United Communities of Spirit

SACRED CONFLUENCE

INTERRELIGIOUS NETWORK DEVELOPMENT

ON THE GLOBAL INTERNET

An Agenda for Activists

Prepared for the 1995 IRFWP Conference

Realizing the Ideal: The Responsibility of the World's Religions,

Section III, "Religion and the Ideal Society"

Bruce Schuman

PO Box 23346, Santa Barbara, California

http://rain.org/~origin

July 13, 1995

CONTENTS

1. Realizing the Ideal Society:

The Responsibility of the World's Religions

2. The Key to the Ideal: A Scientific Approach to Unity in Diversity

3. The Power of the Internet

1. Realizing the Ideal Society:

The Responsibility of the World's Religions

It is with pleasure that I offer these thoughts to the International Religious Foundation for World Peace. Thank you for your global leadership, and thank you for this opportunity. I am especially happy to be here because I am convinced that the explosive recent growth in international online telecommunications has created a very special opportunity for the world's religious communities, and I am excited to share my understanding of these possibilities with you.

My objective in this paper is to outline the dimensions of this emerging new opportunity for interfaith communications and network development, and to argue that the avant gard leadership of the world interfaith movement is today in a position to develop an unprecedented and brilliant cooperative project, that can have a profound impact on global civilization, and significantly contribute to the realization of the ideal society.

Indeed, I am convinced not only that this opportunity now presents itself to us, but also that it is the responsibility of the world's religious leaders to recognize it, and to fully explore its implications. This vastly powerful new communication medium can play a significant role in amplifying the global impact of the classical religious message, in a variety of unprecedented ways which we must not fail to recognize. Given the many crises in the world today in which an empowered interreligious vision could play a significant role in mitigating human suffering, it seems evident to me that any tool that can advance these possibilities ought to be promptly put to work. Internet telecommunications today are linking together an enormous array of intellectual and spiritual resources, located all over the world, at the speed of light, and at astonishingly low cost. These potentials are begging to be organized by responsible and visionary leaders, who are capable of surveying this potential in all its multi-aspected vastness, and recognizing how these pieces can be put together to form a meaningful and high-impact global project with substantial real-world implications.

Thus, it seems clear to me that the global interreligious community ought now to take steps towards developing a substantial program for exploring the applications of this new medium. Given the enormous power of this technology, and the crying need for interreligious cooperation in a world in crisis, the tools of the Internet offer a unprecedented and most sacred opportunity to develop an international multi-religious network project that could have a significant impact on global society at all levels.

This project could address all the problems of interreligious cooperation in a systematic way, organize a common front, determine with scientific precision exactly what are the common principles which all participating religious groups share, and advance a general vision of virtue and spirituality and healing that could be felt in every corner of the world.

As someone who has been working in the psychology and epistemology of religions for almost thirty years, and who has been developing computer network projects for ten years, I know that these things are possible. We already have the designs and the underlying philosophy and the technology, and if we could solicit the recognition and participation of the world's leading religious institutions, we could build a low-cost high-impact international network with world-transformative potential.

We have the tools, and the insights, and the philosophy, and the basic designs for how to proceed. We have a vast array of psychological insights, and scholarly studies in religion. We understand the basic elements of an authentic philosophy of "unity in diversity" that does not compromise the unique identity of any cultural tradition, yet defines ways that all traditions can work together. If we choose, we can build a multi-level "integrated system" with room for all, that accommodates all points of view, within an integrated spectrum. We can cooperatively devise an abstract theory and "universal theology" that points to all factors that religions have in common, and we can do this in a way that in no way infringes upon or compromises any unique cultural identity. We can create a project based on "layers of interfaces" that meets every religious group on its own ground, on its own terms, seeking a spiritual bond with them at the deepest level, and working with that group to advance a well-defined common agenda that transcends differences.

Because of the power of information technology, we are able to organize and engineer complex programs and build systems which would be far too ambitious in any other context. We can bring hundreds of related factors into our design, and build a system that is intimately shaped by the input of all participants, and which intimately relates to the specifics of their tradition. We can quickly build a universal interreligious library with thousands of scholarly and scriptural texts, and we can build a complex system of online scholarly conferences to discuss every implication of this library for human and world affairs.

We can gather and assemble what could legitimately be called "the collective wisdom of the human race", doing this in way that honors the unique value of each individual tradition, yet builds a bond with that tradition through the principles it shares in common with all others.

The new information technology, in conjunction with the vast array of insights into religion that we possess today, as illuminated by our insights into science and psychology, can be combined to produce an inspiring and brilliant vision of human spiritual potential, in which all religions can share, and which can radiate across the world as a unified voice of spiritual freedom and virtue and illumination and redemption, in a way that can certainly have a substantial impact on the daily affairs of struggling humanity.

International online telecommunications offer to the world's interreligious community a radiant promise of a sacred future, and we must not fail to recognize this potential, or to take the steps necessary to fully unfold its implications for a world that aches for true leadership.

2. The Key to the Ideal: Scientific Approaches to Unity in Diversity

The world interreligious community is well along the way to developing a sophisticated formal approach to the philosophic problems of intercultural "unity in diversity". In the frontispiece of his seminal gathering of insights into this question, A SourceBook for Earth's Community of Religions, Joel Beversluis quotes Steven C. Rockefeller in Spirit and Nature, p 169:

"In this new ecological age of developing global community and interfaith dialogue, the world's religions face what is perhaps the greatest challenge that they have ever encountered. Each is inspired by a unique vision of the divine and has a distinct cultural identity. At the same time, each perceives the divine as the source of unity and peace. The challenge is to preserve their religious and cultural uniqueness without letting it operate as a cause of narrow and divisive sectarianism that contradicts the vision of divine unity and peace. It is a question of whether the healing light of religious vision will overcome the social and ideological issues that underlie much of the conflict between religions."

In the body of his book, Beversluis gathers together a substantial array of independent statements on these questions by some of the world's foremost thinkers, and a clear picture of a sound global philosophy emerges. The global religious community is in a position today to define a powerful central philosophy that is based on the factors held in common by all major religious traditions, doing this in a way that does not compromise or blur individual differences. It is, of course, quite true that these common factors are very general, and there is no broad consensus among religious groups on more specific and controversial issues. But this fact need not derail the emergence of a powerful central coalition that is grounded in classical virtue, and which each tradition could certainly accept, without compromise to its own doctrines, at least in the broadest sense.

And for those traditions who argue that their faith involves an "all or nothing" acceptance of a highly specific ideological doctrine, and who therefore are unable to intimately join forces with a global interreligious coalition that is based on fundamental generalities, we need not omit this group from our co-joint project, but can allow them to position themselves somewhat to the periphery of our central circle, preserving our cooperative liaison with them, and working with them in every way we can on every dimension of commonality that we share.

We need to build this kind of flexibility into our coalition, because it will make our work much stronger, and far more inclusive. Even "narrow" religious groups generally stand on a platform of solid virtue, and we can share that platform with them, and be strengthened by their presence. Thus, we must work to avoid alienating these groups, because they represent a force of goodness and virtue that strengthens our coalition, and their critique of our positions through dialogue can help us refine our insights, and overcome our blind spots.

In his popular book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, in the section "Why Divided?", Pope John Paul II offers an insight that I believe is a key to the creative empowerment of global religious community. In answer to the question "Why did the Holy Spirit permit all these divisions?", and speaking in ways that are broadly applicable to the world religious community, John Paul II responds

Could it not be that these divisions have also been a path continually leading the Church to discover the untold wealth contained in Christ's gospel and in the redemption accomplished by Christ? Perhaps all this wealth would not have come to light otherwise...

More generally, we can affirm for human knowledge and human action a certain dialectic is present. Didn't the Holy Spirit, in His divine "condescendence," take this into consideration? It is necessary for humanity to achieve unity through plurality, to learn to come together in the one church, even while presenting a plurality of ways of thinking and acting, of cultures and civilizations. Wouldn't such a way of looking at things be, in a certain sense, more consonant with the wisdom of God, with His goodness and providence?

Nevertheless, this cannot be a justification for the divisions that continue to deepen! The time must come for the love that unites us to be manifested! Many things lead us to believe that that time is now here, and as a result, the importance of ecumenism for Christianity should be evident.

And I am convinced that we can transpose John Paul II's statement into terms that are applicable to the global religious community, and speak of the reconciliation of its divisions through the power of love. The role of plurality in vitalizing a constructive and creative dialectic is essential. This dialectic motivates a constant creative ferment that occurs today on a global scale, as millions of spiritually-minded souls struggle to integrate a spectrum of insights on spiritual matters which have their sources in diverse religions from every corner of the world.

Though this creative dialectic is at times confrontational and destructive, its broader implications are overwhelmingly positive. Hundreds of millions of souls are today working to formulate their own insights in an increasingly global context, in a way that is informed by a global array of cultural sources -- not only including every religion of the world, but also a wide variety of psychological theories, abstract philosophies, and scientific concepts.

Out of this vast global dialectic, there can only emerge profound authenticity -- and this authenticity makes this process worthy of deep trust by any tradition capable of opening its doors and eyes to fresh creative insights. It is a truism in the history of religions that static dogmatism breeds decay, and this tremendous creative ferment, though it is at times disconcerting and destabilizing, represents the hunger of the human heart for better understanding, for a more profound link to the divine ground of being.

In his widely discussed sociological study A Generation of Seekers, Wade Clark Roof describes the creative ferment going on today among the "baby boom generation" in the United States. These are people in their 40's and 50's today, who have been exposed to a vast array of spiritual insights, who have tended to initially move away from mainstream religious institutions, and who today are tending to return, with their personal world views substantially expanded, and blended in any number of creative ways with insights they have absorbed from the teachings of other cultures.

This entire process is a template for the challenges faced by global religious communities, as they seek to understand how to appropriately relate to other cultures and traditions in an increasingly homogenized social environment. As each tradition evaluates its own position in the context of its neighbors, a spectrum of questions naturally arises: Are we right and they wrong? Could we conceivably both be right? Is there necessarily some global convergence of religions towards one all-inclusive form, or can religions gracefully position themselves relative to one another in a constructive harmony that preserves their unique identities? Is there some possibility that intercultural relationships can be forged which preserve unity and diversity in the same framework, without compromise to either? Is there some "natural" or "best" or "archetypical" way that these relationships can be formed, that preserves and vitalizes their spiritual authenticity, and empowers a broad global-scale coalition that could constructively impact world affairs?

As I see it, there is no question but that these relationships can be formed. There are ways to do these things that are systematic, formal, and precise, and which preserve individual autonomy in a context of global integration and empowerment.

But it is also true that this process can be complex, and that it is going to take some time to work out the details. What is needed is an ongoing process of dialectic and dialogue -- similar to that carried out at this conference, but continued on indefinitely, on a 24-hour-a-day 365-day-a-year basis, around the world.

And today, because of the global power of the Internet, such an ongoing creative dialectic is entirely feasible -- and, in fact, is already happening, as millions of souls interact with one another through their own personal computers in an enormous creative process that some people believe is a precursor to a profound global-scale paradigm shift.

Internet telecommunications can mediate the creative dialogue necessary to work out the specifics of formally-mediated intercultural relations. And information science and engineering -- the theory of project management, flowcharting, system design, etc. -- can powerfully assist in the emergence of these new formal ideas. Cognitive theory and many other branches of psychology may also have some role to play.

We can take our cues from the insights of the world's leaders, starting, for example, with the ideas gathered together in A SourceBook for Earth's Community of Religions. That book is already a network, because it links hundreds of people and ideas into an integrated framework. We can build from that starting point, and from some others, and initiate a process that can establish the foundations of our relationships on a sound and powerful basis, that will facilitate the emergence of highly effective coalitions that advance a broad and yet essential agenda, impacting a confused and wounded world with an integral message of hope and redemption and salvation.

And we can do this in ways which are guided by scientific methods, corrected and edified by international dialogue, and informed by the "eternal truths" of each religion -- and which, far from compromising the individual traditions, can substantially empower and validate them by clearly demonstrating their link to the common underlying factors that bind all the world's major traditions together.

3. The Power of the Internet

The enormous intellectual and spiritual force of the Internet is almost beyond description. Its resources are so vast and so substantial, its dynamics so flexible and fluent, its growth rate so astonishing, and its new technologies so difficult to keep up with, that it can fairly be said that no one really understands it.

But there is a great deal that can be said about it. First of all, there are now perhaps as many as 40 millions human beings (Newt Gingrich's estimate) linked to this global system. These people tend to be among the most intelligent and creative and capable people on the planet. Though it may be true that there is a lot of low-quality information on the public Internet, there are vast resources of scientific and scholarly information, thousands of high-quality full-text books, and thousands of responsible and credible forums where serious students and professionals are discussing issues of subtlety and significance.

The economics of this process can also be astonishing. I myself, for example, am connected to a local system in Santa Barbara California called "RAIN" (Regional Area Information Network), that charges me $10/month for unlimited Internet access -- meaning that I am essentially in a position to make non-stop international phone calls 24 hours a day at a cost of about 33 cents per day, or a little over 1 cent per hour. For this one cent per hour, I can access hundreds of major university libraries around the world, join any of thousands of intellectual discussion forums, download to my personal computer any of thousands of books, and explore with totally liberated intellectual curiosity the explosively growing new medium of "the web" -- which, I believe, will turn out to be the most intellectually powerful and significant technology in the history of the world -- probably by orders of magnitude.

Indeed, it is orders of magnitude that we are talking about here. This is perhaps what is so difficult to grasp about the Internet. It moves enormously quickly, processing enormous amounts of information, doing all of this at the click of a keystroke, for almost no cost. Millions of people are connected to this process, and hundreds of thousands of them are contributing to network growth. Many of these people are highly talented and imaginative, and are creating an indescribably complex array of alternative ways to consider the world. And all it takes to link to their projects is a single click of a keystroke, that can automate the recording of the "location" where one is in this vast array, writing the "URL" (Universal Resource Locator) -- an electronic address -- to a file on our local system, where we can revisit it at our convenience.

We are thus able to create "maps" of our voyages across "cyberspace", and can build amazing libraries of resources with such speed it is barely worthwhile doing with care. The other day, for example, I entered into an Internet archive called "The Christian Classics Ethereal Library", and quickly "clicked" on more than fifty books, including such texts as Milton's Paradise Found, the Autobiography of George Fox, The Imitation of Christ and the Dialogues of St. Catherine of Siena. If I pursue this activity, "clicking" on books that I discover around the Internet, I can build a personal library of thousands of references texts that are in effect stored in my own personal computer -- where I can, if desired, print out any part or all of them. And with equal speed, I can "click on" the religious texts of any of a wide array of other traditions -- Buddhist, Bahai, Hindu, Judaic, Islamic, Zoroastrian -- and do similar things with their text materials.

The convenience of this for religious studies scholarship is astonishing. I not only do not have to trouble myself to actually get to a physical library, where they may not have the book I want, but I don't have to retype any citations that interest me. I can simply "cut and paste" them to my system, and if desired, instantly incorporate them into my own personal writings. In fact, this abundance of riches can be substantially overwhelming, and there are times when the comfort of a familiar hardbound book can be very refreshing. But I find that I need fewer and fewer such books, concentrating only on seminal ones, since this vast array of less essential material is so readily available to me. But the archives of the Internet are but one feature of its vast depths, and there are many other rapidly growing options with substantial implications for interreligious affairs. I can become involved in any number of "online conferences", and my biggest challenge is selecting these with care, so that I do not become overwhelmed with discussions that are not exactly pertinent to my most essential interests. I can have delivered to my own personal "electronic mailbox" any number of daily mailings from a vast array of online mailing lists that deal with every conceivable subject, including a hundred or more that are directly germane to religious studies. Thus, I have chosen a few contacts that seem to me to represent the best material available, and I concentrate my work on these few forums.

In May of 1993, working with the Computer and Information Systems office at the University of California at Santa Barbara, I created my "Bridge Across Consciousness" mailing list, BRIDGE-L@ucsbvm.ucsb.edu, which operates on top-of-the-line L-Soft "listserv" software, and which has had several thousand participants over its two years of life. There are some 385 names today on our mailing list, and we a have a core group of faithful participants, who have kept this project vital over this time. And I also work closely with two other such listserv discussions, INTERREL@vm.temple.edu, The Interreligious Dialogue Network, founded by Dr. Leonard Swidler of Temple University, and G-ETHIC, The Global Ethic Project, also at Temple. Working with these groups, we are building an ambitious and complex set of interrelated systems and networks that are designed to establish the foundation of a global ethic, and to "build bridges" to the world's religious traditions in terms they can understand and support.

We have seen thousands of pages of online dialogue pass through our forums, and though perhaps of uneven quality and significance, their net impact is profound. The dialectic process is ongoing, informed by talented and highly educated professionals, often with deep personal ideological and spiritual commitments. And today, we are moving "beyond dialogue", into the untold mysteries of the "World Wide Web", as we work to design sophisticated new projects that can conduct online polling on ethical and religious issues, compile the composite insights of large groups by systematic methods, and gather together the seminal resources of the world's religious communities in an integrated way.

We are imagining advanced new projects that involve "cooperative computing" on a large scale, as independent systems and programs are linked together through automated web processing, to form integrated and gigantic compendia of resources, that can be searched at high speed, and though which direct connection can be made to any resource in the directory.

This kind of work is presently my own foremost concern, as I work to build the programming technology to empower large-scale automatic resource directories, that are composed of basic identifying information, such as name, date, time, subject, keywords, brief description -- and a direct "URL", which means that anyone finding that resource through keyword search can then directly "click on" that resource and be instantly switched to it, wherever it is in the world, thus accessing to their own personal system.

Since hundreds of these directories can be constructed independently by "anyone anywhere" who wishes to gather together resources, and these independent systems can be linked together into a single system, a single large-scale Internet wide "yellow pages" becomes feasible. As this kind of directory is developed, a fantastic new domain of interpersonal and intercultural connectivity will emerge. And because every listing in this kind of directory can be associated with a complex spectrum of descriptive keywords, very advanced sorts of databases can be devised, that do not "lump" the elements in the database into simplistic and presumptive categories.

This technology of database design has significant implications for intercultural relations, because there is no inherent "categorical imperialism" in the design. All participants -- from whatever culture or tradition -- are free to represent themselves to the system, and to the world, entirely in their own terms, in any way they see fit, in ways that can be as complexly nuanced as they are capable of conceiving.

And sophisticated forms of polling can emerge in this process, that elicit from all participants a detailed profile of their spiritual, ethical and moral beliefs, in ways that can be formally compiled through centralized data processing. This kind of automated online polling can create a highly nuanced profile of any network participant or resource, and can search for "common factors" across this utterly freeform and diverse set of categories, in ways which impose no pre-conceived notions over the results, and deal entirely with the data as conceived by and received from the participants, in their own terms.

If there are limitations to this work today, they lie in demographics. These projects are advanced and somewhat experimental, and tend to be "lightyears ahead" of established institutional presumptions about what is feasible in intercultural relations. Thus, global interreligious network developers have a substantial "information gap" to bridge if they are to introduce their ambitious conceptions to the world at large. Their work is based on advanced philosophy, that combines science and engineering, and psychology and anthropology, and emerging new forms of network development and information processing. All of this work is cutting edge, and moving very fast. We who are working in this area see it as a seminal activity of the Holy Spirit, and are convinced that our work has the power to change the world for the significantly better. But we still remain somewhat isolated and pioneering visionaries, cutting our way into the great unknown, blazing a trail for the global institutions to follow.

Our task becomes that of effectively communicating this vision -- of building workable systems that demonstrate these potentials, of putting together successful pilot programs, and of gathering together the basic resources required to make this breakthrough into a new world of global-scale intercultural relations.

So, we are pursuing this agenda, doing what we can with limited resources, building such systems as we can, and trusting that the unfolding power of the Holy Spirit will not only guide and empower what we do, but will also bring into this work those souls and institutions who are spiritually and intellectually prepared for an advanced new vision of global spirituality, and who are ready to put their resources to the task.

This work is "poised for breakthrough". Basic systems are in readiness today, and we are ready to take significant steps forward, as we seek to build relationships with mainstream institutions, and with spiritual and intellectual pioneers who recognize this potential, and who wish to join with us in this vast undertaking.

Our biggest challenge remains that of solid communication, and of presenting these options as credible and viable solutions to some of the world's most painful problems. But our systems are running today, and they are grounded in classical philosophy, and the best spiritual and intellectual literature available on this planet. With continued investment and growth, there is every reason to suppose that the systems we are pioneering today can lead to the emergence of a powerful new global vision of spiritual wholeness, truth, and vitality, that can substantially impact society at every level, and validate the eternal authenticity of the message of religion in ways that can broadly revive public faith and inspire virtue.

We are working to create an integrated "global lighthouse", a system of ideas and insights and interconnections that can bring the vast array of spiritual resources of this planet into a single focus, in which all groups and individuals, regardless of their ideology, can play an essential role.

These things are possible today, and we are doing them now. We hope you will join us.