Replications of all kinds mark the memetic sequence, and so religion appears in retrospect as propagation of a special kind of information, generated in the human mind as it started labeling what we know, as well as what is beyond our direct understanding. What did not change, although it was rendered relative, is the acknowledgment and acceptance of a supreme authority, known as God, or described through other names such as Allah and Myo-Ho-Ren-Ge, and the nature of the practical experience of self- constitution as believer. If Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius, and the Japanese and Indian religious leaders were alive today, they would probably realize that if religion had any chance, it could no longer be founded on the written text of the Book or books, but in the practical experiences of the civilization of illiteracy. By no accident, the first category on one of the Web sites dedicated to religion is entitled Finding God in Cyberspace.
The educated faithful-a contradiction in terms?
The pragmatic requirement of optimally transmitting experience essential to a group's permanency was recognized as one of the main functions of language. It should come as no surprise that education was carried out, if not exclusively then at least to a high degree, in religion. Neither should it surprise that religion appropriated literacy as one of its programs once the scale of human activity that made literacy necessary was reached. In the context of nation-states that adopted religion as one of their identifiers, the entire history of the relation between society and religion can be seen in a different light. As we know from history, the quest for power frequently brought state and religion into conflict, although one needed and relied on the other. In the unifying pragmatic framework of industrial society, their alliance was sealed in literacy programs. These were simultaneously programs for higher efficiency and for the maintenance of values rooted in religious belief, as long as these did not adversely affect the outcome of work or of market transactions.
Parallel to the initially dominant religious view of life, change, origins, and future, alternative views were expressed as the result of self-observation and observation of the outside world. Philosophy, influenced by religion and by religious explanations of the world, of men, of society and its change, is one example. Sciences would diverge from philosophy, multiplying alternate models and explanatory contexts. These were usually carefully construed so as not to collide with the religious viewpoint, unless they bluntly rejected it, regardless of the consequences of such an attitude. There were also heresies based on an individual's notions, or holdovers from past religions. During the Renaissance, for instance, such holdovers derived from studies of the Bible, which led to the Reformation. Ideas not rejected as heresy were usually within the scope of the church. These ideas were expressed by men and women who founded orders. They were put into practice by religious activists or made into new theologies.
There is no religion that does not go through its internal revisions and through the pain of dividing schisms. On today's list of religious denominations, one can find everything, from paganism to cyberfaith. The rational explanation for this multiplication into infinity is not different from the explanation of any human experience. Multiplication of choices, as innate human characteristic, applies to religious experiences as it does to any other form of pragmatic human self-constitution. The practical experience of science, diverging more and more from philosophy and from religious dogma, also followed many paths of diversification. So did the unfolding of art, ethics, technology, and politics. The unifying framework offered by the written word, as interpreted by the monolithic church, was progressively subjected to distinctions that the experience of literacy made possible. When people were finally able to read the Bible for themselves-a book that the Catholic church did not allow them to read even after the Reformation-protest started, but it started after the Renaissance, when political entities were strong enough to defy the papacy with some degree of success.
The illiterate warriors of centuries ago and the sometimes illiterate, at least unlettered, worshipper and military insurgent of today belong to very different pragmatic frameworks. The former did not have to be able to read or write in order to fight for a cause superficially (if at all) related to the Book. One had only to show allegiance to the institution guarding souls from hell. In the scale characteristic of these events, individual performance was of extreme importance to the community, as we know from the stories of King Frederick, Joan of Arc, Jan Hus-or, to change the reference, from the story of Guru Nanak (the first guru of the Sikhs, a religion prompted by the Muslims' persecution of Hindus at about the time Columbus was on his last expedition to the New World), Martin Luther, George Fox (founder of the Quaker movement), and many others. The educated faithful of the past probably obtained access to the established values of culture and to the main paradigms of science as these confirmed the doctrine defended by the church. An educated faithful in contemporary society is torn between accepting a body of knowledge ascertaining permanency, while experiencing change at a pace for which no religion can prepare its followers. Indeed, from the unity of education and faith-one meant to reinforce the other-the direction of change is towards their contradiction and disparity. The secular web is not only that of the Internet infidels, but also of a broad segment of the population that has no need for either.
Challenging permanency and universality
For many, the survival of religion is itself a miracle. For many more, it is indicative of human aspects not sufficiently accounted for in science, art, or social and political life. Its role in a new pragmatic framework of fast change, mediated activity, alienation, decentralization, and specialization, is obviously different from that it played in the time of religious constitution and in a reduced scale of humankind. Religion did not start out to deceive, but to explain. Its practices, while seeming violent, empty, extreme, demagogic, cunning, or even ridiculous at times, fulfill a purpose deemed pragmatic at the inception. The old and familiar are reassuring, if only by resort to endurance. The promise of redemption and paradise gain in attraction the more people face change and uncertainty. While the original purpose of religion was modified over time, the practice is kept up precisely because novelty and progress, especially in their radical form, are difficult to cope with. Once old values are questioned in the light of succeeding pragmatic circumstances, under new patterns of self-constitution, the result is complacency and deception, if there is no alternative. Religion and literacy ultimately find themselves in the same predicament.
Religious diversification reflects each new scale at which human practical experience takes place. Changes in the pragmatic framework in which people constitute themselves as religious result in tension between the variability of the elements involved in work or new aspects of social life and the claims of the eternal. This tension triggers numerous rethinkings and consequent rewritings of the books, as well as the generation of numerous new books of new forms of faith. Christianity and Islam are revisions; within them other revisions (schisms) took place, such as the Roman and Orthodox churches, the Sunni and Shiite. Other sects and religions, schisms, and reformations and protestations (movements claiming to reconstitute the original status, whatever that means), are to a great extent rewritings based on acknowledging new contexts-that is, new pragmatic requirements. Once upon a time, the Book was supposed to address everyone in the small community in which it came to expression. Over time, many books addressed their own constituencies-adherents to certain teachers, to particular saints, or to some subset of the religious doctrine-within a larger community. The success of these sub-groups grew in proportion to the diversification of human praxis and to the function of education exercised on a broader and broader scale.
From the religion of small-scale human activity to the churches of universal ambitions, many modifications in the letter and the spirit of the respective books occurred. They ultimately reflect alterations of values that religious institutions had to adapt to and justify. The tribes that accepted the Book as a unifying framework- embodiment of tradition which became law-as well as the followers of the prescriptions in the Hindu scriptures of Veda and Upanishad, the followers of the Enlightened One (Buddha), the practitioners of Taoism and Confucianism, also acknowledged a sense of community. It is the same sense of community held, at a different scale and with different goals, by the nation-state.