Keeping the Faith: Cyberfaith unable to replace real thing

Monday I attended a lecture on the relationship between online religious communities and faith in the real world.

Web-based religious communities are found in every form, from Webcasts of services on individual church sites to temples, cathedrals, mosques, churches and synagogues in Second Life.

I learned that involvement in virtual places of worship has not notably affected attendance at their physical counterparts, but of course there is a whole set of difficult questions about cyber-religion that leaves the discussion challenging and complex.

Which traditions from real life should be observed in cyberspace? Should women be allowed to lead discussion groups? Should avatars dress for worship in a virtual world the way their owners would dress in the real world?

Who should have jurisdiction over online religious groups? Who can pastor a Second Life church? Must they be trained like actual pastors?

Can simulated actions be substituted for real ones? Is there any value in taking an online Eucharist or going on a virtual Hajj?

According to lecturer Heidi Campbell, people participate in religious groups online mostly to supplement their real practice and to fill gaps left in their physical communities.

The Internet allows believers to choose their community based on theological similarity or shared experience in a way geography cannot.

Campbell gave examples of a group of people who believed they were prophets who found greater support among members of their online community than in their real life groups. She also discussed of a group of blind worshippers who felt a greater sense of community in their virtual worship than they could among the group they attended in their physical lives.

One of Campbell’s research participants felt that the virtual religion “brings greater immediacy to the abstract doctrine of the universal body of Christ,” reflecting a sentiment found in many religions’ online communities, that the ideal unity of belief and purpose among the followers of a given faith is partly achieved through the transcending of physical bounds by way of the Internet.

Having grown up in a very culturally tight-knit church that spans the six inhabited continents, I am moderately familiar with the value of online communication within a religious community. I have kept in touch with friends all over the world through Facebook and recognize that the sense of community within that church has grown as a result of virtual relationships.

Still, I am skeptical as to whether extensions of Web-based communication beyond supplementation of physical relationships is a good thing.

Initially I wondered whether cyber-religion could be beneficial, with its implication of easy access to the wastelands of Internet immorality waiting to devour the struggling believer, but soon that concern was replaced by a more complicated, overarching one. Therefore, my main reason for reservation is a sort of answer to the question above, “Can simulated actions be substituted for real ones?”

Even if virtual actions can carry value for the modern believer, they do not sit on the same plane as the physical doings of religion, especially when compared to the real lives of forerunners of the world’s faiths.

Without the physical happenings of faith, religion would not exist today to be transferred to cyberspace: The Buddha had to physically sit and meditate, over real, not virtual time to attain enlightenment. The Prophet Muhammad had to lead a physical transplanting of the Muslims from Mecca to Medina to preserve his followers, and make a literal journey back to complete God’s will. Traditions of enlightenment that require isolation must be completed on real, material terms. Jesus’ martyrdom was meaningful because he literally suffered and died. Escape of the cycle of physical births requires a status quo from which to escape.

If the figures of religious history are worth as much as we claim by way of exemplifying the right life, we should not allow ourselves to think that man’s modern ideas can improve upon their practices.

Whether the world is something to be embraced or surpassed, virtual religion cannot supplant real-life devotion and should not be expected to add significant depth to it. We are, like the founders of our faiths, bound to the systems of physical existence through which God has set up the will to worship.

KEEPING THE FAITH is a column about religion and philosophy that seeks to open constructive discussion about our most important beliefs. It appears in every Thursday issue.