Alison Webster is Social Responsibility Officer in the Diocese of Worcester SOF 46 / March 2001 10 By March 2001 (when this magazine is delivered by your snailpostman through your snail-letterbox) the number of UK citizens with access to the internet and email will pass the 50% mark.
The take-up is much faster than it was with radio in the 20s and 30s, the telephone in the 30s and 40s, and television in the 50s. Only five years ago it could reasonably be argued that the internet was socially divisive as only the better-off could afford the thousand pounds or so required to purchase the necessary PC and modem. Today, one in four of those officially designated “poor” have basic internet access. You can email today with equipment costing no more than a family outing to a Second Division football match.
Not surprisingly, therefore, there has been a huge growth in email “lists”, where those who sign on can send and receive messages from everyone else on the list. For a couple of years or so, SoF has been running such a list, with 60 or 70 “members” informing, entertaining and arguing with each other.
Not the least benefit is that members of the three SoF networks - in the UK, New Zealand and Australia - as well as isolated members in the United States and scattered throughout the rest of the _ world, can keep up a daily text-dialogue with each other, on any subject they care to raise. They can - and do - send their messages to all sixty or so subscribers for the price of a single local telephone call, and receive the responses from all sixty free of charge.
This is networking.
In subject matter, absolutely anything goes.
Nonrealism and postmodernism are scarcely ever off the agenda, but every subject that has ever been raised and worried through in this magazine pops up on the SoFlist. Exchanges are generally friendly and supportive, though passions can occasionally run high and tempers have been known to fray!
Inevitably, there are a few who tend to post frequently and at length (one or two seem to have nothing better to do than tap their stream of wisdom into the ether), and some remain silent for weeks before offering an opinion or a personal experience.
But no-one has to read everything, or follow every thread. If you're bored stiff with postmodernism, you trash all the messages under that heading and start a line of discussion more to your liking. No-one knows which messages you are trashing: you can ruthlessly extinguish a bore in mid-blather without anyone knowing - which can be hugely satisfying!
And of course there's no know-all editor making allwise decisions on what will be published and what won't. You do it your way. Free thought, free speech, free expression. That poem, those sermon notes, that scholarly deconstructionist reading of the Tractatus which this half-wit of a magazine editor has unaccountably returned to you with a shame-faced “Sorry-but-space-is-limited” note (or simply lost in his paper-choked office) can be posted unexpurgated on the List.
One of the best recent List discussions arose from reflections on Christmas. How can we go on telling this fantastic story of an immaculate conception, a virgin birth, a shooting star that parks over a stable, shepherds in fields and angels in clouds, three wizards bearing gifts, and a jealous king massacring the entire nation’s first-born? Was it not time to rewrite the story, cutting out all the silly bits?
Shouldn't we start doing that to the whole Bible?
And why not the creeds, while we are at it? One member graciously offered to chair a committee to supervise the revisions and deliver an altogether more rational Christianity.
What nonsense! came the response. These are stories. There’s no more point in rewriting them than there would be in rewriting Beowulf because we doubt its historicity and don't like its warrior ethic, or bowdlerising Shakespeare (as Mr Bowdler did) because we are shocked by double entendres on “country matters”, or because we don’t like the antiSemitism of Merchant of Venice or the disrespect shown to women in The Taming of the Shrew.
So do we have no responsibility to evaluate our old, old stories? asked the revisionists. Must we say, “Because they are old, and written in beautiful language, and they are part of our cultural heritage, we must live with the damage done to women by the Adam and Eve story, and to all of us by the doctrine of original sin?” Not at all, reply the leave-them-alone party. Submit them to criticism, expose their cultural limitations, but don’t play Bowdler with an inexhaustibly rich heritage...
The exchange was richer and more nuanced than that, but | give something of the flavour. It continues as | write.
The SoF email List, then, reflects the full range of debate and discussion among a varied membership, united only in its commitment to a view of religious faith as a wholly human creation. It’s free to join! You might even find it addictive! To get yourself on the List, email lan Stubbs at: ian@denshaw.freeserve.co.uk. He'll fix it for you.