God changing lives

In the last section, I looked at how The Internet, as a natural medium for sharing information and emotions, can touch spiritual aspects of our lives by association with others. In this section, I examine how The Internet changes lives; something that most religions are in the market to do! The extent to which the Internet sweeps us up and carries us forward, engaging our hearts and minds in the way that the great religions proclaim that God should, is therefore the subject of this section.

Those of religious belief might acknowledge that, on an intellectual level, the analogy between The Internet and God has some validity. But they might also argue that the religious experience is much more than this – it is also about accumulated wisdom and history, worship within a community; engaging with God at a deep and emotional level and often changing lives for the better within the moral precepts of each particular religious tradition. This is of course absolutely the case and it is a territory that The Internet can in no way replace, nor should it try to.

But, as Walter J. Ong says, technologies are not merely exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness. In discussing God and The Internet, one cannot ignore the deep significance that The Internet already holds for many people. The Internet may be a tool that we can pick up and put down as we please but it is also often a deeply emotional experience that can engage us at the deepest level. It too has the capacity to change us and makes us into different people. If this is the level at which God works, one would have to make the observation that The Internet God at times seems to be engaging us more fully than the off-line God!

The world religions often adopt something of a missionary instinct, extending into regions where previously they had no influence. The Internet has an innate capacity to engage with every culture, and perhaps more naturally adjusts to each new influence than the most enlightened missionary! The Internet draws us in and engages us in a way that religious practice often fails to do. It fascinates all age groups. Here, in the UK at least, however many Internet terminals are placed in our libraries, they are immediately taken up whilst the books on the shelves beside them gather dust. The Internet knows how to fill our temples, synagogues, mosques or churches, so to speak.

The passion that The Internet invokes is more than just its usefulness as a tool. Our love for it has something to do with its lack of prescriptivism; its resistance to absolute truth – the very ground on which religious authority, though not necessarily God, holds sway. The Internet mindset is perhaps more akin to the Japanese way of seeing religion where different religious states are applicable to different stages of life, no religious position being granted absolute truth.

The Internet may to some extent fit this model in accommodating to our spiritual needs; providing a God of individual preference and a belief structure set up to accommodate our individual requirements. Whilst such a malleable God might be seen as a God lacking in moral fibre and not standing for an absolute truth, the Internet God entertains absolute moral positions too – if this is what we require of our God! The effectiveness of a God that can adjust to our requirements of a God goes some way to explaining The Internet's remarkable hold on our lives and capacity to change us. By conferring on us a sense of identity that we can understand, the Internet God provides us with an individual experience that can be both significant to us and sacred as well. By offering the tools with which we can identify with others who have the same emotional needs, The Internet caters for much more than our intellectual curiosity.

There are areas in which The Internet seems more accomplished than any of the religions. One of these is its approachability, especially to the young. The Internet may lack religious ritual. It may offer nothing comparable to the Christian eucharist. It offers no holy communion built up by habit and ritual. But The Internet is still young and we may hardly have scratched the surface of its potential to ritualize belief. Through the ever more interactive nature of the Web, and through experiencing it body and soul, it will hold emotional experiences and rituals in store.

If we accept the soul's deep yearning to be united with the divine then The Internet can be seen as providing his or her our own connection. It has parallels with the story of Krsna who multiplies himself innumerable times in order to dance with each of the Gopis in the Rasa dance; each Gopi thinking that Krsna danced with her alone. It may seem trite to talk about our Internet connection in the same breath but we can see this too as a way for us to dance with God to our own tune and in our own clumsy way.

So, on The Internet, we can create our God to be as personal as we wish, or as distant. For example, the Internet God could serve the monist Hindu who sees Brahman as beyond himself and also the theist Hindu who perceives Brahman as personal and on first name terms. And this is not necessarily to dilute the nature of the divine experience in my view; rather it is to be able to respond to different aspects of the divine perceived by us. Most religions, after all, acknowledge God's all encompassing nature – of neither East nor West, male nor female or first and last, everywhere and nowhere – whilst recognising too God's closeness to us so that the transcendent is balanced by the personal, the infinite by the immanent. In other words, on The Internet, we can potentially see God in terms that we understand; those terms do not necessarily reflect God's being. But this has always been how humans worship God. They take of God that which they can comprehend and that which means something to them. Without wishing in any way to undermine the role of mainstream religion, it so happens that The Internet too is rather good at facilitating a process by which we can find the God we need.

Nor should we assume that those from one religious tradition or another are immune to a distorted perception of God. Spinoza's position is that men who worship a particular view of God may be more firmly rooted by their religious practice in inadequate cognition.[1] In other words, any particular religious tradition will not of necessity reflect a true God and so we should not necessarily assume that an Internet God reflects God less adequately. The Internet, like God, has an unclear measure, description and form. God has been likened to the sea or rivers whose waters have no shape of their own, but take their character from the land over which they flow.[2] Through The Internet, we may sometimes glimpse what we take to be God's attributes whilst the essence of God remains as ever unfathomable to us. Each sighting, or perceived sighting, may be of the one God, but the more we say of God, the more there remains to be said; an aspect of God that holds true for The Internet too. We should also remember that a free for all and unruly approach to God that can be thought of as one element of Internet culture too, has long precedent as well in the Greek Bacchanalian tradition, or the teaching of the Sikh Gurus, and is as worthwhile, arguably, as any more systematic approach to God; though The Internet is equally adept at systematic approaches to God too!

In this section, I have examined aspects of The Internet that can excite us by corresponding to our spiritual needs; whatever these may be. In the next section, the discussion stands back from our own needs to examine how the Internet God bears up to an absolute truth.

fn1. Spinoza (OUP, 1986) p.93. fn2. Norman Soloman, 'Judaism' in Picturing God (London, 1994), pp. 142- 165, p. 158.