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.