Spirituality on the internets: A poll.

[icarus]

I have a poll. It's to cheer up a friend and settle an argument about spirituality on the internet.

A lot of spiritual teachers have discovered the internet. Hey, even the Dalai Lama Tweets (it's confirmed: it's really him).

There are a lot of phonies out there as well.

I'm of the opinion that people are smart on the internet. I know, I know, I may be overestimating people. But the internet is mostly porn and bullshit, and people know this. Everyone knows that dirty old men masquerade as teenage girls. Everyone knows that a Neo-Nazi can put up a fake "Jews Against The Holocaust" website. People surf with their bullshit detectors on full.

I see people following phonies on Twitter, and I may be mistaken, but I don't believe that they're actually looking for spirituality. I think they're just playing with spirituality, not serious enough to be suckered.

But I could be wrong.

Poll #10488 Which teacher are you more likely to take seriously?

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 21

These spiritual teachers teach on the internet. Which one do you take more seriously?

One who teaches at a real life building, church, temple or whathaveyou.
19 (90.5%)

One who solely teaches on the internets.
1 (4.8%)

One who who teaches out of his or her living room.
0 (0.0%)

One who teaches out of a rented space.
1 (4.8%)

These spiritual teachers have students on Twitter. Which one do you take more seriously?

One who mostly has students who've met him or her in real life.
17 (89.5%)

One who mostly has students who haven't met him or her in real life.
2 (10.5%)

One who has entirely online students who haven't met him or her in real life.
0 (0.0%)

Several spiritual teachers have blogs. Which one do you take more seriously?

One who teaches various similar faiths (example, several different forms of Buddhism).
3 (15.0%)

One who teaches one specific faith.
16 (80.0%)

One who teaches various historically unrelated faiths (for example, Islam and Buddhism).
1 (5.0%)

Several spiritual teachers do outreach on the internet. Which are you more likely take seriously?

One who runs charitable organizations (animal rescue, feed the poor, prison outreach, etc.).
16 (80.0%)

One who does not run charitable organizations.
2 (10.0%)

One who periodically aims his or her online followers to help a specific individual.
2 (10.0%)

Several spiritual teachers have collected followers online. Which do you take more seriously?

One that has had the same RL students/members/followers for more than twenty years.
18 (90.0%)

One that has sporadic RL students/members/followers for brief periods.
2 (10.0%)

One that has solely online students/members/followers.
0 (0.0%)

Several spiritual teachers of the same faith are on the internet. Which do you take more seriously?

One that has no formal or official credentials in the faith they teach (whether education or acknowledgement of authorities of the religion).
0 (0.0%)

One that has formal or offical credentials in the faith they teach from the religious order they represent.
16 (80.0%)

One that has educational credentials through a university.
4 (20.0%)

Several spiritual teachers present their own writings on the internet. Which spiritual teacher do you take more seriously?

One that solely has blog posts containing their teachings.
2 (10.5%)

One who has published books containing their teachings.
17 (89.5%)

One who has self-published books containing their teachings.
0 (0.0%)

Several spiritual teachers on the internet know of political controversies within their traditions. Which spiritual teacher do you take more seriously?

One that regularly criticizes other spiritual traditions and leaders.
0 (0.0%)

One that refuses to discuss any political content or criticize other spiritual traditions or leaders.
2 (9.5%)

One that takes a personal stand but does not criticize any other spiritual tradition or leader.
19 (90.5%)

Comments

[malnpudl]

I vacillated for a long time over the credentials question. I finally went with "educational credentials through a university" because you asked about spiritual teachers and all of my experiences have been with various flavors of Protestant Christianity, and this answer reflected my best experiences and impressions.

I'm sure there are other circumstances in which I'd have chosen the second option instead (formal or offical credentials in the faith they teach from the religious order they represent).

Fascinating poll. I hope you're right about skeptical online consumers, even when it comes to spiritual matters.

[icarus]

Yeah, in protestant religions of course it's through the university. In Buddhism, there are two types, scholars and acknowledged non-scholar spiritual leaders (and there are those who are both). In Wicca, I don't think there's a university option.

I expect people will respond according to what they're most familiar with, and that's perfect, because it's how you really establish credibility of a spiritual leader/teacher who's online.

[elf]

There are Wiccan & other Pagan university options; they're rare. Cherry Hill Seminary is the one I know best; it's is awesome in many ways, but nowhere near as widely accessible as Protestant Christian seminaries. Also, it's not a general-purpose university; it's a seminary. (I've been looking at attending CHS for years. I might now have the money for it; I can't quite squeeze the necessary time out of my job schedule. Yet.)

Googling for one I remember (but may be defunct) turned up one I've never heard of: Woolston-Steen Theological Seminary.

A bit more digging turned up the other one--Aquarian Tabernacle Church, which has some education/training but doesn't seem to be a university. Also, it's more specifically Wiccan than the other two.

Of course, the vast majority of spiritual teachers I respect most have no degrees remotely related to their religion. (I'd have to do some counting to figure out if they mostly don't have degrees at all, which I suspect is also the case. College & Paganism aren't incompatible, but there's not much in most colleges that enhances Pagan spirituality.)

[icarus]

Well, see what I know.

[elf]

There are very few (I really do think that's *all* of them), and certainly they don't have the respect in the community that other religions' seminaries do, if only because almost nobody's heard of them, much less attended.

[everbright]

Well, atheist. Also I have experience-by-proxie with cults, so I'm wary around religious leaders, period. I know that's a hop, skip, and a jump away from being THAT asshole atheist, so I try to pull back and judge religious leaders as people before anything else.

[icarus]

Yes, so you've got your B.S. detector on full alert.

I'm willing to bet (based on long conversations with my ex, who hated all religion with a passion) that there are certain practical markers of what you would call legit or at least a-ok.

Like, I found out Thrangu Rinpoche was building a temple for his monks in Nepal when he discovered the Nepali people outside the cities had no health care. So he founded a clinic for everyone, on top of his other efforts. I think this is the sort of thing people look at and go: "Aha. That's the good guy."

[everbright]

Yeah, Thrangu Rinpoche sounds like a decent dude.

[maire]

I couldn't find a way to express my complete lack of interest in whether someone had a long-term physical location they worked from, so I used 'rented space'. However, I don't regard renters as more authoritative than owners or people with larger organisations; I just didn't have an opinion on that point.

[icarus]

I don't think I can edit polls... if it's not important, I think we can just skip the question.

[azurelunatic]

I regard with deep caution any teacher affiliated with an organization large enough to have its own full-time building, as it is difficult to make a personal connection with that many people, and I have a distrust of organized religion. I am not likely to encounter a person who teaches out of a rented space or living room, but the vibe of a rented space can be impersonal and contrary to learning, and each home's vibe is different. Additionally, someone who teaches in-person classes is unlikely to be able to devote proper time to any internet people, so they would likely be unsuitable for me, and unsuitable for anyone else whose capacity for personal interaction is largely the internet. However, the person who teaches on the internet cannot be an island for me to take them seriously - they must have deep, meaningful, and visible ties to their internet community, and those ties will often involve people they've met in person. I would expect that with the depth of connection that needs to form between teacher and student, that if it were geographically feasible, they would meet; I would not trust the teacher who refuses to meet anyone from the internet.

Even though some people who cannot bond well with people they have never met in person are in fact trustworthy and learned, I cannot take them seriously on the internet, if they have not formed at least minor bonds of fellowship and learning on Twitter with people they have never met. However, interacting deeply and spiritually with people but refusing to meet them should it become geographically convenient is a warning flag. Thus I would take the most seriously someone who has a mix of people who know them in ways that transcend the internet, and people they have not met in person. Beware a homogeneous social group.

The lineage of a particular spiritual practice concerns me less than its internal consistency. Discordians get to get away with pulling clashing things together and asserting that it works, because that is the heart of that faith. Everybody else had better not make my logic detectors go bing. I don't know enough about any one religion to judge its single-sourcedness, and I think a lot of religions have a lot in common, more so than various organizations might declare. However, any blog that says "I would like to teach you this thing", rather than "This is what I have found true and useful" gets my red alerts.

I take a leader who has thoughtfully researched organized large charitable efforts more seriously than someone who points people at an individual, but someone who backs, say, PETA, fails several of my tests. Most of my experience with online communities with a spiritual component has involved everyone involved being too generally poor for anyone to feel comfortable actively asking people to give money, just "hey I heard of this thing, if anyone has spare change it could probably be used to good effect there". So I don't hold anything against someone who is acting in a leadership role (but this isn't their career) not specifically recommending causes.

Longevity of association is the key factor, whether it's face to face or online. However, I would be very surprised to see someone with a group with lengthy association where no one has met that person face to face, and no one within that group have met face to face.

I have not heard of any of the pagan traditions I am likely to seek fellowship in actually having university degrees in the topic, and I am immensely skeptical of its ability to be taught in a classroom setting. Likewise, there are few authorities. Rather, it's best to check community ties. A Grand High Master of Implausibility (4th degree) with 5 best buddies of about a year who totally back him up, and a fuckton of drama around them, is more likely to be full of puffery and possibly dangerous, than the mostly self-taught practitioner who was apprenticed to an elder, and maintains ties with two fellow students from the same time, and also a handful of their own people who have reached self-sufficiency and gone on to do their own thing, and a few of their sister-practitioners' apprentices as well. The integrity of each person in the network vouches for the integrity of that specific person, rather than organizational authority.

I am not as adamant about this as some of the people I know, but putting actual teachings into a book is deeply suspicious behavior. Observations, explorations, perhaps. But actual teachings are a more fragile and ephemeral thing, one that owes just as much to timing and the dance of understanding between two minds, and the shared language of symbols that has meaning in that moment to those two people, but may collapse if revisited or looked upon by someone else. So much depends upon context that it would take great skill, great audacity, or plain incompetence to attempt a book. A blog post is hard enough for actual teachings. That said, editorial review is a great power, and peer review is better than no review at all. And beware the shill who tries to convince everyone to buy their book without even checking if they're basically compatible in teaching and learning style.

A spiritual teacher who regularly flings wrath at other traditions and leaders is a politician, and is either too busy being political to teach, or is likely to teach wrongheadedly and wrathfully. A spiritual teacher who does not criticize may be willfully ignoring injustice. A spiritual teacher who mostly confines themselves to personal stands but does not shrink from offering criticism -- and accepts criticism from their peers! -- is more likely to be able to educate their followers to make their own stands as they encounter various situations in their own lives.

[icarus]

The lineage of a particular spiritual practice concerns me less than its internal consistency.

Good point.

A spiritual teacher who regularly flings wrath at other traditions and leaders is a politician

Yeah.

Additionally, someone who teaches in-person classes is unlikely to be able to devote proper time to any internet people....

I don't know if that's true. The Dalai Lama is clearly too busy. But your small church pastor is probably only doing one major sermon a week (I think). I guess it would depend on how many people we're talking about and how busy the schedule is. I've noticed that when we've had teachers staying with us, during the workweek it's very quiet.

I take a leader who has thoughtfully researched organized large charitable efforts more seriously than someone who points people at an individual

I was actually thinking of someone who's founded charitable efforts, whether it's running a small soup kitchen in Detroit, like the Capuchin monks, or that hospital the nuns started in Seattle, or that Korean church who sends kids to Mexico to serve the poor (one year what was needed was haircuts, you never knew).

But actual teachings are a more fragile and ephemeral thing, one that owes just as much to timing and the dance of understanding between two minds, and the shared language of symbols that has meaning in that moment to those two people, but may collapse if revisited or looked upon by someone else.

You're referring to heart to heart teachings. These are the mainstay of your tradition? Hmm. How does that work online?

[azurelunatic]

But your small church pastor is probably only doing one major sermon a week (I think). I guess it would depend on how many people we're talking about and how busy the schedule is. I've noticed that when we've had teachers staying with us, during the workweek it's very quiet.

This assumes a spiritual teacher whose career is teaching. Pretty much everyone who has taught me has not been a career teacher, but has had a day job, a family, and other significant practical physical-space obligations. I don't think it's outright impossible to make a living as a pagan teacher, but I think it is significantly difficult, and any community large enough to support this easily would also be too organized for me.


You're referring to heart to heart teachings. These are the mainstay of your tradition? Hmm. How does that work online?

In order to get a close enough connection to do that, there has to be a significant and sustained amount of time spent together, ideally in as close to real-time as possible. A person can give general good advice just based on common sense, a description of the issue at hand, some experience in how things tend to go down, and a knack for figuring out the factors that people tend to leave out of their descriptions -- but that's still just plain old-fashioned sensible advice. I would not feel comfortable attempting anything more delicate than that without having known someone online at least ... hm. Numbers are so ugly and crude to express these things, but I might say a month? Minimum? And a proper senior-junior relationship would involve 1-3 hours of back-and-forth a week, minimum. The nature of the internet is such that the time's going to be spread out over maybe 10-20 minutes of direct real-time conversation a day, and little bits and blops here and there asynchronously. It might be composed of journal entries, comment conversations, Twitter, email, IM, IRC, voice chat, text, and phone. Sometimes it's based in a common body of knowledge. For some pagans that is more likely to be from fantasy and science fiction than specific scholarly religious books. My Priestess-Confessor and I used references from C.J. Cherryh's Cyteen, as we had that in common and it worked for the issues at hand. Two particular colleagues and I use a lot of references to dduane's Young Wizards series. There's enough attention that goes into building that relationship that I would not expect someone to be able to maintain more than a very few active ones at a time.

Of course in some cases the situation is such that one receives words that are to be relayed just so, based on nothing more substantial than intuition in a flicker of a moment, but that can't be counted upon for a long-term relationship.


I was actually thinking of someone who's founded charitable efforts

The closest to that I've really seen done by people operating on this small a scale is synecdochic's Planned Parenthood iPod & headphone drive. I'm sure there are pagan charitable efforts, somewhere, but that's still way more full-time organization than anything I'm comfortable spiritually affiliating myself with.

[lebannen]

I would expect that with the depth of connection that needs to form between teacher and student, that if it were geographically feasible, they would meet; I would not trust the teacher who refuses to meet anyone from the internet.

Yes, this exactly.

As regards charitable works, I would usually tend to trust someone who points people in the direction of organisations of which they approve, and possibly supports that organisation in practical ways (e.g. my mother in law's church organises collections for Operation Christmas Child (unofficially aka Shoeboxes for Romania)), rather than going out to set up their own tiny charity, which seems to have so much more potential for things to go horribly wrong, from incompetence to absolute scams.

[azurelunatic]

maureenjohnson introduced me to the shelter box charity, which visits places hit by disaster with shelter and survival gear. It is amazingly elegant.

[lebannen]

Funnily enough, Shelterbox is the charity my mum (not that she's a spiritual leader but anyway) tends to support! I think it's a brilliant example of how organisation and structure can make it useful to 'send things to those people in Country X'.

I was interested to note that when George R R Martin [got married? had a big birthday?] relatively recently, Shelterbox was on the list of charities he posted requesting donations rather than presents, presumably he found out about it via Rotary International or something.

[cleverthylacine]

I will be very surprised if he got married, he's had the same partner for ages and ages and I don't think they wanted to get married? IDK. I know her, but not well; we're definitely not friends, which is a sad because I like his writing quite a bit.

[lebannen]

So much for 'quite recently', it was just over a year ago.

Two of my neighbours had been living together for a similar length of time, and I'd always had them in my head as an example of how people can be happy together without that kind of paperwork, when they also got married last year. Turns out that she had in fact been wanting to be married for a long time, but he'd always refused because of a previous failed marriage, and only proposed in the end because she's seriously ill. Hopefully this is not a similar case.

[elf]

I regard with deep caution any teacher affiliated with an organization large enough to have its own full-time building,

I started to think that, and then remembered I have friends who live and teach at Stone City Pagan Sanctuary (I don't like the website either; sorry). I do give extra points to those Pagans who have put in the effort to find a physical location that's not somebody's living room, and I am wary of renting space in ostensibly Christian buildings.

I have not heard of any of the pagan traditions I am likely to seek fellowship in actually having university degrees in the topic

I mentioned a small number of seminaries for Pagans in a comment earlier.

putting actual teachings into a book is deeply suspicious behavior

Agreed. I left that question blank because I couldn't figure out how to answer it... on the one hand, having the discipline and coordination to get a book through traditional publishing filters shows skill. On the other, rejecting their limitations to write a book for people of the tradition shows honesty and a different kind of skill. And limiting the expression to blog posts shows a willingness to interact with the people she's reached; that, too, is admirable.

I decided that I don't think published-or-not is relevant; I'd have to judge a person's spiritual-leadership (or whatever) by other criteria.

[icarus]

Okay.

I just met a Wiccan from Portland. He's here in DC and is tasked to try to connect with the Wiccans in this area.

I notice you're in CA, so you may not know, but I'd like to help him out. Know any east coast Wiccans?

[elf]

Heh. What kind of Wiccans?

beltainelady is in PA; doesn't journal much, and isn't active in her local groups right now. She's Alexandrian, and ran some fairly big festivals in Long Island for a long time. She probably has ties to most of the BTW groups on the east coast.

droops is not Wiccan, exactly; something closer to Greek Recon. He's in DC, and connected to some of the local groups, especially recons & eclectics.

pj/pjvj is somewhere in an east coast timezone, I think on the north-ish end of that. (From a distance of 3000 miles, I only keep track of specific cities if they mention them regularly. Time zones affect the phone calls.) *checks profile* Ah! Pittsburgh, PA. Is also not-exactly-Wiccan; is a Reclaiming initiate.

My name carries a lot of weight with these people. (And vice versa. Among other things, their support helped me through my encounter with CPS.)

I don't know if I have direct contacts with NECTW but I probably have indirect ones. (Jax--beltainelady--probably has more.) If I knew what kind of Wiccans he's trying to connect with, I could maybe be more helpful.

[icarus]

No idea, but I will ask him.

[icarus]

Okay, he wants to talk to you directly. He's at Pockets Webb on Facebook.

How can he best reach you?

He's trying to return to Portland this week.

[elf]

He PM'd me; I replied; we'll probably talk later. (This morning is very busy.)

[icarus]

Cool. :)

[busaikko]

My husband's in a cult (new religion, he says, but it has all the trappings, so) and I'm really, really skeptical. Which is why for "Several spiritual teachers have collected followers online. Which do you take more seriously?" I chose "One that has sporadic RL students/members/followers for brief periods" because... if people follow someone and then move on, *and* do not post exposes or warnings or otherwise appear to have had a bad experience that they need to warn others of, *then* I feel that that's a sign the teacher is doing something right.

My husband's group has many people who've been there a long time... of course, he's been told he'll die if he quits, so YMMV.

(I miss being able to believe in things, but I am a very untrusting person.)

[icarus]

What is he involved in, if I may ask?

[busaikko]

Subikari, which is a splinter group of Mahikari, started by comic book artist Kuroda Minoru. It's a... very expensive splinter group....

[cleverthylacine]

I really couldn't do this one.

How seriously I take spiritual teachers has to do really with only 3 things:

1) Do they ask people for money a lot?
2) Does the stuff they say sound like utter unmitigated bullshit?
3) (most important actually) How much control do they try to exert over the personal lives of people who want to work with them?

I tend to regard spirituality as a YMMV thing, and there are many good and excellent teachers who will never be able to teach me much because I'm just not here to learn what they're teaching the way they are teaching it. I have also learned good lessons from really crappy people (whether they claimed to be teachers or not).

But in evaluating religious leaders of any kind, these are not really my criteria. I don't care where they do their work. There are good teachers and assholes to be found in organised religions, on twitter, on blogs, and in their own religions.

If they aren't advocating charitable works, then I don't care if they are involved in that or not; I mean, I don't need to know if you contribute to charity, and which ones, to get a sense of whether I like what you have to say about energy movement or meditation or any other topic that's not directly related to social justice. Not every spiritual teacher is addressing the kinds of problems that charities fix.

I don't judge people on whether they call others out about political issues because some people prefer to handle those kinds of discussions in private; I care mostly about what they practise and support themselves.

I REALLY REALLY don't expect teachers to teach only one or to teach several faiths; I expect them to teach only the things they believe and feel comfortable discussing. And credentials matter more in some traditions than others.

[icarus]

Fair enough. I appreciate your telling me your actual criteria.