Mock Cults/Religions

While I was thinking about the question "do cult leaders believe their own bullshit?" the case of mock cults and mock religions came to mind. A couple of good examples of those are Dudeism, which is a faux religion/philosophy based on the movie The Big Lebowski which is maybe related to concepts from Robert Anton Wilson's "Discordianism".

Another related phony religion is "The Church of the Subgenius" which was a big thing when I was in high school and college--the mascot image of that religion was a 1950s looking man with a pipe named "J.R. Bob Dobbs". I'm not even sure how I knew that. It's possible some friends of mine had materials from the parody "religion" in high school. One of the guys who developed the "Church of the Subgenius" is Ivan Stang who was headquartered in Cleveland Heights, Ohio for some time, which is maybe why it was a big thing here. Stickers of J.R. Bob Dobbs were all over the place. I haven't seen one for ages though.

The mock religions are an interesting case because they are created, intentionally, as a parody of mainstream religions and cults. I think they mock the general concept of "belief" in what's often, ultimately a comic book. Or maybe more generally, they are a reiteration of the concept that the symbolic reasoning mind is really an alien to this earth and can actually "know nothing" of substance. This concept is emphasized most strongly, I think, by science, the ultimate rational mind project which basically demolished all "revealed" religions and then led to the bizarre concepts of the 19th century philosophers who gave birth to Nazi and Zionist ideologies which are really just another species of mock religions.

The "judaism" of a guy like Benjamin Netanyahoo or Ben Shapiro is as "serious" as Dudeism or the Church of Scientology. The core of their "belief" is from a Nazi philosopher who preached that "believing really really hard" was the ultimate/best human activity, which is obviously nonsensical.

Another related example of these fake churches is faux music groups like "the KLF" who had a number of huge hit songs in the early 1990s like "3AM Eternal" and that song that's played all the time at basketball games "Dr Who and the Tardis".

This whole subcategory of philosophy or overall approaches to life is really related to what I'd call "the way", and it pops up at the end of empires. A philosopher like Diogenes is a great example of one. I think the overall category could be labeled "absurdism". I'd even lump stoicism in with that category, and count myself as an absurdist. I think the gnostics are another related category; their claim to knowledge is radically subjective.

The absurdists realize that claims on knowledge are mostly false. Not much can be known. Virtually ever single person parading around on the public stage is an absolute fraud and scumbag. Nations and religions are corporations fleecing people and often mass murdering people for profit.