As the ideals of the open source movement inspire collaborative thinking and challenge top-down hierarchies, more religious groups are putting up Web sites and declaring themselves an “open source religion.” Jews are by no means the only religious group to experiment with open source methodologies, as NewAssignment.Net reported last week.

Take Yoism, an open source religion founded by Boston-area psychologist Dan Kriegman in 1997. Growing up a Jew trying to make sense of the monstrous evil of the Holocaust, Kriegman dedicated his Ph.D. to trying to understand what draws people towards religious ideologies.

“Having a religious identity is the norm, not the exception,” Kriegman said. “It provides essential things, a sense of belonging and higher purpose.” But there’s a dark side. “It knits together a group and prepares them to commit genocide, or defend against it…What we need is a religious belief system that provides all the good things without the crazy stuff,” Kriegman said.

Kriegman’s son Isaac, a Linux programmer, encouraged him to start his own religion — and to make it open source. “Almost every single thing can be changed,” Kreigman said. “We believe everyone has access to a piece of the truth.” Yoism counts more than 300 members, of which 30 might congregate on any given weekend. “There’s no prayer to a God, but there’s a lot of singing.”

Likening his faith to a Linux distribution, possible changes have to be ratified by Yoism’s board of directors, people “who have been showing up and shown they’re serious,” Kriegman said. “It’s about finding the good and quashing magical thinking.”

But if Kriegman hopes open source methodologies can stop “magical” thinking, others hope the open source movement can empower “magickal” belief.

Magick (spelling the word with a “k” indicates you mean the “real thing,” as opposed to sleight-of-hand or “stage magic”) is a practice dating back to 19th century London, when Aleister Crowley spearheaded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society that practices occult rituals combining elements of Egyptian paganism, Jewish Kabbalah, and Freemasonry. Magick, Crowley taught, is “the art and science of causing change in conformance with human will,” and followers flocked to him in droves.

But secrets are hard to keep in the age of the Internet. For the intrepid researcher, most of Golden Dawn’s source materials were available in libraries, used bookstores, or on Web sites. Rather than maintain the illusion of secrecy, in 2002 Sam Webster, a systems analyst and practitioner of magick, founded The Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn in San Francisco. In a complete break with more than a hundred years of Golden Dawn tradition, Webster put all of its occult teachings online, and even the promotion exams between ranks. “We publish everything we do,” Webster said, “that’s unheard of in this space.”

Old practices were then reexamined, starting with Golden Dawn’s neophyte ritual for new members. In open source fashion, potential recruits were invited to contribute ideas. “Sometimes only the newest person can say ‘The emperor has no clothes,’ and sometimes the newest person is right,” Webster said.

What all “open source religion” have in common is the axiomatic belief that “open source” is something good and desirable — but that’s about it. For some, “open source” means only that the technology and openness of the Internet is being utilized for the modest purposes of creating a bible study group online.

Andrew Perriman founded Open Source Theology fours year ago, after putting a series of religious essays on the “Emerging Church” Christianity movement he felt weren’t “book-worthy” on the Internet for public consumption and debate. The site has grown to accommodate more than a thousand registered readers and innumerable lurkers, with Perriman writing a good deal of the content but getting about 30 posts a month from other users.

“Sometimes people express strongly divergent views on things, but it very rarely gets out of hand,” Perriman said. He says he is rarely forced to delete a comment, and when he does it’s usually because of irrelevancy, not offensiveness. “I look at other theological Web sites where the attitudes are horrifying, I don’t know why we’re so lucky,” Perriman said. “Maybe it’s because I’m not American,” chuckled the Englishman living in Holland.

While sometimes criticized for a lack of orthodoxy, Perriman’s site is about mainstream Christian practice. “Open source is only a metaphor,” Perriman said. “It’s a set of questions: Why do we believe this? What do it that way?” The contributions are open, but the religion is not. “It’s not a free-for-all, theologically.”

But a “free-for-all, theologically” is exactly what some others mean by “open source religion.” Take the mantra of Discordianism, the so-called “religion disguised as a joke disguised as a religion” inspired by the cult-classic 1965 treatise Principia Discordia.

Discordians preach a sort of sacred silliness, and righteously accuse the seriousness of mainstream religions as leading towards war and murder. Any number of tongue-in-cheek, Discordian-inspired “open source religions” have blossomed on the Internet.
The Khala Project is a typical example. It introduces itself as “an effort to create an open source, rational, dynamic and benevolent worldview.” The joke, buried in the fine print, Khala is modeled after the fictional alien villains of the 1998 video game StarCraft.

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Eric Krangel is a student in the journalism program at Columbia University. His work has appeared in numerous papers including the Chicago Tribune and the New York Sun.