Cyber Worship Revisited - Balaji, a Hindu priest offering prayers

Folks are finding religion online
By KEVIN SULLIVAN, The Washington Post, © March 18, 2007
TIRUCHIRAPALLI, India - Balaji, a Hindu priest, stood before the reclining god and offered a plate of coconut and bananas. His chest bare and his face adorned with red and yellow sacred paste, he set the food at the foot of a statue Hindus regard as an embodiment of the powerful god Vishnu.

Following ancient tradition deep inside one of India's oldest and holiest temples, he chanted Vishnu's names 108 times to beseech health, wealth and good fortune - not for himself but for an Indian emigrant living in London who had bought the prayer with her credit card on a Hindu Web site.
The Internet has become a hub of religious worship for millions of people around the world. Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs and people of other faiths turn regularly to Web sites to pray, meditate and gather in "virtual" houses of worship graphically designed to look like the real thing. Some sites offer rites from baptism to confession to conversion to Judaism.

For many cyber-worshipers, online religious life conducted at home or in an Internet cafe has replaced attendance at traditional churches, temples, mosques and synagogues. Some are coming to religion for the first time, in a setting they find as comfortable as their grandparents found a church pew, while millions of people reared on churchgoing are discovering new ways to worship. [Continue reading or read this: Linking Ancient and Modern, A Worldwide Web of Worship]

A comment on the above article:

This seems, to me, like an interesting use of LR quadrant technology (exterior collective) with LL quadrant culture (interior collective), which, for the person involved, has an impact on the UL quadrant psychology (interior individual).

OK, once more in English – I like the way technology is being used in this example as a tool for assisting people with fervent cultural religious belief to satisfy their drive to have their prayers placed in the most auspicious temples. Clearly this is a very superstitious belief system, and one that some of us might see as pre-rational, but for those who hold the beliefs it can be very important to their sense of well-being to know that they have done their best to seek favor from the Gods
[more from this comment: Putting Prayers in Your Shopping Cart, @ WH's Blog

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