What do people need / want / get from religious texts?
If you give people exactly what they want you are gonna have a religion full of weenies! A good religious text (and among ‘good religious texts’ I include not only the ones that SlyBevel and I hold as canon, but also the Q’uran, the Dao De Jing, a bunch of Buddhist teachings (the closer to Gautama the better), the Book of Enoch, Jain vows, the Gospel of Thomas, just about anything ever written by William Blake, and a whole bunch of other stuff)—as I was saying, a good religious text should comfort you sometimes, but at other times it should kick your butt. Have a look at the Sermon of the Mount. Have a look at the economic laws in Deuteronomy. Have a look at the many commentaries elucidating what can and cannot be done during Ramadan. Have a really good look at Jainism. These texts are not about fluffy feel-good strokes and they are not about enshrining conventional wisdom. They are direct challenges to complacency, short-sightedness, and especially to the illusion of self-importance.
If I were doing this, I’d break it down like this: 1. Rules – You need to make people do things, make them feel like they are sacraficing something that the unbeliever’s don’t. There must be some sort of unpleaseantness to make them feel different and righteous. There also needs to be a sliding scale of obdediance, if you will, so more hardcore believers can further differentiate themselves, but still allow room for the everyman to only slightly adhere. All successful religious have this. Examples are obvious, but here are a few inspired (*rimshot*) ones that crop up over and over: dietary restrictions, repression of sexual desire, rejection of technology (this is a great one for the modern world, because it’s making a lot of people miserable), and mandatory charity (which may be charity towards The Great Meatbomb). The goal here is to make people feel guilty about everything they do, but provide a clear path for compulsive
