"www.allsoulsindy.org"

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, October 13, 2002

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

"We live in a different world." That phrase has become almost a mantra for modern life. Each day, it seems, we witness technological changes that seem to re-arrange how we think of how to communicate, how to work, how to think.

I'm a bit older than some of you, and younger than others, but you can tell a person's age by describing the technology they remember growing up. As for me, I pre-date color television. I almost pre-date television itself, but it's just that my family was the last one in the neighborhood to get one. My parents broke down and did so only because my brothers and I were spending all our time over at friends' houses watching theirs.

I come from the land of black, corded, dial telephones. That is the only kind of telephone there was in my day, but you did have one choice. It could be desk-top or wall-mounted. No one owned a telephone - they were not sold, only rented. The good news is that rental fees paid for repair and replacement. And, by the way, rental was cheaper if you signed up for a party-line, sharing the phone line with a couple other households.

I remember the luxury of electric typewriters. I remember the IBM Selectric, the Cadillac of typewriters, which, with the stroke of the right key, could white-out any typographical error you might make.

I come from the time of mimeograph machines in school, with their not unpleasant but distinctive aroma as the teacher passed the papers around the room. All teachers had blue ink on their fingertips. I remember when television was first able to broadcast live coast-to-coast stories, and it would take a few seconds for the person in California to hear what the person in New York had said.

My earliest music came from pre-FM radios and the music spun at 78 and 45 rpms. We didn't wear seat belts because they only existed on airplanes, and a house was "hi-tech" if it had a transistorized intercom system.

I can go on and on with this, and I'm sure many of you could too, but I'm going to stop here because I'm beginning to feel like an exhibit in the Smithsonian.

We live in a very different world, indeed. CDs, DVDs, cell phones, palm pilots - common, everyday items that many of us take for granted weren't conceived a generation ago. E-mail, the Internet, satellite television, digital cable, thousands of television stations - our communication systems are flourishing!

I approach my subject today with the confession that I know embarrassingly little about it. There are many people in this room who are far more informed about technology than I am. I confess that I still look at a television as if it were a magician's trick. But I also approach this subject with the conviction that it is important. I am not here this morning to speculate on future technology so we can "oooh" and "awwwe" about what great gadgets are here, or just around the corner. I enjoy doing that, but the person sitting next to you probably knows more than I do. It is my intention to focus a bit on how some of the changes may affect us as individuals, and maybe as a church community.

One of the first things that strikes me about the changes of technology is that it affords us of a great deal more choices to make in life. Take the simple example of the telephone. Remember the rented, black, dial telephone I mentioned at the beginning? Today that simple appliance delivers us hundreds, maybe thousands of choices to make. Not only the color and design, but do we want cordless, and if so with how many channels. Will we sign up for voice-mail or caller I.D. or call-forwarding or call-blocking, and on and on. Choices.

But those choices are minuscule compared with what the Internet can offer us. I know this whole concept of the Internet is confusing to many, in too many ways, it still is to me. For those who may have succeeded in dodging the overwhelming presence of this in our lives, let me explain this from the point of my limited understanding. The internet, in a way, is like a vast electronic library of books and articles and other information, retrievable by searching through each book or article by a key word. A web site is created by the person or group who gave that book or article to the electronic library. If you search a word or words on the Internet, your search will take you to the web site of the group who gave that information to the library. For example, if when I searched for "Unitarians in Indianapolis", in .13 seconds, the computer gives me a list of 356 items relating to Unitarians in Indianapolis - everything from an announcement of a fiftieth anniversary party for a couple who are members of the Oaklandon Church, to the web site of Kurt Vonnegut, which mentions that he was raised a Unitarian at All Souls here in Indianapolis. Also among the 356 items is the All Souls web site: allsoulsindy.org.

Let me give you another example. I typed the word "noosphere" into the computer, and my search engine identified, in exactly .25 seconds, over 15,000 books, magazine articles, essays, and other references to the word "noosphere." I'm guessing many of you are as puzzled by that word as I was about a week ago, but I'll save the explanation for later. For now I just want to illustrate how powerful this thing is in communicating even the most obscure information. It also gives me many thousands of choices to make about how to explore the meaning of the word an unusual word.

We live in a different world, and it's probably going to become more different more quickly than we can imagine.

Here at All Souls, changes in technology bring about new circumstances - and I'm not just talking about office equipment. We have discovered, for example, that these days the majority of visitors first visited our web site - www.allsoulsindy.org - before visiting our church. Our surveyss show that many people learned about us first through the Internet. It used to be the case that people visiting us first heard about us through friends or through references in books and magazines, they like what they heard, so they pay a visit to find out what we're all about. It used to be that the typical visitor coming through our doors is curious about us, and is here primarily to gather information so they can decide if they like it here. It has been our hope to supply enough information about Unitarian Universalism for them to make an intelligent decision.

That is not the typical situation anymore. Today, many, perhaps most visitors, have spent time on the Internet learning about us. They have visited the site of the Unitarian Universalist Association and read about UU principles and activities. They have visited the All Souls web site and, before coming through the doors, know about our covenant and about the history and about the activities and organizations and about the minister and D.R.E. Many visitors coming through the doors today for the first time are better informed than some people who have been members for years. These visitors are coming, not so much for information, but for the experience. They already know a great deal, and they like what they've learned, but they come to find out if the experience feels right.

By the way, this point gives me an opportunity to offer a public appreciation to those who made our web-site possible: Jim Strange, who created it originally, and John Mendonça who has upgraded and maintained it for some time now.

The way in which information flows has changed dramatically in the last ten years, primarily due to the Internet. An astounding amount of information is now at everyone's fingertips - more information than could be found in almost any single library only ten years before. We need to remind ourselves, of course, that the information available is not guaranteed to be accurate, but it is still amazing what can be found.

Among other topics, it is remarkably easy to discover information about religions. It has been observed that many very obscure world religions are making converts because people stumble across their web-sites. Druid and Celtic religions are on the rise. Paul Harrison, an Englishman who maintains a Pantheist web site, reports that 500 people every day visit his site. It's hard to imagine, ten years ago, 500 people inquiring about organized Pantheism in the course of a year. In addition to the more esoteric religions, new ones, entirely inspired by the Internet, are being created. You can learn about the First Cyberchurch of the Scientific God, or alternatively, the First Internet Church of All.

A few months ago, Nancy drew my attention to a web site that appears to be one of the most reliable sources of information about religions. It is called "Beliefnet.com" It is a non-sectarian site devoted to disseminating information about world religions. From what I have seen on that site, the information is accurate and presented with as little bias as can be possible in such a subjective area.

One little sub-section on this site is a self-survey called, with tongue-in-cheek, I'd say, "Belief-O-Matic"! Belief-O-Matic is a self-test with series of questions about your religious beliefs. At the end of the survey, the computer calculates which of the world religions most closely fit your beliefs. The results are drawn from dozens of different religions - Catholicism, Jehovah's Witness, Hinduism, Jainism, Mormonism, liberal Protestantism, fundamentalist Christianity and so forth. At the end the result will declare whether you may be 85% liberal Protestant, and 55% Pagan, and so forth.

The small sampling of those I know who took the test seems to confirm it fairly well. For example, it was impressive to discover that in our household, three out of four children taking the test came up with 90 to 100% Unitarian Universalist. These results should not be too shocking from the home of a Director of Religious Education.

Something else about this fun little Belief-O-Matic struck me, though. I wonder how many thousands of people taking this little exam discover, in the end, that they are Unitarian Universalists, and never heard of us before? I suspect that those curious about their results would then click onto the various links to Unitarian Universalism to find out what in the world that means!

It is rather astounding to me that someone in, say, Botswana, who has access to a computer, and a minimal knowledge of English, could, by taking this self-exam, discover, in a matter of ten minutes, that he or she is a Unitarian Universalist, whatever that is. And then, being puzzled by that label, search around and, in a matter of an hour or two of study, have a basic, if minimal, understanding of what that means.

In the intersection of computer technology and religion, an unlikely prophet has been discovered. I say he is an "unlikely" prophet because he died in 1955, long before the computer as we know it today existed, and long before the concept of an internet could be imagined.

Teilhard de Chardin was an internationally respected scientist Born in 1881, his area of science was geology and paleontology born in 1881. He became best known for his writings in defense of evolution, and many of his efforts were to give evolution a religious grounding. Tielhard was also a Catholic priest of the Jesuit order. Though his ideas were so radical he was officially silenced by the Church's authorities, he remained loyal to the Church. The bulk of his writings were published posthumously. Here is an example of what he wrote about evolution:

"Is evolution a theory, a system or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, as systems, must bow, and which they must satisfy henceforth if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow."

Tielhard's writings on evolution were designed for the non-scientists and hoped to inspire a positive intellectual spirit toward nature itself. For many years, he has been a favorite writer for those involved in the environmental movement, for he advocated respect for the earth and its eco-systems.

He saw the earth as a harmony of natural sub-systems of life. The biosystem of the earth, with its plants and animals and atmosphere and natural resources, is a delicate web of interdependent parts, carefully and harmoniously balanced.

His writings on this were enough to inspire generations of both scientists and naturalists - not to mention theologians who are attracted to environmentally sound ideals. One part of his writings, though, seemed to be a bit of a stretch for some people to accept.

Tiehard believed that evolution was headed in a direction, and toward a culmination. Over the millennia of natural evolution, the tendency has been toward greater harmony and interdependence and what may be described as cooperation in nature. He was among the first to describe the earth itself as a single, living organism, living and breathing and functioning as a self-contained unit in the cosmos.

He speculated on what he thought would be the final stages of evolution for our planet, and he described that to be a cooperative unity of human minds - an interconnected global consciousness of thinking. This ultimate level of evolution on our planet he called the "noosphere." He coined the term based on the Greek word "noos," which means "mind."

The noosphere, then is the linking together of the minds of all intelligent life on this planet. In other words, the final development of evolution is the creation of a single global consciousness. To explain it, he draws an analogy with the evolutionary development of the cerebral cortex of the human brain. It was not until evolution allowed for this part which connects the previously separated parts, that human consciousness appeared. The process that allowed for the creation of the cerebral cortex will also guide the creation of a world wide interconnection of minds. Or put differently, a world wide "web" of consciousness and intelligence. When this happens, he wrote, "evolution (would become) conscious of itself."

It is not difficult to see how his concept of the "noosphere" is being reclaimed by those who study impact of the Internet on our culture and our world. (You can see why there are over 15,000 hits on this word when searched.) Here are a few selected quotations from Tielhard concerning the noosphere.

"My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him."

After describing the efforts of individual scientists over history working in separate parts of the globe unable to join their efforts, he said this: "Today we find the reverse: research students are numbered in the hundreds of thousands - soon to be millions - and they are no longer distributed superficially and at random over the globe, but are functionally linked together in a vast organic system that will remain in the future indispensable to the life of the community."

"We are faced with a harmonized collectivity of consciousness to a sort of super-consciousness. The earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope, a single unanimous reflection."

An extreme interpretation of Tielhard's thesis is sometimes used by futurists who apply the concept of a noosphere to today's Internet technology. Writer Steve Mizrah explained how that works:

"Following Tielhard de Chardin, a number of non-idealist 'info-mystics' suggest that, while the universe is made of matter, it is evolving into pure information or pure mind (the noosphere). While the matter in the universe is falling into entropy, ultimately life and consciousness may be able to escape this fate by becoming forms of information which are material-independent, i.e., patterns of organization, and enter into hyper space or other dimensions. I suggest that these mystics are non-idealist in that they subscribe to emergence - they don't see mind as prior to matter, but rather something which emerged out of matter and may eventually be able to leave its material substrate. It may be the escape route from entropy."

It seems to me there are a few problems in taking too literally this concept of "noosphere" - that evolution leads to a unified mind and consciousness. It is also true that there are problems in taking anything too literally. Yet it seems to me our emerging experience with advanced communication, and especially with the internet, is directing us toward some sense of intellectual interdepence that we never previously imagined.

Tielhard's sense of evolution of thought has some merit, I think. Thousands of years ago, the invention of the written word was the first huge step toward bringing together minds of individuals. The invention of the printing press took another great leap in connecting our minds across civilizations. (Back during the millennium celebrations a couple of years ago, I recall several commentaries concluding that Guttenberg;s invention of the printing press was the single greatest invention ever to change the course of human civilization). Radio, television and telephones also brought minds around the world closer together. But the creation of the Internet web of communication may in fact become every bit as significant as the printing press in advancing the evolution of thought toward interconnectedness.

Whether all of this makes sense biologically or metaphorically, or whether the whole sense of a growing collective mind is simply mumbo-jumbo having nothing to do with the development of communication technology, there is no denying that we are entering a very different world that we have known before. For better or worse, the internet will be a fundamental piece of that world, and with luck will be helpful in bringing us more closely together. Whatever the case, out in the cyberspace of tomorrow's world, All Souls Unitarian Church can be found, for it has an address: www.allsoulsindy.org. Those who visit will find a community that has been around for a hundred years, giving support to its members, who share together the ups and downs of life, and the give and take of the search for ideas. Those who visit will find our covenant which speaks of who we have been, who we are, and who we will be. And those who visit will find that we, perhaps more than many religions, have and will continue to respect the interconnectedness of all living things, or as the UUA principles say: the interdependent web of existence, of which we are a part.

READING from Robert Wright, "The Man Who Invented the Web"

Time Magazine, May 19, 1997

{Tim Berners-Lee, the man who created the World Wide Web, chose not to privatize his work for profit, but to offer it to the world. He now heads up a non-profit oversight group called the World Wide Web Consortium, with offices at M.I.T. The following is from the closing paragraphs of this article: )

Berners-Lee is not easy to read, not prone to self-disclosure. Ask him if he's a sociable guy, and he tells you that on the Myers-Briggs test, "I rate pretty much in the middle on introversion vs. extroversion." Ask about his wife, and he'll tell you that she is an American he met in Europe wu cross the border while she was working for the World Health Organization, after which details get sketchy. "Work is work and home is home," he says. And when you cross the border between them, his turbo-charged gesticulation subsides.

Other sources volunteer that Berners-Lee met his wife Nancy Carlson at an acting workshop; he turns out to have an artistic piano-playing festive side. "He is both British and the life of the party, and that's not a contradiction," says Rohit Khare, who recently left the Web consortium. "He can be the life of the party without making the party about him.

Berners-Lee, standing at a blackboard, draws a graph as he's prone to do. It arrays social groups by size. Families, workplace groups, schools, towns, companies, the nation, the planet. The Web could in theory make things work smoothly at all of these levels, as well as between them. But the Web can pull the other way. And Berners-Lee worries about whether it will "allow cranks and nut cases to find in the world 20 or 30 other cranks and nut cases who are absolutely convinced in the same things. Allow them to set up filters around themselves... and develop a pothole of culture out of which they can't climb." Will we "end up with a world which is full of very, very, disparate cultures which don't talk to each other?"

Berners-Lee doesn't kid himself. Even if the Web had followed the technological lines he envisioned (which it is finally starting to do, as software evolves), it couldn't force people to nurture the global interest, or even their neighborhood's interest. Technology can't make us good. "At the end of the day, it's up to us: how we actually react, and how we teach our children, and the values we instill" He points back to the graph. "I believe we and our children should be active at all points along this."

On Sundays Berners-Lee packs his family into the car and heads for a Unitarian Universalist church. As a teenager he rejected the Anglican teachings of his parents; he can't bring himself to worship a particular prophet, a particular book. But "I do in fact believe that people's spiritual side is very important." and that it's "more than just biology."

He likes the minimalist Unitarian dogma - theologically vague but believing in "the inherent dignity of people and in working together to achieve harmony and understanding." He can accept the notion of divinity so long as it is couched abstractly - as the "asymptote" of goodness that we strive toward - and doesn't involve "characters with beards."

Berners-Lee is sitting at his desk, in front of bookshelves that are bare, devoid of books and other old-fashioned forms of data. A few sheet-metal bookends stand there with nothing to do, and nearby are pictures of his family. He concentrates, trying to put a finer point on his notion of divinity. A verse he's heard in church comes to mind, but all he can remember are fragments. "All souls may... " his voice trails off " ...to seek the truth in love... " He is silent for a moment. His brain has failed him. Then inspiration strikes. "Maybe I can pick it up from the Web." In a single motion, he swivels his chair 180 degrees and makes fluid contact with his IBM Thinkpad.