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A Put God into Google for a glimpse of cyber heaven
14 June 2001

Holy Moses! Got a question? Try askmoses.com for the definitive answer, reports Chloe Veltman

The rabbis at askmoses.com, a Jewish website, are a busy lot. "How does reincarnation work?" asks one surfer on the site's "Ask Moses Now" live chat page. "I have a few questions about converting to the Jewish faith," says another. "Why do the Israelis think they own the world?" asks a third enquirer. Within minutes of typing in a question, the duty rabbi replies.

THE rabbis at askmoses.com, a Jewish website, are a busy lot. "How does reincarnation work?" asks one surfer on the site's "Ask Moses Now" live chat page. "I have a few questions about converting to the Jewish faith," says another. "Why do the Israelis think they own the world?" asks a third enquirer. Within minutes of typing in a question, the duty rabbi replies.

With interactive religious websites springing up all over cyberspace, the internet is a resource for anyone seeking spiritual information, advice or worship at any time of day or night. Unlike many other religious websites offering advice from "virtual" priests and rabbis, AskMoses responds in real-time, 24 hours a day, six days a week; "We don't operate on the Sabbath or holidays," says Rabbi Dov Greenberg, one of the site's staff rabbis.

Rabbi Greenberg usually works a 3-hour paid shift from his base in California, juggling between 20 to 40 conversations per hour and answering questions from Jews and non-Jews alike, that "run the entire gamut of the Jewish experience". The site's "global network of rabbis" enables people to get round-the-clock spiritual help, with funding provided by donations.

On one occasion, Rabbi Greenberg counselled a teenager in Germany who was struggling to deal with the "intense hatred he felt towards Jews," having grown up in a family who had served in the Nazi party in the Second World War. "Because of the nature of the web-based format, which allows for privacy, people are often much more open about the real, intimate issues of their life," says Rabbi Greenberg. "It enables people who otherwise would not have the opportunity to ask questions due to their distance in terms of geography or religious affiliation, to ask them."

Anyone who has ever typed "religion" or "god" into an internet search engine will know that cyberspace is not short of higher powers. Google.com displays around 22m links for "God", which makes it a close runner-up to "sex" at 23.6m links. There are sites covering every faith from The Hindu Universe (www.hindunet.org) to The First Church of Cyberspace (www.godweb.org) where surfers can read sermons, participate in discussion groups and read Christian-tinged film reviews. Elsewhere, you can read the Koran and Dead Sea Scrolls, search the Bible by topic or take a Bar Mitzvah audio tutorial. There are sites where you can buy religious T-shirts, find a partner with similar beliefs or study academic works by theological scholars.

At Rentapriest.com, a site developed by an organisation called Celibacy Is The Issue (CITI), Catholics can search online for a priest willing to perform ceremonies that would otherwise be discouraged. The international directory of priests, dubbed "God's Yellow Pages Online", has more than 2,500 ordained priests on its database who will perform unorthodox services such as divorcee marriages or open-air funerals.

"I am quite worried about the damage the internet can do to religion," says Steven Waldman, who founded www.beliefnet.com with the catchline "We all belive in something". Beliefnet.com aggregates news bulletins, quizzes, meditations and prayer circles for numerous world religions, but the very nature of this spiritual melting pot goes against a belief of its founder. "Religion rubs our faces in certain uncomfortable principles even when it might be more convenient to ignore them," he says. "The internet, on the other hand, lets us choose, smorgasbord-style, what we like or dislike."