It's long been my belief that the content on the Net must mirror the interests of humans in the aggregate. Business, science, politics, pornography, religion -- if people spend energy on it in "meatspace" they will spend energy on it on the Net. Recently I've been accreting pointers to religious sites; a few are listed below.

Ultraseek provides a quick count of Web pages having the following words in their titles. The total of 63,785 compares favorably with the cyberporn count of 11,702.

  21740    church,temple,mosque,archdiocese
  19560    hindu,catholic,baptist,lutheran,muslim,orthodox,protestant
  12569    christian
   6120    bible,koran,torah
   3796    jesus,buddha

• [ 1997-06-12 ] This item relates only obliquely to religion: it's a page celebrating the NunBun, a cinnamon bun that emerged from the oven of the Bongo Java coffee shop, in Nashville, Tennesee, molded into an unmistakable likeness of the good woman of Calcutta -- one of only five people ever voted by Congress to the distinction of honorary citizen of the United States of America, in the company of William Penn and Raoul Wallenberg. Christopher Hitchens reflects pithily on the story in The Nation. His article is entitled Mother Theresa on a Roll.

• The Virgin of Guadalupe, credited with bringing Catholicism to Mexico, has a new home page on the Web, titled "interlupe." Read details in Nando.net's coverage.

• This site offers free home pages to churches and Christian-related groups.

• The Monestery of Christ in the Desert -- where the brothers have brought the ancient art of the illuminated manuscript into the electronic age.

• The German Conference of Bishops recently renounced Confession by Computer, a PC application developed in Cologne that lets users confess to one or more of 200 sins. The program also offers advice on how to reach priests and ministers on the Net. (A year and a half ago TBTF for 1995-04-29 covered a new Internet-based electronic confessional operated by the Diocese of Pittsburgh.)

• The Virtual Diocese of Partenia presided over by Bishop Jacques Gaillot. This outspoken French bishop was stripped of his former seat at Evreux by the Pope in 1995. But since bishops cannot be defrocked unless excommunicated, Gaillot had to be given another diocese. The Church's solution was to make Gaillot bishop of Partenia, a small area in the Sahara Desert in which no people have lived for at least 1,500 years. Since he had been made the Bishop of Nowhere, Gaillot decided to become the Bishop of Everywhere -- i.e., of cyberspace.

• Please indulge me, I couldn't resist this site's splash screen. If you are sensitive on subjects religious perhaps it's best not to visit. For the rest of you, The Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua is

  a sacred place in cyberspace named in honor of a little old dog with
  cataracts, who barked sideways at strangers, because he couldn't see
  where they were. We humans relate to God in the same way, making a
  more or less joyful noise in God's general direction, and expecting a
  reward for doing so.

Most recently updated 1997-11-29