Session 4b: Religion and Spirituality
Chair: Rob Fisher

Perichoresis and Praxis in Usenet
Debbie Herring
Sheffield University, UK

The Usenet group uk.religion.christian is a well established online community. A two year ethnographic study of the group by a long-standing member of the community, analysed and explored from the perspective of contextual theology, suggests ways that religious community may be envisioned for computer mediated environments. Several important themes have emerged, of which two are highlighted in this paper.

First, the nature of the community existence of the group may be usefully conceptualised as perichoretic: that is, members of the community relate to one another by mutual interpenetration on an intellectual level. Imaginative reconstruction of a persona from text based communication, undertaken as part of the corporate life of self-identified community with a shared framework of values, results in a culture where individuals identify themselves with others by recognition, even where there is no direct interpersonal communication. Some unexpected findings on the phenomenon of lurking is especially illustrative in this regard.

Second, the analysis of the religious life of the community showed forms of behaviour which could be described in terms of both faith and action (praxis). Close scrutiny of the group's communication showed that there were elements of their written communication, and concepts behind the written communication, whose effects were practical rather than just intellectual. Furthermore, these were not confined to practical outcomes, but were manifest in practical behaviours in the context. Four mode of praxis were identified.

These findings are presented by drawing heavily on the group's own discussions so that the authentic voice of the community may be "heard". The researcher's conclusions are corroborated from the results of a comprehensive questionnaire, which included responses to open ended questions exploring the community's introspection. The insights into being religious community in cyberspace resulting from this major, long-term study form a base-line for future research.

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Religion and Spirituality in Cyberculture, Science Fiction and Cyberpunk
Andrew Saunders
University of Tasmania, Australia

“I met a ghost that was not there.”
Deus ex Mechina and associated techno-mystic hokum.

Science Fiction enjoys a particular relationship with the sublime, a relationship with the “spray paint pulp utopias” that never were. Cyberpunk, essentially an American literary movement, enjoys a particular relationship to the postmodern sublime, a sublimity that finds its transcendence in the truly colossal constructions and inventions of humanity. The irony is that the sublime, associated as it is with religion and spirituality cannot exist in the same arena as cyberspace and its conceptual source cyberpunk as the new sublime must be understood to be mystified, understood as a modern failure of nerve.

This failure of nerve correlates with what Gilbert Murray called a “failure of nerve” among the Greeks, a shift to philosophies that substituted mystification for analysis and spiritualism for science. It follows that the cyberpunk sublime is not: it is rather a lack of comprehension concerning the everyday. Cyberpunk sublimity is a failure of nerve concerning the everyday and subsequent spiritualisation of the “things”.

Cyberpunk sublimity must focus on a “thing” to be sublime. To transcend the mundane, it must first be understood in mundane terms and allowed to extrapolate: once the “thing” has been allowed to percolate it may assume the mantle of the spiritual. Conversely, the subjects of the “old” postmodern sublime have lost their position as icons of sublimity, belonging as they do to a bygone era as much Ozimandias as Moon Landing.

In this paper I will argue that cyberpunk, through its unique realisation of the sublime and failure of nerve, enjoys no relationship to the spiritual but a simple mystification of the mundane. This failure of nerve sublimity is seen in the demi-deity artificial intelligence within Tom Maddox’s short story Snake- Eyes and the necromantic nanotechnology of Bear’s Blood Music while the passing of an older sublime can be seen in the Gibson/Sterling collaboration Red Star, Winter Orbit.

The Desert of the Real: Christianity, Buddhism and Baudrillard in The Matrix and Popular Culture
James McGrath
Butler University, USA

The movie The Matrix draws explicitly on imagery from at least three major sources within the domains of religion and philosophy: Buddhism, Christianity, and the writings of Jean Baudrillard. This provides a fascinating opportunity to explore popular culture’s ability to synthesize eclectically from diverse and often discordant traditions. Christianity historically accepts the reality of the world while claiming that there is an unseen, transcendent one that gives it meaning. Buddhism essentially denies the genuine reality of the visible, physical world. Baudrillard has been called a ‘hyper-realist’, and he argues that those things traditionally considered ‘reality’ are not the things that seem most real to us, obscured as they are by maps and simulacra of our own making, which come to take precedence over the things they purport to describe. As is well known, the movie The Matrix ties contemporary technology and the concept of virtual reality to the perennial philosophical question ‘What is real?’ Yet by giving its answer in language and symbols drawn from three seemingly incompatible world views, the movie provides us with an insight into the way popular culture makes eclectic use of various streams of thought to fashion a new reality that is not unrelated to, and yet is nonetheless distinct from, its religious and philosophical undercurrents and underpinnings. In examining the treatment of these issues in The Matrix, reflections will also be offered concerning whether a genuine ‘cyberculture’ is in fact arising which transcends traditional national, cultural, religious and philosophical boundaries, or if this cyberculture is simply one more element of virtual reality, a simulacrum obscuring the continuing underlying differences that confront human society.

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