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The Structure of The Church
How the Church of Reality is Organized
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The Church of Reality is still a small Church. This is the current organization of the Church. It is subject to change in the future. Many positions are yet to be filled.
- The Council of Realists - The High Council of Realists is the Board of directors of the Church of Reality.
- Marc Perkel - Marc Perkel is the First One of the Church of Reality. He is the person who came up with the idea and is the person who is presently responsible for the creation of Church doctrine. He is the visionary behind the creation of this organization. Marc Perkel is a self taught individual who has become an expert in philosophy, law, computer hardware and software, systems administration, and religious beliefs. Marc is a writer and has an extensive web site at perkel.com. He runs a small web hosting company specializing in free speech issues. He is also a former systems administrator (root) for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
- Robin Gross - Robin Gross is a San Francisco based attorney specializing in intellectual property issues. Robin is the founder of IP Justice - a nonprofit organization dealing with international copyright and patent issues. She is on the board of directors for the Union for the Public Domain. She teaches international copyright law at Santa Clara University School of Law. She is on the Advisory Board for Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility - Peru. And Robin is licensed as clergy by the State of California.
Robin travels the world giving speeches, organizing, and advising policy makers from around the world on the impact of intellectual property rules on traditional rights and innovation. Robin has made it her mission in life to protect the Tree of Knowledge from being choked off by over-broad copyright laws. She is also a former staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
- Deborah Pierce - Deborah Pierce is founder and Executive Director of PrivacyActivism. Her work focuses on consumer education campaigns, advocacy, and analysis of privacy issues, with particular emphasis on data flow, data matching, privacy risks associated with data collection, and biometrics.
Deborah is currently a member of the University of Washington's Shidler Center for Law, Commerce and Technology Advisory Committee. She has been on several committees to help find solutions to privacy and security threats, including the Washington State Bar Association's Access to Justice (a committee formed to develop more detailed guidelines addressing the issue of the technological impact on privacy within the justice system) and the Federal Trade Commission's advisory panel on online access and security.
In April 2005, Deborah chaired the 15th Annual Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (CFP) conference. CFP is a conference that has played a major role in the public debate on the future of privacy and freedom in the online world and brings together attendees and an audience from government, business, education, and non-profits, as well as from the community of computer professionals, hackers, crackers and engineers who work the code of cyberspace. The themes have been broad and forward-looking. CFP explores what will be. It is the place where the future is mapped.
In her previous role as a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, she worked on issues related to electronic privacy, database information collection and personal identity. Deborah was the inspiration for the Sacred Principle of Privacy.
- Administration - The Administration is the business end of the Church of Reality. The administration is run by the executive director who is responsible for the executive staff and conducting the business of the church.
- Marc Perkel - Currently Marc Perkel - the First One - is also the Executive Director. Some day when we are bigger the Executive Director will be someone else.
- Technical Staff
- Marc Perkel - Webmaster
- Michele Kaeder - Technical Assistant
- Owlswan - Technical Assistant
- Paul Gaskin - Logo Design, Artist
- David Lewis - Voice Artist
- Joe from Digital Images Design - Web Monk
- Editorial Staff
- Marc Perkel - Visionary
- Michele Kaeder - Editor
- Carole Fanning - Editor
- The Monks of the Order of Root - Are the highly committed members who are maintainers of projects and have the power and authority to fulfil their missions. The Monks of the Church of Reality get their direction from the Executive Director.
- The Beacons - The Beacons are the clergy of the Church of Reality.
- The Membership - People who have taken the Oath of Reality, by accepting the Sacred Choices and identifying themselves as Realists. Through the Sacred Choices they have committed themselves to the Sacred Missions and The Sacred Principles.
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Church law and religious rights are set fourth here in the Kernel which is our Church Doctrine. This doctrine might include external references like Humanism or United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. This forms the documentation of our belief system which is a growing and evolving document. The First One and the Council of Realists have the power and authority to interpret church law and doctrine. Issues not covered specifically, or where there is a controversy over the meaning of church doctrine, may be settled by an edict of the First One.
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The Church of Reality is not one of those churches that passes out ministries by mail order like the Universal Life Church. To become a Beacon you have to get the consensus of the Council of Realists. You first have to be a Monk of the Order of Root and you need to start a project of some sort that is doing some sort of work that requires clergy status. This kind of work might include weddings, funerals, counseling, visiting prison inmates, youth programs, or speaking to groups on behalf of the church. Clergy status is granted to those people who are actually doing something or close to doing something where clergy status is required or will significantly enhance the performing of the project duties. |
Control issues are something that is going to be a challenge for me. Like everyone else, I like being in charge. It means that I get to get my way. On the other hand it means that I'm going to have to deal with a lot of crap from everyone. People are going to be pushing me to go in directions that I don't want to go in. There will be ego battles. People getting offended because I didn't reply to their email. People getting offended because I didn't even read their email. Christians who want to save my soul. Muslims will want to have me killed. The news media will demonize me if I'm lucky enough to get them interested enough to demonize me. This is going to be a lot of hard work.
One of the key elements will be finding the right people early on who really get the idea of what this church is about, and have the talent to help make it happen. I'm hoping to be able to delegate control to the right people, yet I fear losing control and the early church falling victim to infighting or getting pushed off track over gay issues, race issues, politics, vegans, or other things that have nothing to do with the mission of the Church of Reality. I'm going to make mistakes. I'm going to piss people off and in some cases it will be my fault. There will be things that I could have handled better and mistakes will be made. I'm trying to go into this without a big ego though and not claiming supernatural inspiration.
One thing to keep in mind is that the Church of Reality is about reality, not about Marc Perkel. So if I get caught in a motel with a hooker then that's just about me. Reality itself isn't changed by that. I am not the spokesperson or the vicar of an omnipotent power. I didn't invent reality, reality invented me. So for the record, I apologize in advance to the people I am about to offend and ask in advance for your forgiveness and understanding for the things I'm going to do wrong. Now that I have pre-apologized, I can go ahead and screw up.
Everyone has a brain and brains are generally similar. Different people have different abilities both physically and mentally. For example, when I see Olympic gymnasts and compare them to what I can do physically, what they can do almost looks superhuman to me. When it comes to art and music, I can't even comprehend how to even start. If I were given the task to completely clean and organize my apartment, I don't know if I could do it. I don't read well because I'm dyslexic and I have some attention problems. My brain is so full that in order to learn something new I have to forget something to make room for it.
But for some reason I seem to have a talent for seeing the big picture. I can see the forest from within the trees as the saying goes. My ability to do that to the degree that I do, seems to be rare to the point of scary. Why am I inventing the Church of Reality? Why isn't it already here? Why isn't it obvious? I mean - now that you've heard of it - Church of Reality - a religion based on believing in what's real - it's obvious now. So why am I the first person in the history of the world to take it this far? To me this is spooky. I don't want to be the smartest being in the universe anymore. (kidding!) But on a more serious note - there have got to be some other people out there who can do what I'm doing even better than me. Whatever it is that I do needs to be understood and replicated. It is really clear to me that there are not enough big thinkers in the world and whatever it is that is unusual about me, I think it can be learned. So go learn it. |
The Church of Reality is an Internet based religion. Traditionally, churches have started in the location of the church founder(s) and have developed over the centuries from there. Many of these religions are forks of existing religions. Someone told me, and I don't know if this figure is accurate, that there are 33,000 forks of Christianity in existence. Many of these forks have occurred in the last 100 years and I believe that new technology has played a role in that. As new technology has developed, religions have used it to spread their gospels.
We now have a new phenomenon called the TV preacher who is a preacher who has learned that he can use technology to break the time and space limitations of a physical church. Churches have the limitation that all the people have to be there in the same spatial and temporal coordinates limiting their reach to those who can physically attend. The TV preacher breaks these limitations allowing the message to reach people in different locations and with video recording to allow people to be reached who are not in the same time frame as the preacher.
The Church of Reality is designed to be a web based religion that is similar to the way the Linux operating system was developed.
In the Church of Reality we embrace the latest technology in that our religion was actually founded on the Internet. It was done that way by design allowing us to be out there in front of the entire world from the very first day that it went online. In fact, with the recognition of the future as the Sacred Direction, it would almost be a sin for the Church of Reality not to use state of the art technology - not to create a network of like minded realists around the world - not to form the core of our beliefs and share them with the entire planet in real time. We use the Web to shed ourselves of the limitations of Time and Space. With the power of this technology I can not imagine any new religion not taking advantage of it. We therefore shed ourselves of the limitations of location and declare the Web to be our home.
As a role model for our development, I turn to the development of the Linux operating system as a model of how I see this church growing. Back in the olden times, in the long long ago(1950 - 1990), programmers worked together on software in the same location. But in the 1980s and on, people started building a community around the development of free software and making all the tools free for everyone to use. In 1991, Linus Torvalds started writing a Unix-like operating system that became known as Linux. Linux was uploaded onto a server and other programmers around the world became interested in it and started developing a community around the Linux project. That community of developers is in the hundreds of thousands and now there are over 100,000 free software projects that have formed communities around their software most of which runs with Linux. And now every person who uses any computer anywhere is probably using many programs that came from these communities. The Internet, which we refer to as the Sacred Router, was created from a software community of people working together over the internet with no central location. The Church of Reality is designed to develop in the same structure model as Linux.
This model works for software development and I think it will work for our religion as well. The Doctrine of the Church of Reality is like writing the Operating System for the Human Race
The Church of Reality is a community project that is location independent for the most part and is a product of the people who join in on the project. Right now we are developing the Kernel of the Church. Once the Kernel is sufficiently developed, we can add in all the other stuff that churches do, and then some. |
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The connection between creating a religion based on reality and writing software is very strong. Although writing software is more precise and predictable, it is nonetheless amazingly similar. In particular the logical organization of the structure is a very similar process. We're trying to figure out the overall design, what the human interface will look like, what features it will have, creating the documentation, and most importantly, how to attract and work with a community of developers. I see the model created by open source programming communities as being something that I really like in that it works well and achieves a goal in a very sane way. It's almost like religion and software have the same kind of connection as gravity and inertia. |
At present the Church of Reality doctrine is written by Marc Perkel with the approval of the High Council of Realists, and with input and suggestions from anyone who has good ideas to contribute or provides inspiration. At present the Church is in the very initial stages of creation and the present structure must change and will change in the future.
The Church of Reality can be compared to an open source GPL software development project. Software projects usually start with one person who gets an idea for something and goes off and starts developing it. Sometimes he shares his code, or at least his ideas, with his friends, but he does the development by himself to start with. Eventually he starts releasing his work to the world that downloads it and runs it. If the program is a good program and people find it useful, they will start giving the author feedback telling him what's not working, what needs to be added, requesting better documentation, and spreading the word about this great new program.
As time goes on a community develops around the author of the program and the author is overwhelmed by the growth in usage of his software. The first thing he does is create some kind of online support forum, a discussion mailing list, or a bulletin board. This allows users to communicate with each other and support each other freeing the developer of the burden of support. But if the software is really successful, it gets to a point where a single person can no longer keep up with the development demands.
At this point you have other skilled programmers writing add-on software to make the software better. This might be done independently or through an application interface that the developer creates to support plug in modules. The developer might open up the code base in a way that allows many other developers to work on different parts of the software. If the developer is successful in integrating other developers and / or allowing plugin development, then a good community forms around the software project and eventually there may be millions of people who are involved with the software.
The Church of Reality can be compared to an open source software project. At least - that is the official plan for how this church is to grow. This is a GPL project in the early stages of development. We still haven't got to version 1.0 yet and the initial code of the religion is still being written. So even though the church doctrine has only one developer and one maintainer now, it is not the way it will stay in the future. For the church to evolve into what it is designed to become, it must grow beyond the limitations of Marc Perkel as sole developer. |
To continue the software project analogy, in the begining of a project it is necessary for the person who has the overall vision to be allowed to complete their initial work on the project. In this case the project is to write the structure of the natural religion of the human race. And I have to come up with this without the benefits of having supernatural powers or even the inspiration of omnipotent beings. This is starting out as the work of one guy with an idea that he came up with one night while smoking a joint. It's a huge job with awesome implications. Nonetheless, I seem to be stuck with it and I'm going to do as good a job of getting this started off in the right direction as I can.
Like other software projects, there is a time where the developer needs to maintain sole control of his work until it is sufficiently developed to the point where it can be cleanly handed over to a larger group of people who can continue to take it forward and have it develop organically into what it was originally designed to become. The Church of Reality is still in the pre-release beta testing stage where it is open for scrutiny and suggestions. I have opened it up for external editing. I have someone who is fixing the grammar and spelling, so there is a second developer who at least has a minor role in directly controlling the final product. I continue to listen to the ideas of other people to incorporate into the project. I am not the one who thought of everything here. A lot of people deserve credit for coming up with the concepts used here. But it is in the design specifications to turn this project into a community based project and have it develop a life beyond the original designer. In fact - this feature is considered a necessary feature of the final product.
At what point and to what extent does the developer relinquish control to the community? That is a tough question indeed. And it is especially tough for me as someone who isn't the most highly skilled at working with other people. I am somewhat inspired by the work of Linus Torvalds, the developer of the Linux operating system and one of the greatest contributions to the Tree of Knowledge in the history of the world. Linus developed Linux using the GNU free software development tools developed by Richard Stallman, to create a Unix like operating system. He started it on his own and eventually attracted other developers. Now Linux is the accumulated work of hundreds of thousands of people and is in use on tens of millions of computers, which serve directly or indirectly every single person on the planet.
My true role in the Church of Reality is that I am the Project Manager and I am developing a public domain religion.
Linus is still in control of Linux and rules over it as a benevolent dictator of sorts. Linus has assumed a position of great responsibility and trust and has maintained his position as leader of a great movement and has kept his original vision on track and true to its purpose. Linux today has grown far beyond what Linus originally dreamed of, yet is true to the original vision of what it should become. It didn't degenerate into chaos or something that was unrelated to its original intent. It has remained pure, and it is my hope that whatever happens that the Church of Reality develops to be as true to its original conception as Linux has done.
Linus's official role in Linux is project coordinator. I think of myself as the project coordinator for the Church of Reality. Some people (jokingly) refer to me as the Pope of Reality but I am not a pope. I'm just the guy who keeps the project on track.
So - if I do a good job and it works out, perhaps I too will remain the project coordinator for many years to come. Or it might turn out that I attract others who have superior skills and fully understand the power of the original vision behind the church and will gracefully take charge of this project but continue to be true to the vision of a natural religion that is rooted in reality and true to the Principle of Positive Evolution. I do not know which way this church will evolve, but quite frankly, if better people came along who wanted to take on this task and can do a better job of it than me, I am totally fine with it. I am a lazy person, so if someone else wants to do my work - go for it! I am always looking for volunteers. |
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Newsflash |
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The IRS has approved the 501(C)3 tax exempt status of the Church of Reality. |
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Please link to us, discuss us in online forums, and blog about us. Every time anyone thinks about reality the world becomes a little smarter.
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The Church of Reality is a non-prophet organization.
"RealityŽ" and "Church of RealityŽ" are registered trademarks of the Church of Reality.
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