This was an informal session at Sol 2012.
- Ben: We had a lot of topics left, and we were going over the same philosophical ground over and over, and the event was just long enough to come up with a good general concept:
- Religion should exist to promote spiritual experiences, gather people who want those experiences (because they find purpose and meaning in similar ways), and use the experiences to motivate positive action in the world
- If a religion becomes fossilized so that its practice is more important than the above, we have to leave it behind and start over
- We need a mechanism to prevent the religion from trapping its adherents inside
- Brandon: Open-source projects use forking as a central mechanism, which effectively limits the power of a "priesthood"
- Each fork of SolSeed should have a Sparkline-style activity log on its website, so you know whether it's active or has tailed off
- Ben: A certain amount of continuity of the practice is good to make it feel more legitimate as a tradition, and less "we just made this up"
- Maybe there's a natural life cycle where the tradition will always become too important, and that's the point where a religion should die and let its children take over
- Eric: Maybe people forming a religion should plan for its death