The Great God Hoax

Religion is a hoax with a history at once ornate, wacky, beautiful and terrible. So much has been built on a foundation of fantastic speculation, and so many people have been employed in doing the work of mysterious imaginary friends. Such an amazing con game -- as one Zen master laughed on his death-bed: "All this time I've been selling water by the river!"

One of the Kinderhook Plates
The P.T. Barnum of American Religion has got to be Joseph Smith, whose facially preposterous story of discovering the divinely inscribed Book of Mormon proved to be compelling and amazing, spawning its own counter-hoax in the form of the Kinderhook Plates, and Ongoing attempts by members of the religion he founded -- still going strong over a century later -- to shore it up with further pseudoarchaeology.

A more recent pretender to the throne was memetic engineer L. Ron Hubbard, the creator of the baroque belief system and behemoth known as Scientology. It's as if Star Trek and Erhart Seminar Training had an unwanted lovechild.

But these are just two especially colorful examples of what is really a highly successful pocket of human oddity. The vast majority of Americans, for instance, believe in (and occasionally talk to) a curiously anthropomorphic embodiment of good who is omniscient, omnipotent and responsible for every detail of reality. And then the ignorant bullies make fun of children for believing in Santa Claus.

The end-times have been prematurely announced by Christian cults ever since Paul was playing good shepherd to his scattered and easily-misled Mediterranean sheep. Every year now there's new incontrovertable proof that the apocalypse is imminent.

Why not see just how far you can push the envelope: take a cue from the Discordians or the Church of the Subgenius and make a new religion even more preposterous, and even more True, than the last. Or just take a riff from an already-existing religion and run with it. I think today I'll call myself a Zenarchist.

Shroud of Turin (detail)
Here's a good one: There's a woman by the name of Vassula Ryden who claims to receive what she calls "original handwriting" messages channeled from Jesus, his mom and Dad, and an angel named Daniel. She started engaging in divinely-inspired automatic writing when filling out a shopping list in 1985, and has been on the lecture circuit as God's personal dictation secretary ever since. The Pope considers her brand of nonsense a heretical distraction from his own, but she's got true believers even among the Catholic clergy.

Lord knows that some of the creative religious hysteriæ have been painful in the extreme, both to participants and to innocent bystanders. After all, there's no human torture that can compare with eternal hellfire, so the ends clearly justify the means. Perhaps you've heard of the Salem Witch Trials, or their more recent counterpart: the hunt for satanic ritual child abuse.

A source of inspiration to me has been the life and work of Brother Jed, a wandering campus preacher in the U.S. who has adopted the technique of donning the caricature of the ignorant and intolerant Bible Belt fire-and-brimstone preacher ("Slatterns! Trollops! Women should be obedient baby machines!") in order to attract crowds of college students eager to be seen in public rebelling against such a father figure -- making an appearance in the quad by Brother Jed one of the best-attended lectures at college.

That religious types often take their religion very seriously has been used by pranksters like the Christians for the Cloning of Jesus (using DNA found in blood on the Shroud of Turin), whose web site prompted more than a few enraged reactions from Christians who saw no need to hurry the Second Coming.

More up-in-your-face was the bold stunt performed by an ex-catholic who, in 1950, with the cooperation of a band of Lettrists, caught, gagged, stripped and bound a priest before the Easter High Mass, put on his vestments, and stepped to the pulpit to declare to the congregation, "Brothers, God is dead" and to outline what this was going to mean for the poor, misguided souls. According to one account, "[s]everal minutes passed before the congregation actually registered what was happening. He managed to escape out of the back of the cathedral but the congregation caught up with him on the quai where they proceeded to try to lynch him. The Lettrist, alas, was forced to surrender to the police in order to save his neck."

If you're interested in checking out the weird archaeology used to prop up beloved primitive myths that have been taken too literally, don't miss our Archaeological Forgeries section, where you'll learn the truth about fossils, all about the discovery of Noah's Ark (as reported on CBS), and the science of creationism. Learn more about Pseudoscience on our page dedicated to that topic.

God isn't the only author whose signature has been forged. Check out our Literary Forgeries section for more. And if you're considering becoming God, or a close relative, check out some of the other Invented People, and learn from history.

Pilate's official report on the crucifixion of Jesus was published to rave reviews in 1879.

Credentials for your favorite religious title, from Minister or Imam all the way up to Pope, Saint, or Messiah are available from the Universal Life Church, which thinks the world would be a lot nicer if we all could become the Reverend So-and-so. I can't help but agree -- I became a minister back in 1994 and I've never felt better -- look into it.

What do you make of Leo Taxil? Went from being a prominent free-thinker and anti-Papist in the 19th Century to being an equally prominent anti-masonic Catholic before announcing before a shocked crowd that he'd been taking the Church for a ride.

There is a respected place in many a mythological pantheon for the archetype of The Trickster, and we've got another page for Loki, the Coyote and their friends.