Design your own religion - I'll take a polygamy with a side of ancestor worship, hold the nonviolence.

[???]

How does one create and propagate a new religion?

The process of creation seems to be either starting something entirely new; or reinterpreting, adding on, or removing parts of an existing religion. Reviving dead religions does not seem hugely successful.

What goals should a religion have, and in what ways should it suggest or command you to achieve those goals?

What sort of person, and group of people, should a religion try to mould?

What are the implications of the beliefs of existing religions, or your religion?

What are the implications (societal, biological, evolutionary, ...) of various beliefs, such as:
* The belief that the relationship between two people is the basic building block of civilization, rather than the individual?
* Prohibition of 1st cousin marriage and anything closer than that?
* A requirement to treat others as they treat you?
* Explicit ethnocentrism and religious-centrism, based on whitelists and blacklists of competing religions and ethnic groups?
* Exoteric texts designed to deceive religious outsiders?
* An obligation to lie to outsiders, especially to save your own skin and those of your coreligionists, and to gain advantage over blacklisted religions and ethnic groups and those without faith?
* Prohibition of giving interest bearing loans from coreligionists?
* Prohibition of accepting interest bearing loans from anyone?
* A requirement for men to master martial skills?
* Somewhat strict sex and gender roles?
* A requirement for religious leaders to have families and be successful in their social roles?
* Explicit roles for socially and sexually atypical people, which seeks to weaponize their dysfunction against blacklisted religions and ethnic groups?
* Laying out different modes of acceptable worship, instead of the typical Abrahamic prayer leading and lecture?
* A requirement to socialize periodically, to know how to dance as a group, and to not eat alone when possible?
* Forbidding women from having authority over men and adolescent boys?
* Allowing polygamy of your religions women only when there are not enough men, and preventing men from unilaterally exiling other boys and men from your religion?
* Allowing polygamy with women from other religions and faithless people, as long as the children are raised in the father's religion?
* Exiling women who leave the religion to marry an outsider?
* A requirement to infiltrate and take over governments that rule over you, to benefit your religion and whitelisted religions and ethnic groups?
* Refusal of death rites and burial in community plots, and entrance into an acceptable afterlife for suicides, especially those of young, healthy, fertile, and valuable people?
* A requirement to periodically eat meat and dairy products?
* A requirement to eat food raised by a family member?
* A requirement to raise, harvest, and store food in a natural manner and using natural materials (no pesticides, no plastics, no synthesized additives)?
* A requirement to wear clothes only made of natural fibers grown in a natural manner?
* A requirement to not martyr yourself unless absolutely necessary?
* Allowing leaders to declare that some rules may be broken for a limited time in exceptional circumstances, as in a war?
* Laying out rules for dealing with contradictions, ambiguities, and new revelations?
* The belief that this religion, the law, and the state are one?
* The belief that a higher power exists, is morally legitimate, is rational, and follows the rules of reality regardless of whether or not it created reality?
* The belief that members of my religion were created by this higher power, along with members of whitelisted religious groups?
* The belief - not publicly acknowledged - that members of my ethnic group are superior to other ethnic groups?

 

[Immortal Technique]

You basically wrote the Scientology & Mormon manifesto.

 

[Franjevina]

Tolkien is my prophet and Lord of the Rings is my Bible ... 'enough said .

 

[TFT-A9]

The goal of a benevolent religious philosophy should be to rein in the worst aspects of humanity while promoting the better aspects. The problem arises when someone else has a different idea of what constitutes a "good" aspect and what constitutes a "bad" one, and is compounded further by flaws in implementation. A system put into effect by humans is going to have every imperfection innate to humanity.

 

[The Fool]

All anthropomorphic concepts are sapient beings in their own right, and these creatures exist in a metaphysical reality comparable to our own. This reality will intercept our own and intertwine with it, erasing unnecessary parts and replacing them with each other's components. Entire nations will be torn asunder as if they were a flickering candle being blown out for the final time, while the fancies of the dreams of those thrown into oblivion will replace their moral flesh and become everything they have ever dreamt, taking on the coils of those very entities they have envisioned.

 

[Pickle Inspector]

I'd just make a new age religion that has no real goals other than to be a feel good religion for normies so they'd give the church money.

Things like: Buy these special blessed incense/candles and it'll grant you luck and happiness.

And then lots of mumbo jumbo about how reincarnation is real and you've got to be nice to everyone and then humanity will evolve into the next dimension and try to be vague enough that most people would be happy with it.

 

[Joe Swanson]

Tolkien is my prophet and Lord of the Rings is my Bible ... 'enough said .

The Silmarillion resembles a religious text better then TLOR

 

[HollaGemini]

I'd just make a new age religion that has no real goals other than to be a feel good religion for normies so they'd give the church money.

Things like: Buy these special blessed incense/candles and it'll grant you luck and happiness.

And then lots of mumbo jumbo about how reincarnation is real and you've got to be nice to everyone and then humanity will evolve into the next dimension and try to be vague enough that most people would be happy with it.

This. It is so true. Women especially are interested in new age shite, almost all psychics and channelers on youtube are women.
You probably wont get any intelligent people to join, but thats not the point at all, you just need numbers.
New age shit is easy for idiots to consume. Its all the fluffy fairy vibration energy feel good crap that works these days.
The answer to your question is too subjective, it depends on the types of people that are around you or that you want to draw in.
But the best place to start would be from a new age perspective

 

[mr.moon1488]

Someone already made the best shitposting religion irl.

 

[DidYouJustSayThat]

Someone already made the best shitposting religion irl.

The new crop of Black Israelites has gone downhill - where are the cool robes - wearing t-shirts, really? It's like they are not even trying anymore.

 

[Lemmingwise]

One essential part any new religion must have is how it contends with existing religions.

For example, muslim religion mostly does so by marketing itself as monotheism 2.0. They're the atheism+ of the religious world. Yes, these others are also right, but we're more right because we're the new and improved version. This allows them some hooks into previously christian/jewish people that they're converting. But the fact that they do so at the point of the sword also helps and the power vacuum by a collapsing roman empire also helped.

Scientology also grew thanks to the room made by the changing understanding of our psyche/soul. L ron Hubbard's book Dianetics may have been rejected by academia (he tried to get it published in Journal of the American Medical Association and the American Journal of Psychiatry), but it found popular appeal in their zeitgeist. There was a general attack on religion in the west at the time (whether deserved or undeserved) and scientology found a niche between science and religion.

Now by definition any such new religion will cause division, for their differentiated way of viewing the world. Completely independant of how well-thought out and irrespective of the value of the tenets of belief of the new religion, it will be in competition with the other ones. And I think that division aspect and how it is dealt with is far more important than the precise beliefs of that said new religion, which can be co-opted or subverted over time anyways.

 

[mr.moon1488]

The new crop of Black Israelites has gone downhill - where are the cool robes - wearing t-shirts, really? It's like they are not even trying anymore.

Lol idk. I kinda like the ghetto sithlord thing some of them have going on now.

 

[Unyielding Stupidity]

Depends on if I want to actually like my religion, or purely have it be successful.

If I'm purely optimizing it for success, it'd probably be an even more violent version of Sunni Islam - maintaining the whole "murdering non-believers/apostates" thing, merging the concepts of religion and state, maintaining concepts similar to jizya, jihad and taqiya, allowing enslavement of non-believers, the concept of the holy texts being the unaltered word of god, etc. These traits are useful, as without heavy resistance to being converted, your people will either become atheist or convert to a more zealous religion like Christianity or Islam. Likewise, you need to focus heavily on expanding your religion at all costs, as otherwise, again, the more zealous religions will outnumber you and as a result more easily destroy you. As such, violence is a great tool to both convert non-believers and make sure that your followers don't convert to another faith. If we were still in the age of decentralized religions, pagans and polytheists, we could get similar success with a zealous, but nonviolent, religion as most pagans/polytheists are much easier to convert than monotheists. To add onto these concepts, you'd want to make sure that your religion began in a region like Africa or South Asia, so that the Western world will be afraid to criticize your religion for fear of being labelled as racist, so you can easily reach a critical mass high enough to outbreed them, outnumber them, then destroy them. I'd also make sure that the religion doesn't have much divine/spiritual concepts, to make it more palatable to fedora-tipping atheists/agnostics as an alternative way to get back at their parents. In fact, any little optimizations that could increase the effectiveness of converting non-believers , maintaining current believers, or helping the religion be geared for a holy war would be highly suggested.

Now, if I wanted a religion that I'd actually like? Well, any religion I'd like would be so lacking in concepts of the divine, higher powers, spirituality and other pseudo-scientific bullshit that it could hardly be considered a religion, more a series of laws and rules to live by that'd fill the role of preventing people from doing stupid, amoral things (Because some people apparently need a deity to tell them that things like stealing, murder and rape aren't okay), and not much else. As such, the religion would have to have a major sense of community between believers, as peer pressure is a great way to prevent people from being self-centered pricks. Again, it's barely even a religion without such divine concepts, so I'm not sure this even counts as a religion.

 

[Dr. Troon]

The new crop of Black Israelites has gone downhill - where are the cool robes - wearing t-shirts, really? It's like they are not even trying anymore.

They got noticed that they wuz kangz a little bit too much and toned it down.

 

[Marco Fucko]

1. I am God.
2. You only go to Heaven if I say so
3. Give me your money

 

[Autocrat]

I dislike a majority of your tenets, but I've been interested in making a religion for the past decade. You sound like an anti capitalist luddite.
My religion, which is the religion of life itself, seeks to empower its members. Others only inherently matter insofar as they affect us. That is one of the first principles in life.
Ultimately, intellectual pursuits are the main requirement. Knowledge is largely useless if it can't be applied, so applying knowledge is a big theme. Applying knowledge, with the north star of it being to the benefit of the members. Power and well being. Everything else is open for discussion. Slaves are fine to own.

Someone already made the best shitposting religion irl.

You're not even trying

3:40

 

[???]

I dislike a majority of your tenets, but I've been interested in making a religion for the past decade. You sound like an anti capitalist luddite.
My religion, which is the religion of life itself, seeks to empower its members. Others only inherently matter insofar as they affect us. That is one of the first principles in life.
Ultimately, intellectual pursuits are the main requirement. Knowledge is largely useless if it can't be applied, so applying knowledge is a big theme. Applying knowledge, with the north star of it being to the benefit of the members. Power and well being. Everything else is open for discussion. Slaves are fine to own.



You're not even trying

3:40

So Luciferianism?

Since no one is doing it, I'll offer some analysis of existing religions.

Sunni Islam commands Muslims to emulate their ideal man, Mohammed. This places a high value on polygamy with few strings attached and 1st cousin marriage. The former causes people to become more closely related and therefore ethnocentric, while the latter often drops IQ by up to 15 points. Stupidity positively correlates with violence, as does inceldom. Thus you get clannish, violent, and backwards peoples on a long enough timeframe.

Sunni Islam believes that god transcends reality, and can shape reality by will alone. Some schools even believe that fire is a divine miracle. Since god can overpower rational laws of reality, you don't need to plan far ahead or even in some cases aim when you fire a weapon. Simply point your weapon in the general direction of the target, fire, and praise god. If your faith is strong enough, god will bend space and time to make the round hit the target.

Judaism states that the daughter of an accomplished scholar is a fit bride for a king, but a man who can't read is not allowed to participate in ritual cleansing of sins (and is therefore outcast). The result is that daughters of verbally gifted men marry rich men; verbal intelligence and skill in twisting meaning is selected for, while verbally unskilled men aren't allowed to marry into the group or participate in society.

 

[mr.moon1488]

I dislike a majority of your tenets, but I've been interested in making a religion for the past decade. You sound like an anti capitalist luddite.
My religion, which is the religion of life itself, seeks to empower its members. Others only inherently matter insofar as they affect us. That is one of the first principles in life.
Ultimately, intellectual pursuits are the main requirement. Knowledge is largely useless if it can't be applied, so applying knowledge is a big theme. Applying knowledge, with the north star of it being to the benefit of the members. Power and well being. Everything else is open for discussion. Slaves are fine to own.



You're not even trying

3:40

Lol I was actually looking for that video, but couldn't find it. Thanks for that.

Edit: the negro thot patrolling is epic.

 

[Autocrat]

So Luciferianism?

No. If we define God as omnipotence (and the mutually inclusive omniscience), then God controls everything in the universe. Humans, since we are controlling more and more at a relatively rapid clip, are becoming God. We are a very low level Demi God.
Becoming God is the Great Work in my ideology / religion. It's audacious (also completely inherent in our existence; it is what we are doing) but there are very many small wins along the path that we should strive for. And we are already striving for them, even if it's not with the express intention of becoming God.

Edit:
Moreover, we need to unite humanity. The Demi God that is humanity is also somewhat insane, with all of these competing wills and nations. We need to bring unity and sanity to our God.

 

[DocHoliday1977]

Just me Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit and kids.
No dipstick know it all preachers nor any gossipy jerk parishioners

And no asshole know it all agnostics or atheists or pagan witch illuminati satanist scumbags.