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(PLEASE NOTE:  If you do not know the definition of the word "satire," please go look it up before reading this article.)

There are many reports suggesting a religious revival of some magnitude is currently sweeping the United States. This just seems to beg for exploitation. It's the American way, after all, to cash in on any phenomenon that catches the popular fancy at any given moment.

So how do you cash in on a religious revival? Well, you can go on television and preach. TV preachers can make a lot of money, most of it tax exempt. The fact that what they do has a lot more to do with show business than religion is conveniently ignored. The problem with this idea, though, is that you generally do have to actually be an ordained minister in some (usually) legitimate denomination, which means a lot of studying and being able to convince the denomination's authorities that you're taking all of this seriously.

A much simpler way is to start your own religion. It's been done before, and more than once the results have been really astonishing.

But how do you do it? Probably, you just need to keep a few simple rules in mind and before long you'll find your rolls filling up with new members and your bank account with their money. Here are some of the more basic rules.

1.  Find a good name. This is important. If you decide to call your new religion "The Church of Crap," don't expect too many people to join. Who wants to go around calling themselves "Crappers?" So think of something that's both catchy, and lends itself to being turned into a nickname. "Lovers of God" sounds good, and the members can become "Lovers," which also sounds good. (Or "Goddies," if you plan to be hyper-moralistic and think "lovers" sounds too erotic.)

2.  Keep the services simple.More than one person has suggested that at least one reason Judaism has never swept the world is that the services are too long and the ritual too involved. They may have a point. You can get through a weekday morning service in 20 minutes, but the service on Saturday morning frequently runs three to four hours. (And that's the one people generally come to.) The Moslems caught on to this trick very early. They have to pray 5 times a day, but the prayers only take a few minutes.

3.  Shift the blame.People don't really like to feel guilty, so you'll need to find a way to shift the blame for their problems onto someone else. This has been another problem area for Jews, but hardly any problem at all for Christians. If a Jew does something wrong, he pretty much has to blame himself. He's been told he has free will, and that this consists mainly of being able to choose between good and evil (or bad) options in any situation. So if he makes the wrong choice and recognizes that he has, he is more or less forced to blame himself.

On the other hand, if a Christian screws up, he has Satan to blame for it. He was tempted by the Devil, so he wasn't really culpable—he was just momentarilly weak and gave in to a bad influence. (Jews don't have a devil to fall back on, only the twin good and evil impulses that are an inherent part of everyone's own spiritual personality, which goes a long way toward explaining why Jews always feel guilty about everything, even if they had nothing to do with it.)

Moslems also get off the hook in this area. Since they believe that everything that happens is the Will of God, they aren't really responsible for it. Considering the severity of punishments under Islamic law, what this says about the character of their God is perhaps problematic. Since God made the thief steal, does it really seem fair to chop off his hand for doing something he had no control over? Or is the divine purpose of stealing actually to cause amputations? Arguably, Moslems don't actually believe in a God of Justice, since a just God wouldn't impose punishment on people who have no control over their actions, and are just doing what he is forcing them to do.

When passing out the blame, it is probably best to lay it on a spiritual entity of some sort. If you blame particular individuals or groups of people, someone may eventually take advantage of that as an excuse for harming them. It would probably be a good idea to remember that Hitler believed he was just doing what God wanted him to do. (And if you read much pre-Holocaust Catholic doctrine regarding Jews, you can see where he got it from.)

4.  All people are inherently evil and doomed without your help. This has worked wonderfully for Christianity over the centuries. Original Sin was such a useful idea for getting people to join up that it's amazing the Jews never thought of it. (Which might come as something of a surprise to a lot of Christians, who have always assumed that's where they got it from.) If even a newborn infant is already guilty as hell, it provides such a great incentive to get "saved." Even if you lead an exemplary life, you still need to turn to your religion in order to get into the next world. (Which, obviously, has to be much nicer than the current one!) This is important. If anyone can get into the next world by simply being a good person you won't get too many members, because you really aren't offering anything special.

5.  Punishment must be horrendous. This is a corrolary to the need for making sure everyone thinks they're doomed without your help, since that always raises the question "Doomed to what?" The Jews never had much of an answer to this one. If you were a good person, you would get to return to God. If you were moderately bad, you'd have to spend some time getting purged first, but it wasn't too awful, it would never be for longer than a year, and you got Saturdays off. If you were completely rotten, your soul would be erased, which would mean you'd cease to exist, but, since you were erased, you probably wouldn't actually care once the moment was past.

There was also the possibility that you'd have to come back and live another earthly life in a different body, but most people wouldn't find that terribly intimidating, either. You'd done it once already, after all.

Christians got this one right when they came up with Hell. Now, instead of a mild punishment or oblivion, you had the threat of being toasted over a slow fire for the next few million years. It wasn't a limited punishment with a reward—or, at least, a pardon—at the end, but eternal damnation and physical torture. (Okay, it was your spirit that was being tortured, but it would feel physical, and that was what counted.) Just where they got this idea from is hard to say. It certainly wasn't Jewish, and most pagan religions seemed to think of the afterlife as sort of gloomy but tolerable. But they did come up with it, and that was what mattered. Now they had a club to hold over their members. Do as we say, or you face eternal punishment. This works, so you'll probably want to include it.

6.  You will be forgiven, and you can escape the consequences of your actions. This has always been one of the chief lures for the Christians, so why not let it work for you as well? If you've ever seen a tearful preacher begging that a convicted murderer should be allowed to live because the killer has "repented" and become a Christian, and is now forgiven, you know what I mean. The preacher will tell you that Jesus has forgiven this repentant sinner, and now he's a new person and deserves another chance. (True, it wasn't Jesus that the guy killed, but that's never mattered in Christianity, which has always been very big on vicarious atonement. That is, you get off the hook by asking an uninvolved third party to forgive you and not your actual victim.) This may not seem very fair, but the Christian God is inherently unjust to begin with, so it works. (A just God, after all, wouldn't condemn someone to eternal punishment for failing to believe in a savior he'd never heard of in the first place.)

7.  Keep it easy. You might say the Jews got screwed on this one. Since they got their religion directly from God, instead of having it made up by various people, they also got stuck with the most complicated set of rules of any western religion. What was the first thing the Christians did? They threw out most of the rules! They eliminated the need for surgery (if you were male you no longer had to be circumcised), got rid of the dietary laws, and cut way down on the number of commandments. Jews still have 613 commandments to contend with, while Christians stick to the basic ten. (Which, by the way, are still three more than Jews would argue a gentile is actually required to obey.) They also simplified the ritual. And the government eventually decided they were okay when they realized there was a rule that said you had to obey a king, no matter how bad he was. Jews had a law that said that you were supposed to throw out a bad king, which wasn't an idea that royalty much cared for. (Which, by the way, sort of suggests that the United States was founded on Jewish, not Christian principles, or why were we rebelling against the king God chose for us?)

8.  Centralize it. You want the income to be coming your way. You don't want to organize things so that any money that gets raised stays with the local congregation. Let them keep some, sure—they do need operating funds—but make sure that most of it winds up in the central governing body's coffers. (You, of course, are the central governing body.) The leaders of the congregations will have to be ordained, and since you're the head of the religion, you get to do it. You also get to charge them for their education, because you obviously want to insure that they will follow the rules you've set up, and the best way to do this is to have your own school to train them. They're going to need books and pamphlets and other literature, and you'll naturally provide it. And you'll need to provide for a heirarchical structure, with you at the top, to insure that everything is done in accordance with your rules. (Which, while they should naturally be simple for the bulk of your followers, do need to be sufficiently complicated for the leaders that they'll need you to explain things from time to time.) Make your new religion a sort of franchise operation. For so much you get the right to organize a new congregation and use the name of the religion on the sign out front.

9.  Only you know everything. Obviously. There always needs to be a final authority, and since you created the religion that authority will naturally be you. There are plenty of precedents for this. Saint Paul fell off his donkey on the Damascus Road, thrashed around a bit, and informed everyone that he had just been talking to Jesus and now knew all the new rules. (Which in many cases were somewhat different from what Jesus actually taught. If you go by Jesus' own teachings, Christians would refrain from opening bank accounts or otherwise attempting to accumulate any wealth, and would mostly be married to their first spouses, since Jesus ruled that adultery was the only valid grounds for a divorce.)

Mohammed hid out in a cave for a while and came out, told everyone he'd been visited by an angel, and now he knew all the rules and, furthermore, had been told to edit the Bible and correct all of the errors—and, just coincidentally, make everything Arab-centric in the process. Joseph Smith was another one who had a mysterious angelic revelation, leading to the uncovering of a collection of golden tablets with the Book of Mormon written on them. He naturally transcribed this onto paper, which had the advantage of allowing him to claim that the angel had taken the tablets back, giving him a good reason for not being able to actually show them to anyone. So go into a trance from time to time, tremble a lot, and wake up with a few new rules.

For the Jews it took the voice of God speaking to the entire nation from Sinai, and scaring the crap out of them in the process, to convince them. Most other people are a bit more gullible and won't really ask for much in the way of proof as long as you can sound convincing.

10.  A bit outrageous is good. Pure logic works for Vulcans. The rest of us seem to need a gimmick or two. If Scientologists can convince people their problems will be cured by talking to an "auditor" while holding onto a pair of tin cans wired to a galvanometer, you can probably convince them that something equally odd will work. (The auditing sessions actually do work, but mostly because of the basic psychological or psychiatric principles involved, and not because the meters actually show anything useful. Scientology also discourages their followers from having anything to do with psychiatry, of course.) Maybe your followers will need to wear a special piece of clothing when they worship, and you can supply it. Maybe they have to start every conversion with "Mellow Greetings." (I liked that movie.) You'll think of something.

11.  Only your people get saved This is another place where the Jews screwed up on the keys to popularity. Since they believe that any righteous person has a place reserved for them in the next world, people never felt compelled to join them in this one. Christians and Moslems, on the other hand, tell their followers that no one else gets into Heaven, which provides a great incentive to join. (The Moslems don't actually say that infidels can't get into Heaven, but Moslems will get all the benefits and the rest of us will be their slaves.) So be sure to insure your followers that they will get into Heaven and live out eternity in pure bliss, and that everyone else will go to Hell. They'll naturally feel superior, being saved, and with luck they'll convince their friends and relatives to join. (Be sure not to make the usual cult mistake of arguing that everyone who isn't a member is a tool of Satan and should be shunned. The rest of their family is just deluded, but can also be saved if they just see the light and join up. If you alienate your members from their families you invite lots of trouble. If the families see that their relatives are now much happier, and are also still clearly loving family members, you may be able to get them to join and contribute the the faith's—and your—coffers.)

12.  Don't take yourself too seriously Try to remember that you're in this for the money. If you made up the rules and "traditions" of your new faith on your own, don't suddenly decide that you really got them from God. You didn't, and you know you didn't. If you start taking it all too seriously, the next thing you know, you'll be secluding everyone on a compound somewhere, stocking up on weapons and poisons, and deciding to have everyone kill themselves and go connect with a spaceship.

13.  Consider the consequences The major problem with trying to create your own religion is, of course, the possibility of irritating God. If you're an atheist, this probably won't matter. At least not as long as you're alive and maintain your convictions. What happens when you die is another matter, but you'll deal with that when it happens. If you do believe, you'll no doubt want to make sure your new religion doesn't stray too much. This pretty much rules out writing your own Bible; you're going to have to stick to the one that's already there. You can still create your own sect, obviously. You'll just have to be more careful not to go too far off into left field. Sure, you can probably expect that God will forgive you, but you still don't want to get him too mad.

14.  Don't forget the tax benefits Churches and other religious institutions are tax exempt. You definitely want to keep this in mind when you're organizing your new religion. It means you have to meet IRS tests for getting and keeping the exemption, including things like actually holding services, and not just printing ordination certificates and selling them, then trying to claim your living room is a seminary.

Finally, try not to take this article too seriously, either.