In The Soul of Cyberspace Zaleski quotes Rabbi Yosef Y. Kazen, founder of the Chabad-Lubavitch Web site, description of his “Global Interactive Database of Good Deeds” in which users type in an act of goodness or kindness and a ‘vitrual menorah’ lights up:

“[this database adheres to] our perspective that the Internet is a fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy of swords into ploughshares”

The text referenced is: “And He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” (Isaih 2:4, Neviim, The Tanakh)

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The following quote from Tiitsman’s article on destabilized spectatorship and the creative potential of chaos in Blade Runner suggests another cognitive space in which a Temple of Cyborgism emerges.

“Replicant identity can only be unequivocally determined by a test of involuntary pupil dilation in emotional response. However the viability of this test is thrown in to question as the replicants spontaneously develop human emotions on their own after a few years. For the genetic designers, this ability signals a facet of replicant development exceeding the control of their design — the emerging life of the robotic beast.”

As Tiitsman points out, the genetic designers see the development of ‘their creation’ exceeding the control, or original intention of their design. This is clearly a similar reaction to that seen in human parents when their children pursue a path that diverges from the expected. However, in this case, the replicants aren’t ‘getting a piercing’ they are getting ‘humanness,’ rising to a ‘higher’ level of sentience. This suggests they are a kind of emergent life form, they are coalescing in the way that microbial life may have become more than it was by “adding the uniqueness” of other life forms to its own (the quotes here indicate the borrowing of this phrase from Roddenberry’s ‘Borg’ concept).

Emergent, yes, but what kind of beast is this? The beast that swims the moat around the “territory of creation?”

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O’Leary (1996) as quoted by Højsgaard & Warburg in “Religion and Cyberspace”

As we move from text-based transmissions into an era where the graphic user interface becomes the standard, and new generations of programs such as Netscape are developed which allow the transmission of images and music along with words, we can predict that [the available resources of] online religion will [expand beyond text to include] iconography, image, music, and sound — if not taste and smell…Surely computer rituals will be devised which exploit the new technologies to maximum symbolic effect.

Quote from metacritical.com:

Jesus is a computer.
Transubstantiation via silicon wafer.
We have declared the cyborg religion.
Mammon is God, born this day.

From a summary of the preceedings of the 2000 AAR meeting: “Models of God in Religion and Science”

“Cyborg religion” also came up at a Religion and the Social Sciences section devoted to, “The Moral Life of Cyborgs: Issues in Forging, Navigating, and Resisting Virtual Communities.” A foursome from Union Theological Seminary, including Rachel A. R. Bundang, Nancie Erhard, Davina C. Lopez, and Aana Marie Vigen, offered a fascinating exploration into this cutting-edge topic.

This Union Theological Seminary group argued that virtual technologies are profoundly re-mapping “the actual way in which human beings relate within the world.” Presenters situated cyberspace within the larger political-economic-cultural context of an emergent visual age. Four themes were discussed: (1) the impact of visual images upon people, (2) the impact of cyberspace upon ecological relationships in the non-human world, (3) issues of morality as they are related to the body and sacred community of life, and (4) the relationship between the proliferation of information technologies and changes in patterns of human labor within the internet economy.

Josh Levy’s project on activism in Second Life takes the form of a Machinima Documentary. In this screenshot you can see the slogan “Avatars Against the War.” The avatar has ethical practice. What about worship, spirituality? How do Second Lifers express religiosity in the virtual world?

May 6, 2007
Bhutan Lets the World In (but Leaves Fashion TV Out)
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

THIMPHU, Bhutan — “Explore the World,” promised the signboard outside.

Inside Norling Cyberworld, in a second-floor corner of a busy shopping arcade, Dorji Wangchuk rolled up the sleeve of his Puma sweatshirt and offered a glimpse of his worldly explorations. Inscribed in blue-black ink on the pale inside of his left forearm was the image of a dragon, a tattoo that he had drawn himself, with instructions from the Internet.

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When the tech and the environment are no longer disambiguated. This is an ultimate boundary crossing for RelTech.

Ubiquitous computing (or “ubicomp”) is a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities. As opposed to the desktop paradigm, in which a single user consciously engages a single device for a specialized purpose, someone “using” ubiquitous computing engages many computational devices and systems simultaneously, in the course of ordinary activities, and may not necessarily even be aware that they are doing so.

From Wikipedia

I read Meditations on the Indranet (Erik Davis) for the first time today. I say this as though I should have read it earlier because I ran across the text online while doing research for my work on mapping the Temples of Cyborgism and just didn’t have time to read it. When Davis talks about comparing the net of Indra to the internet he concedes it isn’t as vast, and then says “But our world’s humble digital net is the first technological expression of this magical metaphor.” I was reminded of a quote he recounts in another text Magic, Memory and the Angels of Information:

One of the most compelling snares is the use of the term metaphor to describe a correspondence between what the users see on the screen and how they should think about what they are manipulating … There are clear connotations to the stage, theatrics, magic—all of which give much stronger hints as to the direction to be followed. For example, the screen as ‘paper to be marked on’ is a metaphor that suggests pencils, brushes, and typewriting….Should we transfer the paper metaphor so perfectly that the screen is as hard as paper to erase and change? Clearly not. If it is to be like magical paper, then it is the magical part that is all important…
—Alan Kay, “User Interface: A Personal View“