Effective methods of starting new religions (followers, Mormonism, worship, Christianity)

[TrueQ]

Plotting world domination is one of my hobbies and, while it wasn't deemed as effective as a series of bloodless coups and assassinations in the Pacific Rim, initiating a global holy war of some sort was one of the things me and some friends talked about. We spent a good while deciding the most effective ways to draw people into a religion and make them believe strongly enough to fight for it, I'll gladly tell what we learned.

Keep in mind though, most of the stuff you have to do to start up a religion quickly is obviously evil, obviously illegal, or obviously both, which is probably why most religions get started over the courses of many centuries.

The main hurdle you'd have to get over if you wanted to quick-start a new religion for non-global domination purposes is the fact that people in most of the developed countries are both cynical and skeptical of new religions and many of them also already belong to one fairly strict religion or another. Having an actual religious revelation or vision (Or being able to fake it totally convincingly) would help you overcome that hurdle, much more so if it was shared by more than two others. Telling everyone about it would be unwise, since people who heard it would instantly label you as 'some sort of kook', but it would provide you with great drive and a few followers you could trust completely. But, without that, you'd have to content yourself to starting up a new denomination of the local dominant religion or having a very small congregation. Brainwashing would also work, but only if you happened to be a power-crazed super-villain.

You'd have to begin your work in a liberal region, cities with many colleges, universities, libraries, and worship centers from multiple different religions would be best. Residents of such places are more likely to be curious about other religions, and open-minded enough to take you seriously for no reason. Cities where no one religion is a clear majority also have the advantage of non-believers treating you with greater respect and dignity. Anyway, you'd have to stake out a place of worship, just using your apartment would not be a good idea, but, unless you or one of your early converts is rich, its probably unavoidable. Country houses are great places to set up temples, but you would be very unlikely to find many people willing to convert there.

The real effort comes when you're trying to sweet talk people into joining your religion, most non-cults never do this, and thats the reason why most religions die out in their first year or so. There are two goals you have when people dealing with people, the first is getting non-believers to join your religion, the second is getting believers to stick with it. The best fixes to both are actually pretty simple:

1. Good teachings, a religion that actually has good teachings will attract followers despite itself, just look at the Christians, in the beginning, they were trying to stay underground and never talked about their religion, now look at 'em. Good teachings have the added bonus of being easy to come by, just take some common modern wisdom, phrase it mystically, add one or two slightly odd things to use as dogma (like "Picnic every Saturday to experience and make peace with Nature"), and claim it was revealed to you in a half-feasible way.
2. Sense of community, people are reluctant to leave nurturing communities, and will often develop a sense of pride in being part of them. This makes people less likely to try and leave your religion. Brainwashing is an alternative to this but is typically only used by psychotics. Sense of community is hard to develop, especially if you are psychotic.

If you have really good teachings and beliefs, and a learned debater among your followers, then you can probably stage effective street demonstrations to spread word about your religion. If you don't, then you are better off trying to influence young kids over the age of 18 who do not intend to go to college, Army recruiters actually do the same thing (which is kind of weird), and have lots of great tips on going about it.

Of course, in more isolated spots of the world, the rules are totally different, a little technological or drug induced trickery towards the more gullible and less educated tribal populations of the world could easily win a solid base of believers and strengthen their faith with works. You'd still have to use a little subtlety (They're primitive, not stupid), and some groups would stubbornly hold on to traditional beliefs, but, since religious doubts are common to all cultures and communities, steady nerves and careful planning would eventually prevail.

That's the general plan we decided on after a lot of debate and disregarding of consciences. As you can guess, there are a lot of nuances to starting a religion, and lots of things can go just right or precisely wrong. After many late nights of discussion about his, I walked away with the profound desire to not be anyone's spiritual leader.

Lol, look at that long-*** post, I'm sick today, and I'm realizing now that I have waaayyy to much free time to deal with.

[EnhancedSpirit]

Originally Posted by TrueQ

Plotting world domination is one of my hobbies.

Pinky- "Brain, what are we going to do tonight?"

Brain- "Same thing we do every night, Pinky, we are going to try to take over the world!"

Pinky- "NARF"

[TrueQ]

Lol, yeah, its like that but with more snacks. What can I say, devising evil schemes is huge fun!