Peace Park Opens

May 19th marked the official opening of Peace Park on InfoIsland. A 3D religious resource area, it is a place where people on Second Life can come to learn about all religions, to meet and talk with others, or a place to quietly reflect. Several other uses were mentioned for the area at the opening and we hope to implement these soon, they include discussions of religious publications and interfaith discussions of today’s real life religious issues.

In opening, I thanked everyone who has been involved in creating this area:

“Bucky Barkley for his helpful building tips. Rocky Vallejo & Cindy Elkhart and others for helping to locate religious resources. Religious leaders from all around SL who consulted with me on the buildings, objects, and symbolisim: Beth Odets, Dinnie Devonshire, Drown Pharaoh, Gonzo Mandlebrot, Marino Nuvolari, Pratyeka Muromachi, TaiChi Pontoppidan, and Tara Yeats.
Their help and guidance has been indispensable to this project! I also want to thank Lorelei Junot. Without her, Infoisland would not be here. It is her innovative spirit that has given us all space to create!”

Drown Pharaoh, founder of Second Faith, a not for profit consultancy service providing information on religion and religions in Second Life, was the guest speaker. He agreed to let us post his speech for those of you who could not attend.

Drown Pharaoh, Peace Park Opening, May 19th, 2007
First of all, may I begin by extending my congratulations to the Library on the event of its first anniversary in Second Life. I also wish to convey my deepest personal thanks to thanking Abbey Zenith, Rocky Vallejo and all those connected with Alliance Second Life Library on InfoIsland for this wonderful resource.

It was this project that inspired me to develop my own Second Life project, Second Faith, a not for profit information portal and consultancy resource providing information on religions in Second Life. I’m sure most of you here today are well aware that religious life in the metaverse is a rich and diverse phenomenon, one which I have so far merely perused and catalogued in terms of its more visible manifestations.

I should also begin with an apology, in that I have spent much of the last two months on Second Life engaged in another project, and hence the information available on the Second Faith website is already dating. Technical matters have also hampered me restarting my explorations of a religious world that demands the attention of serious researchers. I fear my enthusiasm is often misconstrued for expertise on religions in Second Life, which I am indeed eager to develop but I am in reality at the very earliest stages of developing.

My hope is that Peace Park will help attract the attention of the academic religious studies community some of whom, much to my chagrin, seem perplexed by 3-D virtual realities just as I’m sure they were by the Internet in its early days. I hope you will therefore indulge me if I say something about researching religions in Second Life, as well the relationship between religion and education and its role in generating interfaith dialogue in-world.

There is a perspective within academia and also outside of it that what happens in Second Life is only as important as its repercussions in the real world. This, I believe, is the result of a false binary between virtual and real, mixed with common misconceptions that Second Life is ‘about pretend’, aided by some very ardent and skilled academic positioning, particularly within British social anthropology.

I think it is important not to confuse the personal and the social. Individual human experience is meaningful regardless of its context. Second Life architecture, for instance, is no different from other forms of popular, contemporary art - and indeed, this resource is a contribution to that art form. People can and do experience all the emotions they do in encountering other forms, from wonder to joy to anger, in their explorations of Second Life environments.
At the same time, I believe that the social reality in the metaverse differs not simply in degree but in the very quality of social contact compared to other cyber environments. The nature of human contact in Second Life is far more palpable, visceral and intimate compared to most other real-time cyber environments. I suspect research currently being pursued by one British postgraduate psychology student will eventually support this contention. Second Life is not reality – but it is ‘real’ in a way other cyber environments are not.

By way of example, I would mention my experience of meeting people here whom I have known over a prolonged period via blogs. It is an experience that has approached meeting people I have known online in real life and has, in one instance, proved to be equally disappointing! The important point here is that the quality and nature of dialogue is quite different from anything else I have encountered – and that includes the potential for dialogue between people of different faiths.

The role of education in supporting such dialogue is critical. Peace Park provides an important source of information that has its origins in institutions external to interfaith discussion, thus imputing it with a validity which is crucial in challenging prejudice and misunderstanding. Only this week, one long-standing multifaith group on Second Life imploded over attitudes towards my own faith and my prayer is that those unsure or uncertain about Islam or indeed any faith group will make Peace Park their first port of call.

I would like to end, however, by pointing out that you don’t have to be the least bit religious to be interested in Peace Park! The fact is, religion continues to be crucial to life on planet Earth and if you are genuinely interested in the wonderful, intriguing, infuriating species of hairless ape that currently populates this beautiful world, your studies should – at some point – include the religions of homo sapiens. Like complex language, opposable thumbs and Paul Wolfowitz’s toupee, it’s what truly distinguishes us from the rest of the fauna!