Thursday, March 15, 2007

Putting Prayers in Your Shopping Cart


The Washington Post ran an interesting story yesterday about religion online -- Linking Ancient and Modern, A Worldwide Web of Worship. The article focused on one particular example -- a Hindu website that allows Hindus around the world to purchase prayers in their favorite holy temple back in India.

This seems, to me, like an interesting use of LR quadrant technology (exterior collective) with LL quadrant culture (interior collective), which, for the person involved, has an impact on the UL quadrant psychology (interior individual).

OK, once more in English -- I like the way technology is being used in this example as a tool for assisting people with fervent cultural religious belief to satisfy their drive to have their prayers placed in the most auspicious temples. Clearly this is a very superstitious belief system, and one that some of us might see as pre-rational, but for those who hold the beliefs it can be very important to their sense of well-being to know that they have done their best to seek favor from the Gods.

I'm surprised there isn't something similar for Jews who want to have prayers placed at the Wailing Wall, or Catholics who want their prayers read in one of the great churches of Rome, or even the Vatican.

Anyway, here is a bit of the article:

The Internet has become a hub of religious worship for millions of people around the world. Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs and people of other faiths turn regularly to Web sites to pray, meditate and gather in "virtual" houses of worship graphically designed to look like the real thing. Some sites offer rites from baptism to confession to conversion to Judaism.

For many cyber-worshipers, online religious life conducted at home or in an Internet cafe has replaced attendance at traditional churches, temples, mosques and synagogues. Some are coming to religion for the first time, in a setting they find as comfortable as their grandparents found a church pew, while millions of people reared on churchgoing are discovering new ways to worship.

"The first wave of religion online, in the 1990s, was mainly for nerds and young people and techies," said Morten Hojsgaard, a Danish author who has written extensively about online religion. "But now it really is a mirror of society at large. This is providing a new forum for religious seekers."

Hojsgaard said the number of Web pages dealing with God, religion and churches increased from 14 million in 1999 to 200 million in 2004. Religion now nearly rivals sex as a topic on the Internet: A search for "sex" on Google returns about 408 million hits, while a search for "God" yields 396 million.

The boom in online religion comes at a time when people, especially the young, are questioning traditional institutions, Hojsgaard said. Many are interested in religion, but they want the freedom to fashion a personalized style of worship. "Old mechanisms of religious authority are changing," Hojsgaard said. "There is more emphasis on individualism. We want to decide for ourselves."

India, with more than 1.1 billion people and a passion for technology, has become a leader in the practice of religion online, through a very large number of often very small Web sites, a pattern that reflects the decentralization of much of religious life here. Hindus sitting in the United States or Europe watch streaming live video of morning prayers from temples in their home towns. Sikhs listen to podcasts of prayers from Kashmir. Muslims download schedules of prayer times and recordings of sung verses from the Koran.

Members of India's fast-growing middle class have embraced the Internet in ways that startle their parents, many of whom were raised in villages that still barely have telephone service. At many Hindu temples, a priest's typical day includes pre-dawn prayers for a sacred cow or elephant, and time set aside to read e-mails asking for blessings.

The article goes on from there to look at one specific example of a Hindu woman living in Europe who buys prayers in a specific temple back in India, and how those prayers get to the temple she intended. Very interesting.


No comments: