F: HOW DO I ASSEMBLE MY RELIGION?
Appropriation, Amoebae, Enthusiasm, Connexions
EVERYTHING PUT TOGETHER, SOONER OR LATER FALLS APART, is the basic law of entropy. Yet some organizations manage to last many centuries or even millennia; witness Roman Catholicism, the Sicilian Mafia, the Illuminatus conspirators, the Icelandic Parliament. Assemble your Human Game carefully, and it too may last forever, or at least until the next Ice Age.
APPROPRIATION - Any or all of the theology, beliefs, rules, art, music, products, ANY aspects of may either be original, appropriated, borrowed, plagiarized, from other belief systems. Remember, ALL belief systems are modular and interchangeable. Take whatever aspects, components, modules you need from anywhere, either intact... or more-or-less modified, and incorporate them into your Game. This is how ALL belief systems in the past have been created. You're just following in a grand old tradition.
AMOEBAE - Remember the characteristics of belief systems: They tend to act like giant amoeba, engulfing / devouring other amoebae and resources around them, and then fissioning. You should provide mechanisms both for devouring other belief systems, other cults & sects & groups & individuals, and for being devoured yourself! Games tend to fragment and schism. Your Game should provide mechanisms both to PROMOTE such schisming, and to PUNISH the schismatics! These dynamics provide a great deal of energy, which serves to empower and strengthen your Game.
ENTHUSIASM - Sufficiently INVOLVED and ENERGIZED members of successful belief systems will enthusiastically commit and suffer mayhem, murder, suicide, fratricide, enslavement, imprisonment, any human cruelty, committed against or suffered from anybody outside their specific sub-group. {Again, this distinguishes belief systems (Games) from knowledge systems (Sciences). Scientists DON'T usually slaughter each other over differences in theory. Religious, economic, artistic and athletic enthusiasts, DO. So, your Game should provide motivations to provoke violent enthusiasm... to kill and be killed, to inflict and receive suffering. If you can't whip up your members into a mob frenzy, you're a PUTZ, and you deserve to be destroyed.}
CONNEXIONS - Your beliefs should be untestable, or be embedded with tests that are trivial, that lead to foregone conclusions. All the logic within your belief system should be circular. To accomplish this with a haphazard or random selection of belief modules / components, it may be necessary to write a surrounding meta-belief structure, that appears to tie together all the loose ends. But again, that tying-together should not be coherent, it should be contradictory. Every loose end should be multiply-connected; every thread of thought should tie in to multiple other threads, either explicitly or implicitly. The fun part there would be to use symbology, metaphor, simile, to suggest connections: multiple, incoherent, inconclusive, irreconcilable, contradictory connections.
For more hints on how to construct belief systems, see my guide-book, HOW TO DESIGN AND PROMOTE A CONSPIRACY THEORY, available at no extra charge on this site.
G: WHAT IS THE OPERATIVE BASIS OF MY RELIGION?
Spin-Off, Synthesis, Novelty, Social, Meta-Social, Technological, Stealth
How do you want your Game to operate? What should it look like to the outside world, if any? This operative basis both provides a public face and an internal coherence, necessary for the survival of you Game in a harsh and uncaring universe, the demon-dogs of adversity and competitiveness tearing at your very jugular. Get it right.
SPIN-OFF - Your religion may be a spin-off from an existing religion (as the now-infamous Branch Davidians spun-off from Davidian adventists, who spun-off from Seventh-Day Adventists, who spun-off from Millerite millennialists, who spun-off from Baptists, who spun-off from Anglicans and Calvinists, who spun-off from Roman Catholics, who spun-off from Orthodoxoi, who spun-off from Nazarenes, who spun-off from Jews, who spun-off from Baalites, et al).
SYNTHESIS - Or, you may position your religion as a synthesis of other religions, such as contemporary Christian-Buddhist-UFO cults, or the Baha'i World Faith (which sees itself as the fruition of all preceding monotheisms). This puts you in a position to siphon-off Players from other Games.
NOVELTY - Or you can declare your religion to be based on entirely new revelations, with no connexions with any previous faiths - but this can be difficult to sustain. (Standing on the shoulders of giants, you get a free boost upwards. You may choose to exploit your links to other Games, style yours as an improvement, a natural evolution, or even as the True Faith from which other groups have deviated.)
SOCIAL - Or you can position your religion as a social movement, possibly in reaction against some other social movements or phenomena, and THEN declare your group to be a church - as Scientology originally was an anti-psychiatry protest, which then incorporated as a church, allegedly for tax reasons.
META-SOCIAL - You may proclaim your organization to be a philosophical or meta-social or intellectual group, without specific religious overtones, but with other connections to the paranormal; as for instance 'est' was a mindcontrol-reprogramming enterprise [unrelated to the earlier Earth-Space Timetable], and the Raelians are a sexual UFO-based contactee club. Neither of these are 'religions', but both have leaders who are more-or-less successful race-car drivers - exemplifying and exploiting connexions to sportive Games.
TECHNOLOGICAL - You may position your Game to be primarily a technological entity, to a greater or lesser extent, whether like the Scientologists with their E-meters and other gadgetry; or the promoters of various perpetual-motion and free-energy devices; and proponents of various brainwave monitoring and reprogramming devices and other technical mindcontrol infrastructure.
EMBEDDED - You may take almost any of these kinds of belief systems and incorporate them under the aegis of an existing institution, such as Unitarian-Universalist fellowships, which often harbor Womyn's / Pagan / Wiccan / Yoga / Mythic / Runic and similar interest groups. Or you may be a sub-church of the Universal Life Church, or any similar church that incorporates indepenent autonomous sub-churches. Or you can register as an independent religious organization with your local or national tax and legal authorities, as is common in the U.S. and Japan.
STEALTH - Or you may take a 'stealth' approach, avoiding any public disclosure / exposure, being a "secret society", possibly with various layers of public exposure. You might display the first degree as a public organization, very possibly with only political / economic / artistic / sportive components, with no hint of the religious belief system that's at the heart of your organization. Then, various higher degrees of initiation, bringing members closer and closer to the core beliefs and control functions. (This might be suitable for a hierarchical structure, less suitable for network or relational models -- or it may work in any model. You could have multiple layers of the onion, no matter how many different nodes are in the network and how they're organized.)
H: WHERE AND HOW DOES MY RELIGION MANIFEST?
Gatherings, Media, Existence
Whenever one or more gather, your Game is manifest. The gatherings may be real or virtual, private or public, communicated or concealed or constructed. You have important decisions to make on when and how your followers reveal themselves to the world and to each other. The manifestation of your Game may change in different times and places, based on strategic / survival needs. Observe how the Falun Gong have adapted to oppression.
GATHERINGS - Your belief system, your Human Game, may have various aspects of manifestation in the world. You may have a strong bricks-and-mortar presence, with churches, meeting halls, temples, clearly identified as such. Or your group may meet only in rented facilities... or in members' homes, either fixed or constantly shifting. Or you may only meet outdoors, at certain sacred sites, clothing optional maybe.
You should provide for other sacred sites, which may or may not be meeting places where you can physically gather. In fact, it may be useful to have some sites that are inaccessible -- locales that are ever out of reach, but towards which you can urge your members to strive. Make them climb unclimbable mountains, ford impassable rivers, reach for forbidden cities, dream impossible dreams, and you've GOT'EM!
MEDIA - You may have a strong presence in broadcast media: radio and television, cable, satellite, etc. You may have penetration into other media: videotapes, audiotapes, CDs, books, magazines - printed and electronic literature and presentations. And you may have more or less of an InterNet presence.
EXISTENCE - Your organization MAY exist ONLY in one of these physical / virtual aspects, or in all of them, or in some combination thereof. Keep in mind that the greatest control can be exercised over your group by maintaining secrets, by having hidden inner circles, by keeping various of your communications encrypted, occluded,
surreptitious.
You really exist both as the message that you are transmitting, and the messengers and transmitters and receivers of the message (that is, your communicational structure, communications-control-command; and your social structure, the people involved), INDEPENDENT OF whatever physical or electronic premises you may occupy.
(See STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND and DIANETICS and EARTH-SPACE TIMETABLE and THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY as references for Game organization.)
I: CONCLUSION
And that about sums-up HOW TO CREATE YOUR OWN RELIGION. The same approaches can be taken to creating new political, economic, artistic and athletic belief systems. You can make every political or athletic assemblage a religious ritual. You can make every religious or artistic gathering a political statement. You can make every economic or gaming transaction an artistic expression. By combining any or all of these threads adroitly, you can achieve virtually any goal you desire, short of re-ordering observable physical reality. But since what you are building are MENTAL constructs, physical reality is largely irrelevant. The success of creationism exemplifies this.
NOTE: The author is compiling a series of papers, guides, games and other materials on the creation and operation of Human Games: religious, political, economic, artistic, sportive. Click on the GO! logo on the top of this page, or just below here, to see an index of these pieces. Your comments, suggestions, criticisms, bribes, etc. will be greatly appreciated. end me something good, and you'll get credit for it here. Click on the email address at the bottom of the page to communicate with me. Thanks.
Other Resources
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RELIGION ETC:
Apocalypse
Atheism
Church-Founding
Cults
Decalogue
Divine Retribution
DOGma
Eternal Bliss &
Damnation
GodRules
GOOD GODZ
Heresy
HELL
Holy War
Human Sacrifice
Meditation
Miracles
Pilgrimage
Reincarnation
Revealed Wisdom
Sacraments
Soul Care &
Theft
Spell-Casting
t'CotO
Theocracy
Theopoly
Universal Religion
Visitation & Possession
Xian Origins
and see the t'CotO Archives and the MemePool Religion archives
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