Abstracts

William Sims Bainbridge

Keynote Address: Immortality of Avatars: Deciding between the Paths of Science or Religion
With illustrations chiefly from Second life and World of Warcraft, this presentation considers the tension between faith and wisdom, in the context of virtual worlds. Inspired by John Cage's 1958 relativistic work, Indeterminacy, and by traditional religious bibliomancy, the text will be generated by random sampling of 2 sets of 100 sentences. One set is based on the author's 2007 pair of books, Across the Secular Abyss and Nanoconvergence, plus a 1981 presentation to the American Astronautical Society, "Religions for a Galactic Civilization." The other set consists of 100 "enigmas" transcribed from Babylon 5, expressing the quasi-religious mystery of future science and technology. Simultaneously, the slide show illustrates the coming conflict between science and religion around the issue of the human soul, including the challenge to traditional faiths from artificial intelligence and cyberimmortality.

Tom Boellstorff

Special Session: A Conversation With Tom Boellstorff
Sophrosyne Stenvaag hosts the author of Coming of Age in Second Life, the result of years of anthropological fieldwork in the virtual world, for a wide-ranging discussion of the anthropological perspective, methodologies, the impact of place and identity on religious expression in virtual worlds, and much more.

Lincoln Cannon

Mormonism: A Religion of the Future
We should expect Mormonism to thrive amidst accelerating technological change in coming decades. Its relatively young and reproductive demographics, high cultural retention, emphasis on education, theological compatibility with science, moderate stances in bioethics, and persistent adoption of new technologies will be drivers. The views of Mormon Transhumanists may provide insight into the future of Mormonism.

Helen Farley

Creating Immersion and Engagement: Studies in Religion in Second Life
This presentation seeks to address some of the issues and explore the benefits associated with teaching tertiary-level studies in religion in Second Life. This popular virtual world provides an unparalleled opportunity for people to interact with each other and their environment in unfamiliar and innovative ways. Though originally applied to the acquisition of language skills, immersive learning has been found to be equally useful in other disciplines. For students of studies in religion, successful role identification would enable them to view a variety of belief systems through fresh eyes, helping them to acquire desirable graduate attributes. These would include the acquisition of knowledge about other cultures and times, or the fostering of intercultural communication and an appreciation of cultural diversity, historical consciousness and a global perspective.

A number of elaborately and carefully designed religious spaces already exist within Second Life, their creators encouraging participation in rituals and worship. Every Sunday on Epiphany Island an avatar can take communion and hear the sermon delivered by Anglican minister Arkin Ariantho. But just as Second Life enables followers of many faiths to worship and engage with their religious communities, it also provides the opportunity for students to fully participate in a ritual or role-play in a way that is not feasible in real life for legal, financial and ethical reasons, even if appropriate spaces did exist within their geographical location. The possibilities for using these already extant spaces and the creation of purpose-built ‘religious spaces’ to creative immersive learning opportunities for use in the studies in religion curriculum will be discussed.

Robert Geraci

The Virtual Sacred: Hierophanies of Second Life
Centuries of disenchantment have left western culture with a search for transcendence and online games have become the primary arena for that quest’s fulfillment. For centuries, the aura of religious spaces has slowly diminished as a consequence of advancing scientific knowledge, a process accelerated by the “death of God,” as pronounced by Nietzsche. Over the same period, technology has slowly acquired a sacred aura of its own. Initially written into the Christian expectation of a saintly millennium, modern technology—from atomic weaponry to space travel to artificial intelligence—now frequently receives respect for its allegedly salvific powers. These two historical strands intertwine in the development of virtual reality, which offers a new sacred space, a transcendent world freed from the limitations of earthly life.

Online games provide users/residents with a space and time that has been demarcated from the profane, set apart and made  meaningful. Participation in these games provides users with access to the kind of world cut off in the progressive disillusionment with traditional religious promises. Residents of Second Life experience the hierophany (the bursting forth of the sacred) in several ways, including through the “invention” of religious traditions in-game and through direct participation in the virtual world as a template for the angelic virtual future to come.

James Hughes

The Role of Neurotechnologies in the Religions of the Future
Our growing understanding of the biological basis of cognition, emotion and behavior are enabling new forms of brain training, psychopharmaceuticals and brain-computer interfaces. All of these impact our capacity for compassion, self-control, concentration and altered states of consciousness. How might religions of the future incorporate neurotechnologies to complement their spiritual practices and religious disciplines?

Madeline Klink

Edward Lee Lamoreux

Extant literature about OR/RO is based on, primarily, text-based interactions via email, listserves, and bulletin boards, or relatively static websites. [Edward Lee Lamoureux. “Online Religious Practice Through the Looking Glass: Spirituality and the NetWeb.” Journal of Communication and Religion, Vol. 30 (2) Nov. 2007: 340-375.]

The expanded behavior potentialities in virtual environments, such as Second Life, provide transformative opportunities for OR/RO. Research therein sheds light on new horizons for the use of technology in spiritual practice.

Giulio Prisco

Transhumanist Religions
Description and analysis of new spiritual and "religious" (brackets required) movements that can be broadly described as outlines of "transhumanist religions" compatible with, and based on, the scientific worldview. Key issues: May sentient life evolve toward Godhead? May future technologies resurrect the dead? May we someday create VR universes that contain sentient life? May we _be_ sentient life in such a VR universe? Can complements or alternatives to traditional religions be based on these wild scientific speculations? What can be the impact of "transhumanist religions" on traditional religions, culture, society and politics? And the most important question: Why should this matter to you?

Andrew Wallace

The Technocratic Alternative
We can find religion through out the world in many societies both current and in the past, from out modern monotheistic religions to primitive tribal religions to the ancient religions of Egypt. The evidence we have for religion shows that they probably developed as part of our evolution as a spices from our primitive ancestors influencing out culture as our culture influences our religions. Thus we can see religion as a human construct.

How religion develops in the future, therefore, depends on our own development and how our culture develops. The future development of our society can take many forms. We have a number of challenges ahead of us from peak oils to climate change to over population resulting from our socioeconomic system. Thus, if we wish to maintain a hi-tech society with a good quality of life or standard of living then we need to more to a sustainable society.

The European school of technocracy presents one possibility for a sustainable society that has a distributed characteristic; a moneyless, non-capitalist system that aims to balance the needs of society with those of nature. The system aims to minimise work thus giving people more time to be human. This should lead to an increase in actives such as art and, as religion also falls into the set of human creative activities, more religion. We can find evidence for this in the wide verity of religions today. This paper then explores the possibilities.

Mohammed Yahia

The Hajj Training Simulations and the IslamOnline.net Islands in SL
We would like to highlight our experiences in both hosting the Hajj training simulations and the Ramadan Tent before that. Both of these sims have a strong religious influence that shaped them. However, when we set out to create these sims we decided to examine the limitations we had in real life and how we can surpass them here. We wanted to create a place where both Muslims and non-Muslims can interact safely and understand each other more. We also wanted to focus on the fact that - since non-Muslims in real life cannot visit Mecca - our Hajj sim would enable them to come closer to these structures. I would like to discuss our activities in this regard and how successful Second Life was a medium for us to bring religions closer together and focus on the common grounds we share rather than the differences.