Mall Religion

[SoCalDem]

Found this on a very cool blog site.. www.ammodumpradio.com

Kind of funny..


http://www.ammodumpradio.com/articles.asp?id=008

Oh My God!

Here's basically how religion comes into existence.

Kidnap 1000 people and drop them into a shopping mall and seal it off from the rest of the world with no way to escape. Find a way to anonymously give them all the ingredients they'll need to self sustain without their knowing it (food, water, etc.). Maybe as everyone sleeps have a delivery truck refill the snack bars, etc.

That group will divide into different sections, typically based on what they have in common. You know... Led Zeppelin fans will gather around the Orange Julius, the accountants will gather at the office supply store. You get the idea. They mostly keep to themselves and spend their time trying to figure out how to survive (foraging in the food courts and Pottery Barns). After a while they begin to spend less of their mental energy surviving and more of it wondering why they are in the mall in the first place. They develop theories as to how they wound up there. They pass the theories onto their children and their children's children.

The molten cheese of the nachos makes them feel good and they joyfully say a "thanks" before every helping, not really knowing who they're saying it to. But they say it every night and the next day the self-serve chili is hot and the cola fountain is full.

Coincidentally, one night when they forgot to say a little chant of "thanks" the delivery truck got a flat tire and didn't come. It takes a couple days to fix the flat (it's a non-union gig and it was hard to find the right size tire!) The mall-dwellers begin to believe that it is their lack of saying "thanks" that must have upset whoever brings their food, and this also leads them to believe that they are being watched and judged by this unseen force. They make it a tradition to always say thanks. Sometimes they say thanks and the delivery truck still doesn't come on time. They theorize that this is just the delivery truck's way of testing them to see if they stop saying thanks, so they continue to show uninterrupted love, not wanting to agitate the situation.

They give names to the forces that dropped them in the mall. Names like Allah, Jehova. Every once in a while someone is smart or charismatic enough to claim to have a deeper understanding of these forces. They solidify the local belief system into a definitive set of beliefs and writes down the rules. Eventually they will begin to look down on those whose set of rules is different. In some cases, those rules specifically instruct them to kill those whose rules are different. Other rules tell them to convince others to follow their rules.

Naturally, the folks in the food court may need something from housewares, so they begin to trade. As they trade, they share their views and theories. Some of the theories the guys from the movie theater strike a cord with the guys in the shoe store, and hybrids of these beliefs begin to form.

So now you have the Foodcourtites and a smaller sect known as the IceCreamSundaeists, the JC Pennyites with their odd sect the ComfortFitJeanish, and the Gapites, the Cineplexites... the list goes on and on. All of these groups with different yet slightly similar ideas as to why they were put in that mall in the first place and what they should be doing with their time, and what's waiting for them on the other side of the permanently locked security gates.

Are any of them any closer to the truth than the others? Of course not. All of their organization, storytelling, rituals, and beliefs came from the same place, and that is not a geographical location. It is a place in the human psychology: a need to understand. None of them are wrong, none of them are right, because it's really not about what the truth actually is. It's about fulfilling that psychological need to know. The only thing that is universally true is that none of the ideas are worth killing or dying for. Only once the inhabitants of the MegaMall Earth (just off the interstate, plenty of parking!) figure that out will they be any closer to truly knowing why they are there and what their purpose is.

At least, that's what I believe.