As Far As The East

As far as the east is from the west, [so] far hath he removed our transgressions from us.  (Psalm 103:12)

          How far is the east from the west? It’s a silly question, but it’s fun. If I look out my front window, I can see east for less than 100 feet, and if I look out my back window, I can see west about 200 feet. I know east and west are farther than that, but from what I can see, east is about 300 feet from west. One source suggests that someone 6 feet tall has a horizon to horizon distance of about 6 miles. The problem with this is that I’ve been in the Midwest, where you seem to be able to see for much farther than 3 miles in any direction. I’ve also looked across the water for what I’m sure was much farther than 3 miles. Another source suggested that if you went to the top of a skyscraper, you might be able to see as far as forty miles if other buildings didn’t obstruct your view. On the space station, looking down at Earth, east is about 2,000 miles from west.
         That measurement doesn’t work either, because we know the circumference of the Earth is roughly 24,900 miles. There’s a problem with that, however. If you travel north, once you reach the North Pole, you can no longer travel north. You must travel south. The farthest you can travel on Earth from the North Pole to the South Pole (in a straight line) is 24,860 miles. If our transgressions were removed as far as the north is from the south, that would be the distance. But if you start traveling east from where you’re standing, you could continue east all the way around the globe and back to where you’re standing, and still, you could travel east. There is no point in the world where east becomes west, or west, east.  Technically, if you burrowed through the planet from east to west, the farthest you could travel (hypothetically) is about 8,000 miles. At that point, you’d have to get in a space ship to keep traveling west.
          Now, if we lived on the planet Uranus, then we might be able to say that east and west have a measurable distance from one another of roughly 99,786 miles because what we would call the north and south poles on that planet are at nearly a 90-degree angle the perpendicular line that we think of as north/south. (Earth is off by about 23 degrees from that line.) So, one could say that Uranus has an east pole and a west pole, but I suspect if you were on the planet, you’d still consider one pole north and the other south. 
          In theory, one could follow this line of thinking all the way to the universe. At some point, “north” becomes “south” but east and west never trade places. In every case, it's the same. How far does God remove our transgressions from us? Infinitely far.