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Patron Saint of the Internet
Quite a number of people have been writing with the news that the Catholic Church is considering naming a patron saint of the Internet. The strongest current contender is St. Isisdore, an 8th century Spanish saint, with is created with making one of the first databases - a 20 volume encyclopedia.
I'm not sure that the Catholic Church would approve of some of the rituals I've seen:
1. Sacrificing AOL disks to the god of Packet Storms
2. Chanting the names of great hackers to ensure that code will compile without errors.
3. Building a shrine to the god of Greater Bandwidth entirely out of MSN CD-ROMs.
4. Imploring the High Priestess of IT for a larger disk quota.
5. Daemon processes. 'Nuff said.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Anyone interested in looking up patron saints should try saints.catholic.org -- it contains an index of the officially-recognized patron saints, plus some good background information.
I will quote their explaination of patron saints here:
Some things to note -- the news article simply mentioned a popular movement to have the Vatican declare St. Isidore the patron saint of the Internet. These popular movements happen all the time within the Roman Catholic Church. Some receive official approval, some do not.
Of course, any Catholic (or anyone else) can request the intercession of any saint in any matter. No one needs to wait for Vatican approval.
Personally, while I can see why St. Isidore would show an interest in the Internet, there are some other saints I would nominate:
And we _all_ know that if anything needs a patron saint right now, it's the Internet. An omnipotent God just doesn't cut it when the backbone goes down. We need somebody who really cares.
(All in the name of good humor, folks. :) )
How many times have folks beckoned to their creator in the hope that it might somehow bring a server back up, or clear network congestion, or even ensure that a cable is not too short to reach the FRAD (or whatever)?
Being able to get a patron saint medal that can be stuck to the front of a server isn't a bad idea at all, IMHO. Seriously, most sysadmins can use all the help they can get!
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
This list got buried in the thread hierarchy, so I was jonesing for my 15 seconds of fame:
St. Marconi of Unlimited Bandwidth
St. Turing the Mystic
St. Hopper of Transubstantiation of Bugs
St. Ada the Inscrutable
St. Stallman of Hoofed Mammals
St. Torvalds the Flightless
and from Jimhotep:
St. Tesla the Enabler
See for yourself.
St. Isidore's already listed.
So? St. Mary of Magdala was a prostitute, and they canonized her. (At least, I think she's a saint. There are about a gazillion different Marys in the Bible. I might be confusing her with a different one).
...the expanses of cyberspace allow plenty of room for God while simultaneously making it quite simple for you to ignore religious material which you find objectionable. Admittedly, I find the idea of an Internet patron saint a wee bit silly. But I find it very difficult to believe that you'll encounter any palpable attempts at 'indoctrination' if the Vatican were to go ahead with this. :)
:) While not a Catholic myself and more recently in history being descended from German Protestants, I know I do.
It's all too easy to bring up the Church's missteps throughout the centuries, but these are human errors, some graver than others. That they were wrongly committed in the name of God does not repudiate the value of the religion's message or its true core doctrines, IMHO. And for centuries the concept of personal freedom was largely unknown to the masses who knew only the Church as the starting and ending points of most aspects of their lives. I think for far too long religion got bogged down in the details of things like the Bible, a fascinatingly confusing document which led to the justification for all sorts of terrible deeds. Recently there have been shifts away from organized religions to "personal faith", a more direct connection to one's deity of choice. A lot of right-wing fundamentalist Christian groups emphasize this, as a result of their disillusionment with Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, etc. etc.
All that aside, today you and I have the freedom to cheerfully ignore religion or complain about it as we see fit. That freedom comes from the labors of generations of our ancestors, Christian, Jew, Muslim, or none of the above. While acknowledging the fact that organized religions have made mistakes, their importance should not be so wantonly dismissed. While I am a Christian (Lutheran specifically), I'm quite liberal, and if you want to be a heathen, hey, that's fine with me. I wonder if the fierce reprisals against religion are because the online demographics are much different than the real world...i.e., a higher concentration of agnostics and atheists in the online population. Who knows?
I would also not be surprised (if you are Caucasian) if you owe your existence to the 'Catholic heritage' at some point way back in history.
"There has been no official statement from Rome ... "
This is very signifigant. Unless there is an official statement from Rome, this is just a rumor. I'm not saying it won't happen.. I'm just saying that it's not definite yet. At all.
-- Ace
1) "May all your segmentation faults be benign"
2) "That'll be 20 Hail Marys and 5 lines of assembly code"
3) "Thou shall not covet thy cubicle neighbor's video card"
4) "And God shall smite thee by sending a power surge through your CPU"
5) "God is compassionate, my child...everyone is tempted by the Fruit of the Tree of Microsoft once or twice"
6) "And Apple begat Macintosh, Macintosh begat the PowerMac, and PowerMac begat iMac..."
7) "And on the Seventh Day, Torvald created Linux. And Torvald saw that it was good.
-
If the catholic church were to declare a patron saint for the internet, that means the church either does not understand the internet, or that there may be hope yet for it to become less of a conservative patriarchal hierarchical institution.
Why is everyone forgetting the only one St. Postel ?
Can someone refresh me on this one?
Before the pope declared birth control wrong in the 60's he made an advisory council (probably of bishops) which actually concluded that birth control was NOT wrong. The pope didn't take the council's advice, however. Also, the Church has made formal mistakes before. For example, the Spanish Inquisition, selling of indulgences, and the placing of Galileo under house arrest for the remainder of his life for saying that the Earth revolved around the sun (holy sh*t, he was right!).
I'm not declaring my stance on birth control here. I'm just saying that nothing is set in stone, not even what the Catholic Church teaches.
--Another practicing roman catholic/linux geek
www.god.com? Heaven is a commercial organization? Guess that explains where all the cash I've dropped into collection plates over the years has gone ;-)
Spokesman for the Catholic Media Office Tom Hallwood said: "There are patron saints of many things, so why not let the Internet have one?
Oh dear god no. I'm happy being a heathen without further indoctrination from a fucking organised religion as Catholicism which has traditionally been responsible for the alientation, persecution of many people advocating doctrines which did not fall with in the Vatican's political agenda.
There is no room for God here. We're a product in spite of the Catholic heritage certainly not as a result of it. If I want to pray it sure as hell will not to be what I am told is permissable by a body which murdered and desicrated scientists, philosophers, astronomers, witches...
I recant!
BLAMMO shaken not stirred
Kibo??
And for that matter, Legba?
Though I suppose Isidore is appropriate for his accomplishments. Glad to see the Vatican is more techno-savvy than the extreme right-wing.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
... get a good grip, we're going for a ride!
great line by Tom Waits. He's gone on tour again, and is better than ever.
the AntiCypher
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
The church has no idea what peril they are entering; they live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that they should voyage far. Sending your prayer packets to this so-called "St. Isisdore" only helps to draw attention to both the source and destination addresses.
"But whose attention?" you ask. Well, perhaps it would be better to ask "What's attention?" There are impossibly ancient hungers that lurk out there, furtively waiting in the dark until the comm satellites are right. And when the time comes, it will be both swift and agonizingly slow at the same time. A swift tentacle probing here, a ping packet there, and then you will be beset by the true horror: Shub-Internet, the black beast of the 'Net with a thousand bastard processes!
We already have a patron ... thing. (I guess calling it a "saint" wouldn't quite be right, huh?) Better to leave well enough alone, and pray (quietly to yourself, where nothing can snoop your prayer) that the dawn of Its era comes long after you are safely in the grave.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Did you all know that? the first time I saw that, it freaked me out.
It's funny to tell newbies they can download the latest linux kernel from the vatican's ftp site.
support gun control: take guns from cops
I was not able to fit the whole post in the Reply form (how do you do that?). For now here is an excerpt, but it well worth the effort fetching the original article from UseNet:
-Eos (goddess of dawn): goddess of the bootstrap processes (lilo, Drive A:, BootManager, boot.ini, IO.SYS, etc).
-Nyx (goddess of night): goddess of shutdown -h, screen blanking, and Jolt.
-Morpheus (god of dreams): god of vaporware.
-Muses (nine sisters, goddesses of respective arts and sciences): goddesses of Yahoo, and related Internet directories; goddesses of multimedia and multimedia plugins.
-Hestia (goddess of the hearth): goddess of servers and standalone units; patron of proxy servers and (with Aesculapius, see below) firewalls.
-Titans (various important, antecedant gods): Ada, Babbage, Turing, Hopper (goddess of _software_ programming**), Thompson, Kernighan & Ritchie, GHades (giving the devil his due), and many more.
-Ares (god of destructive war): god of flamers and flaming; also, patron god of all that is M$; god of Doom, Quake, etc.
-Pan (god of flocks & shepherds): god of NNTP; also, along with Demeter, protects databases; patron god of tarballs and PKWare.
-Hymen (first name, "Buster"; god of marriage): patron of device drivers; god of application suites (MS Office, Corel WP suite, StarOffice, etc.); god of Java.
-Eris (goddess of strife & discord--she began the Trojan War): another patron of Usenet; goddess of software copyright infringement. li>-Priapus (god of fertility): god of Internet; patron of the viruses that work by loading up one's ha unending Usenet strings and cascades; god of software bloat; god of AOL & MSN disks.
-Hermes (messenger of the gods, also, patron of thieves, highwaymen, and, I believe, of commerce): god of spam.
-Athena (goddess of wisdom, and all that is noble in war): (with Tux)Linux; patron goddess of GNU.
-Aesculapius (born mortal, deified as god of Medicine): patron god of Unix gurus; god of UPSs, spike protectors, firewalls, etc.
-Chaos: god of random # generators; patron of trolls; god of Error 404.
[OBJOKE]
Al Gore was rejected because he isn't Catholic, and even if he gets elected, he'll only have one miracle to claim. [smile] This really seems like joke material. I had to check the date to make sure it wasn't April 1.
[/OBJOKE]
This really seems like joke material. I had to check the date to make sure it wasn't April 1.
All kidding aside, does the internet really need a patron saint? Maybe so. You see, this may actually help some technophobes overcome their instincitve Luddite fear of the net (remember the kids being "talked to" because they admitted to playing DOOM?). The technology can be seen as being "blessed" as it were, by the Vatican.
For its part, the vatican has been keeping tabs on the internet, with a web presense. Actually, only the Church of Scientology comes to mind as being more net savvy, although the stories associated with the Scientologists are usually negative with respect to the net.
The presense of the Vatican may be even more beneficial, as the internet currently has an image problem (maybe rightfully so) as being awash with pornography, weapons how-to's, and other negative things. Its nice to know there is a major organized religion that may actually champion this technology and help get it seen as acceptable for families, etc.
--
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
Surely he'd be "St. Alan"? It seems that saints tend to be referred to by their first names.