Second Life continues to intrigue me. Lately, I've been working on creating ritual items for a Wiccan Ritual. I have altars to the East, South and West. I discovered the built-in particle system and accordingly, I've created a "circle of blue flame." Pentagrams are the next step.
Still, as fun as it is, I do fret a little. Ultimately, a Wiccan ritual in Second Life is a bunch of people scattered over the globe typing on their computers while their avatars meet in a virtual space, and seems a little divorced from a spirituality that's supposed to be celebrating in a pantheistic mode. And when I'm feeling pessimistic, I can hear a voice in my head saying, "He couldn't find anyone to do ritual with in one of Oregon's larger cities; so he had to do virtual ritual in cyber-space."
I suppose if religion is all in our heads, the the physical locus of worship has little impact on the validity of its practice.
On other Second Life fronts, I'm trying to think of practical applications. Like, maybe a globe with earthquakes or weather patterns (is NOAA in Second Life?) I've always said that it would be wonderful to have a "holodeck" where I could have the text of various books floating in space. I'd arrange the books chronologically, and then make visible hyperlinks from book to book. I think this is called, "Google Books," or something. So using a game client to hypertext seems like overkill. (And then there's the prim count question: does a book get its own primitive, or each page, or each word? And how do you attach a link to a passage from a book?)
Perhaps somehow painting text onto the inside of a spiral; but again, this has been done by someone else to examine the structure of Frankenstein and Alice in Wonderland. I'm sure there's a metaphor in there, somewhere....
On the writing front. It's been a little slow. [Insert writer's diatribe here -- a partial mix of, "If I worked harder," "If I wrote things editors would buy," and "Isn't this supposed to be fun?"]
On the shoulder front: I did the math and I should basically be doing stretches every two hours. Sigh. So time to stop and stretch
3 comments:
Ah, but what if religion is NOT all in our heads?
And even if it is - does not the environment affect the way our heads work?
Hi Dave... I meant to bring this up during the after-critique chat, but the opportunity never came up.
Religion could all be in our heads. That's one way to look at it, and I wrote that quickly; I should have written, "but if religion operates on a spiritual dimension." However, now that I think about the ramifications, I see that one could use the previous statement to justify immoral actions because one was thinking "religious" thoughts as one was doing them.
Sigh. How about "all spiritual meditation is in our heads"? Err... "religious or spiritual thoughts unbound by physical actions remain in the virtual realm" ?
hm. We're accustomed to worship being in meatspace and religion/faith/spirituality being in the ether, so to speak. Having worship in meatspace anchors it in our reality. Moving it a step into to the ether could make it ... less tangible, less satisfying; or more, if you get what you're looking for in terms of connection. Because worship is connecting meat to ether. ... I think I just talked myself in a circle. I did. Does that make ANY sense?
hi, btw. Long time no chat. This is ellen
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