Inventing fake religions in order to attack formal religions has become immensely popular, whether it’s a Henderson-like attempt to showcase the logical fallacies of religious arguments or just for a few convoluted laughs, like Discordianism.
“Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of great spiritual power. We know this because they are capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can’t see them.”
Blessed Be Her Holy Hooves!
A parody of the Ten Commandments is a favourite feature of many ‘religions’. The Church of Google thunders, “Thou shalt have no other Search Engine before me, neither Yahoo nor Lycos, AltaVista nor Metacrawler. Thou shalt worship only me, and come to Google only for answers.” The Flying Spaghetti Monster favors a slightly less demanding “8 I’d Rather You Didn’t” which, thankfully, includes “I’d really rather you didn’t go around telling people I talk to you. You’re not that interesting. Get over yourself. And I told you to love your fellow man, can’t you take a hint?”
While these religions are fairly recent, some are ancient – with origins going as far back as 1958. Discordianism was founded in that great year by Malaclypse the Younger, who wrote Prinicipia Discordia.
Discordianism became immensely popular and created innumerable off-shoots like the Church of Sub-Genius, which was claims to have been founded in the 1950’s by a guy named Bob .It more accurately started with the publication of the Subgenius Pamphlet #1, in 1979 and gained popularity with the ‘rebel’ scene in the 1980s and 1990s.
One of the most famous institutions of it’s kind, the CoSG’s central icon ‘Bob’ was named Times Magazines’ #1 ‘Phoney or Fraud’ in it’s January, 2000 issue. The Church of Sub-Genius is now an incorporated company which blatantly devotes itself to making money. For a sum of $30, one can become an ordained minister with lifetime membership. The Church promises “Eternal Salvation or Triple Your Money Back!”
Of course, joke religions do not exist purely to pull down other religions. Some like Iglesia Maradoniana was created by fans of Diego Maradona, as a light-hearted attempt to transfer the emotion of a religion to a non-divine figure – like Maradona. Tales of temples being built for politicians, cricketers and politicians are not rare in India. When South Indian actor Rajnikanth released his film Shivaji, fans held ceremonies where milk was poured on his cutouts, a treatment usually reserved for Hindu gods. These ‘fake religions’, at some point, start performing a function the followers of organized religions have longed claimed as their exclusive domain: community building.
Comments are closed.