Monday, October 03, 2011

Your Third Religion

Your 1st religion you can't see at all; it's like water to a fish. With nothing to compare it to, you don't even know it exists in any sort of meaningful way.

Your 2nd religion is the worst. You've suddenly seen the light — that everything you thought before was wrong — and you figure this time you've finally got it all figured out.

It's not until your 3rd religion that you start seeing the patterns between them. It's only then that you start to find the higher truths that transcend them. This is when your journey really begins.

Now, by religion, I'm not talking about God and church, per se, but any school of thought that large groups of people get passionate about. Furthermore, it's not enough for you to be simply exposed to it; you need to catch the passion as well. For example, a few of mine: JavaScript, new urbanism, Apple, Lego, programming on the right side of the brain, open source. I can talk to you with evangelical zeal about each of these (and many other) topics.

This devotion to an idea is one of the amazing things about being human, but you're not much good to the rest of us until you're on to your 3rd.

posted by Ian Gilman at 8:18 PM

Comments

Bloody Brilliant Insight
posted by Blogger neoncoyote at 7:06 PM 
I like this a lot. It came up when we were discussing going from spaghetti code to lasagna code and then back to some trepidatiously happy in-between.

Is the third religion pragmatism in this case? I hope its a little more nuanced than that, but I am in the exploratory stages here.
posted by Blogger Adam Tolley at 1:32 PM 
Well, I feel that's when you start understanding the reasons behind things, rather than just blindly following dogma, so yes, I suppose there's a certain pragmatism involved. It's about bringing the right tool to the right occasion.
posted by Blogger Ian Gilman at 3:11 PM 
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