Open Source Religion?

Relativism has its place in the Western world. William Lane Craig has reportedly said,

"Frankly, I don't confront many students who are postmodernists. For all the faddish talk, I think it's a myth. Students aren't generally relativistic and pluralistic, except when it comes to ethics and religion. But that's not postmodernism, that's modernism. That's old-style verificationism, which says things that are verifiable through the five senses are factual, but everything else is just a matter of taste (including ethics and religion). I think it's a deceit of our age to say that modernism is dead."

Brett Kunkle of Stand to Reason recently illustrated this point in discussions with teenagers. He gave them a list of propositions and asked them to identify whether they were objective or subjective. The only ones they had any question about were the ones relating to God and morals. We are objectivists on everything except what we believe and how we behave. Kunkle correctly pointed out that professional philosophers know that relativism even in these things doesn't work, and yet it reigns among the humanities and in general culture.

Our culture's religious relativism was also recently demonstrated by an experiment done by Wired News: Forty Strangers in a Virtual Room Talk About Religion (H/T: Pagans and Lutherans, via WorldMagBlog). It's an interesting concept, and I'm sure that some good came out of the dialogue, as participants said:

"'[I]t was so exciting to see all the different viewpoints. I had never been involved in anything like this forum and I really appreciated it,' Gail Katz, a vice president of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Metropolitan Detroit, said as the online forum wrapped up.

"Katz now is so convinced of the value of this kind of online discussion that she plans to extend a similar opportunity to women in Michigan."

But for what is it valuable? Understanding one another? Certainly. Growing in mutual respect? Of course. "Opening Up the Ultimate Source," as the title of the Wired News article suggested? Apparently not.

The premise of the experiment was "open source religion," paralleling, I suppose, open source software development, to which any qualified person may contribute, freely and collaboratively.

"Americans rank with traditionalist countries around the world, places like Pakistan, in the strength of our religious values. But Americans also are almost off the chart in another powerful value -- our desire for individual self-expression. (We rank with Scandinavia on that scale.)

"So, faith matters deeply to us -- but the reality of open source religion is that we, as Americans, expect to be able to crack open the doors of religion and chart our own individual meaningful journeys through the resources and traditions we find there."

Open source software development differs, however, in that there is a standard, a direction, a clear definition of what the group is collaborating to discover or achieve. The open source Firefox web browser, for example, has goals that include stability, speed, accuracy in html rendering, cross-platform usability, extensibility, and so on. Incompetent contributions are doing are quickly excised, and I assume the contributors are not invited to continue. (Or maybe they never get a chance to start--I don't know how open source software communities are regulated). Mistakes (bugs) are corrected.

Open source religion's goal is to find... what? Consensus about God? Hardly. The least common denominator for all religion? I think the emphasis there would have to be on "least." And who says who is competent to contribute? The strongest word in the article on this seems to be "tradition:"

"Team members did point out real dangers in throwing open the doors of religious tradition. For instance, more than a few people asked: If our Ultimate Source is open to everyone's interpretation, then how can we trust that the timeless tradition won't change?

"We never answered that question, but did discover there's value simply in the asking."

Sure, there is value in the asking, but the assumption here seems to be that there is no answer, only dialogue; no knowledge, only opinion or belief. The Christians who participated in the discussion should have questioned that assumption, but the article gives no hint that they did. The source of genuine religious knowledge is not 40 people exchanging opinions in a chat room. It's revelation from the Source himself. If the "timeless tradition" (whatever that is!) is not connected with truth, why care whether it changes?Rel

Posted: Tue - July 31, 2007 at 09:22 AM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

Open Source Religion?

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson