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What's the point of living if you can't create your own God? Aside from my delusions of grandeur (and how much grander can they get than God-creation?) the main reason I'm doing this is so that I can have a God I can use without offending anyone while I'm writing here on www.aPath.org. And it's fun.
While I originally wrote this for the above reason, it turned out to be a bit more comprehensive and insightful that I had anticipated. I hope you find it enjoyable and perhaps even educational on a variety of levels. I have tried not to offend anyone specifically. More sort of a general offend-everybody-equally kind of thing. Let's get started!
A properly created religion can give you personal control influence guidance over thewallets mindshearts of those who feel that being a Free-Thinking Individual is way too much work.
Here we provide you with our 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.
With our humble guidance, you'll be able to start up your own cult sect denominiationreligion in no time and have all the power money controlfaith you need to get you through this mortal coil.
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.
In this case, eating too much fast food and poor dietary practices. Poof! Millions of people are now in your target audience.
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 I bet you will 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!
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.
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.
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's High Priests study the Dark Arts of Marketing and practice it many times a day in their Most Holy Rites.
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.
Boy, that was fun!
Okay, we've now created our first God.
Now, let's see how easy it is to turn it into a Religion!
You can't have a cool religion with just a single character, so....
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 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.
Wow! 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. Neat, huh?
So much for the review, now back to the recipie book:
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. That'll be fun!
And last but certainly not least:
In our case, we guarantee that you'll get everything listed above. And then some!
But wait! There's more! 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. Really. We Promise.
Oh yeah, one last thing:
The always present but never written down (written down here because I can't whisper it in your ear) Eleventh Rule:
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.
And don't forget the money! Once people realize that http://www.aPath.orgis the only place that they can find The One True Path, they'll start throwing money at me to solve their problems for them and I can quit my day job and hang out at the beach with my religion-driving laptop-toting bikini-wearing interns. Um, I mean staff.
So get to work and start sending copies of this to everyone you know and help me, humbly, to bring them to True Salvation here at http://www.aPath.org.
In fact, if you send this to twenty or more people in the next ten minutes, you may very well win the lottery! If you don't, and your car explodes, it wasn't my fault. It was yours.
Blessed Be,
- Brian Gallagher
Keeper of The One True Pathto Paradise
http://www.apath.org/creating_religion.html
- www.aPath.org - Free Duplication Permitted When This Notice Is Present
Nice Comment
Hahahaha! Am going to start spinning gods, they require the least raw material, religion will take a while
Oh My Lard!
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