Refreshingly humorous, yet strangely sad...

If you read my post from Wednesday of last week, you know that I'm fond of 'text generators'.

Some of them are quite humorous, some are silly and some are... well, inappropriate.

The technology used to do this is pretty simple: a programmer takes a list of words or phrases and then uses a javascript code to parse the text to return a random sample which is then combined with other such snippetts to produce something silly or funny or... well, you know.

I use a closely related technique to produce the 'random' quotes near the top of my website. Of course they're not rally random at all. I entered a list of my top twenty favorite quotations into a text list and then I let a javascript chose one to display upon opening or refreshing the page. To get a different quote, all you have to do is reload the page. Try it.

But my quote list is random only in the sense that the javascript randomly selects one of the texts that I have already entered. I control what is available to be produced and, hopefully, the text list would make sense even if read from paper by human eyes.

Text generators are somewhat different in that they recombine text snippetts to produce outlandish, outrageous, humorous or even offensive results.

I realize this is a long introduction for a simple topic, but some of you have to understand what I'm talking about before I get to the meat of the story.

This is that: I was poking around the web recently looking for some of these text widgets. I'm not sure how exactly, but on some sub-list of someone's daughter page out there in cyberland, I clicked a link that took me to this.

A sermon generator.

(!)

Yes, someone has used this technolgy, in an advanced form to be sure, to produce sermons.

It reminds me of when Simon Peter used a C++ recursive code to confound the Pharisees.

Not really.

At first, I thought this was funny - I laughed. Then, it slowly started to dawn on me that this is not a joke. This is a real product. People are actually using this thing to produce 'sermons'.

That could explain some of the ones I've heard.

Seriously, though, I can't imagine using a computer program to produce a sermon - select a text, plug in some variables and, viola, you've got it made.

All you have to do is stand up and read the thing.

Again, the sad part is that there are folks out there actually using this product.