Month: August 2011

A Different Stance on Christianity

This was originally written as a message board posting, so if you are a Citizen Radio fan, you may have already seen it.

Regardless of what the following may look like, it is not intended as a direct attack on any particular group, but rather something to think about. For this reason, I ask that even if the first part is offensive, keep reading.

My own faith at the moment is in an interesting place perhaps, but I took a long time to get where I am.

My statement, simply put, is this: Modern Christianity’s approach to God is blasphemy against man, and sacrilege against God.

Christians believe that the book of Genesis is the depiction of the creation of the world. Some see it as a literal history, and others see it as more of a symbolic description of a truly massive event. Either way, it is a matter of faith, and happened so long ago that there is not much you can do to prove to most one way or the other. At this point, even the big bang theory is a matter of faith (even if it is more soundly founded in science).

The book of Genesis also goes into one very important detail other than how. It explains “Why?” Most Christians don’t think so much about this detail, and most churches seem to prefer it that way.

If you believe the Book of Genesis, then man was created not to worship, but to fellowship. The “Blind Sheep” concept of worship taught by the church of today (The one that has led to so many atrocities over the centuries) is entirely incompatible with what the ideas presented in Genesis.

It is better that you live as if there was no God at all, than to live as if you were simply an unquestioning servant. When you go before the maker, you should be able to stand toe to toe and say to him/her

“What you have created is Beautiful.”

“What I have created is Beautiful.”

And perhaps most importantly…

“Dude, you know… Some of that shit was real fucked up.”

I am not currently a Christian. I followed that path for a while, but I wandered off of it when it was no longer compatible with my view of the universe and the creator that may or may not be.

I do believe however, that if the God described in Genesis (and most books attributed to Moses for that matter) does exist, then he will not see my decisions as a crime.

I think though, that if he does exist, the modern church is fucked.

Display Your License Proudly

When a developer is creating a library, or any other software package, that they want others to use it is absolutely vital that they choose a license for the project that will allow their target audience to use it.

It is just as important that the licensing information is included among the files that are downloaded when someone gets a copy of the library.

Most people remember these steps, but they are occasionally forgotten.

What is JUST AS IMPORTANT however, is to find some way to inform people who are downloading your code from a website or some other source of what the license is before they download it.

If I don’t know the licensing terms of your code, I am most likely just not going to download it. If I am working on a project, and I am looking for a library to make it easier, then I am looking for libraries that are released under compatible licenses. If the license is incompatible, then the code isn’t worth much to me at the time. It is a waist of my time and your bandwidth for me to download a library I can’t use.

This is especially sad when the developer has taken the time to create a beautiful website with a lot of description of what the program is, and does, but then they forget one of the most important pieces of information.

Please, if your code is licensed as GPL, say so on the site. If your code is BSD licensed, say so someplace on the site. Whatever license you use, display it proudly. If you are using a git repo, and it is set up to be web viewable, this is perfect. You can include it in the README file that your git repo software most likely wants to display to the web anyway.

If you are just offering tarballs/zips. then just include it on the download page.

To be honest, there are two common practices that I have seen most often on websites for successful projects. That is to either include the licensing information on the About page, or to just have a page that specifically addresses licensing issues. In either case, these would be included in the navigation bar/pain/whatever on the website.

Once you have already done all the work of making the code worthy of public display, you owe it to the project to take the last few steps needed to encourage adoption.