From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!seismo!hao!menlo70!sytek!zehntel!tektronix!tekmdp!dadla!dadla-b!hutch
Newsgroups: net.religion
Title: Re: Comprehending an infinite God
Article-I.D.: dadla-b.415
Posted: Thu Apr 14 17:57:20 1983
Received: Tue Apr 19 07:01:29 1983
References: hplabsb.1545

Well, folks, the unibus on tekmdp seems to be at least operational
again, and I therefore get to make religious noises to the net again,
so if I missed any diatribes I ought to have seen, during the hiatus,
let me know via private mail.

To Jeffrey Soreff, HP, regarding "Understanding an infinite God"

You seem to be taking a rather judgemental view of this deity you
slander (yes, I mean slander, not libel, nor any milder word).

I will make a weak analogy by bringing up-to-date an old, old analogy.
Say you write a program, a nicely complex program that talks to you.
Say further that you want that program to do certain things, but that
a pseudorandomly driven, self-modifying piece of code causes the program
to miss meeting your spec.  Since you know that the excision of that
code will be painful to you, and since it has much about it that you
like, you decide to incorporate an awareness of the purpose of the
system into the code.  IF you cannot convince it, by introducing the
restraints, to behave in a fashion which meets specs, then you will
unceremoniously JUNK it.

The weakness of this analogy is that it does not really reflect the
complexity of the human nor of the Deity.

The strength of the analogy is that it does reflect that the Deity
is the CREATOR and has every right to expect the creation to do what
it was designed for.  The creation can complain all it wants, but it
will only be committing hubris in claiming that its creator is broken
based on the much more limited preception it has of itself and its
creator.

(Is tha napalm burning, George?  -Yep)

Steve Hutchison
Tektronix, Logic Analyzers, via tekmdp when she works