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Deus ex Machina: Searching for God on the 'netBy Tom GellerBe sure to see related sidebars on:When I was about nine, my brother John and I became interested in religion. Our father was a most devout atheist and our mother an agnostic, so we explored cautiously -- almost fearfully -- as we knew that our inquiries went against our parents' beliefs. We tried praying, kneeling down beside our twin beds after the door had been closed and the lights put out, with our eyes thrown heavenward and our hands pressed together in comical imitation of the famous Durer sculpture. Our influences were environmental: early 70s TV, the Roman Catholic neighborhood where we grew up, our family's deep history of Jewish secularism. Had I known Yiddish, I'm sure I'd have used it -- to say the Nicene creed in the tongue of the rabbis, there beside my orange-blanketed twin bed. Despite John being three years older, some fluke of judgment labeled me the more scholarly, and I was charged with the task of researching in the service of our nascent spirituality. After some strategizing, I decided that my father would be able to appreciate my religious curiosity on an intellectual level, and could therefore direct me to the appropriate resources -- as long as doing so didn't threaten his own deeply-held beliefs. I caught him at the top of the second-floor stairs the next day, and he gave me some pretty good (albeit noncommittal) advice: Study sacred texts, read quality books on comparative religion, and try the local library. But our education was missing something. After years of learning (and failing to learn, maybe the best teacher of all), I'm now convinced that the ultimate way to transfer knowledge -- especially spiritually charged knowledge -- is through directed activity, person to person, in a community that values learning. The books helped us to dissect (and partially satisfy) our curiosity, but they were, in the end, too detached from the community that gave their ideas life. It's now nearly 20 years later, and I'm pleased to say that I've found the fellowship I need to bring my beliefs to life. I hope the process continues for another 80 years. My education has progressed more rapidly at times, mostly because of the influence of groups and individuals able to guide me in my faith. It's made me wonder: Might these communities of faith have sped my quest all along? Have they not already paved highways to enlightenment?
God's Road CrewIn 1977, at the age of nine, I couldn't have gone into St. Francis' Church to seek spiritual communion. It was too intimidating: I feared that I might insult out of ignorance, or be drawn into a milieu that overwhelmed me, or be discovered as an impostor because of my essential secular Jewishness. In 1995, at the age of 27, I'm still afraid to go into St. Francis' -- but I now have other options for spiritual questioning. I can search for truth in a milieu that is forgiving of accidental insults, that welcomes the ignorant, and that can be switched off if it gets too overwhelming: the Internet. The path is not always clear -- in the words of the British publication The Observer, "God is everywhere, but his URL is proving hard to trace." When one seeks Internet community, the most obvious place to turn to is the system of Usenet newsgroups. There, like-minded people gather to discuss divergent topics: from satellites to SPAM(R), from Pascal to parties, from Mideast politics to sex with furry cartoon characters. Somewhere among those 15,000-plus newsgroups, there are at least 150 dedicated to spiritual belief systems that would commonly be seen as religious. (Greater minds than mine have broken on what constitutes a "religion," and while the level of spirituality in the many "Star Trek"-related groups often outstrips that in Christ-related groups, we'll leave such subtleties for another article. For another viewpoint, see the sidebar on "Religions, Non-Religions, and Pseudo-Religions.") Certainly, the center for Christian belief is in the alt.christnet hierarchy, which includes active newsgroups on prayer, sex, and the Bible. (My personal favorite, alt.christnet.sex.fetish.fat.furry.asian.watersports, hardly gets any postings at all. I wonder why?) Since American Christianity is nothing if not political, the christnet groups are often quite rancorous, with homosexuality and abortion being perennial topics. The discussions tend to be emotionally charged, and agreement is extremely rare -- as should be expected when a group of people as diverse as Christians come together. The scripture might as well read, "When two or more are gathered in the name, there will be a whopping big fight" -- or, as the Jewish version goes, "Two Jews, three opinions." But this is in keeping with Christian (and Jewish) traditions: from Jesus' dissent to Martin Luther's to Joseph Smith's, Christianity has grown and adapted itself to wildly divergent environments by speaking to local plights and local concerns. In the world forum, the evolution continues. The mood changes once one moves away from the larger newsgroups, however. Just as homogenous Sweden has far less conflict than the multicultural United States, so does one find a less combative climate in the newsgroups which cater to smaller sects. In that regard, alt.pagan is the champion of the warm fuzzy competition. (The playful attitude is also evident on Pagan-related World Wide Web pages, such as Bob Bruhin's at http://www.netaxs.com/people/bruhinb/pagan.html. He writes: "This page.. is not sorted, is under construction, and [is] filled with holes. A bit like reality, when you think of it.") While modern-day Pagans hold a wide variety of views on matters from prayer to politics, the overriding feeling in the group is one of harmony, peace, and celebration. Similarly, groups addressing the concerns of Quakers (soc.religion.quaker), Baha'i (soc.religion.bahai), and Zoroastrianism (alt.religion.zoroastrianism) tend to be more focused and peaceful than those that are more general (and active), such as soc.culture.jewish.
Unearthing Sacred TextsI'm glad that my father had the foresight to suggest the library as a place to research religion, for although spiritual communities are wonderful places for keeping faith alive and exciting, it's easy for misinformed opinions that lack a firm foundation in the religion's basic texts to be passed along. The nature of a community encourages this, as members are bound together by their common beliefs, and threats to those commonalties are all too often seen as threats to the community itself. How many Christians, for example, believe that Christ spoke against homosexuality? Fortunately, the source material is close at hand. There are dozens of major religions, and for each that has a central set of texts, you can bet that there's a Web or Gopher site containing those texts. Buddhists and Confucians are at home at gopher://gopher.epas.utoronto.ca/11/cch/disciplines/religious_studies/texts, which includes dozens of seminal works within its libraries. Most of these texts are also available on the major commercial services. For example, those using Apple's eWorld will be happy to note that the service introduces many common religions in its "Religions & Spiritualities" area, found at Shortcut: Religions. (See the subfolder, "The Traditions.") One could categorize similar founts for virtually every belief the world has to offer, and such a list would go on and on. With Bible-based religions being so common in the United States, it's worth mentioning a few of the sites that offer the Christian Bible. A good starting point is the selection of hyperlinked bibles (including those in Finnish, Italian, and German) and Bible resources found on the World Wide Web at http://saturn.colorado.edu:8080/Christian/Bible/bible.html. Scholars will be delighted by the superb bible search system called "The Bible Gateway," which is at http://www.gospelcom.net/bible. For those of you without Web access, the King James version is still easy to find: Project Gutenberg (http://jg.cso.uiuc.edu/PG/welcome.html) makes it available via FTP at ftp://mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu/gutenberg/etext92/bible10.txt, and it's stored in the software libraries of most major online services, such as America Online and CompuServe. But it's not only a Christian world out there, just as this is not a Christian country. Major texts of the two faiths that follow it in national popularity -- Islam and Judaism -- are also well-tended. Members of the University at Buffalo's Muslim Student Association have masterfully collected references to Islamic source texts at gopher://wings.buffalo.edu/hh/student-life/sa/muslim/isl/texts.html. (Even though it's a Gopher resource, use a World Wide Web browser to view it.) Jews will find Torah sources at gopher://riceinfo.rice.edu/11/CampusLife/Orgs/Hillel/Torah; the site includes the Tanach and many Talmudic interpretations. Just how do these texts come to be online? Some, such as the Bible, are so popular that they were put in electronic form as soon as it was technically feasible. But many of the smaller, more sectarian texts come to us through the communities that care the most about keeping their ideas alive.
What is the Sound of One Modem Communicating?A prime example of "passing on the word" via the Internet lives in the worldwide Buddhist community. Where Buddhists have suffered persecution (such as that Tibetan Buddhists feel now from the Chinese government), they have kept the practices alive by propagating information, in the form of texts. Now, through a series of projects, these fundamental Buddhist texts live on in electronic form. Perhaps the most interesting project began at the Sera Mey Tibetan University in Tibet itself, brainchild of former University Head, Khen Rinpoche Geshe Lobsang Tharchin. Similar to the Gutenberg Project in the United States (which concerns itself mostly with Western literature), the Sera Mey project has involved hand-entering important works of the Tibetan oeuvre. According to information found at its American home at http://acip.princeton.edu/, the works included "represent the cream of Asian philosophical thought from the period of 500 BC to 900 AD." As if History is making a point about the preciousness of The Word, the text continues: "With few exceptions, the Sanskrit originals have been lost, and survive only in faithful Tibetan renderings protected over centuries by the natural barrier of the Himalaya mountains." These texts -- and many others -- are found on Tiger Team, a private BBS in Berkeley, California (510-268-0102). Started about three years ago as "America's Buddhist Online Service," it has grown to more than 1,000 members, some of whom call from as far away as Sweden and Japan. According to Tiger Team's information manager, Gary Ray, the service carries "every Buddhist text that you could find on and off the Internet, and we work to develop more with Buddhist book publishers." In addition, the team is developing a searchable database of Buddhist practice centers around the country and a centralized "Buddhist Bazaar" that sells books, subscriptions to Buddhist periodicals, and meditation supplies. As the Internet continues to eclipse private BBS's, Tiger Team is reaching out to it. The service is partially connected to the Internet, offering members e-mail and Usenet newsgroups, but Ray sees its Web site (at http://www.newciv.org/TigerTeam) as the center of its future. "We'll have a leased line going full-time to the Internet, and people will be able to Telnet in [to our BBS] or even click on an icon on our Web page and log on directly," he stated. "There are some companies that are designing interfaces which will translate the RIP [internal language that the BBS now uses] into HTML [the language used on the Web]. If they don't come up with that, we'll probably ditch the RIP and go right to HTML, and make everything 'Webable'." But I was nagged by a seeming conflict: How does going online benefit a community that lives so deeply in tradition? It's clear that Buddhists in general are already well-represented on the net (one repository for relevant links is at http://sunsite.unc.edu/zen/). But what does Buddhism say about such developments? Like the Lubavitchers, the Buddhists believe that the Internet is not just a means to an end for them, but also a resource for understanding the ether, said Ray. "There's a big trend in Buddhism -- a lot of it started by the Dalai Lama -- that basically says that science and Buddhism are very close," he told me. "They both seem to have the same cosmic view on how the world works. So, when Buddhism moves onto computers, a lot of teachers consider it a very natural process that it would take that medium. A lot of Tibetans in particular find it a wonderful bridge into a different realm. There are some people -- mainly older Americans -- who are horrified, but only a few of them. Most consider it a very natural process."
The Rebbe SpeaksMany religious communities are famous for their dedication to preserving "The Word," and perhaps none are better known for their scholarship than Jews, biblically called the "People of The Book." A visit to Jewishnet's page (http://jewishnet.net) led me to a surprising discovery: Lubavitcher Hasidim have a significant presence in the Jewish online sphere. The Chabad-Lubavitchers are Hasidic, part of that branch of Judaism that in many ways mimics the life lived at the time of the sect's founder, the Ba'al Shem Tov. They are instantly recognizable in the streets of Brooklyn's Crown Heights and Manhattan's Diamond District: in their heavy black caftans, fur-trimmed hats, and long curls by each ear ("payos"), one might guess that they live conservative, anti-technological, Luddite lives. But appearances are often deceiving, When it comes to using technology to make sacred texts accessible, the Lubavitchers have embraced the Internet as a b'rukha ("blessing"). One of the men primarily responsible for realizing the promise of this blessing is Eli Winsbacher, director of systems for the "nerve center" of the Lubavitchers in Brooklyn, New York. Winsbacher spoke to me about how the Lubavitch community first approached the Internet, and its importance to reaching the community. "It started quite a few years ago," he recalled. "Rabbi Kazen was communicating with people via BBSes [Bulletin Board Systems] about questions of Judaism and so on, and a lady asked him to send her material in e-mail because she had an allergy to ink. He thought: 'If there's one person like this, maybe there are many others.' So, Rabbi Kazen and I decided to start up this net site, and we asked for permission -- actually, for a blessing -- from the [supreme] Rebbe. The Rebbe was very positive about it: he told us it was great to do so. [In the end,] it was actually done at the orders of Rebbe Schneerson. Its success was much greater than we could have wildly imagined: [via a combination of Gopher and listserver systems], we started getting several thousand requests a day." But what, I wondered, about the sect's traditions? Silicon offers a place for archives, but aren't the ways of one's ancestors another sort of memory requiring a different kind of repository? If the Ba'al Shem Tov were alive today, would he have his own domain name? Surely, I thought, Hasidim would be resistant to change in ways similar to the "Plain Folk," the Amish and Mennonites. Winsbacher disabused me of this notion. "We've always been in the forefront of technology," he contended. "There was a public speech by the Rebbe about 20 years ago which encouraged the use of technology to propagate and spread religion and Judaism. The Rebbe said that the technological means that we see in this century are actually in preparation for the ultimate redemption." The speech Winsbacher referred to can be found at the Lubavitchers' main Gopher site, gopher://lubavitch.chabad.org:70/1. (Choose 4, then 6, then 1 for this particular document.) At the time, Rebbe Schneerson couldn't have foreseen the Internet as it exists today, but uncannily, he cited scripture that describes it. To wit, electronic media in general ".. [pre-echo] the universal diffusion of knowledge in future time: 'For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of G-d, as the waters cover the ocean bed.' "
The Family That Nets Together, Gets TogetherAs it turned out, I was wrong not only about the Lubavitchers, but about the Amish and Mennonites as well. They also have information available on the net. The Amish Web page is (irregularly) at http://www.epix.net/homepage/Amish/amish.html, and extensive information about the Mennonites is at http://www.prairienet.org/community/religion/mennonite/menno.html. Both of these references come from the central repository for Christian links on the net, the Christian Resource List maintained by Simon Damberger at http://saturn.colorado.edu:8080/Christian/list.html. It was through this list that I discovered the overwhelming number of Christian sect headquarters, colleges, and local churches that maintain a home page. One such church is the Toledo First Seventh Day Adventist Church, with pages maintained by Dave Albrecht. For Albrecht, the site was more than a place to ".. put pictures of [the] church and say, 'Hey, we have a wonderful church.' " For him, the site at http://www-cba.bgsu.edu/amis/facstaff/dalbrec/t1home.html represents a way to build a worldwide community through information and common worship. "One of the motivations for my making a [page] was.. to tell about Seventh Day Adventist faith to the world community," he told me. "So, it was important for me right from the start to be creating and scanning materials in that people who know little about the SDA church could find of value. One of the things Christians are supposed to do is to be evangelistic. You shouldn't, as a kid's song puts it, 'hide your relationship with God under a bushel basket.' I'm really into trying to create material and resources for people to look at, so that [those resources] can actually contribute to their Christian walk." Albrecht doesn't ask the denominations of those who visit his site and sign the guest book, but he stated with some confidence that not all who visit are Seventh Day Adventists. (SDA members mostly meet in a for-pay forum on CompuServe, Go: SDA.) For Albrecht, writing HTML code is another way to reach out to others and praise God. As he said, "I spend a lot of time on it, and I feel that if there's anything that I can do to be of service to God, I don't mind spending the time. It's a labor of love."
Knowledge, Celebration, and WorshipI talked with my father a few days ago. He told me that he and my mother were off to an elderhostel for the week, that he's been studying sign language at Gallaudet, and that he's finally going to buy a computer. I wonder if he'll seek out like-minded community once he gets it, and whether that community will include alt.atheism. My grandmother turned to the Jewish community as she got older. Perhaps this is a natural function of age which will affect my father. Perhaps it will affect me. I remain convinced that the best way to learn a new way of thinking -- whether it's how to play chess better or what steps to take to follow Buddhism's eight-fold path -- is through the sort of apprenticeship mentioned before. But one is often cut off from the community where such a process can take place, either by distance, cultural barriers, or fear. As Karen Wickre elegantly explained in The Net 04 (pages 42-49), the online world can circumvent those barriers: it's not the same as the physical, "real life" one, but it has opened doors to personal interaction where no passage existed before. And one need not fear that these electronic friends will be false, as the online versions of religious communities, as it turns out, accurately represent those in the world of wine and sepulchers. Judaism is not evangelistic, so it makes sense that Winsbacher's Lubavitcher resources reference materials mainly of interest to those already in the faith. Christianity, as Albrecht points out, is evangelistic, and his Web pages reflect that in their user-friendly, "open door" format. Buddhism travels its own path: accessible, yet hidden; disciplined, yet relaxed; strong, yet not ambitious. Tiger Team's Buddhist essays have followed a similarly unique and creative path into the electronic world. For religious knowledge, one needs only books. For religious encouragement, one needs a like-minded community. Fortunately for us, both are available through the Internet, and together they make up the amalgam that is spiritual celebration. I think Dave Albrecht put it well: "I enjoy surfing to other local church pages: I almost view it as going to church. I will sometimes cruise the other churches as a Sabbath activity -- I really enjoy it. I just had [a note] this last weekend [from someone who had visited my page]. It said: "Thank you for letting me come and worship with you."
This page was last updated on Monday, February 09, 2004 at 3:07pm CST. All contents copyright 2005 by Tom Geller.
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