Create Your Own Religion in Your Pretend Country
What's the point of living if you can't create your own god? Aside from delusions of grandeur (and how much grander can they get than god-creation?) creating a god can be useful for an imaginary realm. And it's fun.
Here is a simple format to take you through the basic steps, from creating your own gods and goddesses to creating a simple yet ambiguous framework for your followers to try to conform to. You'll be able to start up your own cult sect denomination religion in no time and have all the power, money, control and faith you need to get you through this mortal coil.
Steps
- Create a god. One with a catchy name is best. Should be simple and out of the ordinary, but not too far out that people can't remember it.
- In our example we will create "The Great god Lardicus". It has "Lard" in the name which people already associate with fast food. It has "-icus" at the end of it, which sounds Greek, so it must be old and have centuries of tradition behind it.
- Make it in charge of something people already focus on, but don't have a target for that focus.
- In this case, eating too much fast food and poor dietary practices. Poof! Millions of people are now in your target audience.
- Make it something that people will be reminded of frequently.
- In this case, whenever they think of fast food, they will think of Lardicus after reading this (at least for a while). In fact, the next time you drive down the road you may think of The Great God Lardicus at least once. And the second time, you'll think of it because you'll remember thinking of it the first time. And so on. See how easy that was!
- Make it easy for them to "buy into" the worship of your New God.
- In this case, whenever you eat fast food, you are honoring The Great God Lardicus.
- Whenever you pay at the drive-in window, you are tithing to The Great God Lardicus.
- Make it ambiguous. Let both sides of an argument claim it as their own.
- In this case, is The Great God Lardicus a "Dark God" bent on destroying The Temple Of Your Physical Being, or is he a "Light God" and the patron of those who are too busy in their lives to stop and eat a well-balanced meal?
- Why define it when you can let people fight it out themselves. People are funny. They'll fight over anything. Even something you just made up. Enjoy the show and try not to think too much about the Karmic issues you are creating for yourself.
- Establish some standards by which the God should be referred to, creating an intrinsic reverence right from the start.
- In this case, The Great God Lardicus must always be referred to as "The Great God" Lardicus. Once people see this a few hundred times, they'll start believing it without even realizing it.
- Make sure that the full title and name are always capitalized. This is because that everybody knows that something that has capital letters is much more important than something that isn't.
- This is called "Marketing" and all the Most Holy of The Great God Lardicus' High Priests study the Dark Arts of Marketing and practice it many times a day in their Most Holy Rites.
- Make cool symbols. They should be things that people already know and see everywhere. And they should be easy to draw and say.
- In our case, The Great God Lardicus's symbols will be the Arch, the Crown and Pigtails. (If you think you'd look silly in pigtails, just substitute an image of a Pig, which works well when you think of bacon, pork chops, and the obvious "pig" symbolism). You'll suddenly start seeing The Great God Lardicus's symbols everywhere. Temples to The Great God Lardicus will appear, as if by Divine Intervention, on every street corner in every town across the nation.
- You need an opposing force. Not necessarily an arch-enemy, but an opposite perspective so that people can pick sides and fight over things.
- Remember the stuff about people up there in Number 5? If everybody gets along, nobody will ever hear about your new religion. Most people hardly ever talk about how happy and content they are with their spirituality. In fact, many feel that they have to impose their beliefs on others in order to validate themselves and their beliefs. Because if you can get other people to be convinced to believe the same thing you do, you must be right! And that validates your choices. You want to play into that if you're going to be creating your own religion.
- In this case, we will create The Gentle Goddess Dietima.
- Notice how we have used all the rules so far with this name and the subtle effects it engenders. Let's review:
- It has "Diet" in the name, which is obviously the opposite of "Lard". It sounds Greek too, so it fits nicely into our freshly created pantheon of pseudo-Greek deities.
- It sounds catchy. And it should. Because we have simply co-opted the name of an actual character from Greek Literature, Diotima. Many people will vaguely (but not quite) remember her name from a high school or college class. This is another great technique when you are creating a new religion: overlay your gods, legends, temples, holy days and whatever else you can think of over top of the ones used by The Other Religions. Why invent something new when you can simply co-opt it and claim it as your own? Then people can fight over who stole what from whom and the nefarious motivations for doing so. People love to fight, and it would be cruel of you to deny them this chance.
- Who hasn't been on or thought about going on a diet? The Gentle Goddess Dietima is the patron for you! Is there anyone you know that isn't painfully aware of diets and dieting?
- It sounds Feminine with just the right mix of Fluffy-Bunny and Wise Woman. It is sweet enough for the flowering gentle pre-teen who wants a kinder, more understanding world but it also sounds great for attracting the people who would never worship a masculine meat-eating fatso un-environmentally-conscious goat-mater like Grease God Lardicus!
- Intolerance is fun and yet still makes you feel superior and important, while at the same time elevating you to the moral high-ground above those who you don't agree with.
- Notice how we have made The Gentle Goddess Dietima attractive to the entire spectrum of human emotion! Now we can just sit back and watch Her Faithful fight over which of her aspects is "The Real One".
- The Gentle Goddess Dietima should always referred to as "The Gentle Goddess", unless you are in need of her unspecified warrior attributes which are whatever you want them to be whenever you want to use them.
- Dietima's symbols are the cute adorable little bunny (because nobody could not love a cute adorable little bunny), a curved silver knife (crescent moon shaped, great for cutting earth-friendly veggies to eat and tilling the ground, and useful for those unspecified warrior aspects, and similar enough to the Arch to cause more fun bickering) and the egg (fertility, orb shapes are common, and it will further confuse the whole spring holiday symbolism thing and cause more exciting discussions). Now back to the recipe book:
- You need to confuse everybody. This will make sure that nobody can be really certain WHAT they believe, because it is all so non-sensical to begin with. And when you don't spell it out exactly (or even if you do) you know how those funny humans will all magically just get along, right! In this case, we'll try to be real thorough here:
- The Gentle Goddess Dietima and The Great God Lardicus are Divine Brother and Sister. However, they are also Husband and Wife. And The Great God Lardicus is the child of Himself and The Gentle Goddess Dietima. As is Dietima. They love each other, but argue and even fight regularly for a variety of reasons that we won't go into here because we want people to make up their own reasons, which they can then fight over.
- We don't even have to explain how any of this is possible because they are Gods and can do whatever they want. We don't want to specify who was born first or the details of their immaculate self-conceptions, because that might give one side the upper hand in any arguments. Remember Rule Number 5: Keep it ambiguous.
- The Gentle Goddess Dietima and The Great God Lardicus may or may not have other children, parents, siblings or acquaintances. We can add them in later if we want or need to, and then the old-timers (historians, scholars, etc.) can fight the new converts (who are always the most passionate about things) about whether they should "really" be in the pantheon or not, since they weren't there in the beginning. We'll probably just say we found some ancient scrolls that nobody is allowed to examine that mentioned them when we want to add in any new characters.
- And last but certainly not least:
- The Big Reward. You know everything you always wished you had in this life? After you die, you'll get it! We promise! Hot women. Cute Guys. Flying Cars. Washboard abs. Rivers of Chocolate that won't add an ounce or an inch to your perfectly fit, weightless body. And lots of cute, adorable fluffy bunnies to frolic with in virgin green pastures.
- In our case, we guarantee that you'll get everything listed above. All the people you love in this life will be there. But not the people you don't like. They all go to "The Other Place". Don't worry. They'll get theirs. And you'll spend eternity in Paradise.
- And the always present but never written down (written down here because I can't whisper it in your ear) Eleventh Rule:
- Get the word out! What good is creating your own religion if you can't get people to worship your Gods and beg you for guidance because they don't trust themselves to navigate their own way through life? They'll be much better having an uninformed random someone else tell them what to do than looking at their own situation objectively and determining a logical path to take that is likely to help them improve their lot in life.
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