Prophet Wanted: Entry-Level Position, No Tablets or Burning Bush Required

[sugarimp]

New York Times, USA
Aug. 28, 2006
Michael Luo

The help-wanted ad had the whiff of a practical joke. “Documentary will pay you $5,000 to start your own religion,” it said. “No exp. necessary.”“I laughed out loud,” said Joshua Boden, 35, a bald-headed bassist in an indie rock band, the Angelic Bombs, who stumbled across the ad in the Village Voice

Comments

[min0taur]

I have to doubt that most religions we'd recognize as such have origins in a deliberate act of "founding." Seems likelier they sort of coalesce like planets, starting out as what we'd call cults: One person has a vision or a conversion or an epiphany, tries to put it across, it resonates enough with some folks that they start hanging around and become fervent followers, then they bring in their friends and relatives. Get enough folks on the bandwagon to reach critical mass, and the rest of it follows like a chain reaction: people take it upon themselves to work up tenets of belief and us-versus-them ideologies, giving the original vision some consistency (either by oversimplifying it into dogma or overcomplicating it into mystery), and after awhile it's a movement that has some momentum. Then all it has to do is accrue cultural staying power, and that comes about largely as a result of historical accident -- the social standing of a few key converts, a few wars here and there -- and later by sheer repetition ("what I tell you three times is true"). Only when enough people are convinced that the movement "has always been here since the beginning" does it have serious credentials as a religion. That varies from culture to culture. I dunno, but efforts to "found" a religion just to make a point or see if we can get away with it have probably already answered their own question.