I once set out to create a religion as a prank, in true Prankster tradition.

You know, just to see if I could… like everyone does, right?

Now this was back in the days before Photoshop existed. And at the time I had unique access to systems that could perform that kind of “image magic”. And as an added bonus I could also print stuff in color, which was practically unheard of at the time.

This religion itself centered around a friend of mine who had long hair and a beard of the requisite brown color usually found in your stereotypical Hollywood-style light-skinned Jewish carpenter.

And as an added bonus, the guy’s name it got based on just happened to be a linguistic variation of yet another significant religious figure’s name.

And neither of these religions are known for their sense of humor in some areas. But I’ve always had an irreverent side. In hindsight, I am probably lucky I didn’t end up with some curse on my head, or much worse.

It lasted for a couple years. Myself and a few friends spread ‘The Word’ by sending out unsolicited prank mailers to our friends in far away cities.. We would include poster-sized color images of the (what I always thought was) buffoonery. And we would include some textual reading I wrote up that were probably about 2 steps above fortune cookie.

The whole thing ended because we met some people one day whom we didn’t know, and they way they acted made us wonder if they really believed this crap or they were just never breaking character in their own prank! Either way, it was time to put away the pulpit and hide for a while.

It’s a complex world, and some people are really susceptible to these kinds of ideas. But what is worse is that there are too many who would have looked for any opportunity to take advantage of these people.

So yeah, it’s true. I did that.