It's almost a week that the Pope created a lot of fuss by using an obscure citation in a lecture. Among all the reactions, I liked most what Tariq Ramadan contributed. When I think about the Truth being limited by "reason", I can only think of Khidr a person mentioned in the Quran whose acts look unreasonable but as we gain more knowledge, it turns out they were more reasonable than we thought at first.

On this nightly browsing journey, I came across the story of Al-Hallaj. He did not end very well, but it's hardly him alone that can be blamed for that. It's quite interesting to read what he thinks about the people that call him a heretic and about the people that call him a good guy -- he says the ones that hate him are right. Translated in today's language this is an extreme form of self-denial. He got burned for the things he was saying, although his story lives on in countless poems.

Today I was writing code... this is not very surprising, because I do that everyday. But today I had exceptionally great fun, because I was cleaning up some messy part of our software that I have not written myself, and that nobody had ever asked me to clean up, and if I had not touched it would probably live on in its messy state forever. The maintenance work consists of disentangling programs from time to time, especially when there's several people writing them. And it was great fun. Pirsig expressed it beautifully in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the pleasure one can experience when something technical is done right. There are a dozen times when he inspects the chain of his motorcycle and greases it.

That reminds me that I have a motorcycle too, and the week starting from Sunday might be a good week to use it and make the big 1000km trip to my parents in Germany. This happens also to be the first week of Ramadhan. It is a wonderful time of the year, when friends come together to break their fasting and the day-to-day routines are exchanged for some spirituality. Probably, this is the time designed to disentangle the habits and little acts of ignorance that came to affect one's life, and replace them with a new life. A new life and new blog.