Tags: dudeism | organsation | religion

Want to start your own religion? Well, Oliver Benjamin explains why you can't just jump right in...

There's a right time and place and person for the job. Truth is, nearly every great religion was founded by a studly young male in his mid-thirties after spending some time alone in the wilderness.

It makes sense. If you're too young, no one will take you seriously and if you're too old you'll be out of touch.

Hanging out by yourself in the wilds is a good way to go crazy, and let's be honest - only men are reckless and egotistical enough to do something as stupid as start a religion.

As a mildly-bored thirty seven year old male who just recently spent a week alone on the beach, I was in perfect position to make myself a prophet. There was only one problem: I was a far from studly. 2000 years ago, people would have quickly passed me over for the tall, flaxen-haired dude without the nasally whine.

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But 2000 years ago there was no internet: Today obese old men can visit chat rooms and pretend they're eighteen year old lesbians. Behind the veil of the 'net I could easily convince everyone that I, like Jesus Christ or Angelina Jolie, was a spiritual sex-bomb sent here to save mankind from certain doom.

Let's Get Metaphysical

So I set to work. Like any other altruistic megalomaniac, I would need a platform: A creed, a belief system, a marketing strategy. More importantly, I would need a really cool logo. You can't have a world-class religion without a really cool logo. I spent days designing one that screamed "world-class religion" and also which would look nice as a tattoo.

As for market positioning I was looking for something with a wide range of appeal, something like "The Religion With Absolutely No Dietary Laws" or "The Religion that Loves Small Children and Furry Animals." Finally I settled on "The Religion of Reality!" I didn't know what it meant, but it sounded commercial.

Since most religions are kind of ominous and threatening, I decided to take a different tack and populate my pantheon entirely with friendly cartoon characters. Among my official saints were: Swami Pastrami, Jeannie Yogini, The Olly Lama, Dear Rabbi, Barry Krishna, and Santeria Claus.

After a while, however, I realized that although there wasn't much difference between gods and cartoon characters, people might think I wasn't really serious. SuperGod, Mutha Earth and The Frying Nun were scrapped and I returned to the drawing board.

Truth was, I was unsure just how serious to be about all this. There was one problem that kept getting in the way of my new religion: I'm an atheist. Even writing the word "God" makes me squirm. But what was the alternative?

It's impossible to base a religion on atheist principles. It would be just like basing a war on pacifist principles. Luckily, I remembered that this is exactly what the Bush administration had recently accomplished in the middle east. Could I perform the same kind of ideological jiu-jitsu and engender the world's first atheist religion? It was worth a try.

The problem with this strategy was that atheism is terribly dull. Take for example William Blake's spiritual invitation "to see eternity in a grain of sand, and infinity in an hour."

An atheist would see only silicon dioxide and minutes. Consequently there is very little atheist poetry out there. And a religion must have poetry! It must have flesh and feeling and zeal and zing!

Moreover, it must have exclamation points! I would have to find a way to create a system full of both rhyme and reason, something people could connect to with both heart and mind, and perhaps, pocketbook.

Holy Market, Mother of Grace

I knew that other religious organizations already existed which ordained people for free. The most famous was called The Universal Life Church, based in Modesto California. In the 1970s its founder, Kirby Hensley, announced that he would ordain anyone who sent him a written request, at no charge, no questions asked.

The ULC made money by selling marriage certificates at huge markups and its newly-ordained ministers made money by officiating at wedding ceremonies. It had very little to do with religion and everything to do with empowerment (by which I mean making money). The ULC has been sued repeatedly for fraud, but due to America's strict separation of church and state, it has always emerged unscathed.

After all, who is to say what constitutes a religion and how it should operate? Some religions force children to wear funny hats or hairstyles, for which they are often beaten up. Others advocate taking huge amounts of drugs in order to see God, unlike normal people who just take them for fun.

Still others claim that their God can turn water into wine, but incredibly, he never does it. So I felt it was time to get rid of all the funny hats and nonsense and just reduce the spirit of religion down to its very essence with this simple and very honest idea: Give me a dollar.

The Universal Life Church essentially democratized religion, though perhaps too much: it had no creed, other than the meaningless "To do that which is right." Furthermore, its logo was awful. I was convinced that not one of the million ordained ministers had ever gotten a ULC tattoo. My idea? Make a Universal Life Church, but with some Life in it

The Temple of Earth

After months of tinkering I finally had what constituted a full-blown religion. Named "The Temple of Earth" and billed as "The World's First Religion of Rationality," it consisted of a simple on-line ordination form and many pages of self-confident blather. I also created an online store from which people could purchase tee-shirts, mugs, clocks, journals and teddy bears with my religion's logo on it.

There was a forum and a chat room, which would provide online meeting places for my flock. I invented a "logical" form of yoga called Loga™ and also an affiliated university to offer more secular services. I created some fun holidays too. Now all I had to do was wait for a flood of earnest seekers to so show up and prostrate themselves at my virtual doorstep.

So how goes it? In two months hundreds of people have already signed up. While most clearly did so only for the free ordination certificate, a few write in that they really dig the message, which is essentially this: The concept of God is meaningless. It's just a funny way to spell "good." So worship the good. And use your rational mind to decide what is good and what is not. Worship the good, young grasshopper. And give me a dollar.

God Brand It!

To be honest, I've decided not to make any money off this thing. What started as kind of a joke has turned into something I'm quite fond of. Which is why I no longer want to sully it with commerce. Dare I believe my own religion? I doggedly do. Religion as it is traditionally practiced is utterly irrational.

And even now, centuries after the scientific revolution the majority of people on this planet still believe in their personal brand of God™. Like fashion labels, religions divide people more than they unite them together. And so the only viable alternative is an organization that denounces the value of irrational knowledge while at the same time satisfying the human need to enlist as a member in an over-arching system of thought.

Furthermore, we draw strength from our associations with others and presently there are few interesting organizations for the rationally-minded. This is why fundamentalist religions have such astonishing power: They're well-organized, and for whatever reason, freethinkers are not. Universities once served as bastions of rationality, but today most are so fragmented in design, tangled in internal politics and buried under tenured professors' pet theories, that they no longer adequately serve the cause of reason. Viva la Revolucion! I say, though it already happened hundreds of years ago and few managed to notice.

Another thing that really gets my sacrificial goat is the way that religious officers are afforded unearned respect. No one likes to see a priest get punched in the face - but what if he's a jerk and deserves it? Why should a rationalist be any less-respected just because he doesn't wear a silly collar? One should be esteemed by their deeds, not by their duds. But if that's the way it has to be, The Temple of Earth will happily sell ministerial garb to everyone at cost price.

My Big TOE

The Temple of Earth will not likely go very far. I'm far too lazy and unqualified to do much besides place my little dinghy in the great ocean of internet ideologies. Still, there is always a chance it might travel on its own. Jesus Christ surely didn't intend for his extemporaneous soliloquies to end up carved into sky-high marble edifices.

Perhaps one day, far in the future, The Almighty Temple of Earth Inc. will amass enough power to erase this article from the world's databanks and replace me with someone much taller, flaxen-haired and handsome, a godman who espoused something altogether different than I did. Now, that would be something! I wish I'd be around to see it. After all, Christ's greatest tragedy was not dying on the cross, but the fact that he wasn't around to find out what happened afterward.

Many critics claim Jesus would be enraged to see the mess that became of his humble, peaceful ideologies. Not me. Were he alive today, I think he'd laugh himself silly. Like the Buddha, Christ preached that our world is a corruptible one, that it's far better to engage with the abstract world of ideas.

Were he alive today, he'd send his gospels by email. He'd administer his home page with a deft mouse and a sturdy firewall. And he would instruct: "Google always for the good in the search engine of your soul." Jesus Christ would have loved the internet. "The geeks shall inherit the earth" he once preached, sort of. How very true that turned out to be.