And here I leave you

Well friends, we have come, as all things must, to the end. We’ve had some fun (at least I hope so) and learned lots of interesting things.

So how to conclude my blog?

Well, my Communications Studies lecturer used to say the way to write an academic paper was to tell your audience what you’re going tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them. So what have we learnt?

Well, that parody religions come in all shapes and sizes, that they wouldn’t exist without the internet and that on the whole they are little rays of silly sunshine in the over serious world of religion.

And what might the future might hold for the wonderfully weird world of parody religions? I like to think that maybe, in hundreds of years, when, as a particularly bleak folk-song has it “all our bones are blackened, and our faces are no more” that futuristic archeologists (River Song perhaps) will find records of Discordianism and the FSM and Jediism and maybe even Linus and his great Pumpkin (see what I did there?) and think that their anscestors where a little bit odd, but really, rather wonderful.

Don't these people have anything better to do?

So why does anyone ever join a parody religion? Sure we’ve all had a few laughs at their antics, but most of us haven’t rushed out and bought a copy of the Principia Discordia, or covered our cars in FSM stickers. But there are some who actually do. So why?

Well that’s where the term parody religion becomes problematic, because people join different parody religions for different reasons – stands to reason when there are so many of them and they’re all so different. And of course most of what I’m going to say in this post is simple logical deduction. There really isn’t much info out there about the whys and wherefores of parody religions – it’s mostly just pictures of people in silly costumes. But here’s my uninformed opinion anyway. People's reasons for joining parody religions depend entirely on the parody religion they choose to join.

Members of the Church of the Blind Chihuahua for example, are practising and believing Christians, in search of a place where they can meet like-minded Christians and find a new and friendlier way of worshipping Christ.

Pastafarians on the other hand may join the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster for a variety of reasons. Those within the USA may join because they agree with the original point Bobby Henderson was trying to make, about the unconstitutional encroachment of Christian beliefs into state funded education. In this country though they mostly join because they think it’s cool. The teaching of ‘creation science’ has never been a big issue over here – I seem to remember my biology teacher briefly mentioning that some people belief that a deity of some kind created the world and that frankly that created a lot more questions than it answered and that was that.

Ultimately though, I think parody religionists are simply looking for a reasonably polite and socially acceptable way of flicking the Vs to the establishment and societies' norms. They’re too sociable to become hermits and too peace loving and generally sensible to become violent extremists, so they dress up as pirates or give people business cards telling them they’re Pope. And good luck to them.

But what's so great about them anyway?

You’ve probably noticed by now (that is, assuming anyone’s reading this – it can be very lonely out here in cyberspace) that I like parody religions. I think they’re a good thing. But why?

There has been a bit of an anti-religious uprising in recent years, most especially in the USA, where Christianity is still the accepted norm and a big part of many people’s every day lives. I don’t object to aethiests, or their protesting about the separation of church and state – that is afterall a legal more than a moral question – but even the most committed atheists among my (possibly imaginary) readers will have to admit that, most of the time, atheists just aren’t doing themselves (or anyone else) any favours. The way they present themselves, and the way they treat people of faith, can all too often mean that compared to them the Pope looks tolerant and Nick Griffin looks open minded. Not that we can blame them – take a look at these unbelievable quotes from Christian Forums.

What many parody religions are doing is saying all the things the atheists are trying to say, but saying them in a way that is far gentler, far less confrontational and far less offensive, than many atheists can manage. Take this guy for example – the amazing atheist – his idea of a protest in favour of free speech and human decency is to destroy 40,000 copies of the Qu’ran (depressingly this guy has 198,462followers on youtube). And they wonder why atheists are so unpopular!

And then compare it to this strange but wonderful little man, with his home made charts. I think we’d all agree that the latter is much more pleasant, and frankly more logical!.