Monomorphic

This writer is not a believer in Christianity. However, I am interested in trying to understand the history of and heritage from Christianity, as it is a major component of Western culture.

Of particular interest to me is the heritage from protestantism, which also happens to be the official religion of Sweden, the society that I grew up in. One of the innovations that protestantism seems to have introduced when it split off from catholicism is the notion of personal salvation. Each individual must examine his own soul and be accountable to himself in terms of whether he is sinful or not. The judgment takes place within, and is not made by an external authority. In this way, piety can be a matter of being clearly aware of one’s actions and intentions, and of examining these scrupulously.

I believe that the notion of sin is fundamentally unhealthy, but piety as outlined above can surely be valuable for, for instance, software developers. As development goes on, bugs and issues can quietly find their way into code, and even exhaustive testing can not always trap them all. The habit of critical self-examination on behalf of developers can be one way to address this. Severe self-scrutiny, proactively rooting out errors and misdeeds that have not yet manifested themselves but one day will, actively nurturing the conceptual harmony of a codebase with a view to needs of the distant future – is this not analogous to introspection, a search for something like sin in one’s soul? But we can also see that this kind of piety is a purely negative force, something that removes the dirt, excess and sloppiness left behind by previous actions. By itself it would not allow anything to be created. It must be complementary to a creative force.

Perhaps this analogy also puts Christian piety and its perpetual oscillation between the states of guilt and salvation in a new focus.