Wednesday, September 27, 2006

The "Church of Fools"

For those of you who love both Jesus and The Sims, there is finally a way to do both at the same time: A virtual church called the Church of Fools, that exists entirely on-line.



You can pick an identity, go to sermons, invoke gestures, like genuflecting, kneeling, raising your hands, yelling “hallelujah” – everything you ever wanted to do, but were too shy or white to do in public with real people. It apparently has real sermons delivered by simulated preachers and allows real-time interaction with others who are logged in.



Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to actually load the software that lets me enter the church on either of my computers. I’ve long suspected my computers are demon-possessed, and now I finally have proof. Thanks, Church of Fools!

Despite the tongue-in-cheekness of it all, it is actually a serious effort by the Methodist church to examine whether an on-line community can do “church”. It will be interesting to see how the experiment develops.

Any church that was able to banish Satan in its first week is off to a pretty good start, though.

http://www.churchoffools.com/news-stories/02_sulphur.html

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why not just write a program to control your virtual christian and have it do what normal Methodists do (I am a member, so it's my right to poke fun): such as sit, stand up and sing, sit, repeat after the pastor, stand up and sing, sit, repeat after the pastor, stand up and sing, sit, listen for 15 minutes, stand up, and leave. Then, in this virtual church, you'll have virutally nothing to do with God at all. Kind of like the real-world version.

Curious...could these comments be considered blasphemy? I'm sooo going to H E double hockey sticks.

Dan S said...

If you sent your virtual Christian off to virtual church to constantly pray and be holy, would it be you or him that gets to go to heaven?

snarkbutt said...

I've often thought that God is to us what we are to our computer games.

What I mean is: the Sims, Sim City or Civilization are crude imitations of real life. They approximate our world, but don't get anywhere close to the complexities of real life. That could be what we are to God: We're just little pixles that crudely represent God's reality.

So going to heaven, I guess, would be like a Sim getting to live in the real world.

Have I, like, blown your mind, dude?

snarkbutt said...

Why do they call it "Church of Fools?" Is that some sort of joke? Or editorial comment?