“God is the only being capable of loving everything.”

That is my definition, anyway. Even if it is only a personal theory, I find it comforting. It is so hard to love other people (friends, neighbors, family) sometimes. We often fall short.

If you are new to this blog, I will share a little bit about myself:

I am 45 years old, divorced and a contract employee at a large and well-known corporation. I was an English major in college and a journalist in my 20s. I wish I could write full-time, but content myself with amateur blogging and the occasional self-published work. Got to make a living, ya know?

Actually I love what I do (coding and design) nearly as much as writing. I am lucky that way, although perhaps not in every way. I recently survived a multi-year ordeal of severe fibroids with anemia. You can read more about that experience here. I am blessed that surgery was able to resolve the problem. It has been amazing to have enough energy to hike and exercise again. The unfortunate consequence of the surgery is that I am now unable to have children. It’s ok, in the long run. I could have had kids in my twenties, but instead I prioritized writing this book. My husband later left me for another woman. I blamed his betrayal, in part, upon my long absences and travel while researching the subject matter.

<HINT>The book is about Christianity.</HINT> So I guess you could say I have some issues with God as a result.

God and I are working through those, I hope. Kind of hard to love God when you know that God is only a construct in your head — a limited way to express a living force beyond our knowledge or comprehension.

That’s all for today, folks. Thanks for reading.

I know some people who use GitHub’s Gist feature like a blog. I myself have only written one public Gist in my life. Here it is, first published on May 2, 2017:

https://gist.github.com/tessgadwa/47fedfaa053cb1d8f0b9d0aef82b565f

Project Eva was for a worthy cause — evangelizing open source.

I quote,

“The chief Gnostic error is to believe that the rest of the world can remain in Hell.”

“The world cannot survive half slave and half free.”

If the tone seems a little bombastic, bear in mind that I had recently left Christianity behind. Or to be more accurate, taken a several years hiatus. Considering that I once wrote a book on the topic, that was kind of a big step. It’s not surprising I looked to something else to fill the void.

Five years later, I believe that while FOSS is powerful both as a practice and an ideology, it is not the be-all and end-all of solutions, for three reasons:

1. Security vulnerabilities.
2. Decentralized systems tend to propagate and amplify bias.
3. Difficult to make economically sustainable.

I have written at length about numbers two and three, and number one is problematic for fairly obvious reasons. That is not my point today. I am not sure that every system needs to be free software, or that the model translates across disciplines to areas such as engineering or the arts. I am not sure that it doesn’t.

I am also in a different place theologically than I was a few years ago. What strikes me now are the similarities between the communitarian principles and values of FOSS, and those of early Christians. I would love to start a coding organization for people of faith — but it’s going to have to wait until my body recovers. Right now it’s all I can do to work and cook myself meals.