Public Faith

I’m curious about religion for many of the same reasons I’m curious about open source. They’re organizational systems that bind people tightly together, and whose norms, fascinatingly, didn’t derive from any one place, but rather from a shared consensus iterated upon by each passing generation.

I have my own version of spiritual practice; I’m just not used to acknowledging it to others. But I think it gets expressed through the “why” of the work I do every day, where I’m moved to amplify creative potential in the world, and where I’m in awe of all the strange, ineffable qualities that make us human.

Why is faith so much more visible in open source, then? My theory: faith and open source both place high value on community and a sense of public service. Organized religion is the original distributed community, and it’s lasted thousands of years.