Having done all these things I've come up with a project that involves combining two exploitable vocations with established track records for guaranteed success. The first is the perennial vogue for "How-To" manuals for doing everything from designing rock gardens to training seals. The other is the industry, hoary with antiquity, of religion. The prospectus I intend to send around to publishers will describe the contents of my book:
Case A:You want to be the prophet of your own religion. This can lead to all sorts of difficulties as you are then required to both be a certain kind of person, and promotethat person. Certainly one does find persons with a natural talent for charismatic leadership who are able to fill both roles; I doubt that they would learn much from reading my book. For people without such natural endowments, including myself, a division of labor is the more sensible course.
Case B One goes into business with several other partners. Only one of you will assume the role of the prophet, the rest serving as his or her press agents. That way the prophet can devotes his or her time to receiving and proclaiming revelations, the PR agents assuming responsibility for the production and publication of the sacred books, arranging lecture tours, setting up occasions for miracles, advertising and so on.
II.The Revelation: Every rule has its exceptions, but in general the prophet ought to have been a lost soul. How lost? As lost as possible, without committing suicide. A record of serious crimes, not stopping at murder, together with heavy jail time are pluses. He or she has to have reached rock-bottom in the period just before receiving the bone-shattering revelation(s) on which the new faith will be founded.
Venues for receiving revelations include jails, mental asylums, Skid Rows, hospitals. Perhaps after his last brawl in which he received near fatal knife wounds, all of his companions deserted him,muttering "good riddance" and leaving him for dead. If the revelation occurs in a bar, a good model to keep in mind is the stage setting for Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh".
All of this servs to establish the persona and need have little relation to the actual life history of the partner who is to be designated as the prophet. The point is that his(her) life must be filled with sin before the revelation , and embarrassingly good afterwards
Indispensable to the revelation itself is the fact that it is bestowed upon the prophet through no effort of his own. This immediately distinguishes the sort of religion we have in mind, the "quick-fix", or "cult" approach, from real religions such as Buddhism, for which the Buddha had to endure 7 years of gruesome ascetic practices, or Christianity, which Christ alleged delivered after fasting for 40 days and nights in the desert.
Remember: the people you want to attract to your cult very much need to believe that God will mysteriously reach out to them some afternoon when they are sitting at the dinner table over their third helping of steak, gratuitously bestow upon them the blessings of grace and salvation. It will therefore be in your interest that they believe that something similar had happened to the prophet himself at one point.
III. The Sacred Book : The sacred book codifies whatever was revealed in the revelation, adorning every facet of its wisdom with appropriate anecdotes, legends, fables and parables. Evidently its creators must be endowed with considerable literary skill, (another excellent reason for a judicious division between prophecy and P.R.) .
The stories themselves ought to be really good stories! However, the moral issues that they that they seek to address may be fairly humdrum. Unlike Aesop's witty fables , they must be devoid of all cynicism, painfully obvious, even dreary.
One example is enough to illustrate the general tone: a spiteful, disagreeable, shiftless pan-handler demands money to keep himself drunk. You give him a dollar, in exchange for which he spits at you. You then give him a second dollar. Lo and behold! He is smitten with shame, grovels in the dirt, calls you a saint and sings praises to God. Moral: Good deeds always prevail.
Then there are dogmas, rites, rituals, odd beliefs about sacred this and that. These too must be embroidered with clever tales. Consider this example: suppose you want your religion to include the odd dogma that a certain plant - say the dandelion - is sacred. Religious persons, so you will announce, do not eat dandelions. They do not make wine from dandelions, they do not trample on dandelions. No doubt it is going too far to teach that believers have a right to murder people who do these things, yet it is only just that they be shunned, ostracized, even cast out from the company of the faithful. The way one justifies such a ridiculous notion is through the manufacture of a good story. Here are some suggestions:
(a) There was a time when the prophet was so rejected of men that he slept out in the fields. Seeing he was in danger of death, the dandelions gathered themselves up and offered themselves to him for dinner.
(b) The dandelion is the image of the face of God on earth. When He (or She) created the world He planted dandelions in all the fields to reflect back His own face. This gives Him extraordinary pleasure: one can never go wrong by making your gods insufferably vain and egotistical.
(c) In fact no-one really knows why dandelions are sacred. It is a true measure of someone's faith that he believes in the sacredness of the dandelion without any demand for rational justification. One then invents a clever story to illustrate the supreme virtues of irrational and unquestioning faith.
As some kind of story will be required to explain or justify virtually every belief and practice of the new religion the writers of the sacred book should expect to spend anywhere from 5 to 7 years on its composition and compilation. Compilation is the right word for it: the authors may feel free to loot and pillage the texts and practices of all other religions. Such wholesale thievery, by integrating one's beliefs with the mainstream, lends an air of authenticity to your faith.
IV. Miracles: This being a scientific age, it's very difficult to persuade a public gathering that they are actually witnessing a miracle. One useful tactic (employed by Moonies and Scientologists, among others) is to locate some prominent scientist whom one can bribe to testify to the miraculous nature of certain occurrences. This is by no means difficult. Scientists are as weak as the rest of us, and there are many knaves among them.
A good miracle ought to be offensive to both modesty and taste. Compare the efficacy of some inane stunt like turning water into champagne by breathing on it, to getting some unbeliever's mouth to fill up with blood through the spontaneous eruption of stigmata in his gums.
In the past, levitation was a sure winner. Nowadays there's always the risk that some team of physicists will discover that anti-gravity does exist after all.
V. Disciples: There's little purpose to be served in collecting a herd of followers if they haven't got any money. At the same time it's scarcely possible to go about the task of garnering support from the rich and famous if one's time is totally taken up with proclaiming revelations or inventing the sacred books.
For all these reasons it is advisable at the earliest possible moment to pull together an inner circle of disciples. The Christians got it right when they fixed their number as 12. Some variation is possible here, but the number should not be less than 7 nor more than 20.
If the inner circle exceeds 20 one runs the risk of becoming the victim of a coup-d'état .With less than 7 there won't be enough manpower ( or in this progressive age womanpower) to deal with the huge amount of work involved in founding your religion: revelations, sacred writings, P.R., miracles, proselytizing, enforcing discipline, attacking other faiths, building churches, celebrating rites and rituals, etc. Fund-raising activities alone can absorb the energies of 3 or more disciples.
There is another reason as well why it's wise to have at least 7 disciples. As every gifted ruler determined to stay in power knows, one must so arrange it that the persons directly under one's control are kept in constant competition for the " 3 p's" : prestige, privileges and perks. They must be encouraged to so entangle themselves in subterfuge and deception that they cannot organize themselves to get rid of you. A proper degree of internecine warfare among disciples requires at least 7 of them.
V. Fund-raising : The cardinal rule of all fund-raising applies with redoubled force to religious fund-raising: shameless begging is only shameful when done by beggars. In the service of a higher cause all things are ennobling, and no stratagem is too low. You can feel perfectly justified in standing before your congregation and letting them know that God ( one or several) will strike them dead if they don't give all their money to the church. Shills can be planted around the church interior to spontaneously stand up on cue and announce miraculous cures. It is perfectly all right to publicly humiliate the donor of a $1000 check if you've good reason to believe he's got more where it came from. It is permitted to roll on the floor, wet one's pants, cry like a baby , squeal like a pig and howl like a dog if these things will terrify your followers enough to come forth with the big bucks. DO IT!
"Cults for Dummies: How To Start Your Own Religion" comes with a money-back guarantee.