[dragonwriter]

> The funny part to me is believing in an all-powerful and omnipotent god whom you can nonetheless fool with semantics and shuffling papers.

There's no fooling going on. There's just faith traditions that believe God, either generally or for specific subsets of the overall rule set, is extremely concerned with the letter of the rules and not what humans might infer the spirit to be from the letter. That is, the rules are the rules, not an imperfect approximation serving some higher but difficult to express set of rules.