Open Source Religion?
Citizen journalism, like other open-source ventures, has been criticized as a business model that relies on free labor or poorly paid amateurs who erode quality and destroy jobs.
Yet its successes have been indisputable. The blogosphere has altered the political landscape and uncovered serious lapses by traditional media.
....To Dan Kriegman, who founded Yoism in 1994, an open-source framework offered the solution to an age-old challenge: how to make religion inclusive, open to change and responsive to collective wisdom.
"I don't think anyone has ever complained about something that didn't lead to some revision or clarification in the Book of Yo," said Kriegman, a 54-year-old psychologist in Chestnut Hill, Mass. "Every aware, conscious, sentient spirit is divine and has direct access to truth…. Open source embodies that. There is no authority."...
Ah, but the problem is that most "open source" projects like the news allow experts outside the loop to criticize things. So Milblogs criticize the press reports on the Iraq war, and those familiar with how to write memos in the military and those familiar with typeface/fonts are the ones who brought down Dan Rather...Wikipedia has stuff written by readers with expertise...so you won't see an article on linguistics done by a professor of home economics, or an article on physiology done by a professor of Ancient history...(For example, Chomsky is a great linguist but when I read his political writings, I realized he had never been in the countries he described, and his analysis had little to do with reality of those places).
Similarly, the arguments on religion in the Mensa journal is about the level of a 12 year old temper tantrum...and that's why I suspect that this project will be worse than useless.
...The open-source frontier is religion. That's where Yoism comes in.
But is it really a religion? Chester L. Gillis, chairman of Georgetown University's theology department, is skeptical. Yoism, he says, embraces a transitory view of reality that contradicts traditional concepts of religion based on belief in fundamental truths.
"There's an authoritative source in religion that [Yoism] lacks. It doesn't talk about revelation from the divine," he said. "Any religion that hopes to survive is essentially conservative — it conserves elements of the faith. This one lacks that."
But Yoans have an answer for Gillis. As it is written in the Book of Yo, "There always exists the possibility of one day discovering that all our current truths are indeed wrong."
Yet its successes have been indisputable. The blogosphere has altered the political landscape and uncovered serious lapses by traditional media.
....To Dan Kriegman, who founded Yoism in 1994, an open-source framework offered the solution to an age-old challenge: how to make religion inclusive, open to change and responsive to collective wisdom.
"I don't think anyone has ever complained about something that didn't lead to some revision or clarification in the Book of Yo," said Kriegman, a 54-year-old psychologist in Chestnut Hill, Mass. "Every aware, conscious, sentient spirit is divine and has direct access to truth…. Open source embodies that. There is no authority."...
Ah, but the problem is that most "open source" projects like the news allow experts outside the loop to criticize things. So Milblogs criticize the press reports on the Iraq war, and those familiar with how to write memos in the military and those familiar with typeface/fonts are the ones who brought down Dan Rather...Wikipedia has stuff written by readers with expertise...so you won't see an article on linguistics done by a professor of home economics, or an article on physiology done by a professor of Ancient history...(For example, Chomsky is a great linguist but when I read his political writings, I realized he had never been in the countries he described, and his analysis had little to do with reality of those places).
Similarly, the arguments on religion in the Mensa journal is about the level of a 12 year old temper tantrum...and that's why I suspect that this project will be worse than useless.
...The open-source frontier is religion. That's where Yoism comes in.
But is it really a religion? Chester L. Gillis, chairman of Georgetown University's theology department, is skeptical. Yoism, he says, embraces a transitory view of reality that contradicts traditional concepts of religion based on belief in fundamental truths.
"There's an authoritative source in religion that [Yoism] lacks. It doesn't talk about revelation from the divine," he said. "Any religion that hopes to survive is essentially conservative — it conserves elements of the faith. This one lacks that."
But Yoans have an answer for Gillis. As it is written in the Book of Yo, "There always exists the possibility of one day discovering that all our current truths are indeed wrong."
posted by Nancy Reyes at
6:57 AM
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