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Agnostics Anonymous: A bulging net
Jesus said 'where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them', and since the internet seems now to be where people gather, it's appropriate that virtual churches be built for them. If religion in general has a future, much of it will be played out here, in vicars posting their sermons, and jihadis swapping bomb-making tips.
It was more concern about the latter sort of use that motivated the launch of Faithbook, intended to put online religious interaction on a friendlier footing. A rabbi explained: 'It is essential that we utilise social networking tools, which is the way that so many people are starting to communicate, and that we utilise them for the good.' A prayer on the new site intoned: 'God of all creation, we stand in awe before You, impelled by visions of human harmony... In that which we share, let us see the common prayer of humanity.'
Many have found the internet conducive to these 'visions of human harmony'. A famous Time article argued that 'For many signing on to the internet is a transformative act. In their eyes the web is more than just a global tapestry of personal computers. It is a vast cathedral of the mind... where faith can be shaped and defined by a collective spirit.' This sounds the utopian note never far away when discussion of the internet turns visionary: the notion that it can work to realise human-kind's 'collective spirit', connecting alienated nodes into a cushiony web of peace and understanding. Marshal McLuhan's well-worn 'global village' metaphor captures this homely idealism.
But the internet does little to domesticate the world. When you contemplate it, the 'global village' metaphor wilts. The web is a galaxy of daunting, beautiful and gruesome human variety (with a supermassive black hole of pornography at its gravitational centre). If it is a 'cathedral of the mind', it is the broadest church conceivable, with huge tenebrous spaces reserved for the id.
The claims of any religion to universality never seem so inadequate as when one tries to imagine this extraordinary eclecticism corralled into any one belief system. Given the attachment of certain religions to their universal claims, the idea that this will ever be greeted with cries of 'vive la difference!' seems a little hopeful.
Where once we perceived other cultures through a glass darkly, the internet lets us see them face-to-face. In the search for the 'common prayer of humanity' we see shades of Douglas Adams' celebrated Babel fish, which, 'by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more wars than anything else in the history of creation.' From an agnostic's perspective, it seems that wherever religions are gathered together, two's a crowd.
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