Looking for a new god? A fresh creed?

When it comes to answering life's big questions, the World Wide Web offers more research options than you can wiggle a mouse at.

Trying to find the right used car? Doing homework to find an appropriate college for your firstborn child? Are you a cat person or a dog person? What breed?

Perhaps you wake up in the middle of the night wondering if you need a new god or a fresh creed. Are you a liberal Protestant kind of person or a Hindu person, a Baptist or a Scientologist, a Reform Jew or a Neo-Pagan?

Want to find out? Then go to www.SelectSmart.com/RELIGION/ and click your way through Curt and Lorie Anderson's new and improved "Belief System Selector" site that covers two dozen world religions. Then you can tell them how happy or furious you are about the results. But don't ask about their religious ties. You can ask, but they won't tell.

"People have accused us of being part of every imaginable religious group in the world," said Curt Anderson. "A lot of people accuse of being members of their religion, only they think that we've totally messed it up. Or they feel really threatened and they think that what we believe must be the total opposite of what they believe."

Lorie Anderson interjected: "Some people say, 'You must be Scientologists.' Other people think we're a Buddhist front. ... A lot of people think we're Unitarians. It seems that if you go through and click on answers randomly, the test almost always tells you that you're a Unitarian Universalist. Of course, maybe that says something about Unitarians."

Cue the rim shot. One patron even claimed to have received a mixed test score of "100 percent Unitarian-Universalist" and "100 percent Jehovah's Witness." Sure enough, the writer emailed them the old joke: "You know what you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness with a Unitarian? Someone who knocks on doors for no apparent reason."

The Andersons created SelectSmart.com three years ago, combining her social work and psychology skills with his experience in marketing and advertising. Their Ashland, Ore., home base is near the California border, which means they live in one of America's most complex regions, when it comes to religion and, of course, technology.

So far, they have written or endorsed 200 "selector" programs to help people make choices affecting everything from hobbies to careers, from vacation spots to romance. The site includes links to nearly 2,000 other tests written by volunteers. At the peak of the campaign season, their presidential-candidate selector was receiving 80,000 visitors a day.

Since making its debut last August, the religion selector has been attracting 7,000 users a day and the site now includes advanced quizzes to help Fundamentalists, Jews, Gnostics, agnostics, Pagans, Muslims and others further refine their options. The site includes scores of links to official Web sites representing the various churches, movements and traditions.

Lorie Anderson said she worked on the religion quiz off and on for at least six months and has continued to fine-tune her text, based on user feedback. The goal was to find issues that united the faiths – creation, evil, salvation, suffering – in order to provide some structure. Then she had to pinpoint doctrinal differences in order to sift through the users and pin on some theological labels.

The results often yield strange bedfellows. Orthodox Jews, for example, have more in common with Muslims than with Reform Jews. Liberal Protestants have more in common with pagans than with evangelical Protestants. Liberal Quakers resemble Hindus, while orthodox Quakers may hang out with the Mormons.

The test still isn't perfect. In particular, the Andersons have struggled to break the Christian doctrine of the Trinity down into bites of computer data. Is God a "corporeal spirit (has a body)" or an "incorporeal spirit"?

"That's a tough one," said Curt Anderson. "Christians believe that Jesus had a body, yet God the Father does not. Yet they're both in the Trinity. ... We're still working on that one."

"Right," said his wife. "Words mean a whole lot when you start trying to describe who or what God is or isn't. ... When it comes to words, religious people get really picky."

Kosovo mourns on All Soul's Day

For generations, Serbs have visited the graves of their ancestors on All Soul's Day to mourn, pray and give thanks for the ties that bind.

But the refugees in a Brezovica hostel had a problem last week, as they prepared to make dangerous trips to cemeteries elsewhere in Kosovo. When they requested an armed escort, a KFOR official said the timing just wasn't right. Couldn't they do their rites some other day?

The NATO officers didn't get it. The Orthodox Serbs who practice their faith had to observe All Soul's Day on All Soul's Day, because this precedes Lent. NATO is powerful, but not powerful enough to reschedule Lent, Holy Week and Pascha, which is Easter in the West.

Nevertheless, the terrorists who put about 500 pounds of explosives in a drainage pipe under the road to Gracanica knew the power of centuries of unbroken tradition. They knew thousands of Serbs would risk returning to Kosovo on Feb. 16, to the blood-soaked land called the "Jerusalem of Serbia" and its 1,300 churches, monasteries and holy sites.

"We cannot know what was in the mind of the bomber, but it is likely that this happened on All Soul's Day for a reason," said Father Irinej Dobrijevic, of the Serbian Orthodox office in Washington, D.C. "We do know this. ... Religion is not the true cause of the violence. Religious leaders are actually a moderating influence in Kosovo. Yet it is also clear that religious groups have been the victims of much of the worst violence there."

So someone pushed a remote-control button and shredded a bus full of parents and children, seconds after armored troop vehicles leading the convoy rolled past. Thus, there were another dozen deaths to mourn on All Soul's Day.

Surely this pleased ethnic Albanian extremists, since it demonstrated once again how dangerous it is for Serbs to remain in Kosovo. And the blast certainly provided encouragement to Serbian extremists with ties to former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, since they believe all Albanians should be driven out of Kosovo.

The mourners were the religious leaders who remain caught in the middle, those who have long sought a multiethnic Kosovo.

"I have almost lost my voice from shouting to the international community that something must be done to stop the violence against all the people of Kosovo," said Orthodox Bishop Artemije Radosavljevic, speaking through a translator last week to students in George Mason University's Program on Peacemaking Policy.

Anyone truly seeking peace, he said, would recognize the symbolic role of religion in the Balkans and seek negotiations involving Christian and Muslim leaders.

Yet interfaith talks could only be held with the protection of NATO forces. After all, clergy who tried to travel to such meetings would be risking their lives. No one would be in greater danger, stressed Artemije, than moderate Albanian leaders – Muslims and Christians – who openly advocate peace, nonviolence and a multiethnic Kosovo.

The bishop of Kosovo knows what he's talking about. Artemije is used to drawing sniper fire – literally and politically. Radicals in Milosevic's neo-Communist regime once called him a traitor to the Serbian people. When Serbian army units swept through Kosovo, he sought justice for ethnic Albanian refugees. While living in what amounts to a NATO protectorate, Artemije has pleaded for protection of Serbs who are refugees in a land that, theoretically, remains part of Serbia.

Nearly all of the 200,000 Serbs in Kosovo have fled, with a remnant living in guarded ghettos. During the past 20 months, Artemije has seen nearly 100 of his parishes, monasteries, shrines and graveyards damaged or destroyed. Many were ancient and irreplaceable. There have been no arrests or trials after these crimes.

This shepherd needs a military escort just to pay pastoral visits to his flock. Now, the All Soul's Day bombing has demonstrated that armed vehicles are not enough.

During his latest U.S. visit, Artemije was repeatedly asked what he thought NATO forces should do. "I am not a military strategist," he said. "I am a bishop. ... But the voices of religious leaders in Kosovo are not being heard very often, and when they are heard, they are not respected."

Praying with the digital natives

It's hard to move into a new office without spending some time exploring the past.

Digging into a 20-year-old box, Drew University evangelism professor Leonard Sweet time-warped back to his Ph.D. studies as he dug through layers of onion-skin paper smudged with real ink and an ancient substance called "Wite-Out."

"I went from being an archeologist to, as I dug deeper, a paleontologist. I found carbon paper. This thing need to be carbon dated, it was so old," he said, speaking at a global forum for leaders from 150 Christian campuses. "I looked at this and I said, 'Sweet! This is from a defunct civilization.' But you know what? It was from MY civilization. I'm a Gutenberg person. ... My world was shaped by the book."

Now that world has passed away, even if the rulers of many fortresses haven't noticed.

Sweet believes there is one fact of life that clergy and religious educators must learn – pronto. If they refuse to do so, he said, they will have as much success as someone who tries to make "a credit-card call from a rotary telephone." Here is that fact: "If you are born before 1962, you are an immigrant. If you are born after 1962, you are a native."

Calendar age isn't everything, Sweet conceded. It's theoretically possible to be a 70-year-old native or a 20-year-old immigrant, in the land of digital dialogues and postmodern parables. But immigrants who want to leap from the old "Carpe Diem" world into what he called the culture of "Carpe Manana," must be open to learning languages, customs and skills from the natives.

"I am an immigrant," he said. "I am having Ellis Island experiences every day."

While trained in church history, Sweet is best known for his attempts to peer into the future of the church. He draws rave reviews as a speaker in both liberal mainline and evangelical gatherings, while writing waves of books with trendy titles such as "Quantum Spirituality" and his futuristic trilogy "SoulSalsa," "AquaChurch" and "SoulTsunami."

The history of education has included three landmark events, said Sweet, speaking in Orlando last week to leaders of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. These were the creation of the Greek alphabet, the invention of the printing press and the arrival of the World Wide Web. Colleges and seminaries can handle the first two, but most are doing little to face the implications of that third shift, other than buying hardware and software. They have re-wired their campuses, but not their brains.

Immigrants lead these institutions and many have replaced their rose-tinted glasses with "black-out shades," said Sweet. Nevertheless, they know the natives are restless.

When seeking answers to big questions, the natives don't want to sit in orderly rows and sing tiny sets of hymn verses interspersed with bulletin-board announcements, all of which precede a long lecture called a sermon. When they sing, they prefer flowing songs that seem to last forever while they stand enraptured in an atmosphere of worship.

They are not pew people. What they want, said Sweet, is faith, and even education, that is "experiential," "participatory," "image-based" and "connective." They want a faith that is timeless and timely, at the same time. They want truth that touches all of their senses.

This will be traumatic for leaders of America's aging mainstream religious groups, said Sweet. They feel comfortable with people with blue hair, "unless it shows up on a 16-year-old kid." Many worship in sanctuaries containing images of a Savior with pierced hands and feet, yet they panic when young people show up who "look like they fell out of a tackle box."

Truth is, these natives are swimming in information, but they lack perspective, he said. They don't need the help or permission of authority figures to find their own information about politics, technology, morality and even religion.

That is when the immigrants must be willing to listen carefully to their questions, said Sweet. The natives have information, but many are asking, "Now, what do I do with it? How do I test what is good and what is bad information? How do I turn that information into knowledge and then that knowledge into wisdom?"

The Late Great Planet Hollywood

The book was a global phenomenon and inspired sequel after sequel until millions rallied around the apocalyptic cry, "Don't be left behind!"

True believers handed copies to friends and warned strangers about the Second Coming. Evangelists said the books would convict sinners. It would have made a great movie, except that William E. Blackstone's "Jesus Is Coming" came out in 1878, before Hollywood was born.

"These books were very, very popular. ... They gave evangelists a new weapon in the war for souls," said Baptist historian Timothy Weber, author of "Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875-1982."

"If you read the sermons from back then, it's clear that the great revival preachers were using the same kinds of lines. They were saying, 'Christ could return before I finish this very sentence! Are you ready? What will happen to you if your loved ones vanish into heaven?' ... You heard this all across America. They were saying, 'Don't be left behind!' "

Today, these apocalyptic visions are alive and well, as the thriller "Left Behind" by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins leaps from mall bookstores into movie theaters. The first eight books in the planned 12-book opus have sold 25 million copies, with audio and kids editions selling 11 million more.

The movie – produced for a mere $17 million – blends snippets of "Independence Day" warfare and Bible conference plot twists. Secular critics are slamming it, with the Washington Post calling the film a "blundering cringefest." Some Christians have cautiously called it a small step forward for religious entertainment. Truth is, parts of "Left Behind" are so bad it could become a hip classic, a fundamentalist "Rocky Horror Picture Show."

One thing is certain: the 700 churches and businesses that invested $3,000 each to help Cloud Ten Pictures distribute the movie did so in an attempt to win converts.

Belief in the Second Coming of Christ is an ancient doctrine. But in the 19th Century, John Nelson Darby, Blackstone and other "premillennial dispensationalists" began dividing world history into a complicated series of covenants and "dispensations." They believed Jesus would "rapture" believers up into heaven before a seven-year time of tribulation, followed by an apocalyptic battle between good and evil and Christ's victorious return. This "rapture" concept was especially popular with evangelists.

"Until then," explained Weber, "all preachers really had was the threat of unexpected death, the whole idea of asking, 'If you died tonight, would you be ready to meet God?' Well, that's serious business, but people get used to the idea that they might die. ... The idea of a mysterious, secret rapture took things to a completely different level. How do you debate that?"

After grasping this central image, many converts graduate into a labyrinthine school of prophecy built on highly literal interpretations of the Book of Revelation, Daniel and other mysterious Bible passages. This approach infuriates traditional scholars, yet has long intrigued spiritual seekers – especially in the age of mass media and paperback theology. In the 1970s, Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlson built a publishing empire on "The Late Great Planet Earth," one of the biggest non-fiction hits of that decade.

Dispensationalism has it all. It offers a doctrinal system that claims to address everything from Y2K to OPEC, from Darwin to the United Nations, from Russian nuclear strategy to how many Israeli jets can land on the head of a pin. It also packs an emotional punch. Adults raised in homes steeped in this worldview always have childhood stories to tell about frightening moments when they asked: Where is everybody? Have I been left behind?

These images make sense when fleshed out in sermons and books that provide lengthy passages to explain complicated historical references and obscure symbols. But outsiders will struggle to read between the pictures in "Left Behind: The Movie."

"This may turn into a tribal ritual for people who have already bought into this whole system" of beliefs, said Weber. "You have to wonder if this movie will work as evangelism, in this day and age. ... There's going to be a lot of head scratching going on out there in movie theaters."