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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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