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| SCOTT SIMON | If the Internet has given us anything, it's
given us choices, all kinds of choices.
For Religion has come to cyberspace:
with all manner of faiths, all kinds of
spiritual wisdom. There are web sites
now for official religions with millions
of followers, and sites for potential
cults still looking for their first
converts... |
| I'm Scott Simon. There's something
about the Internet that can arouse great
enthusiasm and great skepticism and
irreverence. Amidst all of this, actual
religious worship is also expanding on
the Web, as more groups and faiths
find cyberspace a place in which they
want to be counted. |
| For example, a Presbyterian Minister,
the Reverend Charles Henderson, has
created a site called the First Church of
Cyberspace. |
REVEREND
CHARLES
HENDERSON | My faith begins with the opening
chapter, the prologue of St. John's
Gospel. In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God. Um,
traditionally Christians have identified
the Word with Jesus Christ but Jews
have also seen and others have realized
that there's a greater subtlety to that than
just Jesus Christ equals the Word. The
Word really is, refers to the wisdom. It
is the structure of truth that ties the
whole cosmos together. And we, we
say that that is part of God or it is God.
Now, the whole idea of the World Wide
Web is that ultimately all of human
knowledge could be tied together
through the links of hypertext. Now if
you achieve that and you had all human
wisdom tied together in an
interconnecting web, or a structure, this
would be analogous to the Biblical
concept of the Word. So couldn't you
say, in the beginning was the Web? |
| SCOTT | Charles Henderson has served several
congregations during his thirty years in
the ministry, now he is reaching out to
yet another congregation, on the
Internet. Henderson believes that,
modern as the Net might be, it is in fact
only catching up to the Bible. |
| REV. CHARLES | The Bible is the world's first hypertext
document. And what I mean to say is,
have you ever tried to read the Bible
from start to finish? You'll, you know,
you will start and Genesis is pretty
interesting. The five first books of the
Bible are pretty dramatic. But then you
get into those books that are law books,
and you get into long descriptions of
how the temples were created and the
exact dimensions of this or that and it
becomes fairly boring. You have to be a
real survivor to read the Bible in a linear
way from the front to the end and that
wasn't the way it was meant to be read
anyway. The way the Bible was created
was you took poetry, you took drama,
you took laws ... and these were put
together by different people in different
situations over a long period of time.
But when they put it together, they built
in links from one part of the Bible to
another part of the Bible so that for
example, if you were reading the 23rd
Psalm and talked about a shepherd who
guided, somebody through a dangerous
place, that word shepherd would be a
kind of link, if you were literate in the
Bible, to other places where the word
shepherd had been used. So as you
read it, you would think of all those
other links; your mind would jump to
those different places, those different
circumstances where those words also
appeared and pretty soon, you'd have a
conversation going between what the
psalmist was saying and what other
people in different context meant by the
words. So the experience of reading the
Bible would be similar to surfing the
Internet, where you see one thing and
then you make connections between
that and something else that is
happening or has happened. And that is
why reading the Bible is like reading a
hypertext document. |
| SCOTT | In the 1930's through the 1950's there
were a growing number of
Presbyterians in America. But since the
1960's the number of Presbyterians has
been falling, sharply. Henderson sees
the Internet as an historic opportunity to
reverse this trend. |
| REV. CHARLES | If you take a national poll of the
American population and ask, what's
your religious preference, 10 million
people say that they're Presbyterians.
But we only have 2.7 million
Presbyterians who are members of
churches. And of that 2.7 million, only
about a third of those are in a typical
church on a Sunday morning. So that's
about one in ten Presbyterians who are
actually in churches like this. So, that
movement away from the Church has
already happened and what the Internet
will allow us to do is to begin
communicating with those people who
have already opted out and make a
connection with them. People want to
meet. They want to communicate with
each other. The need for friendship is a
fundamental human reality and to the
extent that this tool will help people
have friendship and have real
community, it will thrive. If it doesn't do
that, it will fade away because, what
people want is contact with other
human beings. |
| SCOTT | The Church has been trying a range of
programs and strategies to bring people
into their places of worship, and now
the Internet has triggered a monumental
explosion of religious information and
splendor, unlike anything we have seen
in the history of anybody's church. |
| REV. CHARLES | The Web has a tendency to break down
walls between people. When people
surf the Internet they can jump from a
Fundamentalist page to a Buddhist page
to a Muslim page, to a Catholic page.
Just like that. In a matter of seconds.
And there's no one standing there
saying, "Don't come into this place
because this is different from what you
believe, or don't do this because this is
a heresy or that's a bad idea so don't go
there." There aren't any policemen on
the Net, so everybody has total freedom
to go wherever they want. This means
that it will tend to break down rigid
ideologies. Organizations that depend
for their livelihood on having rigid
ideologies will tend to lose out.
Organizations that can speak to a much
wider audience and to appeal to people
in a much more ecumenical basis, I
believe will thrive. |
| SCOTT | Charles Henderson has no hesitation in
also creating discussion, even on
subjects which Churches have
traditionally found sensitive. |
| REV. CHARLES | There are two reasons that I have, a
section on the home page where there is
a debate about homosexuality in the
Bible. The first reason is that this is one
of the hottest issues in our religious
communities today. It has a potential
for dividing religious communities, like
nothing else in America since the Civil
War and the issue of slavery. So it's a
very hot and a very divisive issue. We
invited two world class scholars to
speak on the issue, taking two sides of
the questions, of the question and we've
invited people to respond to their
papers. I think the Internet can be an
interesting place to carry on such a hot
discussion because people in a way are,
at one removed from each other when
they debate this issue. They're not likely
to get up in a room and punch each
other like they might if you brought
such a topic into a church meeting. So
in, in a way it may be a safe haven in
which to discuss issues that are not so
safe to discuss in a church parlor. Plus
people can preserve a degree of
anonymity even as they participate in
these very emotionally charged topics.
And so for us, that's another reason
why the Internet is a good format for
religious communities to deal with
issues that are very controversial and
potentially very divisive. |
| SCOTT | All this could result in the type of
problem that some religious leaders
only dream about. For out of the
enormous community of the Internet
there is the potential to create huge
congregations, potential parishioners in
the millions. Yet that is not what Charles
Henderson neither foresees nor wants. |
| REV. CHARLES | I'm not really interested in having a
congregation of several million. I don't
really think that you can have real
relationships or carry on the kind of
things that religious community
provides with those masses. Looking
ahead, I think that there will be people
who identify with what I personally am
doing or what the people that I work
with are doing. But there'll be hundreds
of Internet congregations, thousands of
Internet religions springing up like
mushrooms all over the place and so,
although there might be 150 million
people on the Internet, they won't all be
on my page, they'll be on countless
other different pages. There will be
small communities all over the Internet
just as there are small churches all over
the world right now. |
| SCOTT | There are of course some immediate
questions that come to mind when we
start thinking about religion in
cyberspace, other than just pondering
the number of gigabytes on the head of
a pin, for one might wonder if perhaps
even God, like the rest of us might surf
the net- Searching for even more Infinite
wisdom. |
| REV. CHARLES | God surf the Internet. Of course God
surfs the Internet. One of the basic,
fundamental beliefs, not only of
Christians but most religions is that
God is omnipresent, God is everywhere
and since the Internet exists, God is
there ... on the Internet. |
| SCOTT | Whether or not the Internet will ever
replace the traditional modes of worship
seems too remote a point to debate. But
there's no doubt that the organized
religions and even just some committed
individuals, have taken it on themselves
to help fill what they see as a religious
void in cyberspace. And by
approaching that void directly, no
matter which denomination, faith or set
of beliefs they hold, they together, can
only make a place for spiritual life on
the Internet. If you are interesting in
visiting some of the outstanding
religious sites on the net, you might try
ARIL / Cross Currents Online, Charles
Henderson's latest website, featuring
links to the outstanding religious sites
on the Net. |
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