From: Carey Lening (carey@tstonramp.com)
Date: Tue Mar 14 2000 - 12:47:39 PST
http://www.theregister.co.uk/000310-000003.html
Posted 10/03/2000 4:19pm by Thomas C. Greene in Washington
US preacher finds demon-possessed PCs
Forget about viruses and malicious hackers; the real threat these days is
far more insidious. Your home computer may be host to a demon, and you and
your family may well come under its malevolent control, the Weekly World
News reports.
"While the Computer Age has ushered in many advances, it has also opened yet
another door through which Lucifer and his minions can enter and corrupt
men's souls," the paper quotes the Reverend Jim Peasboro, author of an
upcoming book, The Devil in the Machine, as saying.
Demons are able to possess anything with a brain, from a chicken to a human
being. And today's thinking machines have enough space on their hard drives
to accommodate Satan or his pals, the paper reports.
Disk capacity is an issue, however. Only a PC built after 1985 has the
storage capacity to house an evil spirit, the minister explained.
The Georgia clergyman says he became aware of the problem from counseling
churchgoers. "I learned that many members of my congregation became in touch
with a dark force whenever they used their computers," he said. "Decent,
happily married family men were drawn irresistibly to pornographic Web sites
and forced to witness unspeakable abominations.
"Housewives who had never expressed an impure thought were entering Internet
chat rooms and found themselves spewing foul, debasing language they would
never use normally," he declared.
"One woman wept as she confessed to me, 'I feel when I'm on the computer as
if someone else or something else just takes over.'"
The minister said he probed one such case, actually logging onto the
parishioner's computer himself. To his horror, an artificial-intelligence
program started spontaneously.
"The program began talking directly to me, openly mocked me," he recalls.
"It typed out, 'Preacher, you are a weakling and your God is a damn liar.'"
Then the device went haywire and started printing out what looked like
gobbledygook.
"I later had an expert in dead languages examine the text," the minister
said. "It turned out to be a stream of obscenities written in a
2,800-year-old Mesopotamian dialect!"
The minister estimates that one in ten computers in America now hosts some
type of evil spirit.
The Reverend advises anyone suspecting that their computer is possessed to
consult a clergyman, or, if the computer is still under warranty, to take it
in for servicing.
"Technicians can replace the hard drive and reinstall the software, getting
rid of the wicked spirit permanently," he says. ®
See also
Net is bad news, says Archbishop
Bill Gates devil "numerologist" can't count
Intel in Revelations avoidance shocker
Bishops bash web pornmongers
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Mar 14 2000 - 12:47:36 PST