Sometimes I think about things a little too much.
In this particular case, I was configuring god to watch the components of our new software stack at WebKite. God is process management software that lets you start, stop, and restart programs. Most importantly it will automatically restart a dead process so I don’t get paged at 3:17 am on a Sunday.
Software developers are known for coming up with overly clever names for their creations, and god is no exception. It sits there watching over the world, bringing its children to life, keeping a benevolent eye on them, sometimes killing them dead in their tracks, and sometimes resurrecting and healing them when misfortune arises. Pretty clever, right?1
technical information and Richard Dawkins keeps showing up in your results.
I had god set up and working, but there was just one problem. God cannot monitor and restart himself when he dies due to some unforeseen misfortune. For example, a server reboot. For this, I needed to configure upstart since we’re running ubuntu. This turned out to be surprisingly time consuming (ever use rvm and bundler on a server?), but like a lot of dev ops stuff it wasn’t particularly intellectually challenging. Tweak one setting, reboot the server, see if it works. Repeat 50 times.
And this is where my mind started to wander. God only thinks he’s all powerful and almighty. But he’s not. He’s just another program. Maybe a little more powerful than most, still just a userland program. He’s not the One True Transcendent God, creator of all, timeless, formless, boundless. He’s the demiurge!
I imagine at this point most readers are unimpressed and asking, “What the hell is the demiurge?” The demiurge is a deity in Gnostic cosmology. Okay, that probably doesn’t help unless I explain what the Gnostics.
There were a wide variety of Christian sects which had drastically different beliefs between Christ’s death and the time some 300 years later that Christianity was established as the official religion of the Roman Empire and the First Council of Nicaea established proper Christian orthodoxy. They all wrote gospels to spread the Word as they interpreted it. There were hundreds of Gospels. The ones we settled on (Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John) and put in the bible weren’t written by anyone who knew Christ directly. They were written somewhere between 40 and 150 years after Christ walked the earth.2
Jesus, they do so word for word. This leads some scholars to think there is a mythical Q source, a single document that the following gospels used as their source. So even after you account for the fact that you’re not reading them in their original language, the quotes from Jesus are a reflection of a reflection of what he might have said.
There’s an open problem in Judeo-Christian belief systems. In simple terms: Why do good things happen to bad people? More explicitly: If the universe was created by a benevolent, loving, supreme and perfect being, how can it possibly contain any imperfection?
The various Gnostic sects found an interesting solution to this problem: It wasn’t! The universe was created by a flawed deity who created the material world. He only thinks he’s the supreme being. He was an aborted creature, left for dead, who managed to survive, and being alone assumed he was the highest power in all of creation. He then went on to create the physical universe which inherited his flaws. This flawed deity is called the demiurge.
This provides an interesting explanation to the dichotomy of the vengeful god that exists in the Old Testament (flooding the world, destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, punishing and vindictive) and the loving god that Christ preaches about. Christ is teaching us about the real transcendent god who exists outside of this realm. He is trying to teach us how to unlock the divine spark that lives inside us, through gnosis or knowledge, so that we too can transcend the cage that is the imperfect physical universe created by the imperfect demiurge, and reunite the spark with the genuine supreme being.
And this gets us back to the god running our EC2 server. He sits there thinking he’s running the show, that he’s in charge, but in reality he’s a prisoner within a virtual machine that exists within one of thousands of physical servers exist within a server room within the world. He’s completely unaware and oblivious of. He sits there managing these lesser processes, making sure they are cared for, even if they do contain bugs and other imperfections. Yet he can’t remove the imperfections. He can’t fix them. He can only keep the applications going.
If this process is the demiurge in this scenario, what is the real
supreme being? I don’t know. But what I do know is that I had a few
terminal windows open. I rebooted the servers not by running
/sbin/shutdown, but by rebooting them in Amazon’s AWS web console.
And lo and behold, the following message appeared on the terminals
before they shut themselves down:
Someone pressed Control-Alt-Delete.
System rebooting now!
What could reach into the virtual machine and push a Control-Alt-Delete button on a keyboard that never existed? A more powerful monitoring process? One that lives in a heavenly place known only as the cloud? One that was able to reach into a server room, into a physical server, into an imaginary virtual server and touch an untouchable keyboard to initiate a system reboot? One that has no earthly name?
The sad thing is that this supreme process probably thinks he’s omnipotent as he smites the universe that god has been happily monitoring with an unexpected reboot. At least until lightning bolts thrown down from the sky smite this seemingly supreme process as well.