So I saw a cartoon this past weekend in which a young girl asks her father if God is a dot-com or a dot-org. Of course, it's meant to be cute and probably draw the distinction between the youngsters and those of us who grew up with the Internet being a worst-case solution in the event of a nuclear war. The problem I have is that in America we often treat religion as if (the Christian) God were a dot-com or a dot-org.
As a little background, each dot-whatever, called a Top Level Domain (TLD) was established with a specific consumer in mind. For example, the dot-gov and dot-mil TLDs are for government and military organizations respectively. The first publicly available TLDs -- dot-com, dot-org, and dot-net were for for-profit organizations, not-for-profit organizations, and network providers (e.g. ISPs) respectively.
Now I suppose you might be able to argue that religion is a dot-org and maybe even that God is by extension -- but we seldom think of God as an organization, and I'm not really sure we should. Of course the neo-conservatives in America seem to think that religion (and God by extension) is a dot-com -- just remember all of the WWJD bracelets we saw a few short years ago, and then there was the blockbuster Mel Gibson movie "The Passion" -- and I won't even go into how many automobiles in Arizona have little fish or bumper-stickers on their bumpers. Even many churches are getting into the act, making what were once worshipful services into info-tainment because apparently people won't attend otherwise. In the process, God has been re-packaged for mass consumption and the stories of the Christian gospels have been missed or skipped over.
Ok, so back to my TLD metaphor -- is there a TLD that would describe God? I think there is, and I think that this idea is supported by the stories provided in the Christian scriptures. So here's the ground-breaking idea -- God is a dot-net. The primary stories we have in the gospels are of the relationships between the one Christians refer to as "the messiah" and everyone else. In contrast, the mention of "sin" and "redemption" is almost non-existant in comparison. It would almost seem that this one the Christians refer to as "the messiah" didn't focus on "selling" the idea of heaven or hell, but rather focused on relating to people as human beings. My experience would indicate that this same theme is carried throughout the rest of the Christian scriptures -- connect with others and treat them as peers.
So I guess that makes humanity the first peer-to-peer network and God the first sysadmin.
2 comments:
Yeah, peer to peer network is a good metaphor for our relationships with each other, but the notion of God as the sysadmin??? I would prefer to think of God as the wiring that connects everybody together. At least that is what Augustine said. So, God is the hardwiring....
Of course, on second thought, the better metaphor might just be a Disney movie with Users trying to reach the MCP
Ok, I guess I could see God as the universe's CAT5, but I think limits God enough that the concept loses its meaning.
A sysadmin, on the other hand, establishes which protocols can be used, defines acceptable behavior, and coaxes all the performance possible out of the hardware. Of course, the hardware may not actually perform the way the sysadmin wants it too (that's what you get for buying wussy servers).
Whitehead's followers interpreted Process and Reality in such a way that God becomes the creativity of the universe that leads each of us to the best possible result...of course that doesn't mean that the outcome is pre-determined...only that we are drawn to the best conclusion.
This is, in my not-so-humble opinion, what the epistle means when it says that charisma is saving us.
I'm not keen on the TRON metaphor...even though it's been a while since I've seen it, I seem to remember the system trying to block the users (and you have to know that the motorcycle race on the game was wicked hard), and that's a little too dualistic for me.
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