About theinternetisgod.org
With this site, we hope to generate a discussion and encourage contributions around the subject of God and The Internet. Our starting point is an essay entitled: 'The Internet is God' by Frank Den. Frank has no theological qualifications for writing this essay, just a fascination with The Internet and with our understanding of God. This essay is available as a working draft for editing on this site. We hope that this essay could be the catalyst for a joint venture such as has been undertaken at www.wearesmarter.org. We now invite contributions from individuals with an interest in this subject. We hope the subject might be of interest in different ways to a wide range of believers and non-believers – Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Moslems, Agnostics, Atheists and others with an interest in The Internet and God.
Useful contributions to the theme may also be made by those with interests or expertise in areas of arts, humanities, literature and culture, science or social science. There are likely to be biological, anthropological, literary, philosophical, political, mathematical, psychological, psychiatric, neurological and sociological things to say on this matter, for instance.
This is an open ended project but it is anticipated that contributors may wish to post their own paragraphs or sections. These will be rated by the community and allocated to an appropriate section of the site. The rules for posting are that contributors should respect other viewpoints and be prepared to consider changes to their initial posting in the light of community feedback. In other words, no one person will have a copyright veto over material submitted and you submit information and opinion on this understanding. This also applies to the original essay and headings which can be regarded as no more than a starting point. Each paragraph of the original document can be edited and elaborated on by the community.
The writer looks to the community for improvements, corrections and outright contradiction as well as the writing of new sections related to a particular area or interpretation of the theme. Exactly where this project will go, if anywhere, will depend on community reaction and advice. The community will decide if they wish to take this project anywhere and how they wish to achieve any objectives set. No decisions will be made unless there is community interest in taking the discussion forward. Volunteer editors would also be more than welcome to apply in any area where they have expertise.
A word about the site design
As much attention has been given to the graphics on this site as the initial essay. Any visual representation of God is wholly unacceptable to many religions and we have been careful to avoid this. Instead, we have directed our attention to the idea of a net or web. Support for this idea has been provided by the metaphor of Indra's net developed by the Mahayana Buddhist school in the 3rd century and later by the Chinese Huayan school between the 6th and 8th century. The site design is by Tasos Alvas who discusses the modeling process for the artwork on this site on his blog.
