Want to start a new religion? Here's how to do it:
1. Pick a name for your group-to-be.
2. Invent cool beliefs and rituals to differentiate yourself from any other group.
3. Come up with a set of classes teaching these beliefs. The beginning classes should be all full of goodness and light. Gradually ease into the dark side of it so when students get to the advanced levels they won't be surprised or shocked at all when they are told to sacrifice to fish or drink pig's urine or carry around dead people's thumbs.
4. Target mostly young wealthy women with time on their hands- they will form the social and financial base you'll need to sustain your organization.
5. Use your charisma to hypnotize them into thinking you are special. Act holy when they are around.
6. Tell them they are special too, which is why you chose them.
7. Tell them because they are special you want to teach them the supernatural secrets you know.
8. Get them to take the classes and enroll others before they are even half way through the first set themselves.
9. Teach that poverty and charity are virtues so they'll give you lots of money.
10. Swear them to secrecy on your more advanced teachings.
11. Let them feel that they have a special relationship with you and that it is a privilege for them to speak to you.
12. Give earlier members the power to teach later ones and keep them in line. Get them to spread the word that you are some kind of a prophet or messiah.
13. Make sure the new members are surrounded by other members of the group at all times and tell them that outsiders are inferior and associating with them will make them impure and stunt their spiritual growth. Once they are established they'll believe all outsiders are evil.
14.To minimize exposure to other influences encourage all members to marry within the group.
15. Set up schools for their children so they won't hear anything that goes against your teachings.
16. If someone expresses doubt, act hurt and call it heresy.
17. Get your elders to tell members that if they leave they will lose their friends and their families and will be abandoned by God Himself. Hell is always a good threat though not very original.
18. Get your group to terrorize anyone who does leave. If you have enough power, terrorize anyone who doesn't join.
Bingo- you have a new religion. You could be worshiped for thousands of years and have millions of people die for slandering your name. Of course with time your teachings will be hijacked by others and hideously distorted, but you won't be around so who cares, right?
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7 comments:
Now correct me where I'm wrong, but isn't that pretty much the recipe adopted by the early Christians to establish their religion in Rome ?
Especially No 4: Christianity at the time being one of the few, if not the only, religions that did give women equal rights of worship (even if Paul was wont to insist that they had to stay totally silent in 'Church').
Except for No 18, of course, for the first couple of hundred years, one of the stronger binding forces on Roman Christians was that they were the ones being threatened.
Hi Grim
Yes- I used the early Christian church as my model. I did know something about the Moonies and the Scientologists and Jehovas Witnesses and about another cult as well, so I added that in too.
Just so you know, Paul believed all people were equal- whether male or female, free or slave. The bit about women staying silent in the church wasn't written by him, and goes against the letters that have been attributed to him one of which mentions a woman prophesying during a service.
As for #18, yes, I was thinking about the later church. As you say, being persecuted tends to be a powerful unifying force that kept the church alive in the beginning.
I should have also put something in about miracles, but not all successful cult leaders have them.
cheers
Carmen
Carmen,
Well perhaps I have misjudged Paul, or too easily believed the misattributions to him.
Anyway, what you wrote struck me as a well observed and cogent bit of analysis, which probably deserves a wider audience.
Thanks!
Thing is, Bible scholars say some of the letters in the New Testament that say they were from Paul weren't from him at all. For instance Acts is a questionable document because it disagrees with those letters of his that scholars agree he actually wrote. Also they say that things were added to his genuine letters later.
What I do have against Paul is that he misrepresented what Jesus said. Jesus said, basically, be perfect, and if you mess up repent and you'll be saved. Paul said all you had to do was believe in Jesus and you'd be saved. He said this because he thought anyone who truly believed in Jesus would be transformed into someone who couldn't sin. He said that if they did sin they weren't one of his true followers and thus would not be saved. Christianity has lost the last bit of that message. I guess, thinking about it, that wasn't his fault either.
Oh- The New Testament says Jesus and his followers were supported by wealthy women and in early Christianity it was women who kept it afloat.
Carmen,
Good work should be recognised. As with many things, I can mostly grasp what you've done after you've done it, but I could never have done it from scratch myself.
However, it is rather difficult to establish just who said or wrote what, or didn't, back then. When all we may have is a copy of a copy of a copy, and that dating from, in some cases, centuries after the event(s), then we have no reasonable certainty about anything much.
Even Josephus, who might have actually written some of the things he's credited with having written, is believed to have been 'hacked' in various places (generally based on linguistic differences between parts of the narrative supposedly written by the one author at one place and time).
So I'm quite happy to contemplate that much that I have read about Paul (which, incidentally, isn't a lot) may well not be his doing. However, the difference you indicate between Paul and whoever it was that was referred to as Jesus does appear to indicate a somewhat unforgiving nature.
But yes, if you don't happen to favour Christianity, you could think that wealthy, relatively independent women have a lot to answer for :-)
Well, I'm not a Christian but do admire the moral teachings of Jesus. What he and Paul said on moral issues certainly have stood the test of time- they are as valid now as they were then. They could have been written yesterday! According to my Jewish ex-boyfriend, if Christians had followed Jesus' teaching on the Sermon of the Mount there never would have been the Inquisition or the Holocaust or any other persecutions. But that's what you get when you marry politics with religion.
Glad you like my work! I only publish once a week or so because I want my stuff to be good. Have no idea what I'm going to publish next.
Ah, well I understood that the marrying of Christianity with politics was the work of Constantine (and look how they repayed him). Though aided and abetted by 'The Church', of course. And starting with the First Council of Nicaea, they could even practise your rule 18.
I see you share the Gausss family motto: 'Few but ripe' (Pauca sed Matura). It certainly has its benefits, especially in an age in which quantity swamps quality, so good luck.
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