Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Technology Meets Guilt & Tradition

I never quite got the concept when I was growing up and being indoctrinated in the Catholic Church. If God were all-forgiving and God was everywhere, why did I have to work my way through that little memo book of sins to compile a list of transgressions to recite to the sympathetic guy behind the grill work and the curtain? Where does the middle-man fit in?

Of course, if we go back to the Medici we can see a role for the Church in politics that would certainly benefit from knowing which prince was boffing which duke's daughter or which baroness had slipped a bit of arsenic into which lady-in-waiting's aperitif. Get some background to leverage, get a bit of guilt to make the royals amenable to suggestion and then dangle some eternal damnation over the whole festering pot.

But as a fifth grader wondering about the blooming bumps on Mary Ann Ronzetti's chest, I was a bit embarrassed by having to share with Father Frank. Raging hormones seemed to all relate to mortal sins and there wasn't much worth doing on the venial transgression list.

Now we've got this:

Yes, There's an App For That

So, if we can go that far, is it possible to compile a list from the app and then simply submit it by text message, or if you haven't sinned too much by Tweeting it? Can we log in and get credit for six Our Father's, six Hail Mary's and a good Act of Contrition?

And, for those considering my acquisition of an iPhone discussed a couple of days ago; no I'm not downloading the  app.

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