Piqued

My church group is studying “The Reason for God” by Timothy Keller.  This week’s chapter was on the perception that Christianity is a “straitjacket” that compromises our freedom.  Keller’s conclusion is excellent:

“What then is the moral-spiritual reality we must acknowledge to thrive?  What is the environment that liberates us if we confine ourselves to it, like water liberates the fish?  Love.  Love is the most liberating freedom-loss of all.

“One of the principles of love – either love for a friend or romantic love – is that you have to lose independence to attain greater intimacy.  If you want the “freedoms” of love – the fulfillment, security, sense of worth that it brings – you must limit your freedom in many ways.  You cannot enter a deep relationship and still make unilateral decisions or allow your friend or lover no say in how you live your life.  To experience the joy and freedom of love, you must give up your personal autonomy.  [...]

“A love relationship limits your personal options.  Again we are confronted with the complexity of the concept of “freedom.”  Human beings are most free and alive in relationships of love.  We only become ourselves in love, and yet healthy love relationships involve mutual, unselfish service, a mutual loss of independence.  C.S. Lewis puts it eloquently:

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In all my years of using computers quite heavily, I’ve been a Windows user 99% of the time.  But I have used other OSes, particularly Linux in certain work environments.  I’ve configured PXE-boot network-driven automated installs of Suse and Red Hat, tweaked NFS and Samba on Linux servers in a network of mixed client OSes (Linux and Windows), and have played around with Debian a bit on a personal computer.  Yesterday I wanted to set up a file server at work without having to deal with getting a Windows server license, so I decided to go with the Linux distribution that everyone seems gaga for, Ubuntu.

Now, to be fair, I was installing on an old machine that I hadn’t used much beforehand, so it’s possible it may have some hw issues independent of the OS it’s running, so some of my issues could be related to that.  Its CD-ROM drive had apparently died, for one thing, and it had issues booting an OS off of a USB key.  But before I installed Ubuntu, it seemed to boot into Windows consistently, so the vital components appeared to be working.  Anyway, I just wanted to say that some of my issues below could be due to hw, although again, Windows didn’t seem to have problems.

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