Well of course I had to go and Google open source religion only to find that according to Wikipedia since 1998 a group of people calling themselves Yoans have been working on the concept. I have to say, after a cursory inspection of their website I'm generally in tune with their concepts.

I'm not sure I really like the way they have co-opted (perhaps recycled is a better description) terminology like god (it's us stupid), heaven (only to be found on earth if we can make it happen) and saints (Saint Albert and Saint Issac to name a few). I assume the intention is to use terms that are instantly familiar to a wider audience making Yoism easier to get your head around. Too some it may smack of Republican co-opting of phrases like "clear skies" and "healthy forests" and "no child left behind" to be something completely contrary to the usual interpretation. That's not entirely fair since the Yoan versions of God and heaven are more like a distant cousins to the mainstream ones than the antithesis.

But I do think they carry the Christian analogies a little too far at times, such as in their "Book of Yo" where the section Reclaiming GOD "A story of creation" reads more like a parody of the bible, which is somewhat disingenuous. Actually I'm pretty sure it is supposed to read like a parody of the bible but it'll take a pretty enlightened non-Yoan mind to see the humor clearly for what it is. None the less reading that would probably alienate Christian readers who would find it blasphemous - if they hadn't already written off the concept of Yo as worshiping a false idol.

Actually when I can get my head around the terminology it actually makes a whole lot of sense as a way of life and of rationalizing my vestiges of early Christian (well Anglican Church of England which is about as wishy-washy non-committal Christian as you can make it) and then later scientific upbringing at the Church of Physics (aka Oxford University School of Science). Is that useful to me? To have a "religion" (as opposed to "faith") to identify with? Well as Agent J found out yesterday sometimes people are just too damned nosy about what religion you are and what church you go to. To say I'm Yoan would at the very least solve that problem although I might hazard a guess it would generate more questions than it answers.

As best I can tell the Yoans are not up to much these days. They got some publicity at the start of 2004 but there's been very little activity from them since. However another group called the Universalists Movement seems to be getting some weight behind it, a write up in the New York Times certainly helped. Universalists put ones personally discovered truths first, believing that only you can interpret the truths you discover in life. Their main goal is the pursuit of truths through personal experience. You are free to believe in God with a capital 'G' so long as you are doing so based on your own the truths, not simply because you have faith that God exists, i.e. that someone just told you so.

So while Universalism can encompass people who believe in God and describe themselves as a "religion" its on quite strict terms. Outside of those terms they quite clearly declare themselves as anti-faith, and hence find it abhorrent that faith is being used via government to define and control personal freedoms of the populace at large. The Universalists don't declare themselves as Democrats in the US political arena - they believe that many libertarians and hence many Republicans should support their goal of opposing faith based religions and its influence on the populace at large.

I'll be interested to see if the Universalists just fizzle out like the Yoans, or if they can actually find themselves attracting disenchanted people of faith. Both these religions, without the promise of afterlife or the belief in some omnipotent but essentially good supreme being, they face an uphill battle for winning the hearts and minds of mainstream believers. They have little to ofer those that would traditional use a religion as a catch-all comforter for those spritually cold and bleak days when you just want to curl up and be kept warm by the thought that God is good and God is right there up on his cloud looking out for you^*.

^* Even if he did just smite your car, your home, your health, or your family

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