God Is Like Jigsaw/Borg

[Metis]

The Northern Lights (The Golden Compass) is a harsh rip on religion as a means of control.

Apparently Nicole Kidman who starred in it is Christian or something but failed to notice the satire.

She's a Catholic and she sure got a lot of hate off groups like the Catholic League for it.

As for other examples, the one that always stuck with me was Yu Yevon from the Final Fantasy series. Kind of a long story but Yu Yevon was a king in the pre-historic past who invented a religion that would allow him to essentially control the world and make people reshape it as he wished.

What really caught my attention with this story though was Yevon explicitly forbade science, knowing that if people ever got too educated they'd eventually see through his cult and might even invent a plan to destroy him. Eventually someone did, but not before millions and millions of people died willingly or unwillingly for the Yevonite faith and had devoted their entire lived to preaching about and pandering to his every desire.

Really, the way the Yevonite faith is set up in the story with a single theocratic ruler and a savior (Yu Yevon) promising salvation for obedience it makes an eerily close analogy to several real religions, especially the Catholic Church. I was told the religion was inspired by Tibetan Buddhism but it does have some points of universal comparison. The game designers even went into such detail as to include practices like prayer rituals, and create side stories for people to discover how they were invented and what inspired them. The Yevonite opening prayer (bowing with cupped hands) for instance is later discovered to have been copied from a gesture crowds used to do at this worlds version of ancient soccer matches, and Yu Yevon copied the one done by his favorite team. So in a cruel bit of irony every time someone prayed to Yevon, they were doing a salute to Yevon's favorite sports team.

The most compelling line for me actually was in a description of the religion near the end of the game. "Nobody knows when Yevonism truly began, it probably even began with a good aim to bring about a better world and peace, but in efforts to justify its importance and gain power by any means it turned very, very bad. There's no point asking what inspired it, or if it's still working towards its initial goal. The time for those questions has long since passed, all that matters is stopping it".

It sure was creative, I must say http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Yevon