Internet: God's Gift

What good is the pope?  All depends on who the pope is.  Worthless or worse by tradition in my opinion.  Pope Francis is a pope of a different vestment.

"The Internet is a "gift from God" that facilitates communication, Pope Francis said in a statement released Thursday, but he warns that the obsessive desire to stay connected can actually isolate people from their friends and family."

This morning I was pondering the highly structured nature of a computer operating system.  Structured in the extreme like an airplane is structured in the extreme.  Fault tolerant as a function of rigid design when something goes wrong but by design it does exactly what it was designed, not so much to do, (fine point here) but what it was designed to enable.  If the operating system detects a fault it is designed to call attention to it.

Maybe not so fine a point in the last sentence.  I felt compelled to call attention to it being a fine point.  Perhaps only a point made fine by our perception of something that is, when examined, not such a fine point at all but the essence of its nature.  It is the application programs that the operating system enables to do what we want to do.  The things that the operating system does to enable us to do what we want in application is exactly like our mind and bodies that enable us each to do whatever we wish in applying them to some thing.

I have used Michaelangelo's "Creation" often to illustrate the passing of the gift of life, although I view the gift as "Our power to create".  The graphic I like is the focus on the two hands with fingers extended to give and receive.  If the Internet is a gift from God then pehaps the graphic might be the finger of God extended to a a computer mouse.  A mouse of course is old school interface.  Touch screen is new school.  Perhaps the finger of God extended to a human finger on a computer screen?

In a previous blog entry I wrote about the word "Panopticon"  A structural design that either as a physical or conceptual structure enables the ability to see and therefore control everything within its view.  In the frame of an operating system the Internet has its operating system and applications that use it.  Spying on the operating system side is merely system self check maintenance.  Spying on the application side because those that spy have access to the operating system, which they neither own not maintain is just plain old covert spying.

"God" as a traditional concept is a panopticon.  He sees all but does not interfere.  "Interference" as an outside supernatural influence is however a theological debate.  I will simply take the position that if He does he does it in a natural way.  Ways attributed to entirely natural causes. 

God is in the natural operating system.  He enables the use of application programs designed by us without restriction other than the laws of natural structure.  Our conceptual operating systems are equivalent but base on the natural order concept.  Our conceptual operating system also enables us to do anything with a conceptual application system.

The Internet is a gift from God in that it is an expression of the original gift of conceptual creativity.  Ours to employ for whatever good or bad value judgement our conceptual structure of personal and social systems of belief define.

Pope Francis gives some good guidance in that regard.

The Pope is good for something.