Online Religion/Spirituality

 This Blog/Presentation will focus on how Religious and Spiritual material can be accessed, created, shared and used by participants engaging with religious/spiritual material online.

The three areas that will be looked at more closely are:

               

                         Social Media and Religion

                         Virtual Reality and Religion

                         Dedicated sites to Religion and Spirituality

But first...

In relation to what has been discussed in class, the following will just look at how online religion relates to what has been covered.

So, in regard to online religion and spirituality, the internet allows for:

• Religious/Spiritual groups to teach and create awareness about their beliefs and to impart      messages to a wider and to some degree, a more interactive audience.

There are multiple approaches that can be taken to discuss and use religious/spiritual material online and because the internet is so vast and ever growing with new and updated information, all three approaches (Theological, mythological and Ideological) can be found online.

• Websites such as Christianity.com and Chabad.org use their websites in a theological approach. The sites are respectful in their treatment of their religious content. the aim of theological sites online is to inform take their content seriously.

• Some websites use a mythological approach to explore, share and understand religious/spiritual material. to some extent, Beliefnet.com could fall under this category but also crosses over to being a somewhat theological site as well. Websites that are Mythological in their approach to religious/spiritual content use their content in an interactive and involving environment and the position of belief isn't explicitly advertised.

• An Ideological approach to religious/spiritual content online is prevalent in many websites. depending on how we use different sites such as Facebook and Twitter, these sites don't generally advertise religious or spiritual material unless a participant actively seeks other users/pages/feeds that contain and/or share religious/spiritual material. Also the same can be said about material that opposes, critiques and judges religion/spirituality on Facebook and Twitter. If you're actively seeking that kind of content you'll find it on these sites as well. 

The idea of explicit and implicit religious/spiritual material online is dependent on what the participant is actively seeking. Like the use of Facebook and Twitter, these sites could be implicitly or explicitly religious/spiritual depending on the user and what they use the sites for.