Maybe this is just an effect of the techno-savvy books I've been reading lately, but I was thinking this morning about the nature of heresy.
A lot of modern heretics don't necessarily think of themselves as making up something entirely new...or even heretical. It would be somewhat paradoxical to think of oneself as a heretic.
Perhaps part of the reason for this is that on some subconscious-level at least, they approach religion the same way a hacker approaches a computer.
Such people read the Code of Canon Law as if it were some kind of programming code.
In a programming language, the words all translate into some kind of precise machine code. This means you can monkey with it trial and error and see what works. So long as your syntax is correct, you can cobble together all sorts of commands and variables and wait to see the results.
I imagine the results usually aren't pretty in this kind of scattershot approach to hacking, but they might occasionally produce something worth while.
The problem with the spiritual hacker would seem to be two-fold.
First, there is no monitor with which to have almost instantaneous view of output. If spiritual hackers could see the effects of their hacked codes, they would understand why they were a bad idea. But the output of heresy is either invisible to the human eye or it takes centuries to make itself manifest in material way.
Secondly, human language is not a programming code. The meanings of a given programming language are typically fixed. Unless you hack the language itself, the command will usually mean just one set of computations. Human language doesn't work that way, and our religious codes are written in human language, not computer language. A command in English can mean a host of different things--which is why it is important for us to understand the spirit of the law and not just the letter.
I suppose the bigger problem becomes how one comes to understand the spirit of the law without getting tangled up in the slippery nature of language itself. That is, to understand the meaning behind those slippery words, we have to use more slippery words.
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