MEDIUM RARE

How about starting a new religion?
 

Christianity is 2,000 years old. Buddhism – not a religion but way of life – is older. Agnostics and atheists abound, then as now, or else nobody bothered to ask anybody what or who they believed in, or if they considered superstitions as a form of religion.

At any rate, it was Roy, a former colleague whose real name I will not mention, who announced one day, from out of the blue, “I’m going to introduce a new religion. New gods, a new creed, it will be different and it will make my followers rich. Easier than Dale Carnegie’s course. It will be the fastest way to make a buck, or a million.”

Quickly, he added, “Remember, I won’t be paying taxes because religion is not taxable.”

Chuckle, chuckle, nobody, not even Roy, took Roy seriously, even if he had a good voice like a radio announcer’s and he had, like the rest of us who have read about ancient civilizations and acquired even the most minimal background on the glory of Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, that religion is necessary for people because they are such an inferior race.

Roy was only a child when he was enrolled by his parents in the seminary, he was not old enough to read the Baltimore Catechism. Luckily, his parents realized their mistake early on and pulled Roy out of the “kumbento” where the parish priest lived. If Roy had gone ahead with his dream of building a new church or temple, would he have bloomed into a great spiritual leader?

God is good, for Roy became a journalist instead. Journalists, like artists, are not the first people you think of when you think the words “rich people”. Those two words apply to other professions, principally banking, trade and commerce, real estate and housing. Were Ricky Razon and Manny Villar, Ramon Ang and Speaker Martin Romualdez ever journalists in their youth?   

Starting a new religion is not the same as giving a new spin to an old or existing religion. To create a new religion, the leader would need new deities, new rules. To Roy, a colleague had suggested that his religion should “allow divorce without the couple’s need to spending millions.”