azurelunatic | On Memory Leaks & Kali's proper place

http://www.sinfest.net/d/20040410.html (Discussion)

People are fascinated with evil because there's a popular assumption that it's more fun to be naughty than nice.

My own perception at this point in my life is that naughty is more fun in the short-term but nice is more fun in the long-term.

From what little I know of Hinduism, I can see where the Judeo-Christian obsession with good and evil (especially with evil) might be confusing. I've gotten the impression that the perceptions of dark and light are somewhat different and possibly more complex in HInduism than in Judeo-Christianity.

As a basic example, many people from Judeo-Christian upbringings look at representations of Kali and assume she must be evil because she is dancing on corpses and wearing a belt of heads. But my outsider's understanding is that Kali is not evil and is Shiva's more fierce consort (Shakti appearing much gentler.) Kali is very powerful and embodies forces of destruction but (correct me if I'm wrong) destruction is not inherently evil in Hindu thought.

Whereas in Judeo-Christian thought, destruction is almost uniformly considered to be evil. There is little room for the notion of destruction so that more creation can occur. This causes many people of Judeo-Christian faiths to struggle with ideas like death, disease and so forth, wondering how a loving God could have allowed such things to exist and to plague mankind.

I'm kind of rambling now. But maybe that gives a little more insight into why folks raised in the Western spiritual traditions have more tendency to be fascinated by darkness, evil, satan, etc.

azurelunatic:

wonder if there's a significant difference in the number of memory leaks in programs designed/coded by those raised with the traditional Western view of destruction versus those with different cultural attitudes towards destruction.

(A "memory leak" is when memory resources used by the computer program are not freed up after their time for use is over -- improperly disposed of, just sitting there taking up space rather than being properly destroyed.)

pyrogenic:

Geek.

azurelunatic:

Yes, Dear.

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whenever kali comes up in conversation, i'm always reminded of the first astronaut, when he came back from space and had a crowd of people asking him questions about what space was like. One reporter asked him if he saw god. "Yes," he answered "and she's black".

*nods*

I'm not supposed to get homesick when people talk about space, am I?

It strikes me that several coding practices could probably be statistically linked with various religeous beliefs. When creating in a domain of nigh-total control, we would tend to act like those role-models we have for the creators of worlds.

I've definately see examples of what I would term Catholic coding: large, resistant to change, full of arcane rituals, and intolerant toward other systems. Said code probably came from a very management-heavy team, where decisions come from on high.

I am, at least functionally, an atheist. I probably prefer Extreme Programming (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ExtremeProgrammingRoadmap), because its setup encourages evolving an architecture. Or maybe its that as a slacker (http://www.sugenius.com/) I prefer not do scut-work like documentation...

And then there are the reusable code doctrine people, who definitely believe in reincarnation...

And then the .NET thing is definitely the beginnings of pantheism...

Microsoft's panetheism (not "we are everything", but "we contain everything as a proper subset") has been known for years...

Ah. I'm coming fairly new to all of this...

Such a <a href="http://www.subgenius.com/>slacker</a>, in fact, that I can't type the link right without a second try...

*snork* Link right, HTML wrong.

*giggles*

Augh!

Teach me to comment before getting calories...

On Memory Leaks & Kali's proper place

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