Over at Goodreads I published a review of my latest read, Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom. The book is essentially a history of the spread of Christianity across Europe from the division of the Roman Empire in 330 to the reconquest of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099. It’s fascinating to see just how much Europe changed to adapt to Christianity and how much Christianity changed to adapt to all of Europe. But there is one thing I forgot to include in my review: the irony that Europe is now the least religious region in the world. In fact, you could even make the argument that, while Christianity became dominant in the 10th and 11th centuries in Europe, it has only survived because of its impressive colonial export during the 16th and 17th centuries. Today throughout Europe churches continue to close due to falling attendance and a lack of priests. Back in 2001 Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, claimed that Christianity is nearly vanquished in Britain.

In one of the strangest twists of history, it is now up to African priests to save the souls of non-believers in Europe and North America. Trust me, if you would have told this to a priest in 15th century Italy he would have shit himself.

A couple weeks ago John Tierney of the New York Times penned an interesting blog post about the evolution of religion after having read Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures. (This topic has been in the media a lot this past year thanks to Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, Christopher Hitchen’s God is not Great, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God.)

Wade argues “that people have a genetically based urge to worship, engraved by natural selection in the mind’s neural circuits because of the tremendous advantage religion conferred on early societies.”

It is easier to see from hunter-gatherer societies how religion may have conferred compelling advantages in the struggle for survival. Their rituals emphasize not theology but intense communal dancing that may last through the night. The sustained rhythmic movement induces strong feelings of exaltation and emotional commitment to the group. Rituals also resolve quarrels and patch up the social fabric.

Tierney, noting that pious churches installed pews to discourage dancing during service, wonders if nonbelievers could develop new godless institutions that confer the evolutionary benefits of religion. He even suggests environmentalism as a possible secular, 21st century replacement to religion:

One possibility that occurs to me is a version of environmentalism, but with better music and with rituals that are more elegant than sorting garbage. A Church of Green could provide some of the same moral lessons and communal values as traditional religions, and I suspect it’s no coincidence that green fervor is especially prevalent in European countries where traditional religion is on the decline.

Meanwhile, in an interesting discussion on Bloggingheads.tv, Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus wonder if the transparent nature of the networked age is leading to a new omnipotent moral force. In other words, do we behave decently these days not because we’re afraid of the wrath of god or the afterlife, but rather because we’re concerned about how we will be perceived on Facebook and Twitter?

It’s the question: what is important, what is not important, what is important to know? Is this information important? Can we still decide what is important? And it starts with this absolutely normal, everyday news. But now you encounter, at least in Europe, a lot of people who think, what in my life is important, what isn’t important, what is the information of my life. And some of them say, well, it’s in Facebook. And others say, well, it’s on my blog. And, apparently, for many people it’s very hard to say it’s somewhere in my life, in my lived life.

- Frank Schirrmacher

Sometimes I wish that my computer had a “fuck it” key. I would press it and it would fuck everything up. My Facebook page: deleted; my Flickr account: gone; my Twitter feed: evaporated; my blog: what blog?

The sheer beauty of all that digital destruction. The temptation. The illusion of protection through forgetting.

“Sometimes I feel like all that is important in life is what we can stick on a 4gb USB drive,” a friend once told me. I hate that feeling. I know it well.

(And, yes, I realize that all of this contradicts what I wrote just a week ago.)

And so, in that central Kenyan patch of dust called Naivasha, the night before we each head in our own separate direction (Bangkok, Arusha, Los Angeles), you could find us walking down the main strip Reservoir Dogs-style, trying to appear as confident as possible while darting between the murderous motorcycles and lorries.

The previous night – a peaceful Thursday – we had found success: a fun dive bar with a crooked pool table on the outskirts of Nakuru. But Naivasha could offer no parallel. It was a Friday night now and the dusty air carried with it a scent of danger and foreboding. Walking back outside of a second story bar that was the opposite of welcoming, a 10-year-old kid bumped into me, holding his hand out for change. He had a leering grin that grew even wider when I told him I had no change. He pulled a flask out of his beaten-up jacket, took a swig, and smiled again.

I knew I’d have to break with tradition. I went back to the hotel room, read the last chapter of my book and immediately fell asleep.

Thank god. For that was the last full night of sleep that I’ve had in the six days since. First were the fitful bouts of shuteye between Nairobi and Doha, Doha and Bangkok. Then waiting until 1 a.m. for my laundry to dry before waking up at 5 a.m. to get to the Bangkok airport. Next stop: Kuala Lumpur and a work+work+play+work itinerary that somehow kept me going from 6 a.m. to 3 a.m. every single day.

My days in Kuala Lumpur deserve at least a couple of posts – the kindness and hospitality showered upon me by my good friend Jeff Ooi and the entire KL blogging community is far beyond what I could have possibly imagined.

But first, catch-up. I’m now in Jakarta, which I think takes the prize of South East Asia’s noisiest and most chaotic metropolis. I’m embarrassed to admit that once again, the only refuge I’ve found is Starbucks’ corporate formula of decent jazz and plush fabric chairs. Joel, if you’re reading this, maybe you can point me toward somewhere better?

So, our last visit was with Abramz Tekya in Kampala. The next day I met with Kayiwa Fred and discovered the Kayiwa Fred Computer Club. I was humbled and embarrassed to learn that Kayiwa traveled 30 kilometers to meet with me and that he was “feeling a bit weak from a ’bout’ of Malaria.” I couldn’t believe he was standing at all. But then, Kayiwa Fred is the epitome of East African ambition.

His hope, his dream, is to start a cyber-cafe. Nothing elaborate – no world domination – just a business he can call his own. A place where he can both make money as an entrepreneur, but more importantly, make change as a social activist.

Secondary school is not public in Kenya. If you want a high school education, you pay for it. (In fact, even primary school was not freely available to all until this current administration.) Of course, this strengthens class divisions as only the wealthy can afford education and only the educated can secure high-paying jobs.

So what did Kayiwa do? He walked straight up to the director of a high school and said he would like to perform janitorial work at the school to pay for his tuition and book costs. He was nervous, he says, but had nothing to lose and four years later he was a high school graduate, this time facing college tuition costs, but again with no money to pay for them. He secured a scholarship at a local trade college run by the YMCA. This is where he is now studying accounting. He admits that accounting is the most compelling of degrees, but it ensures a job and, right now, that’s all he’s looking for.

He described the pressure he feels from his large family. Kayiwa is the first in his family to attend college and so while his siblings are able to contribute portions of their paychecks to family expenses, Kayiwa devotes all of his meagre income to his study and living costs. He says his family thinks that college study is a fast-track to a high-paying job, but according to Kayiwa, employment in Kampala is still more about who you know that what you know.

After tea and bread we walked down to a nearby cyber-cafe. I would show him how to start a blog using WordPress. The internet café was huge – at least 60 computers – and nearly completely full. I looked over a few shoulders and saw lots of gmail accounts, a few news websites, and just as many blogs. From the monitors alone, it could have been any capital city in the world. Internet access in Kampala isn’t affordable by Ugandan standards – over a dollar in hour. When you take into consideration how long it takes to load just one page, the real cost is around $5 an hour. Plus, sites that depend heavily on JavaScript like Gmail and Facebook frequently crash the old school browsers. In the corner of the cyber-cafe was a smiling young Chinese businessman in stylish glasses – clearly the owner. I did some quick math: $1.50 x 60 computers x 16 hours x 30. He was bringing in around $43,000 a month before rent, taxes, utilities, and the spare change to employ the staff. After all that, probably around $180,000 a year. Not a bad gig, especially when you’re living in Uganda.

The Chinese business community has an incredible level of support for its up and coming entrepreneurs. After talking with Kayiwa for a few hours, I was sure that he is just as shrewd a businessman as the young Chinese owner of the cyber-cafe, but he has no one to lean on for startup capital. So instead, revealing his resourcefulness, he’s taken to Facebook, Razoo, and a number of other social networking sites to try and convince people from the developing world to donate their used computer gear to him. His hope is that eventually he can gather enough equipment so that his only startup cost is renting out a locale. “Then I want to use the profits to do outreach work. To teach the people of my community how to use the internet to do good.” A burst of excitement started to show, despite his exhaustion from enduring malaria.

Throughout my travels this trip, one thing has been hammered home over and over again – and that’s now much harder people from the developing world must work to participate in the global economy. Access to documentation, the time and financial costs of translation, access to reliable communication and electricity – all these things that we take for granted in the US. A 9-5 Western workday translates into a 6 – 9 workday elsewhere because of all these added obstacles. If you have computer equipment – especially used laptops – that you are willing to donate to Kayiwa, you can reach him via Facebook.