{"id":234,"date":"2004-05-16T23:24:20","date_gmt":"2004-05-16T23:24:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blah\/?p=234"},"modified":"2004-05-16T23:24:20","modified_gmt":"2004-05-16T23:24:20","slug":"church_of_the_v","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/2004\/05\/church_of_the_v\/","title":{"rendered":"Church of the Vanishing Avatar"},"content":{"rendered":"

As one of the more radical atheists you’d be likely to find, I probably ought to think the idea of a virtual church is very silly, but the approach taken by Church of Fools<\/a> strikes me as oddly sweet, in a naive-but-I-hope-it-works way. Technically it seems very nicely put together. I particularly like that, because denomination-specific sacraments don’t fit into the new technology, it naturally has an inter-denominational approach, and it can focus on the tradition-free strengths of the church environment: community, meditation, peacefulness. It seems to tend more towards the bumbling good-naturedness of Anglicanism, and be free from the scariness of happy-clappy fundamentalism. I hope it succeeds. In the meantime, there’s also a dry sense of humour about the oddness of the experiment:<\/p>\n

\nChurch of Fools got off to a flying start on Tuesday May 11th, until a computer crashed somewhere in York, England. At the computer was Revd Jem Clines, who was logged in to the church as its minister. His onscreen character, wearing a dark suit and a dog collar, turned to face the sanctuary wall and then simply disappeared, as Revd Clines’ computer died some 225 miles away.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And a piece on the BBC web-site<\/a> has some funny comments:<\/p>\n

\nThought I’d pop in and take a look around. My 5 yr old son on my lap. “WOW,” he said, “which one’s you?” I pointed to me. “So who’s on your team…and which ones do you kill?” I don’t think its going to be a hit with the younger generation.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Good luck to the experiment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As one of the more radical atheists you’d be likely to find, I probably ought to think the idea of a virtual church is very silly, but the approach taken by Church of Fools strikes me as oddly sweet, in a naive-but-I-hope-it-works way. Technically it seems very nicely put together. I particularly like that, because … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}