Downloading my Religion

I've been intrigued by Linda Woodhead's piece on the "dereformation of religion" in the Guraniad. It has attracted the usual plethora of Dawkinian Dinosaurs, of course (unlike the pleasant, friendly and intelligent atheists who occasionally visit these shores).

But I feel she's missed out on the impact that the big Religion-sharing sites are having. Like the peer-to-peer sites of a year or two ago, and the various sites where one can download music and video with little regard for legality - the Religion-sharing sites are undermining the old, corporate religions by enabling people to download Religion without payment or any respect for the central organisations that try to run these faiths.

Let us take Gordon. Gordon is just an ordinary quantity surveyor by day. But at night, thanks to the faith-sharing site "FaithSpottiBookStream", he is able to download megabytes of any belief he chooses. Last Monday, when I spoke to him, he'd just download Jesuitism and was looking forward to educating the masses living in darkness. However on Tuesday he'd managed to install the belief system of a tribe of frog-worshippers dwelling in a remote Amazonian forest, and spent the rest of the working week in a trance caused by licking frog-skins. He dropped me a note on Saturday to let me know he was working on a mash-up of Liberal Anglicanism and Inca religion. That's where you rip the beating heart out of your living sacrifice, while assuring him that he will still be alive and his spirit will be with us "in a very real way".

The Corporate religions, of course, are struggling to know what to do about this. In the same way that video killed the radio star, and  the download is seeing off the CD - what does one do when, instead of making a 200 mile pilgrimage to Walsingham, your potential visitors are downloading the "Catholic Lite" app onto their Android? Especially when you never quite know which of the various belief and behaviour options they're ticking under the "Custom Installation". If the commands and instructions of your denomination are starting to look a bit irksome and your devotions aren't starting so quickly - bloatware, if you will -  there's nothing to stop somebody downloading something open-source like neo-Paganism, and just getting to work with their own development environment.

And then there are the ever-present dangers of malware or software corruption. For didn't even the operating system of this planet suffer early corruption thanks to a Worm? I heard about one poor chap, who was trying to download Buddhism. Unfortunately he'd been suckered into downloading a viral YouTube video at the same time. and now he's terrified he's going to be reincarnated as Rick Astley.