Internet Religion
Not only in India, but the Islamic world even more, is being affected by
the model of the internet.
The Greeks said, that if horses ruled, the gods would be horses. As it
is, we have horse's asses. But even that is changing. All of these steep
pyramidal power structures are being challenged by movements like Debian
and the user lists, which are so broad based, without any significant
power structure for an ego to climb.
All of the Levantine religions, and many of the indigeneous traditions,
were crafted to pander to the instincts of the warrior class,
attributing the personality of an authoritarian political leader to the
Divine. And these religions with different names for that
characterization run into each other. They were all based on creation as
a deliberate planned process, epitomized by the American idea of
"Creationism".
This is being challenged by the example we now have from primitive life,
in which a few simple principles result in self-organization, and that
same principle has produced the internet and this debian list. The
political demogogues have always tried to attribute the characteristics
of the presumed authoritarian deity to further their own ends, but now
see this amorphous model of the internet userbase challenges the whole
idea of centralized leadership.
There has also been innumerable threads on the
psychological/sociological analysis of religion. This began with trying
to understand the tragedies caused by a cult leader, such as the mass
suicide at James Town Guyana. It has not been hard to extend that
analysis to the prosetylizing of Christians & Muslims, affecting the
lives of millions. When you get right down to it, both Christianity and
Islam are dangerous cults. As their violent history, and now ongoing in
Africa and South Asia where the two traditions compete, still
demonstrates.
Again, it is on the net where these impolite questions get dealt with,
and there is nothing that a cult, or even a large mass religion, can do
about it. The Debian model is part of a larger whole of peer-to-peer
relationships which are very challenging to traditional religions. And
ironically, while Christians go to India to try to spread the faith, in
their own homelands, there has been widespread apostasy as indigeneous
peoples have abandoned Christianity to return to their own ancestral
traditions. And now, more recently, armed with the increasing canon of
data from archaeology, increasing numbers of Native Europeans are also
abandoning the Christian faiths to recover something they see in their
own ancestry.
The neopagan/wiccan/druid/astrau reconstructionalists wont be sending
missionaries to India or anywhere else. But they will be buying
archaeology magazines and media presentations, reconstructions of
ancient cult artifacts, and in part paying for the archaeologists they
are sending everywhere. And increasingly, when they do dig something up,
you will read about it here.
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