All rights reversed

In his book Nothing's Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, media scholar Douglas Rushkoff discusses his concept of "open-source religion," which he contrasts to the more traditional, handed-down-from-on-high types:

An open-source religion would work the same way as open-source software development: it is not kept secret or mysterious at all.  Everyone contributes to the codes we use to comprehend our place in the universe.  We allow our religion to evolve based on the active participation of its people...  An open-source relationship to religion would likewise take advantage of the individual points of view of its many active participants to develop its more resolved picture of the world and our place within it...  [R]eligion is not a pre-existing truth but an ongoing project.  It may be divinely inspired, but it is a creation of human beings working together.  A collaboration.

Which all sounds lovely and democratic and ecumenical, but it brings up the problem of how exactly you can tell if the "codes" contributed by people are correct or not.  In science, there's a standard protocol -- alignment of a model with the known data, and the use of the model to make predictions that then agree with subsequent observations -- but here, I'm not sure how you could apply anything like that.  The fact that religion seems, at its heart, to be an intensely individual experience, varying greatly from one person to another, suggests that reconciling each person's contributions may not be so easy.  Wars have been fought and lives lost over people's notions about the nature of God; saying "let's all collaborate" is a little disingenuous.

This is problematic not only between the world's major religions, but within them.  How, for example, could you bring together my Unitarian Universalist friend, who is more or less a pantheist; another friend who is a devout and very traditional Roman Catholic; and someone who is an evangelical biblical literalist who thinks everyone who doesn't believe that way is headed to the Fiery Furnace for all eternity?  All three call themselves Christian, but they all mean something very different by it.

The Discordians' clever labeling of their own founding doctrine as "All Rights Reversed" -- quote, reprint, or jigger around anything you want, it's all yours to do with as you please -- sounds good, but in practice, it relies on an undeserved trust in the minds of fallible humans of varying backgrounds and educational levels, who sometimes can't even agree on what the evidence itself means.

It's not that I'm certain that my own "there's probably no all-powerful deity in charge" is correct, mind you.  It's more that -- as eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it -- "humans are rife with all sorts of ways of getting it wrong," and that assessment very much includes me.  I'm wary of other people's biases, and far more wary of my own.  Physicist Richard Feynman said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."  Even C. S. Lewis saw the danger in the "everyone's voice counts" approach.  He wrote, "A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government.  The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true."

George Carlin put it another way.  He said, "Think of a guy you know who has 'average intelligence.'  Then keep in mind that half of humanity is stupider than that guy."

The problem is that just about every religious person in the world (1) believes what they do because they were told about it by someone else, and (2) believes they've got it one hundred percent right and everyone else is wrong.  And, as Richard Dawkins troublingly points out, what people do believe is often a matter of nothing more than geography.  I was raised Roman Catholic because I grew up in a French-speaking part of southern Louisiana.  If I'd been born to Saudi parents in Riyadh I'd have been Muslim; to Thai parents in Bangkok, I'd likely be Buddhist; to Israeli parents in Tel Aviv, I'd be Jewish; and so on.  I'm suspicious of the whole enterprise because, even given the same universe to look at, people all come up with different answers.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sowlos, Religious symbols-4x4, CC BY-SA 3.0]

And not only are there the ones with lots of adherents, there are countless fringe groups that have spun their own wild takes on how the world works.  Some, like the guy in Tennessee who believed that God told him to build the world's biggest treehouse church, are more amusing than dangerous.  (For what it's worth, the treehouse church was shut down because it was a poorly-constructed safety hazard, and a month later burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances.)  Others, like Jim Jones's People's Temple and the mystical cult that grew up around Carlos Castaneda, are downright deadly.  I have to admit the "open-source religion" idea is good at least from the standpoint of throwing the question back on your own intellect rather than saying, "Just believe what the priest/minister/imam/holy man is telling you," but it does leave the possibility open of getting it very, very wrong. 

As Susan B. Anthony put it, "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."

Again, as I said earlier, it's not that I'm sure myself.  Part of my hesitancy is because I'm so aware of my own capacity for error.  Even though I left Catholicism in my twenties and, for the most part, haven't looked back, I have to admit that there's still an attraction there, something about the mystery and ritual of the church of my childhood that keeps me fascinated.

All the baggage that comes with it -- the patriarchalism and sectarianism and misogyny and homophobia -- not so much.

So right now I'll remain a de facto atheist, although in some ways a reluctant one.  The idea that the universe has some deeper meaning, that things happen because there's a Grand Plan (even if it is, in Aziraphale's words, "Ineffable"), has undeniable appeal.  But if there's one thing I've learned in my sixty-four years, it's that the universe is under no compulsion to arrange itself so as to make me happy.

Or, as my beloved grandma used to say, "Wishin' don't make it so."

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