Internet Religion, or, Where is Your Digital Savior NOW!

Richard Thieme of the National Catholic Reporter gives us a piece calling for Catholics to wake up to a new cyber-reality that is filled with a perceived lack of the Judeo-Christian God and perhaps heralds a complete re-alignment of how we treat faith.

“Spirituality and religious quests permeate those gaming environments and usually draw on various Neo-Pagan spiritualities that seem to be prevalent in hacker communities — yes, hackers often have a deep interest in spirituality, but it is usually expressed through nontraditional religions such as Wicca. Games include spells, rites, rituals, incantations and numerous religious classes of avatars like monks, spiritual warriors and warlocks. Asian disciplines, too, are mined for the spiritual implications of martial arts. Although Catholic traditions would work equally well, the flavor of exotic martial arts and the dissemination of its forms through movies (when was the last time you saw Christian warriors portrayed positively in a movie?) appeals more to young people than an Ignatian retreat or Benedictine discipline.”

Yes Paganism and Eastern religions are pretty common on the Internet and even more common in geek-havens like online multi-player games, but I disagree with the author when in comes to his perceived lack of positive “Christian warriors” in the movies. Wasn’t “Passion” pretty big last year? Plus, if you watch enough horror movies, what is the go-to religion for demon ass-whupin’? Why that would be the Catholic religion of course, plus you have a film about The Crusades coming up (though I would think no decent Christian would want to set your average Crusader up as a “Christian Warrior” to be emulated by kids).

Now on to another major assertion of the piece.

“DPs [Digital People] will interact less and less frequently with images of print-text gods (that is, worship) and more and more often with images of gods-in-pixels in a world in which information is dynamic and distributed, gathered, integrated and recreated on the fly. As digital symbols, icons and glyphs replace printed images, the meaning of processes like ‘redemption’ and ‘salvation,’ now locked into nouns that imply a static state, will be transformed, too. Process theology will inevitably gain momentum because it will describe a cosmic structure congruent with our daily experience of this ceaseless flow. We recreate ourselves in and through the forms and structures of our technologies; the digital world is interactive, modular and fluid, so inevitably our lives and how we think of ourselves are becoming interactive, modular and fluid, too.”

This one I do agree with to an extent, and it is why modern Paganism is spreading so fast and why I think the current “culture-wars” are burning so hotly at the moment. People are no longer limited to one set of beliefs (if they don’t want to be), and every time that has happened is has caused cultural and spiritual revolutions. The Internet has changed things, but the genie is out of the bottle and there is no return to the “Eden” of the print-only past. Even Thieme seems to agree at the end of the piece, “everything in this life, including our ideas about God, is transitory and passing”.

Tags: Neopaganism