Many religious traditions embrace the idea of being an example, a "light unto the nations". On this episode, Leon, Josh, and Roddie explore this idea for those of us who work in IT, when it's a highly stressful situation such as a system outage - the dreaded "sev1 call"? .

Transcript:

Josh:                                      00:00                     Welcome to technically religious where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate it. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh, or at least not conflict, with our religious life. This is technically religious.

Leon:                                     00:24                     Look, we all know that working in it isn't all rainbows and ice cream and unicorns. There are frustrations, there are disappointments, and even times when the work is downright stressful

Josh:                                      00:33                     and perhaps no time is more of that then during an outage when there's a lot of unwanted attention and tempers are running high.

Roddie:                                00:41                     Today we want to explore the ways that we navigate those high stress moments as an IT pro with a strong ethical, moral, or religious perspective.

Leon:                                     00:49                     To put it in scriptural terms. How might we use our perspective to be a light unto the nations in those moments? Um, this week we have a couple of new voices. So let's just do some quick introductions. I'm Leon Adato,

Josh:                                      01:01                     I'm Josh Biggley

Roddie:                                01:03                     and I'm Roddie Hasan. So diving right in. Leon, why don't you tell us where the quote comes from and kind of give us some context here. Okay. For those people who aren't familiar with it, um, it actually comes from one of the books of prophets, Isaiah, for those people who are quickly flipping through, it's chapter 42, verse six. Uh, and it, the whole context of the sentence is, "I am the Lord. I called you with righteousness and it will strengthen your hand and I formed you and I made you for a people's covenant for a light to the nations." So that's, that's what we're talking about. Um, but what does that mean, right?

Roddie:                                01:39                     Like, yes, what,

Leon:                                     01:41                     What, what's that supposed to be? Actually, before we dive into that, um, just, you know who, who among us has obviously, you know, prophets or Navi, uh, is a Jewish, you know, is part of the Jewish canon. So it's part of our context, but I do want to clarify that from a Jewish perspective, the prophets is not considered what we might call gospel. You know, thou shalt it's really considered a timeless political commentary. So, uh, you can derive life lessons from it, but it isn't a binding in the way that a commandment might be. So how about for you guys?

Josh:                                      02:19                     It's interesting. So in Mormonism, um, and as we talked about last week, Mormonism being my, uh, my previous religious belief now identifying as post-Mormon and although, you know, having spent 40 years in the religion, I know a fair bit about it. Um, in Mormonism, Isaiah is feared, uh, only because, hey, it's Isaiah and he, you know, he uses some really complex imagery in order to extract his true meetings. Um, however this particular idea is also reflected in the New Testament. Um, so certainly I think Mormons and Mormons identifying as Christians this idea that we should stand up and use our correctness are... And certainly in context of Mormonism, are our absolute belief that they're, um, that that it is the true reli