I think it started with the census.
In the category "Religion," people wrote "Jedi." It was humorous, but then a few newly-proclaimed Jedis decided to take it seriously and start a Jedi religion. Last week, two of them, along with Chewbacca, went to the UN and demanded official recognition of their religion.
I thought it was a joke at first, but nothing in the article said it was satire, and people commenting on the story around the Internet say it's real.
It also isn't unbelievable. We've always had nutty religions. In the Americas alone, we've had practitioners of Santeria, a Mexican religion favored by drug lords who sacrifice chickens and occasionally a human being in efforts to gain power; the People's Temple; the Unification Church; the Charles Manson family. Scores (hundreds?) of various occult beliefs have laced US history for over a hundred years.
What is new, though, is the request for official recognition. The demands have been popping up like dandelions. Last week, for instance, two widows of Wiccan veterans sued to have a Wiccan symbol (a five-pointed star surrounded by a circle) on their tombstones. Earlier this year, worshippers of the Greek pagan gods successfully sued for recognition in Greek courts. In 2003, Haiti officially sanctioned Voodoo as a religion.
How long until Baal is revived and his worshippers want phallic symbols put on their tombstones?
Unless we want to recognize every crackpot that comes along with a new religion ("I worship the female body. I'd like my pornography purchases to be tax-deductible"), we need to figure out how to deal with them.
I think we have three options:
1. Regain a sense of fundamental metaphysical and logical truths, so we can cogently mock them. We could start by reaffirming the basics: If the world is created by a first mover, the first mover must stand outside of the thing moved. The world, being material, must have been moved by an immaterial (spiritual) cause. This first cause, being the genesis and sustainer of all that exists, must be unlimited by material constraints and must be omniscient and omnipotent. This set of metaphysics eliminates pantheism, paganism, dualism, and an assortment of other religious genres. Further metaphysical advancement would eliminate other nutty religions, but would leave intact most of the major ones. It's really not too hard, but I think it's safe to assume that such a goal is quixotic. Metaphysics and logic will never make it back into the public school curriculum, much less into our sex and money-obsessed legislative bodies. And quite frankly, I'm not sure I want bureaucrats reading, much less interpreting, Aristotle.
2. We could just keep muddling along with the current arrangement, using an ad hoc approach to the various requests for recognition. The IRS does that now, using a lengthy test to determine whether various "churches" are religious bodies that merit tax-exempt status. I've read those Private Letter Rulings carefully, and they're not too bad. If they were put through a brutal test of logic, they would shatter, but so far, those Rulings have endured.
3. Adopt a libertarian approach that doesn't officially recognize anybody.
I can't go into all the reasons, but I favor the third one. Quite frankly, if the state hadn't swollen itself beyond all proper bounds, the nutty folks wouldn't be clamoring for official recognition. It's only because the state has become so overwhelmingly important (intrusive, meddling, powerful) that people want access to it. If it were to shrink back to a healthier size, where local control counted for more and families counted for the most, its religious blessing wouldn't be nearly as important.
