Angels, in Judaeo-Christian tradition are entities that we can not see.
They act as helpers, mitigating certain types of events.
They specialize …eg) St Gabriel is a communicator.
There is a heirarchy of such beings … from the Supreme Being, down to our indiviidual helpers known as Guardian Angels
Linux has exactly the same structure
There is a Supreme Entity … the kernel
There is an Archangel … the initsystem
There are a whole family of invisible helpers … daemons runing in background
And every user has a Guardian Angel ---- your shell.
The analogy is not surprising .
We have a strong inbuilt tendency to see control of our world as an heirarchy.
We build our computer operating systems the same way.
So Linux ( and Unix) really are “The Waltz of the Angels”
There is a song
So is Linux/Unix structured as it is because that is the way our minds see everything?
Perhaps that is behind its success … we feel at home here.
Discussion please… but be careful to avoid religious controversy.
I completely agree with your characterization of Linux as a hierarchy. I totally disagree with your angel idea. We don’t live around the campfire in the dark any more, so we don’t need a mythology to explain it. Perhaps we could find Lucifer somewhere in the Arch world, but then I would be making your mistake.
It is called malware. Dont look too hard , you might fall for it.
The new mythology is called science. It contains at least as many unobservables … have you ever seen an electron or a quark? What is a force? There are unobservable abstract concepts everywhere in science. We have just exchanged one mythology for another.
Science is heirarchical too … because our minds are.
Neville has another point, also valid. Science might be considered a mythology were it not for the overwhelming preponderance of proven facts. There are unobservables, as he says, but not nearly as many as most religions. And yes, our minds are heirarchical to a degree.
The First Peoples saw Spirit in everything, animal, vegetable, mineral, and accepted and honored it. They were probably more right than any newer ideas.
Yes, the difference is in method. The concept of proof does not exist in mythology … it is pure imagination. Science uses imagination too ( it calls it theory) but it moderates it with observations.
Some philosophy of science ( eg Popper) says that you can only ever disprove something … proof is a matter of probability.
I did put a warning, and I intended no offense.
I can only write about the world views that I know , and I do know that Jews, Christians and Muslims all accept the concept of angels.
Malware is not exclusive to Arch, but it propogates it.
The internet is also a dangerous world… one should retreat behind a convent wall ( NAT) or escape into the desert (firewall).
Diehard atheist here - not bothered or offended by the idea that @nevj is suggesting…
What I do take offense at is that second image, the one with the angel and the two kids, looks like AI SLOP to me - and I find that offensive… No offense to you @nevj … But I LOATHE “AI art”…
Also - both images of angels are not how they’re described in the bible - I believe this a more anatomically correct representation of a biblical angel
You might be correct about AI there. It does not have a traditional look like the first image.
Here is a more traditional image
Yes Islam does have Angels … it has some Judeo/Christian heritage.
Also the Ancient Greeks had daemons … which are a similar concept.
What your art is doing is removing the anthropomorphic view ( seeing things in a human perspective). We do tend to make everything look and behave like us. I dont see any thing wrong with doing humanizing concepts , but if you want to make your angel look like a rock I cant see any argument against that either.
When it comes to seeing human emotions in animals, there is some evidence that that is an overreach.
Have you seen the famous Chesterton quote on atheism?
Angel watching over children. A pic like this has been hanging in our children bedroom for 40 yeas or more.. The children are long gone, but the pic is still hanging there.
My wife has one, exactlty the same as yours, in the bedroom. She has had it since a child.
I think I might get some guardian angel background images … maybe I could arrange it so that clamd displays them while running.
NB. Today, 2 October , is the Feast Day of the Guardian Angels.
The former.
The Problem of Evil can be countered by appropriate prayers.
Using a picture helps you to remember to pray.
Visualising thoughts is a powerful learning and memorising technique.
My opinion of course… others may see it differently
Some religions take it further and say that certain pictures, painted by holy persons, are icons … that is they embody and convey some spiritual message.
Somewhat like the meaning of ‘icon’ in Linux … it represents something powerful that it can open for you.
