There's something wrong about the idea of an open source religion, especially the ones doing the rounds on GitHub. For starters, their basic definition lacks any purpose: to distribute authority instead of letting it be accrued, to make it more participatory and democratic instead of authoritative, and to have consensual agreement on all developments concerning the tenets/axioms of the religion.Granted, OS religions require a drastic redefinition of what it means to be a religion, but once that is broken, the religious essence that makes people flock to it, stay with it, and die with it, could easily be lost.
An essential part of partaking in religious faith concerns its soteriology - its doctrine of salvation. By making it less authoritative and more democratic, the concept of sacrifice loses meaning. If everyone has their own way without having to give up on anything important, then there is no sacrifice to be made, no discipline thereby to be gained, and no retentive faith to be instilled. Consequently, salvation becomes meaningless: the world to come will be no different from the world that is/was.
Another source of retentive faith is the presence of a concept that separates the faithless from the faithful as well as the faithful from the orthodox. Usually, they are things like "purity", proselytization, absolution of material desires, etc. Without centralized authority, however, there is no way to establish the dos and don'ts to characterise such laws.Both these issues make OS religion simply a way of life and not a religion at all; even if it seeks to redefine what people think of religion, the result is only something that has lost those aspects of itself that set it apart in the first place.
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