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Discussion on: Can we separate the artist from their art? Should we?

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Bruce Axtens • Edited

When you look at the Mona Lisa do you spend much time thinking about the painter? When you use LibreOffice do you think much about the lives, times and ugly personal secrets of the army of developers who coded it? How about the people who designed and built your car? Or the staff of the company that sold you the car?

As Ruby Hamad of the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper in Australia aptly points out, "All heroes have a dark side, no matter what side they're on". Both Martin Luther King, Jr. and his namesake Martin Luther had a dark side. Hey, even Charles Darwin!

Are we going to trash everything these people did because they weren't perfect? Is absolute perfection the standard? If so, then the only person worth listening to is Jesus Christ who not only claimed to teach truth, but also claimed to embody it.

I often pray to God asking for help and inspiration in my work. However, I don't look in the Bible for information on C#, JavaScript and the history of programming languages. For that I'm going to have to rely on human beings, flaws and all.

P.S. In my little backwater, the name John Sonmez was unknown until I read the article leading to this comment.