Can I download Satan on my Palm III or do I need to upgrade to a
Palm DCLXVI?
"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," said the Reverend Jim Peasboro, author of an upcoming book, The Devil in the Machine.
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.
"Any PC built after 1985 has the storage capacity to house an evil spirit," the minister confirmed.
The Savannah 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 websites 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.
"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 surprise, an artificial-intelligence program fired up -- without him clicking it on. "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!"
Since, then, Rev. Peasboro has researched the problem further and uncovered alarming facts.
"I learned most of the youths involved in school shootings like the tragedy at Columbine were computer buffs," he said. "I have no doubt that computer demons exerted an influence on them."
The minister estimates that one in 10 computers in America now houses some type of evil spirit.
Rev. Peasboro advises that if you suspect your computer is possessed, you consult a clergyman or, if the computer is still under warranty, take it in for servicing. He says, "Technicians can replace the hard drive and reinstall the software, getting rid of the wicked spirit permanently."
Let's set aside that I've never seen a computer that could *think*. Presuming a computer _could_ think, let's look at how smart today's computers *really* are. According to Hans Moravec in the December 1999 _Scientific_ _American_, an Apple Macintosh G4 (in my opinion, the fastest desktop computer available on the market today) runs at about 1,000 MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second). Let's look at the relative processing speed of various things with brains:
| 10 MIPS | - Insects |
| 1,000 MIPS | - Guppy |
| 5,000 MIPS | - Lizard or Chicken |
| 100,000 MIPS | - Mouse |
| 5,000,000 MIPS | - Monkey |
| 100,000,000 MIPS | - Human |