"People are not becoming less religious—they’re becoming differently religious. The old sacred texts are being replaced by the fictional Necronomicon. Ethereal beings that have always been there are bowing before ancient aliens who aren’t really eternal or omnipotent, but who feel more real in our culture." —Steve A. Wiggins, https://steveawiggins.com/2016/03/31/cthulhus-tea-party/
I love Steve—I first heard about him when his brother-in-law Neal Stephenson cited their chats about Asherah for "Snow Crash".
'The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it seems, is going the way of the somewhat more serious Jediism and Avatar religions in that people are deliberately electing fiction as their faith. Interestingly, this may not be a new phenomenon. We are told, for example, that Zarathustra deliberately outlined a new religion… In those days the strict division between fiction and fact may not have been a mental filter yet discovered.' https://steveawiggins.com/2016/04/20/prayer-before-meals/
From the Steve Wiggins NRM goldmine.
One of my hobbies: visualizing Christianity, or Buddhism, or the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, or (you see where I’m going with this), when they were in the same phase that Jediism is today.
“Jedi teachings are generally considered suggestions and guides rather than rules. This often brings about different approaches to the teachings among various groups. None are necessarily viewed as improper or incorrect” https://www.thoughtco.com/jedi-religion-jediism-95690
Like imagining a wizened elder as a mischievous toddler&vice versa
"[The Force] is a deity for a rationalist world. Even today we know that things don’t always turn out the way they should. Juries make the wrong decisions, computers still crash, even even two space shuttles—highly sophisticated though they were—failed and exploded during routine operations. Many find the white-bearded God untenable, but somewhere out there amid the comets and stars, there seems to be a moral force guiding us in the constant struggle of good versus evil"
"Even should a founder have had less than pure motives, that doesn’t translate to any less verisimilitude on the part of the faithful. Some viable religions have been based on known fictions." https://steveawiggins.com/2015/04/06/new-faiths/
"Paganism began to reassert itself only last century. There had been a social stigma with lying outside the territory claimed by church, synagogue or mosque. … a large, and increasingly expanding, variety of religious options exist for the seeker." https://steveawiggins.com/2015/10/12/nature-of-religion/