Zeno Swijtink
12-17-2009, 10:26 AM
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.
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Open to Revisions (https://www.searchmagazine.org/May-June%202009/full-opensource.html)
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 (https://www.searchmagazine.org/May-June%202009/full-opensource.html)
***
Open to Revisions (https://www.searchmagazine.org/May-June%202009/full-opensource.html)
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 (https://www.searchmagazine.org/May-June%202009/full-opensource.html)