Let There Be Tweets?

Are social media tools a blessing or a curse for people of faith? Should we use digital technology to commune with the divine? Does God tweet?

The trick of technology is to distill your message without distorting it. Twitter is compression, or can be. God's tweet? "Let there be light."

The danger of technology is not that it trivializes faith. After all when Moses prays on behalf of his sister Miriam he says merely "please God heal her" - five words in Hebrew which are both spontaneous and heartfelt - the ideal tweet.

The danger of technology of course is that it will shape the message by its brevity and ease. Religion is not only spontaneous and heartfelt; it is also complex, thoughtful, reasoned, meditative. Technology (I say as I write this on a plane) encourages us to do many things quickly, not all of them well. Last week the book editor of the LA Times wrote an article about how difficult it is to find the mental space to read in a digital age. As a reader, I find that testimony profoundly disturbing. As a religious person, I understand that technology threatens not the beliefs of religion, but its practice.

Long ago in "Walden" Thoreau wrote: "And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter -- we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?" If America's naturalist philosopher felt that way about the daily paper, how would he feel about the DRUDGE REPORT?

It is not necessarily true that slow things are deeper, better, firmer, more enduring than things that are quick, but it is often true. The Talmud reports that the pious of old would pray one hour before prayers to prepare themselves. Today, before prayers, people click off their last email and texts before offering up praise to God in between tweets,

So I am of two minds. I don't wish to demonize technology, with its wondrous interconnections, the way it places the world at our feet. But as Heschel warned in his classic "The Sabbath" conquering space gives the illusion that we have conquered time. Life is not measured in tweets. Prayer is not more effective for having been run through quickly. A virtual community is called "virtual" precisely because it is not real.

Technology is a tool but the real resonance endures in hearts. Sometimes, you have to put aside the screen, snap shut the phone, and go very, very slow.

By David Wolpe | August 10, 2009; 10:03 PM ET Save & Share:
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God does indeed tweet and this is what it is saying:

How can anyone leave Judaism and its mostly mythical books out of a discussion of religion since it serves as the "foundation" of two of the largest religions of the world while itself continues to shrink?

To wit:

But the Holy Land is not so holy anymore based on recent studies by many Jewish and Christian exegetes i.e. no Abraham, no Moses, David was not a king but a local leader if that, the walls did not come tumbling down due to Joshua's horn blowing and there was no trial for Jesus and there were no physical resurrection, ascension or assumption.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20E1EFE35540C7A8CDDAA0894DA404482
http://secweb.infidels.org/?kiosk=books&id=766
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/joseph_mccabe/religious_controversy/chapter_07.html

Posted by: ccnl1 | August 15, 2009 4:25 PM
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I mean, anyone ever see the movie 'Pump Up The Volume?'

It was about pirate radio, not the Net... But it shows there was a need for this long before there *was* a Web, never mind Twitter.

World in desperate need of healing.

Talk hard.

Yaknow?

Posted by: Paganplace | August 13, 2009 4:51 PM
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Well, I guess I can say this: While 'tweets' may just be a quicker and more dumbed-down version of the Web... Well.

The Web's kind of full of chaos and noise, particularly on matters of religion, but with it *here,* it's a *lot* harder for any given group of religious abusers or controllers to out-and-out *lie* to someone.

I went through high school thinking I might just be the last Pagan in the world, ...forget about pop-culture Witch-hunts, the only time I heard the word 'Wiccan' was someone offhandedly claiming Wiccans were a sect of *Hare Krishnas,* a claim nothing ever came up to cast doubt upon.

And some things I saw might have come down different if anyone'd Tweeted about it.

Kinda like in Iran, maybe.

Posted by: Paganplace | August 13, 2009 4:46 PM
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"Jesus took time away from regular activities to pray. So, maybe God tweets, at times, but he prefers a real conversation most of the time."

Says who??

Posted by: ccnl1 | August 12, 2009 12:03 PM
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Technology is good because it brings the world of knowledge to our fingertips. It connects us to people so distant, so instantly, that the ancients would probably consider it the work of gods.

However, the downside of morphing all our activities into a technological mindset is losing our personality, personal touch and thoughtfulness--we act on auto pilot without real connections. We end up with a monochromatic world. Boring.

Interpersonal relationships suffer and the beauty of art and diversity and differences are lost.

Because technology generally pushes us at giddy-up pace, we suffer intellectually. Wisdom is never a quick process, it takes time to understand the relationships of people, things, events and ideas.

Jesus took time away from regular activities to pray. So, maybe God tweets, at times, but he prefers a real conversation most of the time.

David Wolpe

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