James Au, whose pioneering beat for Reuters is Second Life, has a fascinating story this morning about the rise and apparent fall of Avatars of Change, one of the first native religious orders to be formed in SL.

The group was founded  as a Neo-Confucian “ecumenical religious and cultural order, united by the Avatarian Way.” It’s membership is interdenominational and it’s practices seem to be centered around consulting an I Ching-based, software oracle.

Au’s story revolves around a controvert sparked when the group’s founder (an offline Christian whose avatar is Taras Balderdash, a gray-bearded Asian man in a silk robe with a blue dragon on his shoulder) asked group members to vote on a proposition that would bar Muslims on the basis of the proposition that Islam is inherently intolerant and therefore not “Avatarian.”:

“There are many jewels of Moslem culture,” he avers. “Music, Sufi mysticism, etc., but the world is now dealing with the youthful energy of its fundamentalism. What I am hoping to hear from our Avatarians is a positive argument against my position; someone who argues, based on the Quran, that I am wrong. So far all I’ve got is constant reminders of other religions being intolerant, particularly Roman Catholic Christianity.”  Taras considers this an evasion of the point. “I am interested in the theology. People are people, whatever their faith, and God loves them all. But what hope do we have that a tolerant Moslem theology will win out?”

The vote, which is scheduled to conclude this Sunday, naturally sparked controversy in SL.

(Au interviews a Sufi, Drown Pharaoh, who leads regular prayers in an SL mosque, whose response to AoC paints the group’s vote as an extension of old western Orientalism. If the exchange reads as an argument among theology students that’s because it is. Drown Pharaoh identifies himself in the story as “a religious studies graduate and a committed member of an interfaith community on SL, Koinonia.” The discussion is fascinating, and it mirrors offline debates about the nature of Islam and about who is entitled to speak for Muslims.)

And enough of an AoC membership revolt that the religion appears to be collapsing. From Au’s interview with Taras  Balderdash:

My questioning the tolerance of Islam for other faiths has produced such grief and chaos that I have rethought the concept of the the Avatars of Change and left the Order,” he told me late yesterday. “I am just a monk now. The Order is falling apart pretty rapidly, so I’m not sure how much of it will survive without me.”

I’m less interested in the theological debate–which mirrors debates in the offline world about the nature of Islam and who has the right to speak about a given faith–then I am in the nature of religion formation in virtual worlds. In an environment where there is no real death, where nothing is random, and there is no mystery as to the creation of the universe, what role could a native religion play?  One sign that social media is truly transformative–not just a new way of doing old things, but a new kind of culture–would be the rise of a native spirituality. But do people’s avatars have spiritual needs that are different in nature from the needs of their humans? Or is there some kind of spiritual practice native to cyberspace that can offer something missing in the real world?

I wish I had the answers. Stay tuned.