Re: [form-al confession]

Dave Long (dl@silcom.com)
Thu, 04 Nov 1999 19:22:26 -0800


> Allows you to go to confession online, and receive absolution. It even offers
> a multiple choice for your sins, so you needn't think about them yourself.

That was a tidbit in Durant's Age of Faith which I hadn't yet
FoRKed. Because of the church's interest in standardization, one of
the early uses of clerical scribes was replicating and distributing
the tables which mapped sins to penances.

I'm on the road, so I sha'n't check it out, but I would not be
surprised to find that this Catalan service actually offers the
canonical penances.

So does it suffice to perform a penance, or do you need to have your
confession heard by a priest for absolution to count? If the
different aspects of sin are separable, perhaps they could
be rebundled, anonymized, etc. I suppose to inquire about futures
markets for absolution is to miss the point entirely.

-Dave

(separating aspects of a transaction is the answer to Greg's question:
taking a ticket has much lower latency than selling one, and
customers may wish to buy tickets early, and walk 5500 steps before
returning to the door. These factors say you should have more
ticket-seller-hours than ticket-taker-hours. An additional factor
is that part-time teenage labor can't cost that much in either wages
or overhead.)