SURFING BELIEFNET.COM : Soybeans & other religious enthusiasms.

Religious people like soybeans. That's the first lesson I gleaned from Beliefnet (www.beliefnet.com), the intriguing, potentially addictive, and occasionally horrifying Web site that caters to the devout. Designed to be a virtual community for "people interested in religion, spirituality, and morality," Beliefnet proffers a smorgasbord of journalism, guided meditations, spiritual exercises, surveys, and discussion groups, both lighthearted and serious. But whatever its topic or religious affiliation--from Baha'i to Zoroastrianism via Christianity, Falun Gong, and "Secular Philosophies"--every block of text comes trailing clouds of commercial links and advertising banners. Try accessing, as I did recently, an article about pet cloning and you'll find your eyes straying to an icon promoting a ferret tuxedo available (with a click or two) from marshallpet.com. Browse a guide to religious board games, rated for their interest to audiences of various theological persuasions, and you'll be invited to purchase one forthwith. And log on to just about anything, it seemed during my early explorations of the site in late February, and you confront a Gourmet-quality photo of "fresh roasted soy nuts covered with the best tasting chocolate." The soy industry, evidently, finds believers a ready target.

Now, the endorsement of such a lobby may seem a dubious achievement. But even the folks behind Tofutti have a limited amount of money to spend on marketing, and they would not be plastering their soy-nut imagery across Beliefnet if it were not a much-populated, visually appealing site that can provide hours of stimulation to the spiritually inclined. If this cybervenue was nominated for a 2001 Webby (the Internet's Academy Award equivalent) in the "community" category, it's with good reason--and it's not just because it offers a menu of amusing religious lightbulb jokes.

Just to start with, Beliefnet is an easily navigable source of enlightening and useful information. Only a few lone souls want to buy ferret tuxedos, but many of us may want, post-9/11, to learn more about Islamic tenets. Beliefnet's "virtual hajj," to give one example, walks the reader through the pilgrimage to Mecca that is one of the five pillars of Islam; vivid photos depict the Haram mosque and other stages of the pilgrims' journey. Beliefnet also functions admirably as a news service--a particularly gratifying trait, given the paltry coverage of religion in most mainstream media outlets--greeting visitors at the top of its home page with religion-related headlines from sources like the Religion News Service and Christian Science Monitor.

At the same time, intelligent opinion pieces by the site's columnists and other writers contemplate the news from spiritual and moral perspectives. At the height of Salt Lake City Olympic fever, for example, Beliefnet columnist Richard Mouw discussed his theology-based impatience with exaggerated patriotism, citing Romans 13; if you were still thinking Enron, not Olympics, you could scroll through "The Dark God of Capitalism," a sermon--quoting John Jay and Alexander Hamilton--by the Reverend Davidson Loehr, a Unitarian Universalist pastor. Leaving aside questions of the arguments' merits, such op-eds provide a refreshing antidote to the all-secular logic that dominates much of the public discourse. The site's culture department is just as stimulating, frequently supplying the kind of idiosyncratic think pieces so often absent in big newspapers' arts and leisure sections. My favorites have included Jonathan V. Last's article on cinematic portraits of Satan (Elizabeth Hurley is just the tip of the iceberg) and "Can Shooting Deer Bring Us Closer to God?" in which Beliefnet's witty columnist John D. Spalding mused over books by Christian hunters.

On a more practical level, the site will clue you in to your local church alternatives, if you select your denomination and plug in your address--and if you happen to be a Wiccan, not a Christian, you can discover your nearest coven (the witchvox.net server was down for maintenance when sheer curiosity tempted me to that option). The "Find a House of Worship" feature goes at least a short way in demonstrating Beliefnet's effective emphasis on interactivity. A Web site that doesn't prod visitors out of passivity isn't living up to the medium's possibilities--this is not a fault one can attribute to Beliefnet, which encourages members (signing up takes just a minute) to build cyber memorials to loved ones, join online prayer circles and study groups, consider online matchmaking services (www.catholicsingles.com is free for seniors over sixty, it turns out), post responses to articles, and generally speak back when spoken to.

Shortly after Ash Wednesday, for example, I was inspired to check out the Interactive Lenten Calendar, designed in a liturgically appropriate purple. Click on a date and you'd get a suggestion for an activity the creators, at least, viewed as spiritually enriching: looking up the vital statistics of a third-world country, for instance, or maintaining equanimity when on the phone with a brusque caller. While contemplating the latter recommendation, I was sidetracked by a pop-up banner with a challenge: "How merciful are you? Take Beliefnet's quiz." Zipping through a dozen or so questions (How do you treat a neighbor who's accidentally run over your pet? etc.) landed me with a score of thirty out of a possible sixty and the deadpan verdict, "You're no Mother Teresa."

Many of the interactive opportunities Beliefnet offers illustrate the site's discomfiting tendency to meander into New Age territory. The homepage, for example, gives relatively high billing to an all-angel department, including an "Angel of the Day" feature that is, in turn, linked to Tarot.com. And the interesting section of guided meditations includes a nine-minute harp-and-zither-scored "Guided Goddess Meditation" by writer-lecturer Mara Freeman, who is apparently an archdruidess in the Druid Clan of Dana.

I was more interested in Edward Espe Brown's Potato Chip Meditation, an instruction on how to eat a potato chip mindfully. The point, of course, is to remain in the moment, taste the potato chip with all one's concentration, and silence straying thoughts--a lesson that Beliefnet sabotaged somewhat by posting a distracting interactive poll on the right side of the screen: "Which of these foods would you rather eat mindfully? A raisin? A potato chip? A spoonful of Haagen Dazs ice cream?" (65 percent of respondents went for the ice cream. I would have stuck with the chip, myself.)

And, of course, the potato chip exercise would not have been complete without an icon prompting surfers to buy Edward Espe Brown's book Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings: Recipes & Reflections. For, alas, Beliefnet's interactive capability--and, in some sense, its relationship with its members--reaches its zenith in the give-and-take of capitalism. If impressed by the archdruidess's meditation, you can buy her Celtic Spirit Meditations CD. Elsewhere in the site, you will be urged to buy a Buddha Wall Calendar, or purchase the book From the Ashes: A Spiritual Response to the Attack on America, or learn how eDiets.com can help you lose ten pounds, or cyber-glide over to ABC to buy the Peter Jennings documentary, The Search for Jesus. There is even a Beliefnet store that offers discounts to members.

To an unfortunate extent, this consumerist spirit undermines the very real spirit of community that the site fosters. Do adherents of various faiths really have something in common--a religious attitude or facility that transcends conflicting dogma? When you log on to Beliefnet, you'll feel that there is, simply because the serious treatment of religion, in cultural, scientific, sociological, or political context, contrasts so strikingly to the secularist attitudes that dominate twenty-first-century America. But when those ads pop up, the atmosphere of empathy starts to feel phony: the rich nexus of information, commentary, and spiritual exercise begins to seem just another corporate marketing gimmick. Has one happened upon an online trove of spiritual resources, one wonders? Or just a sales strategy for soybeans?