Short Friction

13/06/2008

I’ve done a decent bit of research now on the key principles behind getting a religious following. These are:

• Appeal to people who have some existing core beliefs (i.e. already Christian or New-Age, don’t go for the atheists obviously)
• Identify some common themes where the doctrines of people’s churches don’t entirely match up with their personal views – things like sexuality, race, parenting and wealth creation are some examples.
• Develop a set of “new truths” that keep the core of these people’s existing beliefs in-tact but modifies the bits they were uncomfortable with so that they can think, “I was right all along!”
• Develop new prophetic interpretations that allow people to have a sense of certainty about their future while at the same time threatening fear and horrors in their lifetime if they don’t continue in what I teach them. Guarantee easy life, protection and great rewards provided they do continue in what I teach them.
• Use scripture judiciously to “prove” my “new truths” and prophecies.
• Don’t set dates or make claims that can be disproven by any actual event (or failure of an event) like Ronald Weinland’s fatal mistake
• Invest in some well-targeted publicity that reaches the people I’m after. A Google Ads campaign is probably the simplest approach here.

These are all pretty good guarantees of a following. Of course, I’ll be doing this for money as well as the enjoyable sense of having power over people’s minds. So I will need to develop some doctrine that requires people to give me money. Ideally this should tie very tightly into the fear-factor of my prophecies yet at the same time into the guarantees of riches and easy living. I already have a great idea for this one – I’ll use the parable of the talents to prove that God wants his True Church to develop an investment scheme into which they place most of the money that God has given them. If I structure this right my following should have at least the impression they are reaping huge immediate financial rewards for giving money to me. I’ll put together some sort of investment company that all the members can invest in, from which I of course take a good sized cut. I figure I could maybe learn from some of the techniques used by Storm Financial.

25/03/2008

Up early today, couldn’t sleep. Got up and watched this “Benny Hinn” guy on Channel 10. Surprised they let such obvious scammers on tv. He said if I sent $10,000 he would put my name in his private jet and pray for me when he’s flying. Well, better odds than lotto I suppose.

Was thinking maybe I should look into this line of work. Been needing something since the parking ticket gig fell apart.

Did some googling. Decided I’d do better to set myself up as end-time prophet than faith-healer, given the current social climate of end-of-the-world-to-global-warming panic. I thought this Ronald Weinland fellow was on the right track. He’s been predicting for some years now nuclear attacks on the US by next month and the end of the world in 2011 (he’s even published some books!). His timeline ends too soon. Tough for him: his income’s about to dry up. I’ll learn from that mistake: never set dates.

Benny Hinn operates by being huge. Do a gig of 50,000 and if just 1% of people are convinced to give $1,000, you have a taking of half-a-million. Weinland operates small. Even so, if he can convince just 500 people the end is coming and to sell up their assets and give him the money plus 10% of their ongoing income, he should have a cashflow well over a million annually. I could live with that.

I’ll follow his progress for a while to see what works, then see if I can set myself up with a similar gig.

More on Ronald Weinland: Ronald Weinland biography

Have you ever wondered how many laws there are in your country? I have, so I did a search and couldn’t even find a rough estimate. It doesn’t help that law is such a complex thing, with distinctions made between common law, the constitution and state and federal laws. If we try to take the simplest possible definition of law – things you could get in trouble with police for doing – we can easily estimate there would be an enormous number of them. Traffic laws alone would give us a sizable number.

It seems interesting to me, then, that I have heard many Christians and atheists alike criticise the “Old Testament” Biblical God of being too much about rules and regulations. God was leading a nation, Israel, to be His chosen people, governed by Him. Is it really fair to call a little over 600 laws centred around 10 simple commandments “too legalistic”?

Of course, this criticism of God is often more about the consequences of disobedience than the mere number of laws – the idea of a man being killed at God’s command for collecting sticks on the Sabbath day (Numbers 15:32-35) is repulsive to many, as is the idea of stoning a person for cursing their parents (Exodus 21:17). What is missed when we are repulsed by such accounts, however, is the recognition that we are evaluating these laws and their punishments from the perspective of a society that has not been practicing these laws for thousands of years. A society that had such laws, and had them for a long time, may not need to act on them often. The truth is we really can’t know which society would kill a higher proportion of its citizens for breaking laws – an allegedly legalistic God-run Israel or a current day USA which maintains a death penalty in some states for “serious” crimes such as murder. We are also ignoring the trickle-down effects of such laws. My job repeatedly brings me face-to-face with people whose lives have been all but destroyed by being a victim of a terrible crime such as childhood sexual abuse that our society punishes far too lightly (when it doesn’t simply look the other way).

I don’t advocate for the introduction of death penalties in Australia. But I think anyone inclined to see the “Old Testament” God as cruel and punative might need to take a wider perspective.