The people’s new world religion?

The importance of religions in the history of mankind is hard to overestimate. From ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman Gods, to paganism, to Islam and Buddhism, to Protestantism and Baptism, to Pantheism and Hinduism, to Christianity - so many forms and ramifications, which not simply permeated the history, but, in the end, it is History per se, as religions have affected everything around us, starting from moral values and education of an individual, to moral systems of nations. Religions have immensely impacted culture, architecture, music, sciences. Religions divided states and have made wars and, unfortunately, are continuing to fight for influence. And while different cultures currently are battling over whose God is better, unnoticeably but steadily a new kind of religion is slowly emerging. And it has all the potential to become a new world religion.

It is said that for an ideology to be considered a religion, three prerequisites are necessary: assuring salvation, believing in a precise theology, and converting the nonbelievers.

The new ideology not only assures, but already provides salvation from the misery of life, from loneliness, from inequality and from discrimination. It gives joy and pleasure, and it keeps promising more and more. To some extend we may consider that it also provides eternity, once you’ve got into it.

Maybe it doesn’t have yet a precise theology, but it is work in progress, it’s taking shape, and it is a matter of some time until someone will synthesize an exact theology for it. It is all penetrating and borderless, it is free and equal, it has its own habits, whereas ideas circulated in its space can easily turn into dogmas with a limitless potential of zombifying people all over the world.

And it continues to exponentially attract new users, new believers. More than that, while on one side there is a growing distrust of peoples and nations towards their political elite and even towards current religions, this new phenomena is becoming an ultimate source of information, which people consider true and objective, as it is more and more coming from the people.

The new religion is the world wide web, is Internet. Somehow we speak of globalization mostly referring to its financial and industrial aspects, while we have not fully realized its unique impact on cultural, social and religious issues. World economic integration may not necessarily lead to hostility and wars between religious views, rather it can slowly induce mutual compensation (cannibalization of “products”) creating vacuum as a result, which easily will be filled with a new fetish with a strong social and moral influence.

It maybe yet hard to perceive Internet as a new religion, because it seems to be quite a confusing mixture of virtual ideas and views. Many would say that it is more an ideological instrument rather than ideology itself. However, in some creeds tools are the main symbols of their underlying ideology. Thus, give it some time (50 years?) until the core is formed and until Internet will have new capacities and features, unimaginable today, and this tool will become a symbol, to which everyone would pray as to the one and only trustworthy ideology. The one who would control it, might have all chances to become the world’s messiah. Right?