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HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION
Step Six: Prophet for Profit!
So, this is it. You’ve come to the end. You have your religion, and it’s time to reap all its
benefits. Now that you’ve got your little following giving you their money and cutting your
grass, you can finally have everything you’ve ever wished for!
Want a dozen sex slaves? Just say the word. Make up scripture. Tell your followers that
“Stage Six of Manatee Enlightenment” can only be found in the Prophet’s orgasms.
Want a huge piece of land out in the middle of nowhere? Just tell your followers that only
you can build paradise for them and it needs to be really far away—oh, and by the way, they
need to pay for it.
Want power and prestige? Tell your followers to vote you into office or, even better,
overthrow the government with violence. If you do your job well, they should be willing to give
up their lives for you.
The opportunities really are endless.
No more loneliness. No more relationship problems. No more financial woes. You can fulfill
your wildest dreams. You just have to trample on the hopes and dreams of thousands of other
people to get there.
Yes, my friend, you’ve worked hard for this. Therefore, you deserve all the benefits without
any meddlesome social concerns or pedantic arguments about ethics and whatnot. Because that’s
what you get to do when you start your own religion: You get to decide what is ethical. You get
to decide what is right. And you get to decide who is righteous.
Maybe this whole “start a religion” thing makes you squirm. Well, I hate to break it to you, but
you’re already in one. Whether you realize or not, you’ve adopted some group’s beliefs and
values, you participate in the rituals and offer up the sacrifices, you draw the us-versus-them
lines and intellectually isolate yourself. This is what we all do. Religious beliefs and their
constituent tribal behaviors are a fundamental part of our nature.
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It’s impossible not to adopt
them. If you think you’re above religion, that you use logic and reason, I’m sorry to say, you’re
wrong: you are one of us.
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If you think you’re well informed and highly educated, you’re not:
you still suck.
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We all must have faith in something. We must find value somewhere. It’s how we
psychologically survive and thrive. It’s how we find hope. And even if you have a vision for a
better future, it’s too hard to go it alone. To realize any dream, we need support networks, for
both emotional and logistical reasons. It takes an army. Literally.
It’s our value hierarchies—as expressed through the stories of religion, and shared among
thousands or millions—that attract, organize, and propel human systems forward in a sort of
Darwinian competition. Religions compete in the world for resources, and the religions that tend
to win out are those whose value hierarchies make the most efficient use of labor and capital.
And as it wins out, more and more people adopt the winning religion’s value hierarchy, as it has
demonstrated the most value to individuals in the population. These victorious religions then
stabilize and become the foundation for culture.
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But here’s the problem: Every time a religion succeeds, every time it spreads its message far
and wide and comes to dominate a huge swath of human emotion and endeavor, its values
change. The religion’s God Value no longer comprises the principles that inspired the religion in
the first place. Its God Value slowly shifts and becomes the preservation of the religion itself: not
to lose what it has gained.
And this is where the corruption begins. When the original values that defined the religion,
the movement, the revolution, get tossed aside for the sake of maintaining the status quo, this is
narcissism at an organizational level. This is how you go from Jesus to the Crusades, from
Marxism to the gulags, from a wedding chapel to divorce court. This corruption of the religion’s
original values rots away at the religion’s following, thus leading to the rising up of newer,
reactionary religions that eventually conquer the original one. Then the whole process begins
again.
In this sense, success is in many ways far more precarious than failure. First, because the
more you gain the more you have to lose, and second, because the more you have to lose, the
harder it is to maintain hope. But more important, because by experiencing our hopes, we lose
them. We see that our beautiful visions for a perfect future are not so perfect, that our dreams and
aspirations are themselves riddled with unexpected flaws and unforeseen sacrifices.
Because the only thing that can ever truly destroy a dream is to have it come true.
Chapter 5
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