The Marriage Code
While attending a typical south Indian wedding today, i got engrossed in the ceremony and its proceedings. Every hour there was a puja to be done and it was kind of maddening to be very honest. So, while this madness was going along it normal course, i started taking some interest in the prayers being offered to the Gods and started to ask people as to what they meant, (they were being chanted in Sanskrit), i noticed that every now and then the priest would ask for the bride's or the groom's name. Very so often he was also asking for the names of the parents. At places the priest was asking the couple to do a thing or two by giving them explicit instructions for the same.That is when a brain wave came to me, which might probably leave most of the priests unemployed when it comes to performing such ceremonies and prayers.
The whole thing is (simply put) a chunk of code (the prayers) which is wrapped around a function or method with names of the bride, groom and their parents as parameters. The so called instructions given by the priest are nothing but messages being passed from the function to its environment. So, in the view of the statement just made, why can we not have systems which can automate religious ceremonies and prayers? Imagine the amount of efficiency we will get with doing something like that. There will be no bloopers by the priest. There will be no requirement for the priests to come all the way to the actual venue of the event to perform the ceremony. Thus you save a lot of money in transport costs and staying expenses if the wedding is actually in a remote area. You can quicken the process if you want. If you want to involve the human element, you can actually have the priest perform the wedding from a distance. Distance worships!! All this can actually enable the priests to perform various kinds of ceremonies and functions at the same time at different locations in the world. If this whole this kicks off, then you can actually get this whole software/system, as an opensource system, which you can download at zero cost from the internet, and all you would then require is a PC to run it.
We will then have Microsoft shipping a MS Prayer in its Office Suite of Software and Google will throw in the same thing free of cost on Google Docs as a part of its cloud applications. You will actually have a lot of variety to choose from. There will those running on just Linux or Windows or Apple. For Windows you will get the pirated versions. WOW!!! With this idea, you have actually linked piracy with worships, prayers, and weddings. In order to avoid that bad notion of piracy being associated with such sacred events people might actually buy the costly license and for once there will be a software with no issues of piracy. Or, watching this notion by the people, Microsoft might actually overprice the thing, thinking that people will bear the whole cost burden. And then, people might actually show up their true colors and go with the pirated version anyway.
You might actually have one religion accusing the other to have pirated the systems associated with their religious ceremonies. You will have riots in the name of software. International religious conventions will be convened to solve the menace created with this software. Vatican might feel threatened by this use of science and technology and the Pope will then vehemently opose it.
Looking at all this, i guess its better not to go into something like that. But then, come to think of it: The world's economy, religious sentiments and power vendors will feel threatened with this single software. :) Worth trying to find out?