Designer Religion

"Religion is about governing your life with a support system built of beliefs and other ideas in order to attain your goal, whatever it is. Why not take a shortcut? Design the religion that fits your goal, and if you don't have really a goal, pick up the religion that is closest to you."

Designer religion is the answer of the 21st century to religion. The avent of clientelism in the field of spirituality, or some could say, assisted spirituality.

Religion Encyclopedia

The religion encyclopedia provides a directory of existing religions. You will find some example of existing religions with their corpus and other religions which were recently designed

Existing religions

• Buddhism
• Christian
• Catholic
• Protestant
• Islam
• Jew

Recently designed religions

• Scientology
• Jeowah witnesses
• Born again christian
• Mormons

Designer Religions examples

Example 1: Meta-deistic relationalist

 Goal: organic explanation of creations and being thru non-determined pre-existing god

Exegesis, reference to Valis page 67

1. God is each of us.
2. We are viral by nature. We create things which are spirits, monsters, ghosts, gods.
3. We need to feed what we create till each creation can feed itself.
4. We need to be fed till we understand how to feed ourselves.
5. Some creations are organic, and possess easily the viral replication (human, virus, plants, germs, ...)
6. Some creations are spiritual, and evolve only under certain circumstances (books, computer programs, ...)
7. Some creations are material and evolve very slowly (brick, house, ...)

Creations:

• Computer spirit mini-temple

Example 2: Rational Neo-buddhist

 Goal: cope with Karma and reincarnation

1. In the universe, nothing is created, nothing disappears, everything is transformed.
2. Spirit behaves according to 1. as everything does.
3. Spirit is transformed during death but does not disappear. Reincarnation is the name of this transformation during death.
4. Reincarnation is determined by what you have been (doing, not doing) during your life. Karma is the name of this determination.
5. Karma is somehow your "track record" in life. This can be seen as direct or indirect. You did bad things to your friend, nobody will be here when you die. You stopped being social, you will not develop new experiences and die poor in your spirit. You polluted your world, you will die soon and horribly from environmental illness.
6. God may or may not exist, this is not the point.

Example 3: Absolute Atheist

Goal: deny the existence of god and promote human responsibility for actions and events

1. God does not exist
2. Humans are solely responsible for what they do
3. Humans can believe whatever they want
4. There's nothing higher (or lower) than human beings

Example 4: Reborn Atheist

Goal: follow atheism but preserve the possibility due to our recovering from alcohol or drugs

1. <<Insert here Absolute Atheist>>
2. There may be something after death. As humans, we accept that we don't really have a clue and are willing to believe that after death, we may either dissolve into void or meet something that nobody has came back from to tell us about.

Example 5: Modern Anhedonist

Goal: to believe bad things to be unavoidable, and thus persuading yourself that you enjoy this pain.

1. This world sucks
2. Shit happends, and will happend to you, all your life, until the end of your life.
3. You see something bad that's going to happen to you, and you see it as unavoidable.
4. If you fall into anorexia, that's good. Because at least you can control your suffering. You're back in business, you control at least this shit falling on you.
5. Any mild masochism will do, not only anorexia.
6. You try to participate to the maximum extent to your own pain and to the existence of the upcoming problem, you hasten it.
7. You thus show that you enjoy pain, and you yourself believe that you enjoy pain.

References

• Book of Vishslipluplutop, page 78

Example 6: Isolated Pan-psychism or Unitary Hylozoism

 Goal: respect each single entity and everything as independent life forms

1. Each object is independently alive
2. All the constituents of the universe are alive

References

• i Vu chi ito ku ching by Akiko Wu, page 70

Example 7: Universal Hylozoism

 Goal: respect yourself and each single entity as everything is connected and alive

1. Everything is one unitary entity
2. The universe is one thing, alive, with one mind
3. You kill something, you kill yourself
4. You pollute something, you will die from it

Example 8: Gaiaism or Restricted Universal Hylozoism

Goal: respect earth as yourself

1. Earth aka Gaia is one unitary entity
2. The earth is one thing, along with you, alive, with one mind, and you're part of this mind
3. You kill something, you kill yourself
4. You pollute somewhere, you will die from it or other people will die from it, thus part of you will die.

Religion Builders

Religion builders can be people, organization, computer programs, in fact anything that help create a self-sustaining set of instructions that explain and dictates the world.

The Designer Religion Application that is being designed here is a Ruby on Rails application that helps you build your Designer Religion to best fit your quest for what you are searching for.

We identify thus several factors:

Motives

What do you want to gain from this religion?

It can be plenty of things, isolated or alltogether: wealth, spiritual peace, social control, reproduction control, disease control, physical principles explanations, etc...

Goal

What these motives produce as a single aim?

In marketing terms, you would call that your "Claim" or "Motto". As for Nokia it would be "Connecting People", which indeed could be considered as a new designer religion depending on your definition of religion.

Human Scope

How many people need to believe in your designer religion so that it can be self sustaining?

This is not an easy question, for example, for Christians or Muslims, each person who do not believe in the respective religion is either a Lost Sheep or an Infidel, and needs to be either lead into the right path or taken away.

On the other hand, Buddhist don't care. There's no need for them to do proselyt work in order for their religion to stay valid.

Openness

How open is your designer religion?

Do you expose the governing factors of your religion: motives, goals, human scope to your believers and followers, or do you hide them?

Do you allow people to add things to your religion or even to modify your existing religion without prejudice, meaning here you're not going to hit as the Catholics did on the Protestant when the latter tried to reengineer the code of Christianity?

What is the Access Control List on your religion? Read? Write? Add? Execute? Delete?

Interpretation

Is your religion to be followed word by word or can be adapted?

Even in art history, it is said that no art movement of the past can really be fully understood because we see it from the distance of history. What about religion?

Do you think pork was forbidden to muslim because at the time of the writing of Coran, people didn't know how to preserve it without health risk? Or do you think pork has a hellish side that any good muslim, even thousands of year later, has to prevent and avoid?

You can define that your religion is strictly followed, open interpretation, or even mutated by anyone who wants.

New factors

New factors can be added to determine even further your religion development process. So far, the Designer Religion Application only process the previous parameters.

Resources & References

• http://businesslogs.com/web_20/digg_and_youtube_powering_atheism_20.php

FAQ

"Le 21eme siecle sera religieux ou ne sera pas" --Andre Malraux

I designed a new religion but at the end of the process, the rules don't make sense.

Stupid people get stupid religions. You may want to try again based on your experience (incremental) or follow an existing religion (sheep panurgism). Start with simple rules, do not fall in feature creep.