Mar 03, 2007 : God uses Greasemonkey (or, modelling Christianity with HTTP)

At work (the IS dept at a Christian university) a few weeks ago, our lunch discussion came to whether God could both love and hate someone at the same time. I said that if the person is saved by Christ, God sees Christ -- not the person -- when he looks at him. Drew said "it's like a hard link!"

On the web, it'd be like a permanent redirect. But only when God tries to resolve a Christian's URL does he get redirected to the URL representing Christ. "The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart" (1 Sam 16:7). So how would that work? The difference in how the person's URL resolves depends on the viewer, so something has to be done at God's end. We came up with the idea that God must use Greasemonkey with script that applies URL redirections.

I couldn't find any Greasemonkey scripts that did URL redirection (just lame javascript redirects which is not good enough). So here's how I think Christianity could be modeled in HTTP:

Let's say http://brondsema.net/dave represents me (technically, it is an RDF document about me, but I'll avoid getting into RDF). http://brondsema.net/Christianity/Christ will be the URL representing Christ. When God requests http://brondsema.net/dave he needs to get:
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://brondsema.net/Christianity/Christ
This is assuming that a person once saved can never fall from salvation. If it's the contrary, then instead of a 301 Moved Permanently, there'd be a 307 Temporary Redirect

Probably be the best way for God to achieve this would be with a local proxy that rewrites some responses to be 301/307 instead of their original response value. Of course, only God would know how his proxy works; none of us know if other people are saved by Christ or not.

Some definitions, for the less technically inclined:

hard link

like a file shortcut, but better

URL

Universal Resource Locator; aka web address. It can represent anything, not just provide a webpage

Greasemonkey

A firefox extension that lets users install scripts that change the functionality of certain webpages

HTTP

HyperText Transfer Protocol. The underlying protocol that web browser & servers use to request & transfer webpages