Tootfinder

I still had more to say about the whole #cultpunk thing, so here's an expanded essay. I feel like it should probably be a Zine, if anyone has any thoughts on publishing it.
https://hexmhell.writeas.com/on-gods-and-governments

This is actually not too far off from a pamphlet I wrote at my community college as an experiment in "turning assignments into creative writing." I was taking a religion class, so I decided to create one. I was working in a group and by the end we had developed 3 sects of the religion and we each talked about our sect and how it related and differed from the original text.
I also handed out pamphlets at a mall, half as part of a psychology class (because why not find a way to reuse my material) and part as an experiment to see how long it would take to get kicked out of said mall. (The answer was bout 15 minutes, if I remember correctly.)
Somewhere between there and here, the books "The Evolution of God" and "Non-Zero" came out (written, interestingly but probably unrelated, by someone who lived in the town with that mall where I handed out those flyers). These books both have heavily overlapping ideas with the original pamphlet (lost, which may not be the worst thing since it was full of spelling and grammar errors).
But both of those books had a decidedly theistic flavor, though, I think, they were more generally liberal. The whole #CultPunk thing feels like a missing piece to something that's been bouncing around in my head for... uh... some years. But not so much at the front of my mind.
It was actually in the hospital, on pain killers and ketamine, that this all came rushing back. Perhaps that's the right state of mind for such things.

This is actually not too far off from a pamphlet I wrote at my community college as an experiment in "turning assignments into creative writing." I was taking a religion class, so I decided to create one. I was working in a group and by the end we had developed 3 sects of the religion and we each talked about our sect and how it related and differed from the original text.
I also handed out pamphlets at a mall, half as part of a psychology class (because why not find a way to reuse my material) and part as an experiment to see how long it would take to get kicked out of said mall. (The answer was bout 15 minutes, if I remember correctly.)
Somewhere between there and here, the books "The Evolution of God" and "Non-Zero" came out (written, interestingly but probably unrelated, by someone who lived in the town with that mall where I handed out those flyers). These books both have heavily overlapping ideas with the original pamphlet (lost, which may not be the worst thing since it was full of spelling and grammar errors).
But both of those books had a decidedly theistic flavor, though, I think, they were more generally liberal. The whole #CultPunk thing feels like a missing piece to something that's been bouncing around in my head for... uh... some years. But not so much at the front of my mind.
It was actually in the hospital, on pain killers and ketamine, that this all came rushing back. Perhaps that's the right state of mind for such things.

Why this is all relevant to the OP is that there is actually nothing preventing us from exploiting these same vulnerabilities (and doing so far more effectively). The (illusion of The) Satanic Temple has already given us some vision of what that could look like. We can imagine a religious institution that actually challenges power in the way TST claims to do. We could imagine an institution that is more radical. We could imagine an institution so dangerous it actually forces the state to choose between it's own survival and alienating liberals by (more) visibly clamping down on freedom of religion.
One could imagine an anarchist or solar punk religion that intentionally builds an alternative society within the shell of the old, one that recognizes the validity of other religious sects (like, for example, Quakers) who are doing similar things.
While there is a very interesting spiritual element to #CultPunk. I think there's also a very interesting set of radical opportunities that we have long since ignored....