Divine Inspiration From the Masses

From an article of the same title by Charles Piller in the LA Times:

Yoism - a faith invented by a Massachusetts psychologist - shuns godly wisdom passed down by high priests. Instead, its holy text evolves online, written by the multitude of followers - much the same way volunteer programmers create open-source computer software by each contributing lines of code. Adherents of Yoism - who count Bob Dylan, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud among their saints - occupy the radical fringe of the open-source movement, which is quickly establishing itself as a new organizing principle for the 21st century... At its core, the process presumes the intelligence of crowds, and Yoans build their faith around the notion that, together, they take the place of divine inspiration... To Dan Kriegman, who founded Yoism in 1994, an open-source framework offered the solution to an age-old challenge: how to make religion inclusive, open to change and responsive to collective wisdom. "I don't think anyone has ever complained about something that didn't lead to some revision or clarification in the Book of Yo," said Kriegman, a 54-year-old psychologist in Chestnut Hill, Mass. "Every aware, conscious, sentient spirit is divine and has direct access to truth…. Open source embodies that. There is no authority."... The open-source frontier is religion. That's where Yoism comes in. But is it really a religion? Chester L. Gillis, chairman of Georgetown University's theology department, is skeptical. Yoism, he says, embraces a transitory view of reality that contradicts traditional concepts of religion based on belief in fundamental truths. "There's an authoritative source in religion that [Yoism] lacks. It doesn't talk about revelation from the divine," he said. "Any religion that hopes to survive is essentially conservative - it conserves elements of the faith. This one lacks that." But Yoans have an answer for Gillis. As it is written in the Book of Yo, "There always exists the possibility of one day discovering that all our current truths are indeed wrong."

From a certain perspective, it's not all THAT much different from a traditional religion, like Christianity, where the Christian community strives together to properly understand, interpret, and apply that which has been revealed. A big difference, as pointed out by Chester Gillis in the article, is that the Christian community believes that their wisdom originated with a deity while the Yoans believe it originated with themselves.