Unity

I never quite understood exactly why there were so many denominations of Christianity. Hey, we all worship the same guy, right?

It shouldn't matter how you worship Christ, only the core beliefs should be the deciding factor. That one believes Christ is the son of God, that he has granted and holds salvation for humanity (provided one has faith, of course), and that to those ends we should hold faith in his grace and we should do good works in his name. I think that just about covers it.

I feel like all the different sects are really antsy over the little details that don't make much difference one way or the other. Divorce was a hot button issue, which created the Church of England. Martin Luther had a bone to pick with the Vatican over the selling of 'indulgences' to raise money for the Church's coffers. Still others rejected the Pope as the Vicar of Christ, translated the bible to their own ends, and created their own Churches.

Those are all in the past, however. Let's look at the present. As I said, we all acknowledge Jesus and all that comes with him. If I went to any church of any denomination of Christianity, I couldn't disagree with the core beliefs. It's not like Roman Catholics believe in Saint Peter and Baptists don't. It's not like Anglicans believe in the Holy Spirit and Calvinists don't.

Shouldn't we all band together and admit that at our fundamental basics, we all believe in the same thing. There's differences, to be sure, but that should be at a personal level, between you and God, and shouldn't be interfered with above that level. The community, parish, whatever, that should be the sole reserve of indoctrinating the people with their faith and gathering the community together to worship god. The Church should be uniting, but not overbearing. It is at the personal level where there should be differences for each to reconcile themselves with whatever. If you want to get divorced, whatever, don't expect the church in general to condone it but again, that's you and your spouse's business with God. And so on.

Second Life is something of the same way. The other day, reading through the Official Second Life blog, I read a post on LL discontinuing support for Apple's Panther Operating System. That's no big deal, in my opinion. According to them, only 0.25% of all users ran the OS. Assuming peak concurrency of 60,000, that means only about 150 people are running SL on Panther. It's regrettable that some people will be left behind, but them's the brakes. When I got my new computer with Vista, SL didn't like it. I had to wait a while before LL got around to making it compatible. Oh well.

But what appalled me was the fighting that broke out over it. It started with the Panther people complaining. Fair enough. But then we had a giant debate over whether Mac or Windows (XP and Vista) were better.

I just don't understand what the point is. Shouldn't we all be working towards making SL a more enjoyable experience for everyone? Does it matter what machine is running SL as long as we're all logging into the grid?

The Windows people got nasty enough, suggesting that LL didn't bother with Macs because no one uses them, which just ain't true. Mac does have a sizable market share, not as great as XP perhaps, but great enough that it's not right to ignore them. I don't agree with not bothering to update their version of the viewer, either. I run Windows and am content with it, but I find it terrible that LL (according to the Mac Heads I've talked to) does not bother to work upon their viewer as often. And Linux...

The point is, that we shouldn't be eating each other over who runs what and why. It's silly. We're all running Second Life. We all should be working towards improving each other's SL experience. It does us no good to throw mud over Windoze or whatever witty insult there is for Macintosh. Rotten Apples? Anyway, we should be concentrating on what we share and not what we're running. Anything else is a distraction and detrimental to Second Life.