In Jerry Seinfeld's latest interview, he discloses how he used tenets of Scientology to improve his interpersonal communication and performance skills, going so far to say as "It's all technology."
In another article also posted today on msnbc, tech is used to create Jesus 2.0. The proliferation of Christian based, or faith based websites is being touted as shifting the way we worship.
Now I use a few websites myself for theological questions - enduringword.com being one. But does this really change the way I worship? I'm definitely getting more information, perhaps more quickly than in the past when I would have waited for an opportunity to talk to someone with expertise in the area I had questions about.
In the Jesus 2.0 article, this quote disturbed me, and really gets to the point of this post.
"Spark Networks spokeswoman Gail Laguna argues that religion has a real power to pull together a niche market online" (my emphasis).
Not addressed in this article is how these online sites are being funded. Pop up ads? Donations? Specific churches funding them? When Seinfeld took Scientology classes, how much did he have to pay for them.
I'm finding this recent conflation of technology and religion, all the while ignoring the undergirding economic forces, highly disturbing.
Slate.com has quite a few instances of this, albeit a bit more implicit. "Blogging the Bible" was quite popular on the front page for a few months. There was recently a bit of buzz concerning the man who lived every rule (really?) of the Bible for an entire year. Now, journalism, especially online journalism, is a bit trickier to unpack in terms of economics, besides the fact that journalists want to get paid. But in the case of the Biblical guinea pig, he had a book coming out describing his experiences.
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