Today Tristan was asking me about Transformers again. This pleases me because this is the list of the things that I am somewhat expert in (no particular order):

• Transformers
• C/C++
• Star Trek
• Perl
• Doctor Who
• Photography
• Thursday Next
• Never Being Confused

Anyway, he was asking me about where the Transformers came from and I told him about Primus and Unicron, the gods of the Transformers. This is sort of how it went:

me: Primus and Unicron are the gods of the Transformers. Primus created the transformers to battle the evil Unicron.
Tristnan: Did Unicron create the Decepticons to fight the Autobots?
me: No, Primus created both the Autobots and the Decepticons
Tristan: Why did he create them just to fight each other?

I really love the questions that Tristan asks. Now, granted we are talking about a mythology that nobody believes in, but you could easily recreate this exact same conversation using a number of “real” religions that I can think of, and this is exactly the sort of abstract thinking that should be applied to the subject.

In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Stephenson presents a world in which churches are a franchise operation. (The book in general makes all the logical conclusion of the application of rampant free market principals as they might occur sometime in the near future; for example, the CIA of this future buys and sells information to the highest bidder, and the USS Enterprise (CVN-65) is sold off and becomes a personal yacht). The Economist has an article (“A marriage made in heaven?”) about the possible merger of Catholicism and Anglicanism [sic] from a business perspective. It’s amusing, but I am not sure which disturbs me more, the ease at which big religion fits into the language of big corporations, or the fact that capitalists find it so easy to talk about nearly anything using their dogmatic vocabulary.

After much deliberation, I am seriously considering converting to the Church of Flying Spaghetti Monster. If you like pirates and hate global warming, FSM might be for you.