Net.religion was the first place on the internet where people argued about God. Not in the abstract — in the specific, particular, human way that arguments about God tend to go when the people having them are scientists at NASA Ames, software developers in Santa Cruz, and administrators at Digital Equipment Corporation who grew up under stern nuns in the 1950s. The group existed before Usenet was organized, before the Great Renaming divided religion into its modern specialized channels. It was the original container — broad, unsorted, and alive with the energy of people who had found, for the first time, a global forum for questions they had been carrying privately for years.
The newsgroup operated under the original net. hierarchy established in the early 1980s alongside Usenet itself. It preceded and eventually fed into the soc.religion.* structure created by the 1986–1987 Great Renaming, when Usenet's ad-hoc net.* taxonomy was replaced with seven organized top-level hierarchies. The gems archived here date from 1985, representing the last years of the original net.religion before its successor groups took shape. They preserve something that the later, more specialized groups did not always manage: the encounter between disciplined technical minds and the irreducible fact of religious experience.*
Three figures anchor the archive. Kenn Barry, a NASA researcher, applied the rigour of physics to the question of first causes and arrived honestly at the limit of what science can say. Don Steiny, a software developer, read a book about Sufism and could not contain his astonishment at discovering a twelve-century-old Muslim mystical tradition that sounded, to him, like Lao Tzu. Ray Levasseur, a DEC administrator, posted for the first time in his life to share what God had become to him after a breakdown, a dying father, and a pastoral counselor who helped him find a faith he could live with. Together they represent the full range of what net.religion could hold — philosophy, discovery, and testimony.
Origins and Context
Net.religion was established as part of Usenet's original net.* hierarchy in the early 1980s, when Usenet was still a small network primarily connecting universities and research institutions over telephone lines. In those years, Usenet's organizational categories were informal and largely ad-hoc — net.religion was simply "religion," a single bucket for all discussions of faith, theology, philosophy of religion, and religious practice.
The network it served was not religiously neutral. Its users were overwhelmingly technical — engineers, scientists, programmers, graduate students in the hard sciences — and the culture of the net.* groups reflected this. Religion was discussed with the same mixture of skepticism, empiricism, and genuine curiosity that technical people bring to unfamiliar domains. Posts on net.religion were frequently framed as arguments, with explicit attention to evidence, logical structure, and the distinction between what is known and what is assumed.
This did not produce irreligion. It produced a distinctive kind of inquiry: people who had thought seriously about the limits of scientific explanation, who had sat with questions that physics and mathematics could not fully answer, and who were not willing to settle for either a crude materialism or an uncritical faith. The cosmological argument for God's existence was a recurring topic precisely because it sat at this boundary — not provable, not disprovable, but a genuine edge.
The Community
The 1985 archive preserves a snapshot of a specific community: employed professionals, mostly male, working at the intersections of technical culture and religious curiosity. Kenn Barry posted from NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California — the same institution where some of the founding work of the internet was being done. Don Steiny ran a software firm in Santa Cruz. Ray Levasseur administered systems at Digital Equipment Corporation, then one of the most important computer companies in the world.
What they shared was not tradition — they came from different religious backgrounds and held different beliefs — but a willingness to go on record. Posting to a newsgroup in 1985 was a deliberate act. The medium was text-only, asynchronous, and public to anyone on the network. To post about God, about personal spiritual experience, about the breakdown that led you back to faith, was to make something private permanently available. The people who did it were not casual browsers. They had something to say.
The discussions they joined were often already in progress — threads about entropy and creation, about the "Damager-God" critiques of theodicy, about whether Islam could be separated from its most extreme political expressions. Net.religion was not a quiet space. But it was a space where genuine testimony was possible alongside philosophical argument, and where a first-time poster could share a life-changing experience alongside a NASA researcher's careful epistemology.
What the Group Preserved
The archived gems from net.religion represent three distinct modes of religious writing on early Usenet.
The first is philosophical argument. Barry's post on the cosmological argument is a precise piece of thinking: he maps what cause-and-effect can and cannot explain, identifies the domain boundary between physics and metaphysics, and refuses to claim more than the argument warrants. He arrived at agnosticism at thirteen and stayed there — but the argument he worked through is honest, careful, and more rigorous than most published treatments.
The second is cross-cultural discovery. Steiny's encounter with Sufism — mediated through Idries Shah's anthology The Way of the Sufi — captures the specific pleasure of finding that the world is larger than you imagined. His astonishment at discovering that a twelfth-century Persian mystic sounded like Lao Tzu, that Islamic devotional poetry anticipated William James's categories, that five hundred million people carried a tradition this rich and he had never known it existed — this is a document of early cross-cultural dialogue on the internet, when the network was just beginning to create the conditions for such encounters.
The third is testimony. Levasseur's post about coming to know God is the rarest kind of document: an honest account of spiritual transformation, written without theological overlay, by someone who had not previously made a habit of speaking about such things publicly. His description of the strict Catholic upbringing that left him a "God Hater," the crisis of his father's death, the pastoral counselor who helped him separate God from punishment — this is primary spiritual history, the kind of thing that academic religious studies cannot easily preserve.
The Great Renaming and After
The net.* hierarchy was reorganized in 1986–1987 in what became known as the Great Renaming. Net.religion's subject matter was distributed across the new soc.* groups: soc.religion.christian, soc.religion.eastern, soc.religion.islam, and the moderated moderators' forum that became the backbone of structured religious discussion. Talk.religion.misc picked up the more contentious debates that had run through net.religion's less regulated space.
Net.religion itself was retired as part of this reorganization. Its successor groups inherited its topics but not quite its character: the later groups were more specialized, their audiences more self-selected, their discussions more structured. Something was gained — depth within traditions, quality control, reduced signal-to-noise. Something was also lost: the accident of encounter. A software developer curious about Sufism and a NASA researcher mapping the limits of physics did not have to be in the same newsgroup. In net.religion, they were.
Colophon
Net.religion was part of the original net.* Usenet hierarchy, active from the early 1980s until the Great Renaming of 1986–1987. The archived gems date from April and August 1985, representing the group's final years before reorganization. Contributors include Kenn Barry (NASA Ames Research Center), Don Steiny (Santa Cruz, California), and Ray Levasseur (Digital Equipment Corporation).
Introduction written for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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