When I found my professor's PDF "Religion and the Internet" as one of my top results on Google at the beginning of researching for this post, I once again realized that this class is legitimately taught by a professional.
After I got past that, I realized that I've stumbled across the concept that online worship is accepted, (in most cases of Christian practices anyway,) while online rituals are usually disregarded as not real or legitimate. As Christopher Helland proposes his Ritual Transfer theory, that when transferring from reality to online, or vice-versa, certain aspects of rituals must be changed, added, or given up in order to be performed, which causes most people to view the changed rituals as artificial replacements of the original.
In other cases, however, people have made good use of the Internet to give members of a religious community the ability to worship and perform rituals via their websites or online services. CullensAbcs is a YouTube user who creates short videos for teachers to use in worship or teaching settings with small children, usually covering an arts and crafts of some sort, while also teaching a lesson from the Bible, a say-along prayer and providing a song for viewers to learn and sing along with her. One example would be here, http://youtu.be/kZi1NBHP19s where CullensAbcs talks about creation.
In the emergent church, it is not unusual for different congregations to converge via broadband or satellite connections, or even to just broadcast their own services via broadband internet streams for online observers to take part in in the comfort of their own homes. Although this seems to present itself as a very outreach intended action with hopes of getting online participants in the doors of the physical church, it seems that often times those whom participate online have little interest in making the effort to attend the physical church, thus their online participation is not a result of their curiosity, but instead of laziness and social disinterest.
In the case of rituals performed via programs such as Minecraft or websites such as SecondLife, the person at the computer is merely making their own self the puppeteer of an avatar to worship their desired deity, while they themselves simply look on as spectators. The digital recreation of a person is not the same as a physical, animate person, and cannot be regarded as a legitimate worship ritual in any sense either.
After I got past that, I realized that I've stumbled across the concept that online worship is accepted, (in most cases of Christian practices anyway,) while online rituals are usually disregarded as not real or legitimate. As Christopher Helland proposes his Ritual Transfer theory, that when transferring from reality to online, or vice-versa, certain aspects of rituals must be changed, added, or given up in order to be performed, which causes most people to view the changed rituals as artificial replacements of the original.
In other cases, however, people have made good use of the Internet to give members of a religious community the ability to worship and perform rituals via their websites or online services. CullensAbcs is a YouTube user who creates short videos for teachers to use in worship or teaching settings with small children, usually covering an arts and crafts of some sort, while also teaching a lesson from the Bible, a say-along prayer and providing a song for viewers to learn and sing along with her. One example would be here, http://youtu.be/kZi1NBHP19s where CullensAbcs talks about creation.
In the emergent church, it is not unusual for different congregations to converge via broadband or satellite connections, or even to just broadcast their own services via broadband internet streams for online observers to take part in in the comfort of their own homes. Although this seems to present itself as a very outreach intended action with hopes of getting online participants in the doors of the physical church, it seems that often times those whom participate online have little interest in making the effort to attend the physical church, thus their online participation is not a result of their curiosity, but instead of laziness and social disinterest.
In the case of rituals performed via programs such as Minecraft or websites such as SecondLife, the person at the computer is merely making their own self the puppeteer of an avatar to worship their desired deity, while they themselves simply look on as spectators. The digital recreation of a person is not the same as a physical, animate person, and cannot be regarded as a legitimate worship ritual in any sense either.
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