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Church Doctrine

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Church Doctrine

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 who download it and run 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.

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Newsflash

The God who Wasn't There is a really great film that I highly recommend. I saw an early screening of it at Stanford and I loved it. It goes into the early history of Christianity to determine if the character Jesus ever actually existed. I was surprised to find that much of the Jesus story was already in fiction for hundreds of years before Jesus was supposedly born. This is a documentary of how the Jesus myth was created and how little today's Christians know about the history of their own religion. Here's a really great Trailer for the movie. (18mb Quicktime format)

Most Atheists like myself have generally believed that the story of Jesus was at least based on some real events, some popular preacher that may have really existed and was later turned into a supernatural figure by his followers. But it is becoming clear to me that Jesus is total fiction and the stories are adapted from the fiction of the time. I recommend this film to everyone. It gives you a LOT to think about.