I just finished a new article on Story-Systems called “Pimp My Religion!” which imagines what would happen if we took the same approach to religion as we do to cars, hairstyles, homes, wardrobes, breasts and everything else. It encourages people to play with the idea of open-source religion, where the underlying codes are freely available for modification by any and everyone, and culture is advanced creatively by a dedicated community of individuals.

This approach is not popular among established churches who feel threatened by such things. I found an article called “Spirituality Goes Pop!” on a Lutheran website which warns people against such experimentation. It features the preposterous quote:

When make-your-own-religion enthusiasts face problems they can’t handle or their dark side gets the better of them “they’re terribly disappointed,” says Willard, pointing to the suicides of pop icons such as musician Kurt Cobain.

How Kurt Cobain’s suicide relates to pop religion and do-it-yourself spirituality is beyond even my connection-making capacities. It has literally nothing to do with it, and is only evidence of the fact that people everywhere have difficulty facing the dark side of life. Traditionally religious people are no better prepared for it just because they have taboos against taking a shotgun to their faces.

In a way, it all reminds me of the sort of hysterical prohibitionist propaganda that earlier generations endured over their use of consciousness-altering drugs. Just think of movies like Reefer Madness, which suggested that smoking pot would land you in a mental hospital. Or look at how Timothy Leary was booted out of Harvard for experimenting with psychedelics. Examples of this sort of thing could be listed for days.

It’s all just cautionary tales designed to keep you firmly enmeshed in the governing story-system. In days gone by, these would have been fairy-tales about monsters who would eat whole you if you ventured too far into the woods.

Tales of terrorists, serial killers & pedophiles lurking among us serve a similar, if more complicated, purpose. Rather than restraining us from going too far outside the bounds of our community, they bring the forest-monsters inside. Suddenly, even the very neighborhoods and communities we live in aren’t safe. We’ve got noone we can turn to because everyone might turn out to be some kind of horrible freak. We’re left in a state of perpetual fear and isolation, and are consequently left feeling weak and not thinking clearly.

The purpose of my Story-Systems site is to encourage people to become aware of stories, how they can used against us, and how we can re-engineer or “pimp” them to take back power into our lives.