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Dogmas
February 04th, 2021
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With the advent of Covid, things changed in many ways,
and among it there's religious practices.

As a catholic family, we're supposed to follow the Mass
every Sunday, which became impossible due to law
restrictions.  Technology came to the rescue, and now
we've can respect the precept by following via
streaming.  So far so good.

Then I've been asked the question: is it admissible to
follow a recording of a Mass that happened some hours
ago?

To be honest, I didn't delve into figuring out by
querying some authoritative source, but intuitively I'd
say yes.  In fact, if two hours ago wasn't "legal", how
would 5 minutes be legal?  And what about buffering
times, and signal propagation?

Soon enough, I realized I was applying scientific
thinking to the topic, which makes no sense, since
these are transcendent matters.

Even if I did search for authoritative sources, I would
probably have found that nothing so specific was said.
In short, I would not expect the Pope to handle such
tech details, although he might have said something
about recordings, I don't know.

The point is that it's not so difficult to be wrong in
the field of religion, where truth is axiomatic.

As far as I know (by listening to historic podcasts),
this is exactly the reason why the Inquisition was
born: to prevent people to divert from faith.  And yes,
sure, someone got toasted along the way, but that
wasn't the intent.

Now, unless I'm mistaken, many dogmatic truths are said
to be inspired by divine intervention, which is itself
a dogmatic truth.  So the problem is logically
unsolvable, and that's why it's *faith*: you can choose
to believe or not, and if you do you're aware of the
fact you cannot prove things.

Then there are schisms: there's a big enough group of
people who interpret things differently.

Even admitting by faith a holy inspiration, it is still
hard to deny that one of the two branches of the schism
must be wrong (since the divine inspiration cannot be
conflicting with itself).  Who is wrong?  Is it "us" or
"them"? 

Obviously everyone likes to think of themselves as the
main branch, and to others as those who took the wrong
path.  Let's then say that "they" are wrong, otherwise
the discussion is over :-).

It is however possible to be wrong (missing
inspiration).  Therefore, even even passing the
question to some authority (say, the local priest) is
putting on him the burden of either producing a
potentially wrong answer, or to check with the above
authority, as for a DNS lookup.

Unfortunately even the topmost authority might not be
completely reliable (we had instances of corrupt popes
along history, and even with divine inspiration, we're
still fragile and faulty people).

This is getting horribly complicated.  I think I'll
draw some conclusions:

1 - It is quite dangerous to be asked about these
things!

2 - The best to do is to simply admit ignorance, as
being ignorant is the only rock solid thing that can be
claimed.

3 - I'm thankful that deciding what is canonical and
what not is someone else's responsibility.  As for code
that handles time zones, really.

4 - Thinking too hard on these topics seems to be best
way of missing the point.  Maybe it is better to be
like a child.

…let's go back to programming in C.  I'm better with
it.