that arose again, however, was over the degree of morality that we would espouse for our followers. It was the same problem we had wrestled with, right here in this trailer, on that seminal night. Fisher again brought up the goal to attract young people with the web site, and wanted to offer an edgy, anything-goes sort of doctrine.
“Nothing’s going to turn a kid off more than a bunch of ‘Thou shalt not’ commandments,” he insisted. “They’re at the age where they want to cut loose ... to rebel against society.”
To my own surprise, mine was the rather vocal dissenting opinion. Fisher may have bought that stack of religious research texts, but I’m the guy who actually read them.
“Every successful religion has a moral code at its heart,” I said. “We have to do the same if we’re going to be taken seriously.”
“Come on, Brad, think outside the box,” Fisher chastised me (it was one of his favorite put-down clichés). “We’re going to be the alternative religion. People are lazy, greedy, horny, selfish hedonists by nature ... let’s give them what they want.”
“Come off it, you’re preaching spiritual nihilism!”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Well, for starters, how are we going to stay in charge of things if there are no rules?”
“By being in control of the good times they’ll be having. We’ll be the ringmasters ... the pushers that regulate their next fun fix.”
“Then why even try making it a religion? We’ll be just another online entertainment site and, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, we just don’t have enough money to compete with the dozens that are already succeeding out there.”
Fisher screwed up his face and began tugging at his left eyebrow—a sign, as I had learned by then, that my argument had hit home. He sighed. “Then what do you suggest?”
“I don’t think you’re giving kids enough credit,” I said. “Sure, they may be eager to break some laws, like the ones governing soft drugs and underage drinking, but overall I believe they’re generally decent ... well, except for the screwed-up freakazoids that bring an automatic rifle to school and open fire in the cafeteria. Look, within their own social groups, there are codes they follow, and follow willingly. They don’t typically rip one another off, or betray their friends.”
“That’s right,” Stan chimed in, ungluing his eyes from the computer screen for the first time in hours. “Even the most successful social networking sites lay down firm rules their users have to follow. It’s part of what prevents the bad apples from spoiling the experience for everyone. But, dammit, in order to program the logic, I need to know what those rules are going to be.”
Now that I had the reins again, I plunged on. “Remember that religion is first and foremost about your immortal soul, and about earning your way into heaven, or achieving nirvana, or whatever we choose to call it. After all, without a payoff in the end, there’s no real incentive to follow the rules or grant authority to the priests. We don’t want free-thinking nonconformists. We want unquestioning, obedient sheep.”
“It still sounds boring to me,” Fisher said. I began to realize, despite the fact he’s now become a bigger spiritual leader than the Pope and the Dalai Lama combined, that part of the reason Fisher didn’t get it was that he lacked any fundamental beliefs of his own. He never talked about his own religious upbringing, nor revealed anything to do with his own childhood, but from the few unguarded comments he let slip during the time we worked closely together, I don’t think he had ever truly believed in anything. Well, other than looking out for himself.
“Then let’s put some fun into it,” I suggested. “We’ll tell them that partying hearty and having sex is beautiful, and not a sin.”
“Within limits,” Fisher said, with a smug grin, “as long as they don’t harm others, or themselves.” As I’ve said, he was a quick study.
The next few weeks are a bit of a blur, but based on what came out of them, I’d have to call that time the single most productive period of my life. I was surviving on a couple of hours of sleep a night, and pretty much writing non-stop the rest of the time. I’d get as much done at work each day as my Warren & McCaul duties allowed, and then I’d crank it up even more every evening, and on weekends, at Stan’s apartment, where I had my own designated corner filled floor to ceiling with religion books. Often I just put down my head and slept there, with the Bible, or Koran, or Upanishads as my pillow.
Initially, Fisher would look over what I’d written and offer some token suggestions, but I guess he soon realized he had little of substance to contribute to the arcane minutiae, and let me plunge ahead on my own. Besides, he and Stan had plenty of work of their own as the web site moved closer to its big reveal.
Normally, my output isn’t so good when I’m tired, but in this case I felt inspired and uplifted, despite the ongoing sleep deprivation. The stuff just seemed to write itself. Oh, and what beautiful words they were. Firstly, there was the metaphysics, and I personally feel I did a brilliant job walking the fine line between the novel and the familiar, so that the religion would seem new and exciting, but ring true in an archetypal way.
Any Phasmatians who are reading this will recognize it all, of course. Your body is merely a vessel and an incubator for your soul, which is a microcosmic manifestation of the great Universal Spirit—a positive and sentient all-pervading life force whose brightness counters the destructive darkness of intrinsic entropy. That’s right, boys and girls, it’s all about light versus dark. Now that’s hardly original, I know, but I’m especially proud of the modern touches I added to bring that ancient plot line up to date.
I had roomed with a physics major during my first year at Columbia, and remember him going on and on about dark energy, the hot new topic in astrophysics. You can’t see dark energy, and it’s all purely hypothetical, but it always stuck in my mind that these physics geeks had nevertheless established that dark energy accounted for seventy-four per cent of the total mass-energy in the universe, and was propelling its accelerating expansion. So, dark energy became the bad guy in our dogma, and The Universal Spirit is the heroic cosmological force resisting it.
A piece of The Universal Spirit is within you. Like a fire that needs tending, your own spirit must be nurtured and fed. With cultivation (and the guidance of the Church, of course) your essence can achieve a divine state of spiritual energy that transcends space and time, and persists beyond the death of the body. But if you neglect your essence, or allow it to become besotted with negative energy, then it will shrivel to a state where, once your body can no longer sustain it, your spirit will be swallowed up and extinguished by the dark force.
That brings me to Part Deux, our moral code. In setting down these basic rules for a fit and healthy soul, I borrowed the best from Aquinas to Zoroaster, with choice bits of Aesop, Mark Twain, Nietzsche, Gandhi, and Tony Robbins thrown in for good measure. I’ll be honest, there’s absolutely nothing original there (other than the rewording, so I couldn’t be accused of outright plagiarism). After all, how do you improve on “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “Do the right thing”?
I think my only stroke of genius was to point out to the young adults, who were our prime audience, the shortcomings and hypocrisy of previous generations, so that the young would feel rebellious and revolutionary by being good. It wasn’t much of a sell to convince them their parents had screwed up the planet, and were morally and socially impotent. Each new generation always feels like it’s invented sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll. I just added virtue to the list.
So, out with greed, and destructiveness, and violence, and hypocrisy, and misogyny, and excess. Embrace creativity, and charity, and compassion, and tolerance, and patience, and love, and kindness. Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s the same old litany of sins and virtues that have been preached for millennia, mixed with self-improvement clichés. What can I say? The classics never go out of style. But even though we were shamelessly ripping off ideas from just about every credo that ever existed, I felt it important to be fresh and