"chai me sabun"
Hippopotamism is an open-source religion. No priesthood, no fixed scripture, no final answer. Just a community repository of beliefs that anyone can fork, question, and improve.
Hippopotamism ships with a default belief set, but nothing is frozen. What we believe today is simply the latest merged commit, always open to revision and always open to doubt.
There is no final, unchangeable holy text. Doctrine here is a draft, not a verdict.
Every teaching, ritual, and rule lives in the open. Read it, question it, or send a pull request. Belief is public infrastructure.
Nothing is true here because it is old, or because someone in charge said so. We ask believers to think, not just to accept.
Hippopotamism grows only through its community. Every believer is also, potentially, an author of the next verse.
No single person owns the truth. There is no clergy standing between a believer and their own reasoning.
Beliefs update as better arguments arrive. Changing your mind is treated as a feature, not a failure.
Merged from the community. Numbered, not ranked, and open to a future pull request.
Submerge fully, cool off often, and do not apologize for taking up space in the water.
No belief is above review. If something in the doctrine seems wrong, open an issue and say so.
Every idea merged into the faith keeps the name of who proposed it. Belief has an author history.
Disagreement is welcome. Dismissing a claim without a reason is not.
"Chai me sabun": a reminder that a religion can be sincere about its ideas and unserious about itself.
Two co-authors, one initial commit.
Wrote the first draft of the creed and insisted it stay open for pull requests from day one.
Contributed the slogan, several commandments, and the firm belief that no doctrine should ever be final.
Becoming a believer works the same way as improving the doctrine.
Take the current beliefs as your starting point.
git clone hippopotamism
Sit with a teaching that does not quite hold up.
open an issue
Write it down. A ritual, a rule, a new commandment.
git commit -m "faith"
If it holds up to discussion, it becomes doctrine.
git merge --no-ff
All of it lives at github.com/Hippopotamism.
Hippopotamism is distributed the way it was built: freely, transparently, and with room for everyone's next idea. Licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.
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