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  1. TopTop #1
    Zeno Swijtink's Avatar
    Zeno Swijtink
     

    Open Source Religion

    This relates to Julia Bystrova's posting the other day on the idea that spiritual concepts must keep up with our science and knowledge base.

    ***

    Open to Revisions
    by Sam Kean

    Some religious entrepreneurs have adopted an “open source” model, where rituals and doctrines can be rewritten as easily as computer code.

    Sam Webster has serious tech credentials. He has lived for decades in the San Francisco Bay area, a techie Mecca. Back in the early 1990s, before most people had even heard of the Internet, he was writing code for some of the early sites on the World Wide Web. He’s now a systems analyst, or, as he says, “I’m a geek for a living.”

    What Webster never envisioned himself as was a prophet. He’d been involved in a pagan group called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (left) since the early 1980s, and in February 2001, he decided to hold a workshop on his religion in the Bay area. “I never thought it would catch on,” he admits, but people took a shine to the order. They decided to establish a permanent chapter in northern California.

    At the same time, Webster and his fellows were itching to remake themselves. The Hermetic Order grew out of Free Masonry and Kabbalah, a school of Jewish mysticism. “But we didn’t want to do the traditional things like adhere to secrecy,” Webster says. The group also wanted to incorporate practices from other mainstream faiths, include women in their mix, and, perhaps most important, put a mechanism in place to make room for good ideas in the future. So the group self-consciously decided to involve its members by encouraging them to tinker with the order’s structure and practices. And that’s the moment when Webster realized his dual role as geek and prophet.

    “I said, ‘Wait a minute, there’s a name for this’,” Webster remembers. “Open source.”

    cont. at Search Magazine ? Open to Revisions
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  2. TopTop #2
    JuliaB's Avatar
    JuliaB
     

    Re: Open Source Religion

    very interesting! Open source religion. Wow.

    One of my issues with religion is a similiar issue I have with large corporations. Often the ideas and intent they started with get bogged down in too much inflexible structure which can sometimes 'lock-in' the worst qualities of the human being--greed, control and so forth. They often turn into things that then feed off of the people and dumb them down, instead of being there to feed them and inspire them. Open sourcing could be one way to possibly avoid this, I don't know.
    Julia


    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Zeno Swijtink: View Post
    This relates to Julia Bystrova's posting the other day on the idea that spiritual concepts must keep up with our science and knowledge base.

    ***

    Open to Revisions
    by Sam Kean

    Some religious entrepreneurs have adopted an “open source” model, where rituals and doctrines can be rewritten as easily as computer code.

    Sam Webster has serious tech credentials. He has lived for decades in the San Francisco Bay area, a techie Mecca. Back in the early 1990s, before most people had even heard of the Internet, he was writing code for some of the early sites on the World Wide Web. He’s now a systems analyst, or, as he says, “I’m a geek for a living.”

    What Webster never envisioned himself as was a prophet. He’d been involved in a pagan group called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (left) since the early 1980s, and in February 2001, he decided to hold a workshop on his religion in the Bay area. “I never thought it would catch on,” he admits, but people took a shine to the order. They decided to establish a permanent chapter in northern California.

    At the same time, Webster and his fellows were itching to remake themselves. The Hermetic Order grew out of Free Masonry and Kabbalah, a school of Jewish mysticism. “But we didn’t want to do the traditional things like adhere to secrecy,” Webster says. The group also wanted to incorporate practices from other mainstream faiths, include women in their mix, and, perhaps most important, put a mechanism in place to make room for good ideas in the future. So the group self-consciously decided to involve its members by encouraging them to tinker with the order’s structure and practices. And that’s the moment when Webster realized his dual role as geek and prophet.

    “I said, ‘Wait a minute, there’s a name for this’,” Webster remembers. “Open source.”

    cont. at Search Magazine ? Open to Revisions
    Last edited by JuliaB; 12-17-2009 at 10:49 AM.
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  3. TopTop #3
    Thad's Avatar
    Thad
     

    Re: Open Source Religion

    There's some computer terms that have such psychological benefits that have yet to be worked out.

    one of them " defrag your hard drive" in psychological effect ~ get the spaces out from between your ideas so they require less time to find and come more easy to the speaking.

    "fdisk" gives you the ability to repartition your hard drive if how it was wasn't good enough for new uses~ this brings the idea that partitions are dividers and the divisions were done by someone other than you and this gives you the chance to begin new.

    "reload your operating system" how nice to have the benefit of choosing your operating system

    can you imagine an improv theater along the lines of Psychodrama attempting these actions

    "Firewire" A real hot thought
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