imagine my surprise that night when word came over the wireless. i don’t think the phrase “holy shit” was ever uttered anywhere with quite the same feeling. of all the gods in all the households in all the world, mine turned out to be real. fuckin’ nuts. i’d barely even tried if i’m being honest. i hadn’t done any of the genealogical track-back or d.n.a. imaging so often used as a jumping off point when birthing a god. i didn’t swallow a single lordican or deityne or any other of the thousand downer-cut hallucinogenic pharmaceuticals developed specifically for the god-mothering masses. what i did was stand beside my kitchen sink, a tablespoon of chunky peanut butter in my mouth, and trace out the name “elroy” in a mound of spilled coffee grounds.

it had only been 36 years since the trend first took hold on the world wide web, and yet in those 36 years humanity’s pantheon of gods had reached numbers far exceeding anything ever seen before.

initially the idea had been put forward as an defensive tactic; a way to counter what many saw as a troubling redoubling of religious influence over secular society. the old gods were making inroads into politics and law by routes most people had thought demolished a century before. progress seemed to cease everywhere one looked. in america, “jesus” worshippers were running rampant everywhere, ramming their views down people’s throats like a great groaning porn star with a cock made of hypocrisy. the middle east, meanwhile, was a violent, misogynistic, snuff-film starring allah and his trusty thug mohammed. in other areas, there were other gods. most were variations on a theme- arrogant, power hungry in the short-term, and prone to fetishizing humanity’s destruction in the long. it was frightening.

so, on some site (no one remembers where) in the early part of 2006, an idea was floated: why not flood the market with gods?

if a small group of gods, each laying claim to ultimate truth, individually held enough market share as to make power struggles and violence between them inevitable, then what could be done? the fond wish that humanity would eventually abandon its creation myths in favor of systematized rational inquiry into the natural world had long since proven itself a pipe dream. humanity was not ready to relinquish its gods and might never be. in such an atmosphere it seemed that the only method left to effectively reduce the dangerous influence of the old gods was to create enough new ones to weaken their power base; to effectively dilute the potency of each in a cloudy solution of concentrated divinity. the ideal way to do this, argued the forgotten spark-plug “blogger,” was to advocate a personal god for each and every human on planet earth.

the world wide web at that time was a hotbed of discussion, ideas shot through it like a broccoli spear through an anorexic’s digestive tract. arguments ensued about just how this might be accomplished. obviously the proposition of having one’s own god must be made attractive enough to draw proponents. non-religious peoples would sign on, it was thought, because it would be a means to challenge the dominant religions on their own turf as it were. simply by exercising a right which agnostics and atheists felt they had no use for, they’d be able to even the playing field.

converting peoples who already had a religious affiliation would be more difficult of course. some said it was not necessary to do so, that were all the “new-godders” to hang together in the political sphere, utilizing their newfound “moral” clout, they’d do well enough. others said adults were lost causes and the best tactic was to appeal to the rebellious, open-minded, creative disposition of the young. “why follow your grandma’s stodgy old god when you can create your own? with a mohawk if you like!” still others argued that the pocketbook was king. after all, if tax exemptions could be dangled as a carrot, many people would suddenly become very interested in exercising their inalienable rights to worship.

in order for such an idea to be effective on any level, these new gods would have to be recognized under the law, each one with its own church and its own congregation. the key then, it was widely agreed, would be to challenge the legal precedents involved in defining just what a church was. to exploit the often misappropriated ideals of religious tolerance, societies diminished belief in absolute truth, and the cultural love of litigation unilaterally, in a barrage of 1st amendment “shock and awe,” was the strategy.

the idea caught fire. allies popped up all over the place. lawyers found the legal questions at work of interest, having to argue over church zoning, constitutional rights, exemptions for newly consecrated religious ceremonies, the exact numbers required for a congregation, what constituted a “religious service.” etc. creative people were enthralled with the idea of birthing gods. painters birthed abstract deities with conceptual titles. poets spoke in tongues. authors embraced the allegory again, and protagonists became increasingly divine. software engineers sought ways to automate large chunks of the process, creating automatic “bible” authoring software which seized on a handful of key-words, online quizzes for official ordination, god-casts of ritual ceremonies, i.m. confessionals, generative applets to “evolve” a god’s visage, etc. philosophers mulled over the implications endlessly. new-agers drew up new charts, created new decks, and detected new, powerful, energies. most surprisingly many religious sects championed the idea in the courts, seeing an opportunity to strengthen their own footing. eventually, like hungry dogs nose-distance from a slaughterhouse, politicians began to smell a constituency.

within 10 years the “personal god” idea went from an internet meme to a full fledged movement.

now, 36 years on, the spiritual landscape is nearly unrecognizable. a few key supreme court victories forced the government in the united states to choose between offering tax breaks and drug exemptions to everyone with a church (a number at that time approaching the millions) or changing the laws all together. they opted, of course, to do away with tax breaks for churches. likewise the draconian drug laws were scrapped in favor of legalization and taxation because it was impossible to legislate effectively when every religious ceremony had its own set of sacred substances. the old thorny pledge of allegiance controversy was solved with the addition of a humble letter “s” to produce the phrase “under gods,” a solution which was symptomatic of the climate in general.

the initial motive for the “personal god” movement became obscured eventually in that scholars began arguing for it on its spiritual merits alone. “each person is equally as qualified to discern exactly what god is, and thus each ought to feel secure in their own conception of him. let no man impose his own god on you!” the argument went, and people responded. “you can keep your god, i’ve got my own!” read many a bumper sticker and t-shirt. freed from the negative, accusatory, brow-beating tactics of earlier religions, people were able to approach god in a truly personal and creative way.

though many still chose jesus, or followed muhammad, or swore their oaths to other old gods, their market share was dramatically reduced and they were trending downward each year. their following remained large compared to that of other individual gods, but as a percentage of the pantheon, they were significantly outnumbered. excluding them, roughly one “personal god” was worshiped per every 43 households worldwide according to last years u.n. census. 

today business cards regularly include a line like “high magistrate of the golden church of zool” right beneath “accountant.”

today those pharmaceutical ad’s with butterflies and rolling fields (which seemed so nonsensical a few decades ago) having been re-purposed for “god-mothering” hallucinogenics, make perfect sense.

today it is sometimes said that “if you worship a vengeful god when you’re young you’re heartless, if you worship a bacchanalian god when you’re old you’re brainless.”

today at age 13, every citizen is free to choose a god from the world-wide pantheon, or create their own for inclusion. every year sees a score of new gods born while others fall away into the archives. affiliations shift endlessly. if you choose to birth your own god, as many people do, the process is as follows:

you are encouraged to spend a week or so seeking inspiration into the nature of your deity. you can use any of the many tools available to assist you in this- the drugs, the algorithms, the d.n.a tests, the brain-scans, the histories- then you simply log-on and the world wide pantheon walks you through all the steps of creating your god, uploading it’s visage, registering your church, writing your doctrine, codifying your ceremonies, and opening up your coffers. the system then inserts your god into the appropriate place in the pantheon depending on doctrinal relationships to the others. the whole process takes less than an hour. once your god is in the system, a confirmation email is sent to you, and upon activation your license activated. all that remains is to worship your god and see how your church fares.

an interesting by-product of all this are the manifestation markets. at some point the realization struck that conceiving so many new gods each year dramatically increased the odds of eventually hitting upon one or more which were in fact real, which is to say corporeal, who acted upon humanity in a measurable way. speculation began first with the miracles market (which due to its subjective nature eventually mutated into more of a “fantasy football league” for deities), and later with the manifestations market. any manifestation thought to be connected to an existing deity was reported to the world- wide pantheon and went up on the big board. most manifestations were tangential at best, but even minor fluctuations of the market could help influence a particular god’s following.

which brings us back to me.

this morning a bi-pedal elk with platinum antlers entered a liquor store in rahway, new jersey, and announced nonchalantly, to a stunned cashier, that his name was elroy. he dropped two c-note’s on the counter and walked out with a case of bushmills irish whiskey. the security camera footage hit the web less than an hour afterward. link-text screamed “little known prophesy from tiny american sect comes to pass! whole thing captured on video!” when news reached the manifestation market it went crazy. pay-pal tithes redirected on the fly, e-prayers filed past an aggressive spam filter piling into a usually empty in-box, and membership in the “most honorable and inebriated sect of elroy” skyrocketed, making me, in effect, the exalted prophet and high priest of the single largest and most beloved religion on planet earth. my lifetime supply of irish whiskey, courtesy of the bushmills company, began arriving not long after.

“holy shit” indeed.