Religious Networking

I'm sure that the creators of MySpace, of YouTube and lately, of Facebook are all raking in a pile of cash, and quite frankly, I think the marketplace is still wide open.

You see, the problem with those sites, is that they're open to pretty much anyone. This means that they're missing out on custom from all the religious fanatics who refuse to mix with people of other religions, or at least, severely frown upon such mixing. So I’m thinking, a good way to be among the next wave of .com millionaires is...religious networking!

The structuring would be simple, the site would be open to registration for anyone, but instead of sending out a confirmation email, you’d be required to provide the details of a cleric of your particular order, who could then vouch for you.
This would also discourage the many Jedi Knights from signing up, because, as far as I’m aware, George Lucas is holding all the holy men of that order at ransom in his basement and refusing to release them (at least, until he’s screwed with them some more).

Once you’d signed up to the site, you’d be able to meet like-minded believers from around the globe, and add them to your friends list. Like Facebook, the site would be divided up into ‘Networks’ based on religion, with only small degrees of interaction between networks allowed. For example, I’m sure there wouldn’t be too much problem in allowing Orthodox and Roman Catholics to message one another, but I wouldn’t even let those guys see the pictures of someone of the Islamic faith. Obviously, you could only add friends of the exact same religion.

However, here’s where I envision the first problem – I really can’t stand the MySpace trend of having a thousand friends you barely even know the names of, and I’m pretty sure that would crop up without some intervention. As such, I think we could kill two birds with one stone, by implementing a feature which I’m currently calling ‘Crusade’.
Basically, once every fortnight, people are matched together into teams with those in their friend list. These are then sent off to a certain location where they’ll meet a team from another network (aka, religion) and attempt to win points for their religion. I’m still tweaking the scoring system, but here are my initial ideas:

• Proving your God exists – 100 points


• Proving their God doesn’t exist – 75 points


• Making their entire team doubt their faith – 50 points


• Converting one of their members to your religion – 50 points


• Making three of their members act outside the rules of their religion – 25 points


• Killing one of their clerics – 10 points


• Turning up dressed so blasphemously (to their religion) that they’re unable to even look at you – 10 points


• Killing one of their regular members – 5 points

Obviously, the points stack up – so if you manage to kill the 9 regular members in their team and their cleric then you get an easy 55 points without even having to debate anything.

Every month or so, the top religion will get to choose the text to go in the ‘Faithbar’. This will be a bar going across the profile page of every single member of the site, regardless of their network, which will have a message printed on it. Naturally, I’m hoping for some classy stuff to be hosted on here, something that’ll really piss off the members of other faiths and get them interested in the competition.

Obviously, these bi-weekly crusades won’t be the only way to win points, and the site will be running competitions every now and then. I’m not yet decided on what forms these competitions will take – I was thinking of ‘most blasphemous picture & caption’ but most of the religions could score a lot of easy points by just drawing the prophet Muhammad and writing “Hi” on the bottom, so that one might need reconsidering.

Finally, and most importantly, what am I going to call this website, you ask? Well, I’m still stuck between Faithbook and HisSpace...

Xx

Edit: Looks like HisSpace is already taken. guess I'll go with Faithbook then.