinned food. We had a Contemporary Issues in Mission seminar this morning with no topic, so we were encouraged to bring up our own cases studies. One got us talking about integrity in mission, particularly in areas where you can't say you're a missionary - are you lying if you don't?

It was a tricky issue, and as usual, no clear answer. But we suggested that those working in Creative Access Nations (as they're now called) need to have a careful plan and a real identity - if they say they're being sent by a development charity, set up a development charity, don't just hide behind the church, and so on.

It also brought up a theology of mission issue. If you're going in, say, to do AIDS development work, should that be a cover for spreading the Gospel? If you do the work and you come home without having told a person about Jesus, is that enough? I think it is, because I have a theology of mission that says we go out to spread the Kingdom of God and transform society, and helping to fix the AIDS problem has got to be part of that.

Of course I don't think that mission is only societal transformation (but I bet that's how this view will be caricatured!) but I think you can come home after doing your AIDS work even if you've not told anyone about Jesus, and say that you've done mission. I guess that's how Mother Teresa saw it - the Church meets the world and brings in the Kingdom. I'm happy with that.

Yeah, we need to preach, too. But preach in, say, the Maldives, and you only get thrown out of the country; your friends get tortured and killed. Not so black and white now?

The second issue we looked at, I brought up: ancestor worship and veneration. This is a fun one, and many churches in Korea (and Africa, even) have a big problem with it. Part of the problem, unfortunately, is us missionaries - we're so quick to judge someone's faith based on the outward appearances they keep. If someone has a butsudan in their home, they can't be a Christian, right? Again, the world isn't so black and white. And you can argue both sides of the equation from the Bible, interestingly: set Daniel off against Nahum.

Here, though, we did come up with a potential solution - we felt that Christianity should fill the religious need or people will go elsewhere. So, for instance, the Catholic tradition of requiem mass or services for the dead. Some Catholic ideas would seem to fit in theory (veneration of the communion of saints but worship of God) but in practice people aren't able to distinguish between the two concepts, but creating some Christian religious observance to fill the need should help.

Tomorrow I have the Big Thursday, with Christology, Greek and Hebrew keeping me busy all morning. And then in the afternoon, more Bosch.

Urgh.

So I'm in Wales, moving to Cambridge on Saturday, and guess what? I've got nothing to do. No course work, I've just finished this month's Perl Journal article, and for once in the past five years, nobody is expecting me to be writing book chapters. What am I going to do for the next few days, then? Here's the current state of the never-ending todo list:

• Next month's TPJ article (half done)
• Continuing work on the hosting project, which requires:
• Work on templated user-editable CSS with JS editing interface
• Habit-learning Google proxies
• delicious retrofolksonomy with LSI/Bayesian thingy (it made sense when I scribbled it down)
• The never-ending Songbee project
• Flickr-clone for internal use at college. (We can't use anything externally hosted due to security issues.)

The last one sounds like the most fun at the moment, and it's pretty simple to implement as it's a cross between Maypole and Tate. But then that means it's not fun in the sense of "the tech's all there, it's a solved problem, I just need to put the bits together."

I may just, you know, take a break. But then I'd go mental by Wednesday.