(3 of 4)
The point here is not that a major Asatru comeback is in the cards. Thor's best days are almost certainly behind him (though no fewer than 12 Asatru Websites are listed in the Yahoo! Web-indexing service). But there are plenty of other nearly extinct or quite localized creeds that could expand their compass via the Internet and thus heighten the world's already ample multiculturalism, for better or worse. Paganism, shamanism, voodoo, gnosticism, santeria--these and scores more are out there, accessible worldwide. So is the expanding pool of freshly coined sects, some of which will presumably survive. All this may seem unimportant now, with so many Websites looking so gray. But as bandwidth grows, the Web will become a dirt-cheap form of television. Imagine hundreds of Billy Grahams, each preaching a different message to a different audience.
The religious fringe of the Web does have some harbingers of mutual tolerance, even convergence. Many Websites exhibit one hallmark of the scientific age: theological minimalism. Confident claims about the afterlife are rare, and notions of God are often vague. The ecospiritualists may pay homage to Gaia or indulge in tribal drumming rituals, but for many, Gaia is simply a metaphor, and drumming a way to unwind. Even ancient religions, as rendered by their excavators, lose some theological bite. The Asatru Webmaster admits his beloved Thor is just a symbol.
With theologies this fuzzy, what's to fight over? (Especially given another common theme on these Websites: an explicit aversion to dogma, rooted in the Internet's famously antiauthoritarian culture.) Pantheist proselytizer Harrison says he is heartened, not threatened, by movements ranging from paganism to Native American spiritualism. Since Pantheism holds that God is in every bit of the universe, all forms of reverence for nature are roughly consistent with it.
Certainly an environmentalist refrain does seem part of the liturgy of almost everyone on the religious fringe of the Web. And not surprisingly, this green perspective is typically global (the Web is, after all, worldwide). The generally amorphous teachings of the First Internet Church of All have one crystal-clear theme: "saving the living organism known as Earth."
This biophilic notion of a living planet--of Gaia--partly converges, oddly enough, with a kind of technophilia that is indigenous to the Internet. The central notion of techno- sophy--that life is a technology--has as its flip side the idea that technology is a form of life. Strange as this sounds, it is an increasingly common refrain in cyberculture. If the idea is valid--if indeed fiber optics are living tissue--then it is easier to think of Earth in the Age of Internet as a coherent living system, a giant organism complete with a giant brain. Gaia with a high IQ.
The image of a literal planetary nervous system was laid out a half-century ago as a kind of prophecy by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit mystic whose writings were banned by the Roman Catholic Church. Teilhard envisioned the technological evolution of a "noosphere"--the "thinking envelope of the Earth." The noosphere, he believed, entails a "sort of etherized universal consciousness" that will lead us, at last, to an era of brotherly love. Needless to say, Teilhard has a following on the Net.