
Having a soft spot for systems, I can’t begin to explain the amount of aw I reserve for the religious one.
If religion was a vault, it would be in Fort Knox. You can’t approach it, nevermind breach it. If you ever fucked with the religious establishment, here’s what happen to you during the ages:
Greece, Balcans, Middle East 300 BC:
a) your villager neighborous would regard you as jinxed. For any mishap you would experience, they would have a special little god to credit and make a laugh out of it. Then, at the first sign of a community disaster, which could very well be a draught, they would sacrifice your ass in a ritual involving pain, blood and death on your part.
b) your fellow citizen would direct you to a special elevated podium made of stone, then gather around you and listen to your opinion in spans of 3 to 5 minutes. After you form a school where all disciplines are called either physics or philosophy and you really get their attention, they realize they don’t agree with you, stage a quick trial and do you in a public murder with white robes only.
Holy City, AD TD BC – year O
a) you would become a neighborhood holy man. You would have to deal with the black holyman 2 streets away, always stealing your juicy crowds. You would mostly sleep on the street and live the life of a slum dog, become ill at an early age and die. High chances of contracting various types of food disorders, such as dysentery.
b) you become a black holyman. You preach nonsense to rich crowds in private gatherings of people who have never seen a black man ever and you pass time by hustling and stealing the juicy crowds of another holyman, 2 streets away. You eventually end up crucified or worst because of a farisei who witnessed one of your private displays, got a hard-on and tried to rape you, then repentant, declared you a Shepperd for the Devil and fixed you up to become a public torch.
c) [slim chance] you just get borne, have no ideea of the intricate and preposterous net of lies your mother fixed your father into buying. You are, fortunately, white, lack basic child clothes, on the run because of a misinterpretation of the zodiac change that provided the basis of a law passed by a local bureaucrat which clearly stated that you and all others looking like you, but especially – you, must be killed on sight. Your interpretation of a Year O high-speed police chase becomes the basis and most important holiday of the second greatest religion in the world. Momentous happenings, aligned galaxies and visits of kings from across the world take place in the one night that you felt most miserable, cold and generally completely unaware of anything more than 2 inches from you. Your career is all down the drain from there, featuring horrible torture, public diminishing, absurd further misinterpretation of your entire philosophy and death at an early age.
Central Europe, Transylvania, 500 our days
The ways that the religious system would put your tiny voice down in these times seem various because of the piling up of the torture kits from the stone age, the gold age, the bronze age, the iron age, the crazy dictators age, the dinosaur age and so forth. Much of these tools were heavy and out-dated, but all of them , after some gruesome pain, resulted in death. The hardware will be sorted out in the next few hundred years.
Turkey, around 1057
a) create your own religion, name it kindda like the old one and build a new city with a central church so immensely large that the building itself is a proof that your new religion is sound.
b) your fellow villager neighbors will attempt to get you drunk enough to publicly admit that you don’t believe in any religious bullshit so that they can burn you in the only intersection of the village and take away your sheep and furniture.
Somewhere in Europe for the next 700 years
You meet the regional executive inquisitor, a white-faced fellow that has hardly ever lost anything after he lost his mind and walks around covered in a black robe that lets his fingers breathe.
From there, you can either:
a) get tortured for a long time and then impaled on a wicked device intr-un ritual ce imbolnaveste si publicul de varice.
b) get to serve the community one last time as suspended crow-bait; your body hangs until rotten while the villagers hunt down and eat the animals that attempt to scavenge you. Your luck turns 3 months after your death, as your rotten environmentally-hazardous corpse springs an epidemic and kills all villagers 32 villages across, except a few little children.
Meanwhile, all this time, in Japan, they would happily allow you to kill yourself in front of your master in a very dignifying and short ritual that wouldn’t fuck the chi of your master’s morning tea.
XIX century, Europe and Americas
If fucking with the religious establishment during this particular hundred years, odds are that you would either be
a) an indoctrinated religious bastard who’s mum and dad enslaved other poor bastards to pay for the studies that enlightened your tiny mind so much that you actually sprigged up an idea that runs against the mainstream; you then cease to be a religiously indoctrinated religious bastard, you become a mad scientist, various scientific communities make up specific jokes with you, where you’re either an idiot because you don’t have the first clue about electricity or about genetics and creationism all stating the general idea that your idiotic opinion is something that the scientific community can do without. A few decades after your death, streets will be named after you and fellow scientist colleagues still alive then will speak highly of you in newspaper interviews.
b) communist leader/ leech / Marx himself / inhabitant of Russia: your fucking with the religion establishment is easily facilitated and encouraged, but you don’t really care because that aims really low on your list of immediate concerns; probably higher and urgent items would be “cold” “hunger” “imminent war”.
‘90 around the world
By now, fucking with religion got us to an age where freedom of speech got the game on heights expressed in millions and percents. People disapproving other religions than theirs, people having it in against some religions, people fucking it all [16% atheists in 2006 - 960 mil].
You can’t fuck with the gods. Cool system, but the age of Pisces ends soon, and new gods can be created.
So, if you vote for me to become the new spaghetto god in the age of Aquarius, I promise to:
Keep an open call-center 24/7 to handle all shit concerning you carefully and transparently, in a civilized manner
Establish a new Universal standard Measure, so you can blame the management for shit like mass disease, catastrophic airline accidents and wars. The linear scale will be suited for the next ages of the zodiac, so we can draw a line and see who’s who.
Also, I promise to cut the almighty bullshit. I mean, running the entire Universe is a massive job and gods can be pretty cool and skillful, jaw-dropping even, but let’s get real: almighty? when the Universe will start keeping records in a scale that can be checked, like the score at Tetris, we’ll see that some gods rule and some gods make the highscores. I also want to remind you that the allegations of my counter-candidates stating that I approached the only 6 mathematicians on the planet that could verify the highscores that I will fraud with the new Universal God Coolness Measurement System or UGCMS are preposterous and the legal decisions are pending.
In general, life will be good under my rule, earthlings. Surely, massive numbers of mere humans will probably not survive the first critical hours of the new establishment, but a lot of those lucky enough to keep their life will hopefully chill and forget about it.
You now know who to vote for at the next god
elections! Keep it safe! Vote for Syringe!