Leaving Baldism – Forking Baldism

I’ve been giving this a great deal of thought – and though it pains me to say it, I’m going to have to leave Baldism, the  religion I founded back in 2021.

There are many reasons for this – but primarily it comes down to just three.

1) The primary rule of Baldism (the only rule) is “Don’t be a Dick” and while I think it’s a good rule to live by, it’s not appropriate as a religious philosophy for three simple reasons. First, it’s an expletive – a curse word, a vulgar term for male genitalia. Second, there are actually some good people named Dick. Third, forcing people to hear an expletive as part of a religious philosophy is funny in an ‘in your 20s and angry’ kind of way, but it’s definitely a little bit of a dick move. I can’t deal with the cognitive dissonance of that and I would like to embrace a philosophy that can be shared with kids, grandmas, and everyone else.

2) For whatever reason, I’ve held a slightly bitter and condescending view of so called ‘Christians’ for most of my life. Likely it’s because Christianity was the faith I was raised in and I saw first hand (especially living in the USA) just how hypocritical, hateful, and harmful Christians can be. I now recognize that making the mascot of Baldism the character Bald Jesus was an attempt to piss off and offend Christian people. I want to be clear, I modeled Bald Jesus on some of the most profound and wise people it has been my honor to meet in this life – but I called him Bald Jesus just so I could offend Christians. Again, that’s a dick move and a clear violation of the. primary principle of the Baldist doctrine

3) When I created Baldism, I was completely enamored and thrilled by the possibilities of NFTs, the metaverse, and crypto (collectively Web3 culture) in creating a better world. This was early in 2021 and the Web3 space had not yet been overrun by scammers, con artists, and shady people who wear suits and spend their lives figuring out how to rip people off legally.  The  focus I gave to Web3 culture in Baldism was due to my exuberance and enthusiasm at seeing the possibility of a better world in this new suite of technology. While I still believe that appropriate use of Web3 technology and culture can play a part in creating a better world for all of us, I no longer think it should form such an important leg in a religious or philosophical daily practice.  I want to emphasize here that a big part of why I believed people should participate in Web3 was because of the opportunities it created for normal people to achieve financial liberation – I still believe that to be true, sadly, those opportunities are far more regulated, taxed, and hard to find than they were in 2021.

For these three reasons (and others) I am leaving Baldism. Actually there is one more reason- which may be the most important of them all.

–> I created Baldism to be the ultimate in a living and adaptable religious philosophy. There is no such thing as one size fits all in religion and anyone who tells you there is shouldn’t be trusted. As such, I have always been very clear that Baldism is syncretic, open-source, and forkable. 

Being syncretic is pretty clear – it means that you can bring what you want into Baldism from wherever you want. You can add, subtract, adopt, delete, create – and since you are your own guru, no one can tell you different. You can take everything in the Holy Bjble as it is or you can interpret it how you want. You can even take parts of the Holy Bjble and synthesize new parts – but at some point – your synthetic creation may be so different from Baldism that you should consider giving it a new name.

That is where I am at. Thankfully Baldism is Forkable.

What does forkable mean?

It means that there are no impediments to taking the parts you like and throwing out the parts you don’t like and adding in other things you like and creating a new version. It’s the same thing that happened with Bitcoin. Some validators didn’t like a change so they continued to use the old version while a new version was implemented – later that happened again. Other developers decided to copy the code and go in a completely new direction. The results have been many successes – Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision, Litecoin, Doge, and the list goes on…

Baldism is the first religion that is openly forkable. I am leaving Baldism as it exists at the end of 2023 and I am performing the first fork on December 27th, 2023. I’ll introduce the fork on that date.

In the meantime, I want to reassure people – Baldism doesn’t die because I leave it. There are people who take it seriously, want to continue it as it is, and will continue all of the Baldist traditions – and even if those people decide to walk away or fork a religion of their own from Baldism -the Holy Bjble and Baldism live on the blockchain. They are immutable.

At the time of the fork, I will turn over the original Bald Jesus twitter account (@baldjesusart) and the original Bald Jesus Discord and the Bald Jesus Cent page to committed Baldism trustees. I will leave the Baldism.org and BaldJesus.com sites as they are with the exception of adding a link/section that leads to the fork on the Baldism.org site.  I will also give half of the $BALDS token treasury to those trusted Baldist trustees while taking half to my new fork. The current Baldism twitter and the current Baldism Discord will be forking with me.

This will be the first fork of an unchain religious philosophy – I hope that it will only be the first of many. There should be as many religions as there are people with different ideas. It is my hope that we can celebrate the Baldist holidays together, learn from one another, and eventually have Baldism and Baldism forks take over the world. Why not?