It seems to me that connectedness is becoming the new religion.
One of the impulses that gave rise to the internet in the 1960s (idealistic communitarianism on the west coast of the US) is now beginning to manifest itself in new religious movements. Those 60s communes, and many new religious movements, relied on the charismatic leader/guru. The top-down strength that this gave became a top-down weakness when the gurus were revealed to be errant, corrupt, fake etc. The guru model simply doesn’t seem to work. The new embryonic religious movements seem to have a solution to the problem of the guru. If distributed knowledge can transcend the limitations of the knowledge of a solitary (node, person, cell) then surely the ‘distributed guru’ can transcend the limitations of the solitary guru. Distributed gurus, user-generated Godness, crowdsourced faith …
That’s the hypothesis that I will be following with a number of posts in the next few months.
In a recent mashup, Jonathan Pararajasingham, splices together the musings of 50 famous academics on faith and the existence of God. These are all ‘eminent scientists’, winners of nobel prizes and, apart from one solitary voice, all men. Unsurprisingly, there seems to be an overall consensus on the irrelevance of God and faith in attemtps to understand and explain the workings of the universe. Faith, a belief in God, or a belief in the afterlife are seen as unnecessary distractions to be consciously avoided in the pursuance of the ‘work at hand’.
Here’s linguist John Searle in very measured tones on the status of faith:
The battle between science and religion then seems to be inching ever-closer to an overall victory – at least for these physicists, biologists, linguists, philosophers and neuroscientists.
In their attempts to understand the universe religion is at best a distraction and at worst an irrational impulse to be transcended. That doesn’t mean it is likely to go away any time soon. In fact, it may be that faith and a religious impulse towards understanding the world through the lense of the Great Creator may be gaining traction from some new(ish) ideas around the Singularity, the noosphere and other such speculations about the ‘Connected One’.
When Jim Gillian, an internet activist, spoke in a recent Personal Democracy forum and said:
’God is just what happens when humanity is connected …
What we do here. What the people in this room do is spiritual, it is profound. We are the leaders of this new religion. We have faith that people connected can create a new world.
Each one of us is a creator, but together we are The Creator.’
he was, I suggest, speaking for thousands of other ‘activists’ who hold very similar beliefs. Whilst new religions tended to have spiritual leaders/gurus to lead and sustain them, the new religion that Gillian speaks of has a ‘distributed guru’, in the spirit of the network that gives life to the movement. It’s the distributed guru who gives life to and sustains The Creator.
His complete speech:
+ transcript at http://www.internetismyreligion.com.