All Religions Are Fandoms

#heresy
I love religion.

I love them so much, it's been my special interest of independent study and exploration for decades now.

In that time, I've come to the conclusion that all religions are fandoms, and I've developed a theology that views Gods as Algorithms running through myth and dogma, and this does not diminish their power, but instead inverts the power structure that puts gods as our creators and instead, makes them our creations - and makes them programmable.

If you've ever seen fandom wars, you have a deeper insight into religious wars than you might realize.

This note will be a launchpad for my explorations of this topic.

The roots of this thread reside in my long winding explorations of religion and mysticism over the years, and sprouted when I studied Jediism as a modern religion in Anthropology of Religion where we got to pick our own topic and I LOVED IT. That's where I learned about Hyperreal Religions, started diving into hyperreality, and connecting it backwards to my own experimentations with Discordianism and Chaos Magic that led me to create my own goddess who later named herself Paradox and started gathering followers without consulting me because gods are memes that develop a will of their own.

I'm reading Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation slowly - my ADHD has my curiosity bouncing all over the place and that's just one thread in the tapestry. His performance of a philosopher is thick even in the introduction and that delights me - one of my own threads of exploration is the idea that Personhood is a Performance so seeing such a self-aware display of performance in his writing tickles my brain in just the right way.

It extends to the All Religions are Fandoms idea - religion is a people performing ritual to reaffirm the personhood of their deity. Christianity makes it explicit - the Church is the Body of Christ, the ritual of communion, transubstantiating the bread into the body of Christ (who is both the deity and the son of the deity, as well as another third spirit thing), and you are what you eat, ritually, in the church. Eat the god, become the body of the god, acting out the dogma like an algorithm, behaviors emerging from the complex interplay of that and other programs running on the same hardware - Capitalism + Evangelical Christianity = Christofascism but Christian + Anarchist = Charity as Devotion and Nuns going to jail for protesting nuclear plants.

Religion is a simulation - these are the rules to live by, what sort of society does living by these rules lead to? But humans are running a whole bunch of simulations at once, which leads to conflict exploding here and there, so we've gotta get better about bugchecking the code. Paganism is just as prone to infection by Capitalism as Christianity is.