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All Hail The Great God Lardicus
What's the point of living if you can't create your own God?
Aside from my delusions of grandeur (and how much grander can
they get than God-creation?) the main reason I'm doing this is
so that I can have a God I can use without offending anyone while
I'm writing here on Pagan Wisdom. And it's fun.
While I originally wrote this for the above reason, it turned
out to be a bit more comprehensive and insightful that I had anticipated.
I hope you find it enjoyable and perhaps even educational on a
variety of levels. I have tried not to offend anyone specifically.
More sort of a general offend-everybody-equally kind of thing.
Let's get started!
A properly created religion can give you personal control
influence guidance over the wallets minds
hearts of those who feel that being a Free-Thinking Individual
is way too much work.
Here we provide you with our simple format to take
you through the basic steps, from creating your own Gods and Goddesses
to creating a simple yet ambiguous framework for your followers
to try to conform to.
With our humble guidance, you'll be able to start
up your own cult sect denominiation religion
in no time and have all the power money control
faith you need to get you through this mortal coil.
Here's how simple God-creation can be:
1) Create a God. One with a catchy name is best.
Should be simple and out of the ordinary, but not too far out
that people can't remember it.
In our example we will create "The
Great God Lardicus". It has "Lard" in the name
which people already associate with fast food. It has "-icus"
at the end of it, which sounds Greek, so it must be old and have
centuries of tradition behind it.
2) Make it in charge of something people already focus
on, but don't have a target for that focus.
In this case, eating too much fast food
and poor dietary practices. Poof! Millions of people are now in
your target audience.
3) Make it something that people will be reminded of
frequently.
In this case, whenever they think of fast
food, they will think of Lardicus after reading this (at least
for a while).
In fact, the next time you drive down the
road I bet you will think of The Great God Lardicus at least once.
And the second time, you'll think of it because you'll remember
thinking of it the first time. And so on. See how easy that was!
4) Make it easy for them to "buy into" the
worship of your New God.
In this case, whenever you eat fast food,
you are honoring The Great God Lardicus.
Whenever you pay at the drive-in window,
you are tithing to The Great God Lardicus.
5) Make it ambiguous. Let both sides of an argument
claim it as their own.
In this case, is The Great God Lardicus
a "Dark God" bent on destroying The Temple Of Your Physical
Being, or is he a "Light God" and the patron of those
who are too busy in their lives to stop and eat a well-balanced
meal?
Why define it when you can let people fight it out themselves.
People are funny. They'll fight over anything. Even something
you just made up. Enjoy the show and try not to think too much
about the Karmic issues you are creating for yourself.
6) Establish some standards by which the God should be
referred to, creating an intrinsic reverence right from
the start.
In this case, The Great God Lardicus must
always be referred to as "The Great God" Lardicus. Once
people see this a few hundred times, they'll start believing it
without even realizing it.
Make sure that the Full Title and Name are Always Capitalized.
This is because that everybody knows that something that has Capital
Letters Is Much More Important than something that isn't.
This is called "Marketing" and all the Most Holy of
The Great God Lardicus's High Priests study the Dark Arts of Marketing
and practice it many times a day in their Most Holy Rites.
7) Make cool symbols. They should be things
that people already know and see everywhere. And they should be
easy to draw and say.
In our case, The Great God Lardicus's symbols
will be the Arch, the Crown and Pigtails. (If you think you'd
look silly in pigtails, just substitute an image of a Pig, which
works well when you think of bacon, pork chops, and the obvious
"pig" symbolism). You'll suddenly start seeing The Great
God Lardicus's symbols everywhere. Temples to The Great God Lardicus
will appear, as if by Divine Intervention, on every street corner
in every town across the nation.
Boy, that was fun!
Okay, we've now created our first God.
Now, let's see how easy it is to turn it into a Religion!
You can't have a cool religion with just a single character,
so....
8) You need an opposing force. Not necessarily
an arch-enemy, but an opposite perspective so that people can
pick sides and fight over things.
Remember the stuff about people up there in Number 5? If everybody
gets along, nobody will ever hear about your new religion. Most
people hardly ever talk about how happy and content they are with
their spirituality. In fact, many feel that they have to impose
their beliefs on others in order to validate themselves and their
beliefs. Because if you can get other people to be convinced to
believe the same thing you do, you must be right! And that validates
your choices. You want to play into that if you're going to be
creating your own religion.
In this case, we will create The Gentle
Goddess Dietima.
Notice how we have used all the rules so far with this name and
the subtle effects it engenders. Let's review:
1) It has "Diet" in the name, which
is obviously the opposite of "Lard". It sounds Greek
too, so it fits nicely into our freshly created pantheon of psuedo-Greek
deities.
It sounds catchy. And it should. Because we have simply co-opted
the name of an actual character from Greek Literature, Diotima.
Many people will vaguely (but not quite) remember her name from
a high school or college class. This is another great technique
when you are creating a new religion: overlay your gods, legends,
temples, holy days and whatever else you can think of over top
of the ones used by The Other Religions. Why invent something
new when you can simply co-opt it and claim it as your own? Then
people can fight over who stole what from whom and the nefarious
motivations for doing so. People love to fight, and it would be
cruel of you to deny them this chance.
2) Who hasn't been on or thought about going
on a diet? The Gentle Goddess Dietima is the patron for you!
3) Is there anyone you know that isn't painfully
aware of diets and dieting? My point exactly.
4) It sounds Feminine with just the right mix
of Fluffy-Bunny and Wise Woman. It is sweet enough for the flowering
gentle pre-teen who wants a kinder, more understanding world but
it also sounds great for attracting the people who would never
worship a masculine meat-eating fatso un-environmentally-conscious
goat-mater like Grease God Lardicus!
Wow! Intolerance is fun and yet still makes you feel superior
and important, while at the same time elevating you to the moral
high-ground above those who you don't agree with. Neat, huh?
5) Notice how we have made The Gentle Goddess
Dietima attractive to the entire spectrum of human emotion! Now
we can just sit back and watch Her Faithful fight over which of
her aspects is "The Real One".
6) The Gentle Goddess Dietima should always
referred to as "The Gentle Goddess", unless you are
in need of her unspecified warrior attributes which are whatever
you want them to be whenever you want to use them. Good ol' rule
number 5!
7) Dietima's symbols are the cute adorable little
bunny (because nobody could not love a cute adorable little bunny),
a curved silver knife (crescent moon shaped, great for cutting
earth-friendly veggies to eat and tilling the ground, and useful
for those unspecified warrior aspects, and similar enough to the
Arch to cause more fun bickering) and the egg (fertility, orb
shapes are common, and it will further confuse the whole spring
holiday symbolism thing and cause more exciting discussions).
So much for the review, now back to the recipie book:
9) You need to confuse everybody. This will make
sure that nobody can be really certain WHAT they believe, because
it is all so non-sensical to begin with. And when you don't spell
it out exactly (or even if you do) you know how those funny humans
will all magically just get along, right!
In this case, we'll try to be real thorough here:
The Gentle Goddess Dietima and The Great
God Lardicus are Divine Brother and Sister. However, they are
also Husband and Wife. And The Great God Lardicus is the child
of Himself and The Gentle Goddess Dietima. As is Dietima. They
love each other, but argue and even fight regularly for a variety
of reasons that we won't go into here because we want people to
make up their own reasons, which they can then fight over.
We don't even have to explain how any of this is possible because
they are Gods and can do whatever they want. We don't want to
specify who was born first or the details of their immaculate
self-conceptions, because that might give one side the upper hand
in any arguments. Remember Rule Number 5: Keep it ambiguous.
The Gentle Goddess Dietima and The Great God Lardicus may or
may not have other children, parents, siblings or acquaintances.
We can add them in later if we want or need to, and then the old-timers
(historians, scholars, etc.) can fight the new converts (who are
always the most passionate about things) about whether they should
"really" be in the pantheon or not, since they weren't
there in the beginning. We'll probably just say we found some
ancient scrolls that nobody is allowed to examine that mentioned
them when we want to add in any new characters. That'll be fun!
And last but certainly not least:
10) The Big Reward. You know everything you always
wished you had in this life? After you die, you'll get it! We
promise! Hot women. Cute Guys. Flying Cars. Washboard abs. Rivers
of Chocolate that won't add an ounce or an inch to your perfectly
fit, weightless body. And lots of cute, adorable fluffy bunnies
to frolic with in virgin green pastures.
In our case, we guarantee that you'll get
everything listed above. And then some!
But wait! There's more! All the people you
love in this life will be there. But not the people you don't
like. They all go to "The Other Place". Don't worry.
They'll get theirs. And you'll spend eternity in Paradise. Really.
We Promise.
Oh yeah, one last thing:
The always present but never written down (written down here
because I can't whisper it in your ear) Eleventh Rule:
11) Get The Word Out!
What good is creating your own religion if you can't get people
to worship your Gods and beg you for guidance because they don't
trust themselves to navigate their own way through life? They'll
be much better having an uninformed random someone else tell them
what to do than looking at their own situation objectively and
determining a logical path to take that is likely to help them
improve their lot in life.
And don't forget the money! Once people realize that Pagan Wisdom.com
is the only place that they can find The One True Path, they'll
start throwing money at me to solve their problems for them and
I can quit my day job and hang out at the beach with my religion-driving
laptop-toting bikini-wearing interns. Um, I mean staff.
So get to work and start sending copies of this to everyone you
know and help me, humbly, to bring them to True Salvation
here at Pagan Wisdom.com
.
In fact, if you send this to twenty or more
people in the next ten minutes, you may very well win the lottery!
If you don't, and your car explodes, it wasn't my fault. It was
yours.
Blessed Be,
- Brian Gallagher
Keeper of The
One True Path to Paradise
