The kind of thinking that requires quietness alone may not be best served by The Web. Traditional learning will often involve absorbing the ideas in a book, thinking about those ideas and then perhaps internalizing those ideas in the form of an essay.

But just because Web thinking is different does not necessarily make it less valuable. Traditional learning, after all, also requires a sense of perspective. It requires the association of ideas as well as the pursuit of ideas. It requires making leaps of faith and finding unexpected connections. So we must be wary of limiting what we regard as useful thought only to those procedures that our particular generation have grown up with and been educated in. Learning does not have to take place alone in a silent library necessarily.

The interactive culture and cross-cultural possibilities of The Internet seem to be a new development in learning. We should guard against making easy judgements about whether or not the Web assists learning or hinders it. This is because appropriate learning for one age may not be so appropriate to another. An Internet age expects and requires different behaviours – less isolation, more linking, more group discovery and more collaborative thinking, for instance.

And if the Web is changing how we think, it is probably also changing how we think about God. But then human thought on the nature of God has probably never been static. It depends to some extent on the tools available to us. A cave-man might think in terms of cave painting. Someone who can read and has access to printed texts may make more reference to the written word than someone who cannot read. And one would expect a Web connection to have theological implications too, I think.

It may be too soon in the history of The Internet to be able to assess the various ways in which religious thought will adapt to and be shaped by a connected world. But it’s something to be thinking about, either off-line or on-line.

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As The Internet progresses and adapts, it provides us with new ways of interacting. It gives us a voice. The Internet is also unusual in that rather than having hubs where everything is controlled, it largely abdicates control. No one owns The Internet.

My argument is that this provides a new analogy for God. The Internet God accommodates to an absolute truth or a relative truth.  The Internet God can transcend geography and national boundaries. It can handle specifics and generalities, emotion, intellect, love and hate.

In one sense, this is simply to restate the old addage that God is Man. But the more I think about the Internet as a metaphor for God, the more it seems to reward my attention. Perhaps in the future we will look back at the arrival of The Internet not so much as a technological achievement as a contribution to philosophical and religious thought.

The birth of The Internet may come to be seen not just for its scientific and sociological importance but also as a moment in history when our understanding of the world, and our place in it, shifted.

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Watching Richard Dawkins speaking with such conviction here makes me attracted to the idea of a relative truth, a truth tailored to our own experience and requirements. Richard Dawkins would find such an idea scientifically blasphemous.

The metaphor of an Internet God seems to accommodate both absolute and relative approaches to truth. Richard Dawkins, alongside many religious leaders, would not entertain the idea of a relative truth. In this respect, Richard Dawkins sides with many believers in God and sings from the same hymn sheet!

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The Reverend Dr. Raphael G. Warnock from Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia is preaching here about Health Care Reform. His message is that justice cannot be separated from faith, that God is of the world more than the pulpit. The preacher is in a long tradition of religious leaders who have placed morality before ceremony.

Certainly sincerity, wonder, tolerance, patience and a certain absence and presence of self seem to be involved. All these things are very basic to the human mindset of worship, our DNA of religion perhaps.

I love this clip from The Hajj 2009 and I thank the film maker for sharing it. It has a modesty and simplicity and it gives us a sense of the experience from ground level rather than those aerial shots of The Hajj that we may be more accustomed to.

I find the ordinariness, modesty, excitement and tension shown here moving. The experience is raw, stripped bare and completely unpretentious. There’s an emotion here that I think we can all relate to and to some degree know, whatever our religious background.

This video provides some background to Hinduism. It is by no means perfect and it may well have a Western slant – so watch it with a pinch of salt!

That the first traces of color have been found in fossil bird feathers (First Trace of Color Found in Fossil Bird Feathers, Carl Zimmer in the New York Times) only adds to my fascination with fossils and sense of wonder at them. I picked up a fossil once whilst walking in a limestone area and to have held in my hand a creature 50 or so million years old that had probably not been found by anyone previously was a rare privilege.

This short clip captures some of the wonder of finding a fossil:

And so my position with fossils runs something like this. Fossils may well undermine a literal interpretation of some religious texts. But a literal interpretation of myth and poetry has never seemed very productive to me in any case. And fossils are awesome. They cause me to step back from the day to day. For me, they are religious in every sense.

Whilst I accept the Archbishop’s position that community needs to be more than Facebook, I think it is unfortunate to be framing the discussion about social media as if it is a problem for the young. Social media is a valuable and life enhancing phenomenon of our time for the use of people of all ages. It is for all of us to use to enrich our lives in the best way possible. My guess is that most young people know how to use social media in a more balanced way than most adults and that even Archbishops could learn from them on this!

As with most views on social media, there is always another way of viewing each opinion. I prefer to think of social media as another element of life’s rich tapestry; as another tool to community.

And whilst I understand the risks of slavish obsession with any communication tool, I also know that social media can be a lifeline for the lonely and dispossessed. I argue in my essay on The Internet is God that, if God exists, he or she exists in social media and on The Internet too!

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But this idea – that drawing attention to yourself by flowering matters less than fruiting – can be applied to The Internet too. Everything of worth on The Internet does not need bangs and whistles, bold colors or shouting from the rooftops.

Such transparently valuable projects as The Open Source Movement, Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, The Open Directory Project and The Scout Report are appreciated for what they do, not for the fanfare that they create.

And this should be your aim if you are starting out with an Internet idea: Provide nourishing fruit, and even if, like the fig, your site does not flower in a big way, it will still be found and appreciated.

It’s over six months since The Internet is God went live and I’ve had very little interest in the idea as yet. However, I knew at the outset that this might be a difficult idea to sell. It may never catch on and I can live with this. I’m busy with other things and have lots of other ideas that I have no time to implement.

But you never know. Ideas can suddenly establish themselves and as quickly become unfashionable. Stuff happens whether we like it or not and the only thing to do is to keep serious, continue to believe that at least some of our thoughts are worth having and see what happens. You could spend every spare moment promoting yourself and writing press releases or you can relax with the thought that if the idea was worth having in the first place, others might think so too before too long!

Perhaps it’s a rationalization to say that I’m enjoying the lack of attention and the opportunity to consider other things. If so, I’m all for rationalization. Rationalization is one of those kindly tools that the human mind can use to soften disappointment and negotiate everyday life. The best strategy when things don’t go exactly to plan may be to continue to like and trust yourself but not take yourself too seriously either, or beat yourself up about things that are out of your hands anyway!