tw: themes of religious guilt. viewer discretion is advised.
The thesis of this essay is simple: my experiences with my religion and my experiences using linux share common themes that helps inform a key aspect of the human experience: Self-Actualization. I will aim to explore this thesis through the lens of my religious experience, my experience using Linux, and what their common themes mean for us as humans.
To begin with, a brief overview of my relationship with religion is necessary. I am Christian. I believe that that there is a God out there, looking over me. I believed that he is good to the good, and bad to the bad. At its core, it looks simple, doesn’t it. That’s because for the longest time, this was where my faith stopped. It was a simplistic view on Faith, and Christianity as a whole. This was the Christianity taught to me, and was the main thing I accepted. However, this would soon change, as I grew older.
It started small. “Why does God allow suffering?” “Why didn’t God help me?” “Why did God allow evil to persist?” These small seeds of doubt soon bloomed into bright, black flowers of despair. Doubt, I was taught, was the enemy of Faith. I was to have Faith, and to try to remove doubt. But I couldn’t. No matter how hard I tried, doubt became one of the running questions of my life. In the end, I started to feel that every bad thing in my life, all of it, was because of my Doubt. Because I sinned by Doubting. It bound me, and chained me to despair.
This changed when I played Genshin Impact. To be more precise, one of its quests. It isn’t an Archon quest, or a character quest. No, it was a Daily Commission in Inazuma, the one with the child and the shrine. To summarize, one of the key takeaways I had was that we needed to push forward, because God wants us to blaze a trail on our own path. This didn’t change the key issues I had, but it was enough for me to reexamine my doubts in a new light.
This reexamination was refined by one of the required General Education courses I took, Theology. Faith, it argued, was supposed to be based on searching. A Blind Faith, like the Faith I once had, is not Faith at all. Faith must always be tested, and refined. It was not an end-all be-all solution as my naive faith once was. However, it gave me a new perspective: that searching for answers is my faith: a faith seeking understanding. This eventually evolved into a faith seeking action, but that’s outside the scope of this essay. Put simply, my Faith today no longer has the glitter of naivety, nor does it claim that one must have faith alone. Instead, it offers the possibility of an answer, my answer. It forces me to consider my relationship to God, the different facets and ideas of Faith that I may not have known. It drives me to dig, to look under the surface of why I believe. It may not be a pretty answer, but it is mine, to have and refine.
Now, my experiences with Linux is comparatively less heavy. It started with a search for a better editor. I was getting tired of using VSCode, and I was getting wary of Microsoft’s telemetry. An upperclassman of mine recommended Neovim, so I tried that. And I loved it. I loved configuring Neovim, seeing how it ticked. I loved Vim motions, so useful as a language and command system. Most of all, I just had more fun making something that was mine.
Using Neovim exposed me to a whole new world. No longer could I be satisfied with VsCode, with its abstractions of tools like git. No, I began using Command Line tools more often, forgoing things like file managers in favor of ls, mv, cp, and the very useful command line tools. Eventually, I installed WSL for Linux, and found that using Linux was actually really fun! I began to learn more and more about computers, and made the jump around 2-3 months ago to Linux Mint. From there, I began to continue to learn and customize, like learning what a Window Manager is, the different ways to launch apps, how to compile from sources, etc. Now, I’m using Fedora’s i3 spin with a pretty minimal catppuccin setup.
Linux gave me an outlet for customization. It gave me tools, it gave me documentation, and allowed me to shape the system to what I like, which is more than what I can say for Windows. Sure, stuff may break. As of this moment in time, my trackpad doesn’t allow double-tap to click, and I have no idea why. But even despite that, I still had fun, and it taught me things about me computer I used to take for granted. It may have a chance at breaking, it may not look pretty, but it is mine, to use and refine.
From these two differing experiences, I found interesting commonalities. They both started with doubt, my unwillingness to simply accept things as they are. For religion, it was my blind faith, for Linux, it was my text editor. They both involved having a drive to learn more, to not simply take for granted what is there, to continue to learn and grow. Most importantly, they both involved piecing together my own answer, for me. Through those experience, I learned more about myself. For religion, I found that action is how I can practice my faith: by being kind to others, helping them, sharing in their joys and sorrows. For Linux, I found that I have fun programming, creating, seeing things emerge. In both cases, my world expanded when I began to look past the surface.
At its core, the world is complex. Technology, Society, Humanities, Politics, they all are deeply intertwined in a way that doesn’t make sense. It is tempting, then, to cling into things that “make sense”: Religion, Political Parties, Tradition, etc. But in doing so, you rob yourself of the ability to grow, to see what you like and don’t like. You take for granted things like Faith, the concept of Heaven, window animations, and more. Looking past the surface, not taking ideas for granted, allows you to see things in your own way, to arrive at your own answers. That, in turn, gives you agency, allowing you the ability to navigate many differing contexts. And in the end, you continue to refine what it means to be you, whether you’re a programmer or a writer or anything else entirely.
I gazed upon the world, with all its complexity, and found me. I hope that one day, you can find yourself as well.