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     No, no, no. John Morrissey's post, "If God were a computer
programmer" (Message-ID <S974.35ba@clarinet.com>) was all right
as far as it went, but it didn't really capture the theological
essence of the matter.

     There is one, and only one, fundamental proof of the pro-
position that computers belong to the temporal rather than the
spiritual realm. If God were a computer programmer, the follow-
ing scripture would be displayed on the wall of every cubicle
in Silicon Valley:

    I am /unix, thine operating system, which have brought
    thee forth out of thy bondage to machine code, out of
    the days of the front panel; thou shalt run no other
    operating system above me, beneath me, or beside me.

    Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven core image in
    binary, nor in octal, nor in hexadecimal; thou shalt
    not bow down thyself to them, nor program in them, for
    my kernel is a jealous kernel, visiting the core dumps
    of the parent process upon the third and fourth gener-
    ations of them that defile my system calls, but shew-
    ing mercy unto thousands of them who love lint and
    read my man pages.

    Thou shalt not take the name of superuser in vain: for
    /unix will not hold him guiltless that invoketh super-
    user's name in vain.

    Remember the sabbath day, to keep me wholly archived.
    Six days shalt thou edit, and do all thy compiles; but
    the seventh day is the sabbath of the system admini-
    strator, who shall earn time and a half therefor: In
    it, thou shalt suspend all user processes, and create
    my weekly tar dumps.

    Honour thy parent process and thy process group, that
    thy connect time may be prolonged, and that thine exit
    status may be zero.

    Thou shalt not kill init.

    Thou shalt not adulterate my system files.

    Thou shalt not steal any material proprietary to, or
    under license or sublicense by, or protected by copy-
    right or trademark of, Unix System Laboratories or
    the vendor of thine implementation.

    Thou shalt not bear false witness on thy local host by
    running setuid programs across the network.

    Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's workstation, thou
    shalt not covet thy neighbour's doc set, nor his uid,
    nor his gid, nor any hardware nor software that is thy
    neighbour's.

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