(July 4, 2015 at 4:36 pm)TheMonster Wrote: Just a thought experiment!
If you were to create a religion, how would you do it and how would you get others to follow it?
Well, it's a lot harder these days. I can't exactly fly to Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, not without a few jetpacks and some way to beat back the Hamas and Israeli rockets anyway.
I think I would draw upon the "exotic" eastern traditions, as these tend to impress the wealthy middle classes who demographically speaking are the most likely to become cultists and follow a plan like this...
1. Cultivate a history/CV that would make me appear mystical and mysterious that I could put on the back of books; perhaps spend a few years in a monestary, any monestary it really doesn't matter. Take up Yoga, an unusual diet, perhaps even begin to neglect my physical apperance; becoming underweight to heighten the sense of me being an ascetic detached from worldly concerns.
2. Write craptons of New Age self help books, of the "Chicken Soup for the Soul"/Deepak Chopra flavour.
3. Set up seminars and workshops where for exhorbitant prices people can learn from me basic stuff they could learn in five minutes from a book and receive some back patting and ego stroking lectures.
4. Rinse, lather and repeat.
5. After a few times doing the above buy myself a nice big manor with "donations" in Beverly Hills, fill the pool with dollar bills and hire an army of "Pool Boys" from a modeling agency to wait on me hand and foot as I lounge around in it.
6. Repeat step 4 as and when a nice new shiny Bentley or Rolls Royce model I like shows up.
It's perfect! All I need is a name for my new cult
SOON!
