Christian Geek

A Christian Geek is a Geek who is also a Christian.

There seem to be at least a few around, and they can generally be seen active at http://www.geeks4christ.org/.

If you are one, a support page lurks at http://opendesign.cx/ChristianGeeks.htm that tries to deal with maintaining such a lifestyle.

One well known example is LarryWall, but there are others (I remember some non-zero number of Linux kernel hackers are).

Ahah! I always thought Perl was speaking (typing?) in tongues :-)

This is difficult for me. In general, geeks don't seem to like the idea that a single book containing absolute truth exists. (I realize that's not the exact position of all Christians.) Yet some very intelligent and worthy geeks believe so.

Hmm. There's nothing very un-geek-ish about the idea that a book could be a very reliable source of truth. (Just look at the profusion of books that get colloquially referred to as "TheBibles": Knuth, K&R, and so on.) I think the common problem is a little different: geeks, much like other people, don't like being told "This is the truth even if you think you know better." (Many geeks probably have long experience of knowing better than alleged experts at school and at work, after all.) -- GarethMcCaughan

This seems to be a case of strange bedfellows. Geeks are generally not very interested in getting other people to become geeks; as opposed to Christians, who usually seem to be quite keen on getting other people to become Christians. I suspect that whatever the reason is why geeks don't go around handing bibles (geek bibles, that is) to non-geeks, that reason is very much a fundamental fact of geekhood. I suspect that you can only be fully a geek or a Christian but not both, barring the inevitable borderline cases.

First of all, I am sure that no-one would claim that there are no truths except what is in the Bible, although I would say that the EssentialTruthsThatNeedToBeFaced certainly are in there; as to the mixing of GeekHood? and Christianity, no conflict exists. As to geeks not making more geeks, you should be ashamed of yourself! Get out there and give some Linux CD's away, show someone how to OpenSource their code and get MarriedToAGeek and pump out SecondGenerationGeeks -- AndrewMcMeikan

To the anonymous poster above questioning the ability to be both fully geek and fully Christian: it sounds like the majority of your experiences with Christians are with the evangelizing types. They're the ones that try to convert new people. I know that my skills are not in that area - they're more geeky. What I do best is to learn new things and teach them to others. In church, those skills serve to work on helping existing believers to mature spiritually (including myself), rather than convert new believers. Christianity needs both types of people. I find no contradiction between that aspect of Christianity and geekiness, but I do suspect that there are few geek Christians that are strong evangelists. -- GregVaughn

No, it is the ones quietly living up to both that I find hard to understand. Some of my friends are both Christians and geeks, and shining examples of both groups: very intelligent and thoughtful geeks, and modest, loving and charitable Christians. To me, this seems like a contradiction, but I respect these people immensely and know they are neither hypocritical nor foolish. I wish I could understand it.

(I incorporated and removed Greg's questions.)

(Also, it's considered rude on Wiki to add signatures to words the author left unsigned.) Agreed, and frankly, I don't even remember what name someone had put here. -- gv

For a moment, let's remove the labels from your statement and instead look at the characteristics you state: intelligent, thoughtful, modest, loving, charitable. Certainly, no-one has any problem believing all these characteristics could exist in one person, so that can't be the heart of the difficulty in understanding.

I suspect that the fundamental difficulty is trying to understand why a geeky person could believe in something that cannot be empirically proven. I was nearly 20 years old and a physics major in college when I became a Christian, and I can distinctly remember that difficulty. The basic leap of understanding I made was to admit that there could be a source of knowledge that can't be empirically proven. That opened up the possibility of God to me, and from there the Christian faith came almost immediately (largely due to my nominally Christian childhood). Because I had quit shutting out the possibility of God, I could then feel his presence.

Before anyone brings it up: yes, I well know that you can't make a logical argument based upon personal experience, but that is not my goal here. I'm trying to offer an explanation of how geekiness and Christianity can co-exist.

I can't be sure of other ChristianGeeks, but one of my own biggest draws is to the creator aspect of God. I'm now a programmer by trade, and the creative aspects of programming give me a feeling of attachment to that aspect of God. -- GregVaughn

... Give us this day our DailyBuild, On Windows as in Unix... ;-) And forgive us our usage of other's unpublished interfaces As we forgive those who use our unpublished interfaces And lead us not into Methodologies But deliver us from (C++/java/perl/etc...)

I like this - can the original author please continue it? ...

We have some really sweeping generalizations about Geeks and Christians here. Keep up the good work.

Nobody wants offensive generalizations on Wiki; they will be refined out as the page evolves.

Can anybody speak for everyone or nobody? Is offensive a universal evaluation? Or is offensive in the eye of the beholder?

Gee, I can see lots of advantages to being Christian and a geek. If you sprinkle the printers with holy water, maybe they'd @#$%@! work for once. -- SunirShah

No, that's voodoo.

No. Voodoo is when you use a dead chicken to make something work. (See VoodooChickenCoding)

See:

http://transformers.org.uk/

It may be interesting to note that there is a major concentration of ChristianGeeks in Cambridge, UK; far more so than in Oxford, by way of comparison.

From Websters -

geek (gek)

n. Slang

An odd or ridiculous person.
A carnival performer whose show consists of bizarre acts, such as biting the head off a live chicken.

Maybe this page should be called ChristianScientist? instead of ChristianGeek, or perhaps ChristianIntellectual. You can be a geek without being the least bit smart. I think geekdom is usually derived from social ineptitude (at least in my case), causing one to prefer bits and bytes to friends. This may, in some cases, lead to intellectual development. I see no reason why an oddball can't also have Christian beliefs. However, don't do anything unto a live chicken that you would not want that chicken to do unto you. -- WaldenMathews

I think "ChristianScientist?" would be a really bad name for it. :-) -- GarethMcCaughan

Not to mention the fact that ChristianScientist? brings up connotations of Scientology, which I am relatively sure most Christians would not be too thrilled about. -- IoaPetraka . Hmmm ... yes, those of us who are both Christian and Scientologists, and our friends who are Jewish and Scientologists, would surely object to having our existence suspected.

[More related to 'Christian Science', an offbeat religion founded by Mary Baker Eddy.]

Yeah, and ChristianIntellectual didn't fare too good neither. Well, I guess ChristianGeek it is! -- WaldenMathews

I find it poor logic to say that Christian Science is bad, when you don't know even the half of it yourself. You need to ask an experienced Christian Scientist about it, instead of listening to all the Christian non-believers who just take everything Mrs Eddy said literally. Just because you were born into a hardcore Christian family doesn't mean you can just go around saying mean things about Christian Science. I bet you could ask all of your unbelieving questions about Christian Science and have every one answered by a Christian Scientist. And not answered by your own or others' hateful thoughts about Christian Science. I suggest you ask a practitioner. For it is evident that you think that your religion is better just because you were born into it and learned about it and you are "positive" it is the right one. And I don't blame you. But I bet if you even tried to understand Christian Science you wouldn't be so sour about it. -- anon

ChristianGeek sounds so very cool. Count me in. -- CostinCozianu

Isn't this kind of self-describing. Are you Christian and a geek? Then you are a ChristianGeek! Would LlamaOwningGeek?, MarriedTwoKidsGeek?. BuddhistGeek? need pages too? What makes a ChristianGeek(as a term) anything more than mashing two words together? I never though of Christians as "anti-logic", just (sometimes) able to separate logic from faith. . . that doesn't make a ChristianGeek any different from. . . say me (I'm just a GeekWithFaithInTheUniverse?) - but I rejected my Christian upbringing long ago - nothing against God or Jesus, just people. . .

I generally thought that most religious geeks would select an Einstein kind of viewpoint: the universe, its laws, and its math is God rather than God being human-like. It is a bit different in that you don't do things like dress up on Sunday and sing hymns to math. Math does not have an ego, and thus we don't need to kiss up to it. At least that is how I see singing hymns with titles like, "Glory to His name". If that is not a kiss-up ego-bath directed toward the "gift giver", I don't know what is. I find it silly. An omni-potent God should be above that kind of stuff.

Sometimes it's exactly the opposite effect. The more math you know the more "acutely aware of the limited size of your own skull" you are. Real knowledge counterbalances quite nicely the naive positivism that has been the official doctrine of the intellectual elites for the past 2 centuries, and which has been imparted largely through brainwashing upon unsuspecting students. Speaking of hymns, what I do sing is even better than the title you mentioned, it's "Glory to You, O Lord.", which, of course, has nothing to do with what you think. When you say "Glory to His Name" you refer to God in the third person announcing His glory to other people, when you say "Glory To You" it is even more personal, and more geeky.Another thing about ChristianGeeks, we do have a shocking value for the people with the naive positivism attitude who think that religion is the realm of uneducated people who haven't seen the light of "modern science". We count amongst us software engineers, computer scientists, physicians, biologists, chemists and quite likely all the spectrum of science and engineering.

The most notorious amongst ChristianGeeks is, who else, the grandmaster of all geeks, DonaldKnuth, who even wrote a book on the subject.

Being both a Christian and a geek is certainly a problem for me. Especially because most Christians I know are not geek, so I am kind of alone with recurrent problems about truth, the existence of God and other methaphysical questions. And also, of course, because most geeks are non-Christians, and I have the choice either to occult my Christianity, or to appear to my geek friends as a kind of weirdo. I'd gladly reject Christianity, because it seems so complicated and incompatible with reason, but I cannot ignore God. I have felt his presence too deeply and heard too many convincing testimonies. However, I cannot reject totally that geeky attitude, since Christians and churches have so many problems, have been responsible for so many crimes during history, etc.

Yes, but isn't this just a verification of Biblical truth? Christians are just people, prone to committing "crimes," but believers in the Promise that we will one day be freed from that curse. The fact that "Christians" still commit crimes only backs up Biblical teaching about our fallen nature. Most other religions teach of the "goodness" of Man. Yet reallity contradicts that at every turn. -- BrucePennington

So that's who I am, and that's what I think a Christian geek is : a poor guy, stuck between to appealing worlds, with no escape, and alone with the problem since most people don't even see the problem.

Re: "I suspect that the fundamental difficulty is trying to understand why a geeky person could believe in something that cannot be empirically proven."

Hell, there are plenty of GoldenHammer technologies/techniques that some geeks evangelize up the wazoo. They sound damned close to religious fanatics to me. (I evangelize TableOrientedProgramming, but I think that paradigms are generally subjective. I only hope to convince borderliners, not die-hards.)

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