Second Life Divorce

This article, which comes from CNN, sounds like it comes from The Onion. Second Life affair ends in divorce. From the article:

she…hired an online private detective to track his activities: “He never did anything in real life, but I had my suspicions about what he was doing in Second Life.

At least the wife in this case seems to understand that mind and body are not entirely separate, but the fact that she went on to start a relationship with someone in World of Warcraft seems to indicate she has not entirely learned her lesson.

Conference differences

At the same time that I rail against the bureaucracy of the church, I also get angry about lack of good technology. Do I contradict myself? Of course.

Compare and contrast:

The Memphis Conference webpage

The Tennessee Conference webpage

And, the Tennessee Youth Conference page

and Memphis Youth Conference Page (yes, it is in fact, 5 years old)

Techgnostics


New words are interesting to me. Ginormous is in the dictionary now (though blogger spellcheck doesn’t like it, nor the word spellcheck). When I read a comment by Brian Volck at Ekklesia, he used the hyphenation techno-gnosticism. I searched techgnosticism and found lots of links, so now I have a new word for a subject which is getting discussed a lot lately.

It’s easy to see why. This new “medium” which is created and manipulated each day leads to some very obvious disconnects between mind and body. There are plenty of stories about how much more blurred the lines between the worlds of cyberspace and meatspace are becoming.

One of the articles Brian directs us to is the story of a man who plays the online game Second Life to such a degree that it could easily be said that it has become his primary life. But he’s not the only one who is blurring the lines between the real and the hyperreal. IBM employees are now planning a strike in Second Life. Lawsuits are being started over land in Second Life. And, of course, there are new church plants in SL.

If we could just say “it’s one game, a fad, not a trend” then we’d probably have little to discuss, but it’s not. SL is just the easiest thing to point to. Myspace, youtube, facebook, all are aspects of this new world that seems to be growing. There are some who even say there is about a 20% chance we’re living in the matrix already.

I’m not saying it’s all bad or that we should all unplug our computers or stop reading blogs, but we should talk about how we’re affected by the cyberworld, and we should be wary of the ways in which we are separated from the temple of the Holy Spirit when we enter this other world.