Open Source Religion
A Christian burns sage to clear the house.
An atheist says karma will get you in the end.
A child decides that red is the most powerful color.
None of them got the idea to combine those concepts from the book they were handed. Each of them made a choice to believe.
Imagine painting for years and never once calling yourself an artist. That is where almost everybody stands with their own beliefs. You have been assembling a belief system your whole life: from your parents, from a book that arrived at the right age, from a grief you never quite finished, from a friend who once said something that turned out to be true. You have been quietly editing it for decades. Nobody told you that was what you were doing. Nobody told you that you were allowed.
Open Source Religion is the name for what you were already doing, and the practice of doing it on purpose.
The only lesson
There is one line at the center of this, and it is called the Solum Axiom.
Solum Axiom – “The Only Lesson”
You are the architect of your belief system.
That is not a commandment. Nobody could command it, because it is already true of you. It is a fact about how human beings work, in the same way that you are already the author of your own sentences even if you only ever quote other people.
So the lesson is not that you should become an architect. It is that you already are one, and that you can stop building with your eyes shut.
Everything on this page follows from that single line. If you take nothing else, take that.
One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals can choose the way they think.
– Martin Seligman
You are already doing this
Thomas Jefferson took a razor to his Bible in 1820 and glued back only the parts he could stand behind. He was not being irreligious. He thought he was rescuing the thing.
He was two hundred years early. A wave arrived in the 1960’s, when large numbers of people began openly assembling their beliefs out of several traditions at once, and it has not receded since. Ask around your own life. The lapsed Catholic who still lights a candle. The scientist with a lucky shirt. The Buddhist who prays to a dead grandmother. The atheist who will not say the worst thing aloud in case it happens.
Almost nobody now holds only the beliefs of the tradition they were raised in, and almost nobody thinks of themselves as having chosen the mix.
What “open source” actually means here
People hear open source and think free, or shared, or public. That is not the part that matters.
Software is closed not because you cannot see it but because you are not permitted to change it and pass it on. Open source changes exactly one thing: authority. It moves from the institution that governs the source to the people who use it.
Scripture was never closed. The Bible is the most copied, most translated, most freely available text in human history. Anyone could always read it.
What was closed was the authority over it. Who may interpret. Who decides which parts still bind you and what is most important. What happens to you if you disagree out loud.
That is the proprietary layer, and that is the layer that has come open in the last sixty years. Not because anybody won the argument, but because people stopped asking permission.
What this adds to “cafeteria religion”
Sociologists have been describing this for forty years, and not once kindly.
Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart(1985) gave us “Sheilaism”, after a woman who named her faith after herself. It was meant as an insult and it worked as one. Then: cafeteria Catholic. Spiritual but not religious. Patchwork religion. Tinkering. Claude Lévi-Strauss got there before all of them with bricolage, the mind making do with whatever is lying around.
Every one of those names carries a shrug in it. Each describes somebody who could not commit and took the easy pieces.
Open Source Religion makes three claims that none of those names make.
It is construction, not failure to commit. Anything constructed can be designed well or badly. Some people are extraordinarily good at this and some are dangerous at it, and the difference between them is learnable.
It is not a modern decadence. It is what belief has always done. The last sixty years only made it visible, and fast.
It can be done deliberately. Which means it has a method, which means it has failure modes, which means it can be taught.
Naming the weather does not sound like much until you remember that nobody could plan a harvest before there were seasons.
The practice
Three steps.
1. Accept the axiom
You built this. Not all of it consciously, and not all of it recently, but you did the assembling and no one else can be held responsible for the result.
2. Watch your beliefs
Beliefs almost never show up as doctrines. They show up as reflexes: the flinch, the certainty, the word obviously. Watching means catching them in flight.
Four questions, in order:
- What did I just assume? Write it down as a plain sentence. Most beliefs will not survive being written as a plain sentence, and that is useful information.
- Where did it come from? Not to discredit it. A surprising number turn out to belong to somebody else, adopted in childhood and never revisited since.
- What is it doing? Every belief has a job. Some comfort you, some protect you, some keep you small, some exist only to be decorative.
- What would change it? If the honest answer is nothing, you are not holding a belief, you are holding a rock. And the fact that all beliefs are changeable is even more evidence that your belief system is constructed.
3. Edit
Adopt, revise, retire. And then be patient, because a belief you have decided to hold is weak for a long time before it is strong. That is not a sign you chose wrong. The belief you were handed at five years old might have a twenty year head start on it.
What the framework gives you
Editing rights
Any belief can be changed at any time, given new information or experience. Nothing is load-bearing purely by virtue of being old.
Beliefs as modules
Beliefs come apart. You can adopt one without adopting the tradition around it, from any source, religious or not. They sit in parent and child relationships, so pulling on one usually loosens several.
No exclusivity
One belief system can hold pieces from traditions that officially contradict each other. Somebody who believes in both Jesus and karma is not confused. They are an unusual build.
Your faith survives your institution
When a spiritual authority makes a mistake, millions inherit it. Knowing you built your own is what lets you keep the faith and drop the error. Fidelity to the thing, not to the office.
Deliberate construction
Belief systems, religious and not, can be designed on purpose and for a purpose. They can even be built separately for separate parts of a life, as in the Multi-Layered Belief System Installation theory.
Fit you can actually test
Because you specified what a belief was for, you can tell whether it is working. A system that was only ever handed to you gives you nothing to measure against.
How this goes wrong
A framework in which nothing can fail is not a framework, it is a sales pitch. Here is how this one fails.
Comfort drift
If you are the architect, nothing at all stops you building only rooms you like. The beliefs that improve a person are almost never the comfortable ones. There is a test for this and it is unforgiving: when did a belief of yours last cost you something? If the answer is never, you are not practicing. You are decorating.
The weightless belief
A belief you can edit at will may be no use at three in the morning. Grief, dying, betrayal, being asked to do the right thing at real expense: these want something that holds. Choosing a belief and then committing to it are two separate skills, and the second is not optional. Held lightly, a chosen belief is just a preference with better branding.
The private echo chamber
Building alone means nothing checks you. The tradition you walked away from had one genuine advantage: several centuries of other people who had already found the potholes. If you leave that behind you have to replace it, not simply do without it. This is the strongest argument against practicing alone, and it is why any of this eventually needs other people.
Editing to escape
Sometimes changing a belief is growth and sometimes it is running from something true, and from the inside these feel identical. The only reliable tell: growth usually costs you something, and escape usually saves you something.
Mistaking the workshop for the house
Open Source Religion is not a belief system. It is the workshop where you build one. Someone who never builds anything, who simply enjoys being a person who could believe anything, has missed the entire point and will get nothing out of this.
The hard questions
If I choose my beliefs, what stops me choosing the easy ones?
Nothing stops you. That is a real danger of this, not a misunderstanding of it, and it is an honest objection.
What you get in exchange is that you can see the choice. Inherited belief has the same problem wearing better clothes: comfortable doctrine is comfortable whoever wrote it, and you cannot examine a bias you have never been told you have. Choosing badly on purpose is at least correctable. Choosing badly by default is not.
And there is a discipline that follows from it: if a belief system has never once asked something of you that you did not want to give, you have built it wrong. Go back.
Doesn’t choosing what to believe destroy the power of belief?
At first, yes. Then no.
A belief you have chosen is thin for a while, and a belief you were raised inside is thick from the start. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something. But the brain is a plastic thing. Show it something for long enough and it changes. Consider someone who took the bear as their ‘spirit animal’ and then spent fifteen years in a cabin, hunting their own food and living off the land. There is nothing thin about that belief. They built it, and then they paid for it with things more important than money.
The other half of the answer: by not choosing, you have not escaped the problem. You have handed the choice to whoever got to you first.
So all beliefs are equally valid?
No, and this is the most common misreading.
“Choose your own” is not “anything goes”. Beliefs are judged by people for what they actually do: whether they make you more accurate about the world, what they do to the people nearest you, and who you turn into while holding them. That is a real standard and it disqualifies a great deal. A belief that requires you to be cruel will be judged by a jury of your peers.
Is Open Source Religion a religion?
Mostly no.
Religion, in practice, tends to mean a belief system held religiously: unquestioningly, inflexibly, permanently. This asks for the opposite of that at the level of the framework.
But it can be used in profoundly religious ways, and often is. Nothing here stops you committing to what you build with total seriousness. The people who use this framework and remain Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist or anything else usually do so with more conviction rather than less, because they know exactly what they are holding and why.
Isn’t this just what everybody already does?
Yes. That is the claim, not the objection.
Most people know some of this without ever having heard the name. But most people also do not know that a belief can be deliberately designed, held for a stated reason, tested, or retired. Craftsmen do things that almost anybody could learn, and almost nobody learns them until somebody says out loud that it is an option.
What it is for
I am not going to tell you this ends conflict. People have fought ferociously over beliefs they chose entirely freely, and converts are often the fiercest people in the room.
The claim is smaller than that, and I think it holds.
When you know that you built yours, it becomes very hard to believe that the person in front of you did not build theirs. They stop being a representative of a category and become somebody who assembled something, for reasons, out of a life you have not lived. You can still think they are wrong. You just cannot go on thinking they are simple.
That is not world peace. It is one specific kind of contempt becoming unavailable to you, and that turns out to be worth a great deal.
And the harder half of it, said plainly: some people genuinely did receive their faith whole, and hold it in trust, and have thought about it more carefully than you have. That is not a lesser way to live. A framework about empathy that cannot manage empathy for the devout is not worth anything.
This is not neutral
It is tempting to say that if religions were colors, this one would be transparent. Keep the image, but be honest about it. Transparent is not colorless.
Open Source Religion holds real positions, and it should say so: that examined belief beats inherited belief; that a person is the right authority over their own inner life; that the capacity to change your mind is a virtue rather than a weakness. Serious traditions disagree with all three, and they are not stupid for doing so.
Anyone who tells you their framework has no position is selling you one.
So: clear, rather than colorless. You can see through it. You can also see it.
Support Open Source Religion
If this framework has been useful to you, a donation helps keep it going – the same Bitcoin address and payment link as everywhere else on the site.
Where this came from
The term Open Source Religion, the Solum Axiom, and the practice described on this page were originated by Sidian Jones and first published at opensourcereligion.com on February 24th, 2011. It is offered freely. Use it, teach it, argue with it, build on it.
Two projects extend the framework:
MyMythos.org is a fork of Open Source Religion. It carries the same core, including the Solum Axiom, and adds tools of its own: Inner Space, archetypal anchors, and more. Belief discovery, creation and collecting in a story-driven community.
BeliefGenome.com is the research side. AI applied to gathering and mapping every human belief into something navigable.
Start
- Catch one belief today. Any one. Write it as a plain sentence.
- Ask where it came from and what it is doing for you.
- Decide, on purpose, whether to keep it.
That is the whole practice. Everything else is repetition.
You don’t need to change what you believe. You need only to believe that you can change.