Postcards From An Agnostic Diety...

What does it take to start your own religion? Can just anyone decide one day to start one up? Do you have to register it, and if so, where do you do that? What's the difference between an 'organized religion' and a 'cult'? If you want to start up your own religion does that make you crazy? If so, call me crazy!!

Ok, well, maybe not start a religion in the interpreted sense of the word... but a 'religion' none the less.

I was just thinking about what defines a 'religion' and after a little digging (well, the dictionary) I understand it to be, "a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects". Ok, that makes sense to me, but...What is the 'number of persons' required and is there criteria to the 'set of beliefs and practices' that must be agreed upon?

Does 158,984 people count? What about 2? Do the wife and I count? Do we have our own religion because we both "believe":
- Gord is the bestest baby ever
- Bush is an idiot
- That SUV commercial where the doctor tells a woman he can save her life, but yet he can't find the 'edge', is the stupidest commercial ever
- Telemarketers who can't pronounce our last name don't deserve to talk to us

...???

When Gord becomes the age where we need to start laying down some laws, or commandments if you will, does that make it any more official? Should we carve them in stone, or can they be written in crayon and hung on the fridge?

We've actually been discussing lately how we plan on raising the little heathen (and the depraved dependants to follow), and while the prospect of starting our own religion is attractive, I don't think Kim would be up for the challenge -– well with all the public speaking, scriptures needing scripting, and subsequent book tour that goes along with it. So where does this leave us? To this point we agree that trying to follow what our parents did with us would be the best route.

As I've mentioned before, while I don't consider myself religious, I was at one point a very religious kid - recall the whipping? I survived and one day I began figuring things out for myself and I think I turned out alright.

While I may not believe in the rubbish that defines 'Christianity', I think it does a good job of explaining the 'be good' in terms a 4 year old can understand. Where I think our part as parents will come into play is to make sure the words themselves are not taken literally.

Sending Gord (et al) to a Catholic school is not nearly as exciting as officially starting our own religion, but then again, based on the definition, we may already have.

(Wow - this post really went in a different direction I thought it was going to. I was hoping to plant the seeds for my new religion and allow it to blossom... I even developed my own set of 'commandments' but then I realized my last canon debunked the ones that preceded by claiming any formal organization or tenets will be strictly forbidden. Egh...It's probably a good thing, I wouldn't want to be the cause of any new wars.)