Virtual Atheism

Adrian Hayter — Sun, 25 May 2008 18:28:39 +0000

After watching a recent BBC documentary on Artificial Intelligence entitled “Visions of the Future – The Intelligence Revolution” (I’m a Computer Scientist, what else would I watch?) I got into the virtual online world known as Second Life. The documentary noted that the popularity of the game, and our ability to use it to mask our actual personality and create an entirely new one was intriguing.

I tried the game out, created a new character “Tiberius Greggan”, shaped my appearance so I *vaguely* resemble myself in real life (although quite a few people tend not to do this) and set about exploring the virtual world, flying around, walking, running, intereacting with objects and more importantly, the other online people.

One feature in the game allows the character to join certain groups, so I joined a few Linux based ones since I use both Ubuntu and Linux Mint for operating systems (the server is Debian). I then decided to see what would come up if I typed “atheism” into the search box, and low and behold found a group called “The First Church of Atheism”.

The group aren’t new; in fact Hemant Mehta over at Friendly Atheist wrote about them a while back. However the group on Second Life had only just started when I arrived, and they have already bought some land, and constructed a church, which has “pews” for gatherings and talks, and a shrine to Charles Darwin on the second floor. You can ordain yourself as a minister of the Church by either talking to Reverend Baxton on Second Life, or by visiting their website.

More details on Second Life and the group can be found on their blog. So if you want to get a Second Life account (free) then log in and add me as a friend, and make sure to pay the church a visit!

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Virtual Atheism

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