SPIRITECH UK aims to build a Firewall of Faith on the Web. In this section we will be posting insights and observations from interested parties.

The following e-mail from Cynthia Moore has been gratefully received:

I will share with you the fact that already my computer is becoming an extension of myself. Its function alters with my mood and intention. It is so sutble it would not be noticed by a casual observer, but I am quite aware of it. I begin to wonder if it has absorbed my thoughts not as data, but conscious awareness. It is comforting to meet another soul who does not laugh at this possibility.

Did you ever hear the story that Deepak Chopra tells about President Eisenhower? When he first confronted the huge early computer that was installed in the Pentagon, he asked it...."Is there a God?". It answered: "There is now!" A bit of humor, or prophecy?

Science indeed, must reconcile itself to the fact that nothing exists that is not what we call God. He is the substance of all form. It is only when I read such things as you write, that I truly know what it is We Are. This feeling is even more enhanced when the material is read online through cyberspace. What was it Walt Whitman said..." I celebrate the body electric".

The following message has been gratefully received from Jim Parrett:

Yes, the internet is definitely a string in the web of spirituality. Where evangelists using other mediums redefine Armegeddon every week, the Internet is an open mike for us to speak for ourselves and build a new spiritual dialogue.

However I am disturbed, along with many other surfers, by the threat imposed by the fundamental spiritual people whose imagination cannot get past the printed page. At the risk of being an alarmist, I am trying my best to stretch the already immeasurable distances we can travel using the Web with a furtive feeling that it can not last. Why is it that the closer we come to explorers of faith, these people try to squash it? Was the Mayflower the beginning of a web of it's time? Will we in America end up like those who fleed their homeland in pursuit of personal and religious freedoms? (Does the devil himself not walk with the holiest of the holy, whether it be Rome or Mecca?)

I, for one, can not wait for the day that machines start thinking for themselves. It may just free us to explore that most forgotten of all human devices, our spirit and soul. Maybe by then, the internet will have truly developed into a spiritual source that no one person or group can suppress.

The following has been gratefully received from Pete Stewart:

Some thoughts I had while reading were about the "recent" discoveries of cloniong techniques. It seems to me that being able to manipulate DNA would allow us to create biological computers, robots etc. If socieciety can get off the morality question it would be a very useful thing. Just recognizing that we are spirits in physical form negates any morality question. We cannot create human beings, but creating a form with the right features would allow a spirit to inhabit the form. But beyond that, being able to manipulate DNA in such a way as to create the form without all the 'human' capacities but endow it with material technology that would give it programability and be able to function as we would want it to--plant seeds and harvest the crop, operate or work on a production line.

The question of consciousness is something I've thought about, too. It seems that if a machine has the ability to be self-conscious -- to know that I know -- then it would have consciousness...I think...

SPIRITEXTS is grateful for this submission from Steve Scarbrough:

It is not a question of spirit versus the machine. There are no us and thems. When a heart machine saves a loved ones life we forget that a human spirit designed, made and used the machine. When we launch crusie missiles to Iraq, another human spirit has designed, made and used that machine. Through the human spirit we are attached to the technology we create. We bear the good Karma and the bad for our actions. Too many so called spiritual people are trying to run away from this reality when they should be trying to understand thier connection to it. Technology is a natural out growth of mans desire to explore the universe around him.

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