Goddamn it, people.
I understand that you want to build your own tame ideologically-useful religions to serve as social bonding glue, and I’m even prepared to acknowledge that this may be a good idea…
…but you understand that saying “hey, come worship this false idol that I built to serve as social bonding glue!” just isn’t going to work, right?
I’m curious who you are responding to here, but I’m not entirely sure you’re right.
Like yes if you outright say “join our cult not because it’s right but because we have cookies”, then no you won’t get many believers.
But anything short of that, “People who worship Hastur are happier, they fight less, they make better communities, they get more stuff done, and they have beautiful ceremonies that feel meaningful” actually works pretty well, even though you’ve said almost nothing about the truth value of Hastur worship.
Most people just aren’t invested in terminal values. Tell them a religion makes their life better, and let them have some lip service belief that it’s because it is Cosmically Right, they’ll go along and judge the religion primarily on the happiness and social status of its other members.
You do probably need a few true believers at the heart of it, but eh, geeks and mops. Switching early on to purely mercenary sales pitches is not necessarily dumb on a tactical level.
…I was about to say that I don’t think we have an object-level disagreement here, but on reflection, we probably do.
It is true that the long-term survival power of communities largely depends on their ability to provide Satisfying Prosperous Lives in the Normal Sense. And it is also true that the short-term recruiting power of a community doesn’t really hinge on anything like “reasoned appeals to change your beliefs,” so much as it hinges on the community’s ability to provide love-bombing and other emotional rewards that are viscerally real in the short term. But those things are not the same. Cults and tournament-careers are in fact good at sucking people in. “Join us, and your life will blaze like a star!” is an excellent sales pitch. “Join us, and you’ll have a dental plan and a low-conflict social experience!” mostly isn’t.
ALL THAT SAID:
The phenomenon to which I’m responding would be less stupid if in fact it were billing itself as better, on a boring mercenary level, than the Default Plan. “Our fake church will make you happier and healthier and less stressed than your normal leading-brand church” – OK, fine, you’d probably get some takers for that. But of course that’s not what’s going on, because the leading-brand church has been providing social benefits to lots of people for a long time, and the fake church doesn’t even exist yet. Instead the pitch is [something like] “religion is a pack of lies to be sold to dumb babies, but it turns out that it comes with some social benefits, so maybe we can pretend to believe in a God-like object and it will be kind of like belonging to a real church!” Anyone who would find this appealing would be much happier just practicing a normal religion.