Last night I was doing some more thinking for my book (which is going tremendously slow), and started toying with the idea of including exercises at the end of every chapter. Whether they are just mental experiments to think about, or actually try would be up to the reader. But one of the central goals of the book is to provide people with questions, and inspire some kind of framework of inquiry. Something like that. It’s kind of hazy still. But one of the exercises I came up with last night involves extrapolating a religion based on a movie. The idea being that religions are something like a formalized interaction or sacralization of a particularly significant story. It might go something approximately like this:

1. Choose a movie that you like and create a fictional religion based around it.
2. Who would be the central figure(s) in the religion?
3. What would the morality system be?
4. What kind of beliefs would people of this religion likely have?
5. What types of rituals might evolve to allow people to reenact parts of this story?
6. Is there a social structure or organization which would favor or support this religious system?
7. Try outlining another religion derived from a different movie.
8. Imagine some kind of dialogue or confrontation occurring between fictional followers of each religion.
9. Where would they be likely to agree and understand each other? What would be potential sources of friction?
10. Imagine these two religious traditions became syncretically fused over time. How might the emerging conglomerate religion look? What would remain from the original two traditions, and what’s likely to have been deemphasized to preserve unity?

I like the direction this is going, personally. I’m also thinking that within the body of the text, I would probably use historical religious examples to illustrate points. But then maybe that could be contrasted by these exercise sections which focus more on analogous contemporary story-systems - stuff that everyone can relate to whether they have a religious background or not (movies, tv, etc). Anyway, just an idea for now. Needs to be developed more.